THE CREATIVE POWER OF THE MIND.

41

English Opium-Eater. Both beauty and sublimity-you may remember we touched on these subjects at the last Noctes, and, indeed, an hour ago-appear to be visible in visible objects. When we begin to think, we cannot believe that they are otherwise; and we abhor the metaphysical attempt to take the qualities out of the objects, to make them alien to the eye. Why? Because that attempt dissolves the world. It makes that whereon our love, our soul, has rested as on rock-strong Reality, unreal-mere Figured Air!

Shepherd. It would seem, indeed, my dear sir, that our verra life is taen frae us by sic speculations.

English Opium-Eater. Be it so. The great question is, will we know, or will we have ignorant bliss? Know we must. We very soon become convinced, by divers reflections, that our first natural and inevitable idea is not strictly true, that the Beauty and the Sublimity are not so imbedded and inherent in the objects as they once appeared to be. We must give up more and more, and shall find no rest till we recogise that they are totally of the mind. Then, indeed, we btain a support-a life-of a different and more sufficient ind than that which was at first taken away, in the clear onsciousness of the creative and illimitable power of the ind. We can rest well in either extreme-but between nem, rest is there none.

Shepherd. What for do you no write poetry, Mr Quinshyein that ye are a poet? But you're prouder o' bein' a pheesopher.

English Opium-Eater. There are two principal ways, Mr ogg, in which every object can be considered-two chief pects under which they present themselves to us—the phisophical and the poetical-as they are to reason, as they m to imagination.

Shepherd. Can you, sir, make that great distinction good? English Opium-Eater. Perhaps there is no absolute distincin the world of nature, or in the human soul. But let me we may consider all things, either as intellect without ing tends to consider them, or intellect with feeling, i. e., satively and passionately. The great, the most earnestlyring inquiry that pure reason makes, is of the causes of For this end it comes into the world. To intellect working, what it sees is nothing-for what it sees are

gs.

42

INTELLECT.-IMAGINATION.

signs only of what has preceded-and, therefore, such speculation dissolves the fabric to construct it over again. It builds out of destruction. But intellect working by feeling, i. e., imagination, does quite the reverse. What is, is everything to it. It beholds and loves. Imagination educes from its objects all the passion, all the delight that they are capable of yielding it. It desires, it cares for nothing more. Hence philosophy and poetry are at war with each other, but they are powers which may belong to the service of the same kingly mind. Imagination lives in the present-in the shown-in the apparent in the pavoμevov. From the whole, as it is presented, springs some mighty passion. Disturb the actual presentment, and the passion is gone.

"If but a beam of sober reason play,

Then Fancy's fairy frost-work melts away."

That line, beautiful as it is, and true-is yet inadequate to express the demolition, when is and SEEMS encounter, and the latter is overthrown.

Shepherd. Plawto poured out his pheelosophy in Dialogues -and sae, sir, do you-and I'll back ye again' the auld Trojan —that is, Grecian-for a barrel o' eisters. I never understood metafeezics afore-but noo the distinction atween reason and imagination and their objects, is as plain as that atween the pike-staff o' a sergeant o' militia and the sceptre o' Agamem

non.

North. You have been touching, my dear Opium-Eater, on abstruse matters indeed, but with a pencil of light. Certainly, the effect of right metaphysical study is to dissolve the whole fabric of knowledge. Boscovich has metaphysicized matter, and shown that there need be none-that certain centres of attraction and repulsion are the only things needed. Others have metaphysicized vision. Now, two great bonds of our knowledge are-habit, and the feeling we annex to forms; and we repugn the breaking up of either. How our idea of a house, a palace, a kingdom, a man, the sea, is infused with feeling! To all doctrines that dissolve feelings or habits, we are naturally averse. They are painful-as, for example, that which denies that colour or beauty is in the objects-just like that further discovery of the world, which shows us that those whom we thought all-perfect, have great faults. But this is

METAPHYSICS.-IDEALISM.

43

a discipline we must go through-for we begin children and end spirits. There is but One good. There is but One deserving of all love. The discipline forms love in us, and gradually and successively breaks it off from all less objects, so that we remain with the affection, and Him the sole object fitted to it. He is to be all-in-all. The more you approach to total devotion, the more you unite high intellect and high feeling to stable and strong happiness.

English Opium-Eater. Sometimes there seems, sir, to be a simplicity of love that is happy in mere calm, but it is rare; and generally there is not happiness that is not built on the rock, Religion. Every less happiness is broken, imperfect, low, inconsistent, self-contradictory, full of wounds and flaws, or it remains solid by a low measure of understanding and sensibility.

North. Did Mallebranche' say that we see all things in God? It is not impossible that as our moral nature, to find itself entire, must rest in God, so our intellect must. We cannot be happy-we cannot be moral-we cannot know truth-except in him. Thus, it may be destined that our beginnings of life shall be on this earth, as if this earth were all. We love the parents that gave us birth, the spot on which we grow, all things living and lifeless about our cradle. We love this moist and opaque earth, which is our soil for our downwardstriking roots-here we receive the sunshine and the dewsand we begin Terrene. Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own. The homely nurse doth all she can." There seem, indeed, immense powers exerted about us to bind us, to shut us up in earth and mortality, to make us love finite things, centre and limit our desire in them, and be ourselves finite. All our pleasures, all our senses, all habits and all customs, seem to close us in; strong passions spring up and embrace things 1 Nicholas Mallebranche, a distinguished French philosopher, died in 1715, aged seventy-seven. 2 Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;

Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,

The homely Nurse doth all she can

To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,

And that imperial palace whence he came."

2

Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality, &c.

This is natural

finite; this is earth and the strength of earth. man—the child-the day-darger-the Savage. Is it not singular to see what a fitting there has been, and what quantities of power employed, to make terrestrial man? Yet, as if this were but a nursery or school, a place of preparation, lo! another end! For a power evolves, of which it seems the use to destroy and abolish what has been made with such pains, as if all that had been made were but fuel for this new fire to burn-a crop to be ploughed in for the true harvest. The fostered flesh has been strong. The spirit comes. If the spirit could have its force and course, the man should gradually tend towards heaven, as he wears from earth. He should mount continually. Morally, this is true; but is it not, my dear De Quincey, curious in metaphysics to see it true intellectually? To see the material world, that seemed so hard and ponderous, turned into a thought? To see intellect play with it, dallying between its existence and its nonexistence? To see the intellect grow spiritual, till it has rejected cumbrous matter, and only knows and sees spirit?1

English Opium-Eater. That ingenious man, John Fearn,2 with whom Dugald Stewart would not enter into discussion on a metaphysical question involving the whole philosophy of the Professor, has demonstrated that there is no matter, and is quite satisfied about it. Kant thought that there was, but that we could know nothing of it; that it was nothing in the least like what it appeared to us to be; existing as a cause of certain affections of our minds, but in no sort revealed to them— and even Sir Isaac Newton thought that the most solid-looking matter was a most delicate and airy network, if network it may be called, of which the infinitesimally invisible atoms were a thousand or a million times their own diameter distant from one another, and that all the real matter of the universe, compacted, might be contained in a cubic inch !

North. Ay, thus it is, sir, that metaphysicians and physicians concur in overthrowing and absolving our sensible know1 The spirit of genuine speculative idealism speaks in these words. The poetry, however, of idealism is worth little without the proof.

2 John Fearn was a very singular character, and a man of some originality of thought. He brooded for many years, like a gymnosophist, over metaphysics in the jungles of India. When he returned home he wrote books which nobody would read, and died, some years ago, a martyr to a bad and unattractive style of composition.

THE TRUE IDEA OF PHILOSOPHY.

45

ledge. They teach us we are fools! and that what we take

to be solid is the fabric of a vision ! English Opium-Eater. True.

And is not philosophy, my dear Mr North, the very undoer of what nature has been doing from the beginning? To nature, Mr Hogg, the earth is flat-the sky a dome

Shepherd. The ane green, the ither blue, and baith beautifu'

English Opium-Eater. The sun moves-and Galileo is imprisoned for thinking otherwise. But intellect sees through the coloured cloud of things. It is an alchemic fire which fuses the substance of nature, annihilating its customary and known form to disclose its essence, which, alas! is not by us to be found! But we must conceive this utter disdain and rejection of the admitted world, by intellect in its giant, consummated power, and that is the only true idea of philosophy. Intellect, therefore, can have no rest but in Deity—and we have seen how metaphysical intellect is driven to this, when it comes to believe that there is no matter-nothing but a continual agency of Deity upon mind.

North. Just so do we find it excessively difficult, from looking at the world, to find the true relation of religion to man. The looking at the world naturally lowers to us the estimate of this relation, because there is so little religion in the world -hardly any-and we can scarcely believe everybody, here too, to be utterly in the wrong. We think the world must have common sense, and end in thinking the high notion of religion contrary to common sense, and visionary. But do not mankind err— -and do we not know it? For you see that the multitude miss the End of Life. Have they found the possession of their highest faculties—innate in all? No-not one in a million. Have they found happiness? No-not generally. Look sublimely upon them, and you deplore them and their fate. What is human life then? Mixed. High affections mixed with low, religion with earth and sin, the finite with the infinite. Make an idea of man, and you inevitably take him at the highest, and exalt his life to be like him; but look at him existing, and you see bright fragments of this idea mixed with what you would fain reject from his life. But can this mixture be all that was intended, that is to be aimed at, to be required? Impossible. But we have not the invincible,