what they cannot explain, and have at last fairly sickened the world into a sense of their unhealthiness.

What then remains of the poetical denouncements of Andrea de Basso? Why the only thing which ought to remain, and which when left to itself retains nothing but its pleasure-their poetry. When Dante and Milton shall cease to have any effect as religious dogmatisers, they will still be the mythological poets of one system of belief, as Homer is of another. So immortal is pleasure, and so surely does it escape out of the throng of its contradictions.

CHAPTER LI.

Thoughts and Guesses on Human Nature.

CONFUSION OF MODES OF BEING.

PEOPLE undertake to settle what ideas they shall have under such and such circumstances of being, when it is nothing but their present state of being that enables them to have those ideas.

VARIETY OF THE COLORS OF PERCEPTION.

There is reason to suppose that our perceptions and sensations are more different than we imagine, even upon the most ordinary things, such as visible objects in general, and the sense of existence. We have enough in common, for common intercourse; but the details are dissimilar, as we may perceive in the variety of palates. All people are agreed upon sweet and sour; but one man prefers sour to sweet, and another this and that variety of sour and sweet. "What then is the use of attempting to make them agree?" Why, we may try to make them agree upon certain general modes of thinking and means of pleasure we may color their existence in the gross, though we must leave the particular shades to come out by themselves. We may enrich their stock of ideas, though we cannot control the items of the expenditure.

CANNOT.

"But what if we cannot do even this?" The question is answered by experience. Whole nations and ages have already been altered in their modes of thinking. Even if it

were otherwise, the endeavor is itself one of the varieties; one of the modes of opinion and means of pleasure. Besides, CANNOT is the motto neither of knowledge nor humility. There is more of pride, and ignorance, and despair, in it, than of the modesty of wisdom. It would settle not only the past, but the future; and it would settle the future, merely because the past

has not been influenced by those that use it.

Who are these men that measure futurity by the shadow of their own littleness? It is as if the loose stones lying about a foundation were to say, "You can build no higher than our

heads."

SUPERSTITION AND DOCTRINE.

Superstition attempts to settle everything by assertion; which never did do, and never will. And like all assertors, even wellinclined ones, it shows its feebleness in anger and threatening. It commands us to take its problems for granted, on pain of being tied up to a triangle. Then come its advocates, and assert that this mode of treatment is proper and logical: which is making bad worse. The worst of all is, that this is the way in which the finest doctrines in the world are obstructed. They are like an excellent child, making the Grand Tour with a foolish overbearing tutor. The tutor runs a chance of spoiling the child, and makes their presence disagreeable wherever they go, except to their tradesmen. Let us hope the child has done with his tutor.

SECOND THOUGHT ON THE VARIETY OF THE COLORS OF PERCEPTION.

We may gather from what we read of diseased imaginations, how much our perceptions depend upon the modification of our being. We see how personal and inexperienced we are when we determine that such and such ideas must take place under other circumstances, and such and such truths be always indis. putable. Pleasure must always be pleasure, and pain be pain, because these are only names for certain results.

But the re

sults themselves will be pleasurable or painful, according to

what they act upon. A man in health becomes sickly; he has a fever, is light-headed, is hypochondriacal. His ideas are de ranged, or re-arrange themselves; and a set of new perceptions, and colorings of his existence, take place, as in a kaleidoscope when we shake it. The conclusion is, that every alteration of our physical particles, or of whatever else we are compounded with, produces a different set of perceptions and sensations. What we call health of body and mind is the fittest state of our composition upon earth: but the state of perception which is sickly to our state of existence, may be healthy to another.

DEATH.

Of all impositions on the public, the greatest seems to be death. It resembles the threatening faces on each side the Treasury. Or rather, it is a necessary bar to our tendency to move forward. Nature sends us out of her hand with such an impetus towards increase of enjoyment, that something is obliged to be set at the end of the avenue we are in, to moderate our bias, and make us enjoy the present being. Death serves to make us think, not of itself, but of what is about us.

CHILDHOOD AND KNOWLEDGE.

When children are in good health and temper, they have a sense of existence which seems too exquisite to last. It is made ⚫ up of clearness of blood, freshness of perception, and trustingness of heart. We remember the time, when the green rails along a set of superb gardens used to fill us with a series of holiday and rural sensations perfectly intoxicating. According to the state of our health, we have sunny glimpses of this feeling still; to say nothing of many other pleasures, which have paid us for many pains. The best time to catch them is early in the morning, at sunrise, out in the country. And we will here add, that life never perhaps feels such a return of fresh and young feeling upon it, as in early rising on a fine morning, whether in country or town. The healthiness of it, the quiet, the consciousness of having done a sort of young action (not to

add a wise one), and the sense of power it gives you over the coming day, produce a mixture of buoyancy and self-possession, which a sick man must not despair of, because he does not feel it the first morning. But even this reform should be adopted by degrees. The best way to recommend it is to begin with allowing fair play to the other side of the question. (See the article upon Getting up on Cold Mornings.) To return to our main point. After childhood comes a knowledge of evil, or a sophisticate and unhealthy mode of life; or one produces the other, and both are embittered. Everything tells us to get back to a state of childhood-pain, pleasure, imagination, reason, passion, natural affection or piety, the better part of religion. If knowledge is supposed to be incompatible with it, knowledge would sacrifice herself, if necessary, to the same cause, for she also tells us to do so. But as a little knowledge first leads us away from happiness, so a greater knowledge may be destined to bring us back into a finer region of it.

KNOWLEDGE AND UNHAPPINESS.

It is not knowledge that makes us unhappy as we grow up, but the knowledge of unhappiness. Yet, as unhappiness existed when we knew it not, it becomes us all to be acquainted with it, that we may all have the chance of bettering the condition of our species. Who would say to himself, "I would be happy, though all my fellow-creatures were miserable!" Knowledge must heal what it wounds, and extend the happiness which it has suspended. It must do by our comfort as a friend may do by one's books; enrich it with its comments. up and gets unhealthy without knowledge; The former suffers and does not know why. and he sees unhappiness, but he can do nothing for himself or others. The latter suffers and discovers why. He suffers even more because he knows more; but he learns also how to diminish suffering in others. He learns, too, to apply his knowledge to his own case; and he sees, that as he himself suffers from the world's want of knowledge, so the progress of knowledge woul take away the world's sufferings and his own. The efforts to

One man grows another, with it. He is unhappy,