Biographia Literaria

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This authenticated case furnishes both proof and instance, that
reliques of sensation may exist for an indefinite time in a latent
state, in the very same order in which they were originally impressed;
and as we cannot rationally suppose the feverish state of the brain to
act in any other way than as a stimulus, this fact (and it would not
be difficult to adduce several of the same kind) contributes to make
it even probable, that all thoughts are in themselves imperishable;
and, that if the intelligent faculty should be rendered more
comprehensive, it would require only a different and apportioned
organization,--the body celestial instead of the body terrestrial,--to
bring before every human soul the collective experience of its whole
past existence. And this, this, perchance, is the dread book of
judgment, in the mysterious hieroglyphics of which every idle word is
recorded! Yea, in the very nature of a living spirit, it may be more
possible that heaven and earth should pass away, than that a single
act, a single thought, should be loosened or lost from that living
chain of causes, with all the links of which, conscious or
unconscious, the free-will, our only absolute Self, is coextensive and
co-present. But not now dare I longer discourse of this, waiting for a
loftier mood, and a nobler subject, warned from within and from
without, that it is profanation to speak of these mysteries tois maede
phantasteisin, os kalon to taes dikaiosynaes kai sophrosynaes
prosopon, kai oute hesperos oute eoos outo kala. To gar horon pros to
horomenon syngenes kai homoion poiaesamenon dei epiballein tae thea,
ou gar an popote eiden ophthalmos haelion, haelioeidaes mae
gegenaemenos oude to kalon an idae psychae, mae kagae genomenae--" to
those to whose imagination it has never been presented, how beautiful
is the countenance of justice and wisdom; and that neither the morning
nor the evening star are so fair. For in order to direct the view
aright, it behoves that the beholder should have made himself
congenerous and similar to the object beheld. Never could the eye have
beheld the sun, had not its own essence been soliform," (i.e. pre-
configured to light by a similarity of essence with that of light)
"neither can a soul not beautiful attain to an intuition of beauty."

CHAPTER VII

Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory--Of the original
mistake or equivocation which procured its admission--Memoria
technica.

We will pass by the utter incompatibility of such a law--if law it may
be called, which would itself be a slave of chances--with even that
appearance of rationality forced upon us by the outward phaenomena of
human conduct, abstracted from our own consciousness. We will agree to
forget this for the moment, in order to fix our attention on that
subordination of final to efficient causes in the human being, which
flows of necessity from the assumption, that the will and, with the
will, all acts of thought and attention are parts and products of this
blind mechanism, instead of being distinct powers, the function of
which it is to control, determine, and modify the phantasmal chaos of
association. The soul becomes a mere ens logicum; for, as a real
separable being, it would be more worthless and ludicrous than the
Grimalkins in the cat-harpsichord, described in the Spectator. For
these did form a part of the process; but, to Hartley's scheme, the
soul is present only to be pinched or stroked, while the very squeals
or purring are produced by an agency wholly independent and alien. It
involves all the difficulties, all the incomprehensibility (if it be
not indeed, os emoige dokei, the absurdity), of intercommunion between
substances that have no one property in common, without any of the
convenient consequences that bribed the judgment to the admission of
the Dualistic hypothesis. Accordingly, this caput mortuum of the
Hartleian process has been rejected by his followers, and the
consciousness considered as a result, as a tune, the common product of
the breeze and the harp though this again is the mere remotion of one
absurdity to make way for another, equally preposterous. For what is
harmony but a mode of relation, the very esse of which is percipi?--an
ens rationale, which pre-supposes the power, that by perceiving
creates it? The razor's edge becomes a saw to the armed vision; and
the delicious melodies of Purcell or Cimarosa might be disjointed
stammerings to a hearer, whose partition of time should be a thousand
times subtler than ours. But this obstacle too let us imagine
ourselves to have surmounted, and "at one bound high overleap all
bound." Yet according to this hypothesis the disquisition, to which I
am at present soliciting the reader's attention, may be as truly said
to be written by Saint Paul's church, as by me: for it is the mere
motion of my muscles and nerves; and these again are set in motion
from external causes equally passive, which external causes stand
themselves in interdependent connection with every thing that exists
or has existed. Thus the whole universe co-operates to produce the
minutest stroke of every letter, save only that I myself, and I alone,
have nothing to do with it, but merely the causeless and effectless
beholding of it when it is done. Yet scarcely can it be called a
beholding; for it is neither an act nor an effect; but an impossible
creation of a something nothing out of its very contrary! It is the
mere quick-silver plating behind a looking-glass; and in this alone
consists the poor worthless I! The sum total of my moral and
intellectual intercourse, dissolved into its elements, is reduced to
extension, motion, degrees of velocity, and those diminished copies of
configurative motion, which form what we call notions, and notions of
notions. Of such philosophy well might Butler say--

The metaphysic's but a puppet motion
That goes with screws, the notion of a notion;
The copy of a copy and lame draught
Unnaturally taken from a thought
That counterfeits all pantomimic tricks,
And turns the eyes, like an old crucifix;
That counterchanges whatsoe'er it calls
By another name, and makes it true or false;
Turns truth to falsehood, falsehood into truth,
By virtue of the Babylonian's tooth.

The inventor of the watch, if this doctrine be true, did not in
reality invent it; he only looked on, while the blind causes, the only
true artists, were unfolding themselves. So must it have been too with
my friend Allston, when he sketched his picture of the dead man
revived by the bones of the prophet Elijah. So must it have been with
Mr. Southey and Lord Byron, when the one fancied himself composing his
Roderick, and the other his Childe Harold. The same must hold good of
all systems of philosophy; of all arts, governments, wars by sea and
by land; in short, of all things that ever have been or that ever will
be produced. For, according to this system, it is not the affections
and passions that are at work, in as far as they are sensations or
thoughts. We only fancy, that we act from rational resolves, or
prudent motives, or from impulses of anger, love, or generosity. In
all these cases the real agent is a something-nothing-everything,
which does all of which we know, and knows nothing of all that itself
does.

The existence of an infinite spirit, of an intelligent and holy will,
must, on this system, be mere articulated motions of the air. For as
the function of the human understanding is no other than merely to
appear to itself to combine and to apply the phaenomena of the
association; and as these derive all their reality from the primary
sensations; and the sensations again all their reality from the
impressions ab extra; a God not visible, audible, or tangible, can
exist only in the sounds and letters that form his name and
attributes. If in ourselves there be no such faculties as those of the
will, and the scientific reason, we must either have an innate idea of
them, which would overthrow the whole system; or we can have no idea
at all. The process, by which Hume degraded the notion of cause and
effect into a blind product of delusion and habit, into the mere
sensation of proceeding life (nisus vitalis) associated with the
images of the memory; this same process must be repeated to the equal
degradation of every fundamental idea in ethics or theology.

Far, very far am I from burthening with the odium of these
consequences the moral characters of those who first formed, or have
since adopted the system! It is most noticeable of the excellent and
pious Hartley, that, in the proofs of the existence and attributes of
God, with which his second volume commences, he makes no reference to
the principle or results of the first. Nay, he assumes, as his
foundations, ideas which, if we embrace the doctrines of his first
volume, can exist no where but in the vibrations of the ethereal
medium common to the nerves and to the atmosphere. Indeed the whole of
the second volume is, with the fewest possible exceptions, independent
of his peculiar system. So true is it, that the faith, which saves and
sanctifies, is a collective energy, a total act of the whole moral
being; that its living sensorium is in the heart; and that no errors
of the understanding can be morally arraigned unless they have
proceeded from the heart. But whether they be such, no man can be
certain in the case of another, scarcely perhaps even in his own.
Hence it follows by inevitable consequence, that man may perchance
determine what is a heresy; but God only can know who is a heretic. It
does not, however, by any means follow that opinions fundamentally
false are harmless. A hundred causes may co-exist to form one complex
antidote. Yet the sting of the adder remains venomous, though there
are many who have taken up the evil thing, and it hurted them not.
Some indeed there seem to have been, in an unfortunate neighbour
nation at least, who have embraced this system with a full view of all
its moral and religious consequences; some--

------who deem themselves most free,
When they within this gross and visible sphere
Chain down the winged thought, scoffing ascent,
Proud in their meanness; and themselves they cheat
With noisy emptiness of learned phrase,
Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences,
Self-working tools, uncaus'd effects, and all
Those blind omniscients, those almighty slaves,
Untenanting creation of its God!

Such men need discipline, not argument; they must be made better men,
before they can become wiser.

The attention will be more profitably employed in attempting to
discover and expose the paralogisms, by the magic of which such a
faith could find admission into minds framed for a nobler creed.
These, it appears to me, may be all reduced to one sophism as their
common genus; the mistaking the conditions of a thing for its causes
and essence; and the process, by which we arrive at the knowledge of a
faculty, for the faculty itself. The air I breathe is the condition of
my life, not its cause. We could never have learned that we had eyes
but by the process of seeing; yet having seen we know that the eyes
must have pre-existed in order to render the process of sight
possible. Let us cross-examine Hartley's scheme under the guidance of
this distinction; and we shall discover, that contemporaneity,
(Leibnitz's Lex Continui,) is the limit and condition of the laws of
mind, itself being rather a law of matter, at least of phaenomena
considered as material. At the utmost, it is to thought the same, as
the law of gravitation is to loco-motion. In every voluntary movement
we first counteract gravitation, in order to avail ourselves of it. It
must exist, that there may be a something to be counteracted, and
which, by its re-action, may aid the force that is exerted to resist
it. Let us consider what we do when we leap. We first resist the
gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then by another act,
voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to alight on the spot,
which we had previously proposed to ourselves. Now let a man watch his
mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case,
while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process
completely analogous. Most of my readers will have observed a small
water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted
shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the
brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up
against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion,
now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather
strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no
unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking.
There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other
are active and passive; and this is not possible without an
intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. In
philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty
in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION. But, in common
language, and especially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the
name to a superior degree of the faculty, joined to a superior
voluntary control over it.

Contemporaneity, then, being the common condition of all the laws of
association, and a component element in the materia subjecta, the
parts of which are to be associated, must needs be co-present with
all. Nothing, therefore, can be more easy than to pass off on an
incautious mind this constant companion of each, for the essential
substance of all. But if we appeal to our own consciousness, we shall
find that even time itself, as the cause of a particular act of
association, is distinct from contemporaneity, as the condition of all
association. Seeing a mackerel, it may happen, that I immediately
think of gooseberries, because I at the same time ate mackerel with
gooseberries as the sauce. The first syllable of the latter word,
being that which had coexisted with the image of the bird so called, I
may then think of a goose. In the next moment the image of a swan may
arise before me, though I had never seen the two birds together. In
the first two instances, I am conscious that their co-existence in
time was the circumstance, that enabled me to recollect them; and
equally conscious am I that the latter was recalled to me by the joint
operation of likeness and contrast. So it is with cause and effect: so
too with order. So I am able to distinguish whether it was proximity
in time, or continuity in space, that occasioned me to recall B on the
mention of A. They cannot be indeed separated from contemporaneity;
for that would be to separate them from the mind itself. The act of
consciousness is indeed identical with time considered in its essence.
I mean time per se, as contra-distinguished from our notion of time;
for this is always blended with the idea of space, which, as the
opposite of time, is therefore its measure. Nevertheless the accident
of seeing two objects at the same moment, and the accident of seeing
them in the same place are two distinct or distinguishable causes: and
the true practical general law of association is this; that whatever
makes certain parts of a total impression more vivid or distinct than
the rest, will determine the mind to recall these in preference to
others equally linked together by the common condition of
contemporaneity, or (what I deem a more appropriate and philosophical
term) of continuity. But the will itself by confining and intensifying
[25] the attention may arbitrarily give vividness or distinctness to
any object whatsoever; and from hence we may deduce the uselessness,
if not the absurdity, of certain recent schemes which promise an
artificial memory, but which in reality can only produce a confusion
and debasement of the fancy. Sound logic, as the habitual
subordination of the individual to the species, and of the species to
the genus; philosophical knowledge of facts under the relation of
cause and effect; a cheerful and communicative temper disposing us to
notice the similarities and contrasts of things, that we may be able
to illustrate the one by the other; a quiet conscience; a condition
free from anxieties; sound health, and above all (as far as relates to
passive remembrance) a healthy digestion; these are the best, these
are the only Arts of Memory.

CHAPTER VIII

The system of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes--Refined first by
Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the doctrine of Harmonia
praestabilita--Hylozoism--Materialism--None of these systems, or any
possible theory of association, supplies or supersedes a theory of
perception, or explains the formation of the associable.

To the best of my knowledge Des Cartes was the first philosopher who
introduced the absolute and essential heterogenity of the soul as
intelligence, and the body as matter. The assumption, and the form of
speaking have remained, though the denial of all other properties to
matter but that of extension, on which denial the whole system of
Dualism is grounded, has been long exploded. For since impenetrability
is intelligible only as a mode of resistance; its admission places the
essence of matter in an act or power, which it possesses in common
with spirit; and body and spirit are therefore no longer absolutely
heterogeneous, but may without any absurdity be supposed to be
different modes, or degrees in perfection, of a common substratum. To
this possibility, however, it was not the fashion to advert. The soul
was a thinking substance, and body a space-filling substance. Yet the
apparent action of each on the other pressed heavy on the philosopher
on the one hand; and no less heavily on the other hand pressed the
evident truth, that the law of causality holds only between
homogeneous things, that is, things having some common property; and
cannot extend from one world into another, its contrary. A close
analysis evinced it to be no less absurd than the question whether a
man's affection for his wife lay North-east, or South-west of the love
he bore towards his child. Leibnitz's doctrine of a pre-established
harmony; which he certainly borrowed from Spinoza, who had himself
taken the hint from Des Cartes's animal machines, was in its common
interpretation too strange to survive the inventor--too repugnant to
our common sense; which is not indeed entitled to a judicial voice in
the courts of scientific philosophy; but whose whispers still exert a
strong secret influence. Even Wolf, the admirer and illustrious
systematizer of the Leibnitzian doctrine, contents himself with
defending the possibility of the idea, but does not adopt it as a part
of the edifice.

The hypothesis of Hylozoism, on the other side, is the death of all
rational physiology, and indeed of all physical science; for that
requires a limitation of terms, and cannot consist with the arbitrary
power of multiplying attributes by occult qualities. Besides, it
answers no purpose; unless, indeed, a difficulty can be solved by
multiplying it, or we can acquire a clearer notion of our soul by
being told that we have a million of souls, and that every atom of our
bodies has a soul of its own. Far more prudent is it to admit the
difficulty once for all, and then let it lie at rest. There is a
sediment indeed at the bottom of the vessel, but all the water above
it is clear and transparent. The Hylozoist only shakes it up, and
renders the whole turbid.

But it is not either the nature of man, or the duty of the philosopher
to despair concerning any important problem until, as in the squaring
of the circle, the impossibility of a solution has been demonstrated.
How the esse assumed as originally distinct from the scire, can ever
unite itself with it; how being can transform itself into a knowing,
becomes conceivable on one only condition; namely, if it can be shown
that the vis representativa, or the Sentient, is itself a species of
being; that is, either as a property or attribute, or as an hypostasis
or self subsistence. The former--that thinking is a property of matter
under particular conditions,--is, indeed, the assumption of
materialism; a system which could not but be patronized by the
philosopher, if only it actually performed what it promises. But how
any affection from without can metamorphose itself into perception or
will, the materialist has hitherto left, not only as incomprehensible
as he found it, but has aggravated it into a comprehensible absurdity.
For, grant that an object from without could act upon the conscious
self, as on a consubstantial object; yet such an affection could only
engender something homogeneous with itself. Motion could only
propagate motion. Matter has no Inward. We remove one surface, but to
meet with another. We can but divide a particle into particles; and
each atom comprehends in itself the properties of the material
universe. Let any reflecting mind make the experiment of explaining to
itself the evidence of our sensuous intuitions, from the hypothesis
that in any given perception there is a something which has been
communicated to it by an impact, or an impression ab extra. In the
first place, by the impact on the percipient, or ens representans, not
the object itself, but only its action or effect, will pass into the
same. Not the iron tongue, but its vibrations, pass into the metal of
the bell. Now in our immediate perception, it is not the mere power or
act of the object, but the object itself, which is immediately
present. We might indeed attempt to explain this result by a chain of
deductions and conclusions; but that, first, the very faculty of
deducing and concluding would equally demand an explanation; and
secondly, that there exists in fact no such intermediation by logical
notions, such as those of cause and effect. It is the object itself,
not the product of a syllogism, which is present to our consciousness.
Or would we explain this supervention of the object to the sensation,
by a productive faculty set in motion by an impulse; still the
transition, into the percipient, of the object itself, from which the
impulse proceeded, assumes a power that can permeate and wholly
possess the soul,

And like a God by spiritual art,
Be all in all, and all in every part.

And how came the percipient here? And what is become of the wonder-
promising Matter, that was to perform all these marvels by force of
mere figure, weight and motion? The most consistent proceeding of the
dogmatic materialist is to fall back into the common rank of soul-and-
bodyists; to affect the mysterious, and declare the whole process a
revelation given, and not to be understood, which it would be profane
to examine too closely. Datur non intelligitur. But a revelation
unconfirmed by miracles, and a faith not commanded by the conscience,
a philosopher may venture to pass by, without suspecting himself of
any irreligious tendency.

Thus, as materialism has been generally taught, it is utterly
unintelligible, and owes all its proselytes to the propensity so
common among men, to mistake distinct images for clear conceptions;
and vice versa, to reject as inconceivable whatever from its own
nature is unimaginable. But as soon as it becomes intelligible, it
ceases to be materialism. In order to explain thinking, as a material
phaenomenon, it is necessary to refine matter into a mere modification
of intelligence, with the two-fold function of appearing and
perceiving. Even so did Priestley in his controversy with Price. He
stripped matter of all its material properties; substituted spiritual
powers; and when we expected to find a body, behold! we had nothing
but its ghost--the apparition of a defunct substance!

I shall not dilate further on this subject; because it will, (if God
grant health and permission), be treated of at large and
systematically in a work, which I have many years been preparing, on
the Productive Logos human and divine; with, and as the introduction
to, a full commentary on the Gospel of St. John. To make myself
intelligible as far as my present subject requires, it will be
sufficient briefly to observe.--1. That all association demands and
presupposes the existence of the thoughts and images to be
associated.--2. That the hypothesis of an external world exactly
correspondent to those images or modifications of our own being, which
alone, according to this system, we actually behold, is as thorough
idealism as Berkeley's, inasmuch as it equally, perhaps in a more
perfect degree, removes all reality and immediateness of perception,
and places us in a dream-world of phantoms and spectres, the
inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation of motions in our own
brains.--3. That this hypothesis neither involves the explanation, nor
precludes the necessity, of a mechanism and co-adequate forces in the
percipient, which at the more than magic touch of the impulse from
without is to create anew for itself the correspondent object. The
formation of a copy is not solved by the mere pre-existence of an
original; the copyist of Raffael's Transfiguration must repeat more or
less perfectly the process of Raffael. It would be easy to explain a
thought from the image on the retina, and that from the geometry of
light, if this very light did not present the very same difficulty. We
might as rationally chant the Brahim creed of the tortoise that
supported the bear, that supported the elephant, that supported the
world, to the tune of "This is the house that Jack built." The sic Deo
placitum est we all admit as the sufficient cause, and the divine
goodness as the sufficient reason; but an answer to the Whence and Why
is no answer to the How, which alone is the physiologist's concern. It
is a sophisma pigrum, and (as Bacon hath said) the arrogance of
pusillanimity, which lifts up the idol of a mortal's fancy and
commands us to fall down and worship it, as a work of divine wisdom,
an ancile or palladium fallen from heaven. By the very same argument
the supporters of the Ptolemaic system might have rebuffed the
Newtonian, and pointing to the sky with self-complacent grin [26] have
appealed to common sense, whether the sun did not move and the earth
stand still.

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