as there was more or less light; and which still arranged itself among the real objects of vision, with a distance and magnitude proportioned to its greater or lesser faintness. For still as the darkness increased, the image of the fire lessened and grew nearer and more distinct; till the twilight had deepened into perfect night, when all outward objects being excluded, the window became a perfect looking-glass: save only that my books on the side shelves of the room were lettered, as it were, on their backs with stars, more or fewer as the sky was more or less clouded, (the rays of the stars being at that time the only ones transmitted). Now substitute the phantom from Luther's brain for the images of reflected light (the fire for instance), and the forms of his room and its furniture for the transmitted rays, and you have a fair resemblance of an apparition, and a just conception of the manner in which it is seen together with real objects. I have long wished to devote an entire work to the subject of dreams, visions, ghosts, witchcraft, &c. in which I might first give, and then endeavour to explain the most interesting and best attested fact of each, which has come within my knowledge, either from books or from personal testimony. I might then explain in a more satisfactory way the mode in which our thoughts, in states of morbid slumber, become at times perfectly dramatic (for in certain sorts of dreams the dullest wight becomes a Shakespeare), and by what law the form of the vision appears to talk to us its own thoughts in a voice as audible as the shape is visible; and this too oftentimes in connected trains, and not seldom even with a concentration of power which may easily impose on the soundest judgements, uninstructed in the optics and acoustics of the inner sense, for revelations and gifts of prescience. In aid of the present case, I will only remark, that it would appear incredible to persons not accustomed to these subtle notices of self-observation, what small and remote resemblances, what mere hints of likeness from some real external object, especially if the shape be aided by colour, will suffice to make a vivid thought consubstantiate with the real object, and derive from it an outward perceptibility. Even when we are broad awake, if we are in anxious expectation, how often will not the most confused sounds of nature be heard by us as articulate sounds? For instance, the babbling of a brook will appear for a moment the voice of a friend, for whom we are waiting, calling out our own names, &c. A short meditation, therefore, on the great law of the imagination, that a likeness in part tends to become a likeness of the whole, will make it not only conceivable but probable, that the inkstand itself, and the darkcoloured stone on the wall, which Luther perhaps had never till then noticed, might have a considerable influence in the production of the fiend, and of the hostile act by which his obtrusive visit was repelled. A lady once asked me if I believed in ghosts and apparitions. I answered with truth and simplicity: "No, madam! I have seen far too "In many myself." I have indeed a whole memorandum-book filled with records of these phænomena, many of them interesting as facts and data for psychology, and affording some valuable materials for a theory of perception and its dependence on the memory and imagination. omnem actum perceptionis imaginatio influit efficienter.”—-Wolfe. But he is no more who would have realized this idea, who had already established the foundations and the law of the theory; and for whom I had so often found a pleasure and a comfort, even during the wretched and restless nights of sickness, in watching and instantly recording these experiences of the world within us, of the "gemina natura, quæ fit et facit, et creat et creatur!" He is gone, my friend! my munificent copatron, and not less the benefactor of my intellect!-He who, beyond all other men known to me, added a fine and ever-wakeful sense of beauty to the most patient accuracy in experimental philosophy and the profounder researches of metaphysical science; he who united all the play and spring of fancy with the subtlest discrimination and an inexorable judgment; and who controlled an almost painful exquisiteness of taste by a warmth of heart, which in the practical relations of life made allowances for faults as quick as the moral taste detected them; a warmth of heart, which was indeed noble and pre-eminent, for alas! the genial feelings of health contributed no spark towards it! Of these qualities I may speak, for they belonged to all mankind.—The higher virtues, that were blessings to his friends, and the still higher that resided in and for his own soul, are themes for the energies of solitude, for the awfulness of prayer!-virtues exercised in the barrenness and desolation of his animal being; while he thirsted with the full stream at his lips, and yet with unwearied goodness poured out to all around him, like the master of a feast among his kindred in the day of his own gladness! Were it but for the remembrance of him alone and of his lot here below, the disbelief of a future state would sadden the earth around me, and blight the very grass in the field. ESSAY IV. Χαλεπὸν, ὦ δαιμόνιε, μὴ παραδειγμασι χρώμενον ἱκανῶς ἐνδείκνυσθαί τι τῶν μειζόνων· κινο δυνέυει γαρ ἡμῶν ἕκαστος οἷον ὅναρ, ειδὼς ἅπαντα, παντ ̓ ἂν πάλιν ὥσπερ ΰπαρ ἀγνδειν· PLATO, Polit. p. 47, Ed. Bip. (Translation.)-It is difficult, excellent friend! to make any comprehensive truth completely intelligible, unless we avail ourselves of an example. Otherwise we may as in a dream, seem to know all, and then as it were, awaking find that we know nothing.-PLATO. AMONG my earliest impressions I still distinctly remember that of my first entrance into the mansion of a neighbouring baronet, awfully known to me by the name of the Great House, its exterior having been long connected in my childish imagination with the feelings and fancies stirred up in me by the perusal of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.* Beyond all other objects, I was most struck with the magnificent staircase, relieved at well-proportioned intervals by spacious landing-places, this adorned with grand or showy plants, the next looking out on an extensive prospect through the stately window with its side panes of rich blues and saturated amber or orange tints: while from the last and highest the eye commanded the whole spiral ascent with the marbled pavement of the great hall from which it seemed to spring up as if it merely used the ground on which it rested. My readers will find no difficulty in translating these forms of the outward senses into their intellectual analogies, so as to understand the purport of The Friend's landing-places, and the objects, he proposed to himself, in the small groups of essays interposed under this title between the main divisions of the work. My best powers would have sunk within me, had I not soothed my solitary toils with the anticipation of many readers-(whether during the writer's life, or when his grave shall have shamed his detractors into a sympathy with its own silence, formed no part in this self-flattery,) who would submit to any reasonable trouble rather than read "as in a dream seeming to know all, to find on awaking that they know nothing." Having, therefore, in the three preceding numbers selected from my conservatory a few plants, of somewhat gayer petals and a livelier green, though like the geranium tribe of a sober character in the whole physiognomy and odour, I shall first devote a few sentences to a catalogue raisonné of my introductory lucubrations, and the remainder of the essay to the prospect, as far as it can be seen distinctly from our present site. Within a short distance, several ways meet: and at that point only does it appear to me that the reader will be in danger of mistaking the road. Dropping the metaphor, I would say that there is one term, the meaning of which has become unsettled. To different persons it conveys a different idea, and not seldom to the same person at different times; while the force, and to a certain extent, the intelligibility of the following sections depend on its being interpreted in one sense exclusively. Essays from I. to IV. inclusive convey the design and contents of the work; The Friend's judgment respecting the style, and his defence of himself from the charges of arrogance and presumption. Say rather, that such are the personal threads of the discourse: for it will not have * As I had read one volume of these tales over and over again before my fifth birthday, it may be readily conjectured of what sort these fancies and feelings must have been. The book, I well remember, used to lie in a corner of the parlour-window at my dear father's vicarage-house: and I can never forget with what a strange mixture of obscure dread and intense desire I used to look at the volume and watch it, till the morning sunshine had reached and nearly covered it, when, and not before, I felt the courage given me to seize the precious treasure and hurry off with it to some sunny corner in our playground. escaped the reader's observation, that even in these prefatory pages principles and truths of general interest form the true contents, and that amid all the usual compliments and courtesies of The Friend's first presentation of himself to his reader's acquaintance the substantial object is still to assert the practicability, without disguising the difficulties, of improving the morals of mankind by a direct appeal to their understandings; to show the distinction between attention and thought, and the necessity of the former as a habit or discipline without which the very word, thinking, must remain a thoughtless substitute for dreaming with our eyes open; and lastly, the tendency of a certain fashionable style with all its accommodations to paralyse the very faculties of manly intellect by a series of petty stimulants After this preparation The Friend proceeds at once to lay the foundations common to the whole work by an inquiry into the duty of communicating truth, and the conditions under which it may be communicated with safety, from the fifth to the sixteenth essay inclusive. Each essay will, he believes, be found complete in itself, yet an organic part of the whole considered as one disquisition. First, the inexpediency of pious frauds is proved from history, the shameless assertion of the indifference of truth and falsehood exposed to its deserved infamy, and an answer given to the objection derived from the impossibility of conveying an adequate notion of the truths, we may attempt to communicate. The conditions are then detailed, under which, right though inadequate notions may be taught without danger, and proofs given, both from facts and from reason, that he, who fulfils the conditions required by conscience, takes the surest way of answering the purposes of prudence. This is, indeed, the main characteristic of the moral system taught by The Friend throughout, that the distinct foresight of consequences belongs exclusively to that Infinite Wisdom which is one with that Almighty Will, on which all consequences depend; but that for man-to obey the simple unconditional commandment of eschewing every act that implies a self-contradiction, or in other words, to produce and maintain the greatest possible harmony in the component impulses and faculties of his nature, involves the effects of prudence. It is, as it were, prudence in short-hand or cipher. A pure conscience, that inward something, that beós oikelos, which being absolutely unique no man can describe, because every man is bound to know, and even in the eye of the law is held to be a person no longer than he may be supposed to know itthe conscience, I say, bears the same relation to God, as an accurate time-piece bears to the sun. The time-piece merely indicates the relative path of the sun, yet we can regulate our plans and proceedings by it with the same confidence as if it was itself the efficient cause of light, heat, and the revolving seasons: on the self-evident axiom, that in whatever sense two things, for instance, A. and C D E. are both equal to a third thing B. they are in the same sense equal to each other. Cunning is circuitous folly. In plain English, to act the knave is but a round-about way of playing the fool; and the man, who will not permit himself to call an action by its proper name without a previous calculation of all its probable consequences, may be indeed only a coxcomb, who is looking at his fingers through an opera glass; but he runs no small risk of becoming a knave. The chances are against him. Though he should begin by calculating the consequences with regard to others, yet by the mere habit of never contemplating an action in its own proportions and immediate relations to his moral being, it is scarcely possible but that he must end in selfishness: for the 'you,' and the 'they' will stand on different occasions for a thousand different persons, while the 'I' is one only, and recurs in every calculation. Or grant that the principle of expediency should prompt to the same outward deeds as are commanded by the law of reason; yet the doer himself is debased. But if it be replied, that the reaction on the agent's own mind is to form a part of the calculation, then it is a rule that destroys itself in the very propounding, as will be more fully demonstrated in the second or ethical division of The Friend, when we shall have detected and exposed the equivoque between an action and the series of motions by which the determinations of the will are to be realized in the world of the senses. What modification of the latter corresponds to the former, and is entitled to be called by the same name, will often depend on time, place, persons and circumstances, the consideration of which requires an exertion of the judgment; but the action itself remains the same, and like all other ideas pre-exists in the reason,* or (in the more expressive and perhaps more precise and philosophical language of St. Paul,) in the spirit, unalterable because unconditional, or with no other than that most awful condition, as sure as God liveth, it is so! These remarks are inserted in this place, because the principle admits of easiest illustration in the instance of veracity and the actions connected with the same, and may then be intelligibly applied to other departments of morality, all of which Wollston indeed considers as only so many different forms of truth and falsehood. So far The Friend has treated of oral communication of the truth. The applicability of the same principle is then tried and affirmed in publications by the press, first as between the individual and his own conscience and then between the publisher and the state: and under this head The Friend has considered at large the questions of a free press and the law of libel, the anomalies and peculiar difficulties of the latter, and the only possible solution compatible with the continuance of the former: a solution rising out of and justified by the necessarily anomalous and unique nature of the law itself. He confesses, that he looks back on this See the Statesman's Manual, p. 23. |