the spark fall upon the fuel? When and how did the dull carbo and the dry faggot leap into warmth and blaze? The higher the genius, the less it is conscious of the degrees by which it has ascended. Yet even the most ordinary thinker amongst us would seek in vain to discover the origin and progress of his thoughts. Let him concentre his attention on that research, keep it there long and earnestly, and-Sir Henry Holland is right!-ten to one but what he will puzzle himself into Bedlam.

And here let me quote some lines by a French poet, admired in the last century and neglected in this, which have been greatly praised by Dugald Stewart for their "philosophical penetration: ".

"Enfin dans le cerveau si l'image est tracée,

Comment peut dans un corps s'imprimer la pensée ?

Là finit ton œuvre, mortel audacieux,

Va mesurer la terre, interroger les cieux, De l'immense univers réglé l'ordre suprême, Mais ne pretends jamais te connoître toimême,

Là s'ouvre sous tes yeux un abîme sans fonds."*

But, no doubt, the cradle and nursery of definite thought is in the hazy limbo of Reverie. There ideas float before us, rapid, magical, vague, half-formed; apparitions of the thoughts that are to be born later into the light, and run their course in the world of man.

And yet, despite their vagueness and incompleteness, how vivid, how life-like, those apparitions sometimes are! I do not give them the name of thoughts, because as yet they are not singled out of space and subjected to our command. But still they are the souls of thoughts.

That which is most marvellous to me, is the celerity with which, when musing over any truth that one desires to explore, conjecture upon conjecture, image upon image, chase each other, in ever-shifting pano

rama.

"If," says Marcus Antoninus,†

"a man will consider what a vast number of operations the mind performs, what abundance of thoughts and sensations occur in the same moment, he will more readily comprehend how the Divine Spirit of the universe looks over, actuates, governs, the whole mass of creation!" Noble suggestion, in which lie depths of philosophy, from the impersonal pantheism systematised by Spinoza, to the divine omnipresent energy into which the pantheism is sublimely resolved by Newton.

66

When Kant says that we can dream more in a minute than we can act in a day," it seems to me that he rather understates than exaggerates; for so much is suggested in so small a point of time, that, were it in my power to transcribe all that passes through my mind in any given halfhour of silent reverie, it would take me years to write it down. And this leads me to an observation, which doubtless every practised writer must often have made on himself. When, having sufficiently filled the mind with a chosen subject, and formed the clearest possible conceptions of what we intend to say on it, we sit down to the act of writing, the words are never exactly faithful to the preconceived ideas we designed them to express. We may, indeed, give the general purport of a meditated argument; the outlines of a dramatic plot, artistically planned, or of a narrative of which we have painted on the retina of the mind the elementary colours and the skeleton outlines. But where the boundless opulence of idea and fancy which had enriched the subject before we were called upon to contract its expenditure into sober bounds? How much of the fairy gold turns, as we handle it, into dry leaves! And by a tyranny that we cannot resist, while we thus leave unuttered much that we had designed to express, we are carried on mechanically to say much of

+ Lib. 6-25.

which we had not even a conscious perception the moment before the hand jotted it down, as an inevitable consequence of the thought out of which another thought springs self-formed and full-grown. Even

a writer so attentive to method as Cicero notices the irresistible vehemence with which the things that we think of ravish away the words

res ipsæ verba rapiunt;"* and, in return, the words, as they rise spontaneously, seem to ravish away the thoughts.

This want of exact fidelity between thought while yet in the mind, and its form when stamped on the page, has not escaped the observation of Ancillon, a writer who ought to be better known to our countrymen; for into that wide range of knowledge through which the German scholarship is compelled to range in its tendency to generalise, he carries a sense as practical as Reid's, and an elegance of criticism as sober as Dugald Stewart's. "No language," says this charming philosopher, "is a complete and finished imprint of the human mind, were it only because all that is intellectual and invisible in our understanding, our soul, complete and entire, is not and cannot be expressed, except by metaphors borrowed from the world of the senses (du Monde Sensible). . . . Where a man feels and thinks with a certain force, he cannot be content with his expressions-they say always too much or too little."+

In truth, I believe that no author, writing on a subject he has long cherished and intensely pondered over, at whatever length, or with whatever brevity, will not find that he has made but a loose paraphrase, not a close copy, of the work forewritten in the mind. All thoughts, and perhaps in proportion to their gravity and scope, lose something

Cicero, De Finibus,' lib. iii. cap. 5.

when transferred from contemplation into language, as all bodies, in proportion to their bulk, lose something of what they weighed in air when transferred to water.

Musing over these phenomena in my own mind, whereby I find that, in an art to which I have devoted more than thirty years' practice and study, I cannot in any way adequately accomplish my own conception; that the typical idea within me is always far, infinitely far, beyond my power to give it on the page the exact image which it wore in space; that I catch from the visible light but a miserable daguerreotype of the form of which I desire the truthful picture a caricature that gives indeed features, and lines, and wrinkles, but not the bloom, not the expression, not the soul of the idea which the love in my own heart renders lovely to me;-musing over this wondrous copiousness of thought which escapes from me, scattering into spray, as a cataract yields but drops to the hand that would seize it amidst its plashes and fall, I say to myself, "Herein I recognise that necessity for another life and other conditions of being, amid which alone thought can be freed and developed. It is in the incapacity and struggle, more than in any feat or victory, of my intellect, that I feel my thought itself is a problem only to be solved in a hereafter. At present, the more I labour to complete such powers as are vouchsafed to me, the more visible to myself is my own incompletion. And it is the sense of that incompletion which, increasing on me in proportion as I labour for completeness, assures me, in an ulterior destination, of a wider scope and less restricted powers. "Nature never disappoints-the Author of Nature never deceives us." If the child yet unborn "were qualified

to reason of his prospects in the womb of his parent, as he may afterwards do in his range on this terrestrial globe, he might apprehend, in his separation from the womb, a total extinction of life; for how could he continue to receive it after his only supply of nourishment from the vital stock of his parent had ceased?" Poor Unborn!-what a sceptic he might be! How notably he might argue against a future state for him! And how would that future state be best prognosticated to his apprehension? Surely it would be by referring him to those attributes of his organisation which had no necessary relation to his present state, but conveyed hints of use for a future state; in the structure of eyes meant to see a light not yet

vouchsafed, of ears meant to hearken to sounds not yet heard. As the eyes and the ears to the Unborn, are those attributes of the human Mind on this earth which for this earth are not needed-on this earth have no range, no completion. And to Man we may say, as to the Unborn, "WAIT! Nothing is given to you in vain. Nature is no spendthrift; she invents nothing for which no use is designed. These superfluous accessories to your being now, are the essential provisions for your felicity and development in a state of being to come."

For Man, every present contains a future. I say not with Descartes, "I think, therefore I am," but rather, "I am, therefore I think; I think, and therefore I shall be."

Much is said by innovators in complaint of the obstinate resistance they encounter from the professors of the special branch of human knowledge which an innovation is proposed to correct or to expand. The physician in high repute is the most stubborn opponent of some new pathological theory. The lawyer who is an authority in the Courts looks with jealous apprehension on the crotchets of a jurisprudist who never held a brief. Philosophy itself, in which every system received to-day has grown out of innovations on the system in vogue yesterday, is the sturdiest opponent a speculator has to encounter, when he asks the public to accept some interpretation, or even to believe in some phenomenon of nature, which philosophers would have much to unlearn before they could admit to be philosophical. This complaint is immemorial, and was made in Athens, where the genius of innovation was tolerably audacious, not less loudly by the disciples of

Anaxagoras, than it is, nowadays, by those who would ask a Brodie to acknowledge the curative effects of homoeopathy, or a Faraday to convince himself that, in spite of the laws of motion, a table will jump from one end of the room to the other without being impelled by some cognate material force. And the complaint being so ancient, and, notwithstanding our boasted exemption from the intolerance of our prejudiced forefathers, just as frequent in our age as in any age of the past, it is probable that there is something in the organisation of all societies which tends to the advancement of intellectual progress by the very caution with which the recognised leaders of the time receive suggestions to deviate into unaccustomed paths.

No river would be navigable were its velocity not checked by friction; and the friction increases as the stream proceeds, until the flow is thus made the easy thoroughfare of interchange. One man may be sure of a truth, but

before all men can accept it as truth from his ipse dixit, many men must resist and oppose it.

In political science, the necessity of this resistance to pressure is constantly disputed, but never disputed by one politician worthy the name of statesman. All communities which advance durably and safely, contain, like nature herself, two antagonistic powers-the one inert and resisting, the other active and encroaching. If the former be too stubborn, as it is in communities that establish hereditary castes, there can be no progress beyond the limit at which each subdivision of mental labour has been fixed in rigid monotony by a former age. Such societies may last long, but it is the longevity of a centenarian, who, whether he continue on earth five years or fifty years longer, will exhibit nothing remarkable beyond the fact that he is still alive. He holds his existence on the condition of shunning the least disturbance to the chronic mechanism of his habits.

On the other hand, where societies interpose no hindrance to any new innovation which may, for the moment, seize on the popular humour, or be urged by a popular genius, there we may as surely predict their rapid exhaustion, as we could that of the Thames itself, if the power of friction were not opposed to the velocity of fluids. To take a familiar illustration: the first French Revolution was the headlong rush of liberty unchecked; when the Revolution stopped, liberty had run itself out. And ever since, under the bleak fissures through which it burst, and amidst the vast fragments that, whirled from its banks, became the obstructions to its course, it is only here and there that pools, deep but stagnant, reflect the ruins made by the former tor

rent.

As in bodies politic, so in all the

departments of thought amongst which intellectual life is distributed, there must be, for safe and continuous progress, a principle that delays innovation! For by delay truth ripens-falsehoods rot. "There is," says Chalmers, finely, a great purpose served in society by that law of nature in virtue of which it is that great bodies move slowly." Therefore, it is not only excusable but praiseworthy, in those who are esteemed the especial guardians of knowledge, to regard with a certain jealousy all proposals to exchange the old lamps for new. But still there is no truth so venerable but what was once a novelty. And a man loves something or other better than he does truth, if he refuse to investigate any proposition professing to embody a new truth, however unfamiliar to his belief, however militant against his theories. "For my part," said one of the most candid, and one of the most suggestive, of English philosophers, "for my part, as well persuaded as I am that two and two make four, if I were to meet with a person credit, candour, and understanding, who should seriously call it in question, I would give him the hearing." +

of

Suppose that a philosopher is in doubt as to the length of a telescope in a friend's possession, and that ten persons, of whose general veracity there is no question, tell him that they have measured the telescope, and it is twenty feet long, he will accept their evidence and cease to entertain a doubt as to the length of the telescope. But suppose this same philosopher had arrived at the conclusion that the moon is incapable of harbouring any form of organic life, and the same ten persons, whose evidence he has just accepted in a matter on which no pride of science is involved, tell him that they have been looking through a telescope

at the moon, and that they all, one after the other, have seen an enormous creature endowed with organic life-they entreat the philosopher to come and see this phenomenon himself,-would the philosopher be justified in saying, "I shall not deign to take any such idle trouble. I have satisfied myself that no such creature can possibly exist in the moon. Your declaration is against the laws of Nature; excuse me if against the laws of Nature I can accept no evidence, however respectable. It is within the laws of Nature that you ten gentlemen should tell a falsehood, or be deceived by an optical illusion. I accept either of those hypotheses as possible, and I will not debase the dignity of science by examining into that which I know to be impossible:" Would the philosopher be justified in saying this?

Certainly, he would not be justified by any affection for truth. He would be a bigot from the motive most common to bigots-viz., inordinate self-esteem. But perhaps it may be said that no genuine philosopher would have so replied. Pardon me, that answer would have been a warrantable deduction from the philosophy of Hume. When Hume speaks of the wonders, or, as he calls them, "miracles," wrought at the tomb of Abbé Paris, the famous Jansenist, he says, "Where shall we find such a number of circumstances agreeing to the corroboration of one fact? And what have we to oppose to such a cloud of witnesses but the absolute impossibility or miraculous nature of the events which they relate? And this surely, in the eyes of all reasonable people, will alone be regarded as a sufficient refutation." Scarcely so; for what we call impossible in matters of fact deposed by numerous witnesses, not interested in the fabrication of a lie, is merely a something opposed to our own experience. And if a philosopher is to pronounce for himself what is impossible and what is not, there

would soon be no philosophy at all. When the Indian prince asserted it to be impossible that water could become solid, it was because that assertion was opposed to his experience. But in spite of his experience, it was not only possible; it was a positive fact: and I cannot agree with Hume, that the King of Siam's incredulity was "reasonable." Modern physiology has given some solution of those "miracles" at the Jansenist's tomb, which Hume at once declared needed no other refutation than that of their own miraculous nature. Cures that baffle science are effected by imagination. Allow for the inevitable additions which all stories receive as they pass from lip to lip, and not least the stories of unusual occurrences, and the cures wrought at the Jansenist's tomb are facts; marvels if you please, yet not miracles. Certainly Newton would not have so answered, because he never refused to examine. He "was prepared at any moment to abandon his theory." "When Bradley and others had observed a certain rotation of the earth which they could not account for, and were thinking it destroyed entirely the Newtonian system, they were under the greatest difficulty how to break it to Sir Isaac, and proceeded to do so by degrees in the softest manner.' What was his only answer? "It may be so; there is no arguing against facts and experiments." He did not reply that Bradley's discovery was impossible, because it was against the laws of Nature - as those laws were interpreted by the Newtonian system. But it is more convenient to philosophers to deny the evidence of facts and experiments which oppose their system, than it is, on the strength of the evidence, to examine the facts and test the experiments;-more consonant to "the dignity of science" to say to say "Impossible," with Hume, than "It may be so," with Newton.

Now, had my philosopher who