he sees.

sense and observation. If the absurdity in question had been confined to the schools, we should not have gone out of our way to meddle with it but it has got abroad in the world, has crept into ladies' toilettes, is entered in the common-place of beaux, is in the mouth of the learned and ignorant, and forms a part of popular opinion. It is perpetually applied as a false measure to the characters and conduct of men in the common affairs of the world, and it is therefore our business to rectify it if we can. In fact, whoever sets out on the idea of reducing all our motives and actions to a simple principle, must either take a very narrow and superficial view of human nature, or make a very perverse use of his understanding in reasoning on what The frame of our minds, like that of our bodies, is exceedingly complicated. Besides mere sensibility to pleasure and pain, there are other original independent principles, necessarily interwoven with the nature of man as an active and intelligent being, and which, blended together in different proportions, give their form and colour to our lives. Without some other essential faculties, such as will, imagination, &c., to give effect and direction to our physical sensibility, this faculty could be of no possible use or influence; and with those other faculties joined to it, this pretended instinct of selflove will be subject to be everlastingly modified and controlled by those faculties, both in what regards our own good and that of others; that is, must itself become in a great measure dependent on the very instruments it uses. The two most predominant principles in the mind, besides sensibility and self-interest, are imagination and selfwill, or (in general) the love of strong excitement, both in thought and action. To these sources may be traced the various passions, pursuits, habits, affections, follies and caprices, virtues and vices of mankind. We shall confine ourselves in the present article, to give some account of the influence exercised by the imagination over the feelings. To an intellectual being, it cannot be altogether arbitrary what ideas it shall have, whether pleasurable or painful. Our ideas do not originate in our love of pleasure, and they cannot therefore depend absolutely upon it. They have another principle. If the imagination were the servile slave' of our self-love, if our ideas were emanations of our sensitive nature, encouraged if agreeable, and excluded the instant they became otherwise, or encroached on the former principle, then there might be a tolerable pretence for the Epicurean philosophy which is here spoken of. But for any such entire and mechanical subserviency of the operations of the one principle to the dictates of the other, there is not the slightest foundation in reality. The attention which the mind gives to its ideas is not always owing to the gratification derived from them, but to the

strength and truth of the impressions themselves, i.e. to their involuntary power over the mind. This observation will account for a very general principle in the mind, which cannot, we conceive, be satisfactorily explained in any other way, we mean the power of fascination. Every one has heard the story of the girl who being left alone by her companions, in order to frighten her, in a room with dead body,

at first attempted to get out, and shrieked violently for assistance, but finding herself shut in, ran and embraced the corpse, and was found senseless in its arms.

It is said that in such cases there is a desperate effort made to get rid of the dread by converting it into the reality. There may be some truth in this account, but we do not think it contains the whole truth. The event produced in the present instance does not bear out the conclusion. The progress of the passion does not seem to have been that of diminishing or removing the terror by coming in contact with the object, but of carrying this terror to its height from an intense and irresistible impulse, overcoming every other feeling.

It is a well-known fact that few persons can stand safely on the edge of a precipice, or walk along the parapet wall of a house, without being in danger of throwing themselves down; not we presume from a principle of self-preservation; but in consequence of a strong idea having taken possession of the mind, from which it cannot well escape, which absorbs every other consideration, and confounds and overrules all self-regards. The impulse cannot in this case be resolved into a desire to remove the uneasiness of fear, for the only danger arises from the fear. We have been told by a person, not at all given to exaggeration, that he once felt a strong propensity to throw himself into a cauldron of boiling lead, into which he was looking. These are what Shakespear calls the toys of desperation.' People sometimes marry, and even fall in love on this principle-that is, through mere apprehension, or what is called a fatality. In like manner, we find instances of persons who are as it were naturally delighted with whatever is disagreeable,-who catch all sorts of unbecoming tones and gestures,-who always say what they should not, and what they do not mean to say,-in whom intemperance of imagination and incontinence of tongue are a disease, and who are governed by an almost infallible instinct of absurdity.

The love of imitation has the same general source. We dispute for ever about Hogarth, and the question can never be decided according to the common ideas on the subject of taste. His pictures appeal to the love of truth, not to the sense of beauty; but the one is as much an essential principle of our nature as the other. They fill up the void of the mind; they present an everlasting succession and

variety of ideas. There is a fine observation somewhere made by Aristotle, that the mind has a natural appetite of curiosity or desire to know; and 'most of that knowledge which comes in by the eye, for this presents us with the greatest variety of differences.' Hogarth is relished only by persons of a certain strength of mind and penetration into character; for the subjects in themselves are not pleasing, and this objection is only redeemed by the exercise and activity which they give to the understanding. The great difference between what is meant by a severe and an effeminate taste or style, depends on the distinction here made.

Our teasing ourselves to recollect the names of places or persons we have forgotten, the love of riddles and of abstruse philosophy, are all illustrations of the same general principle of curiosity, or the love of intellectual excitement. Again, our impatience to be delivered of a secret that we know; the necessity which lovers have for confidants, auricular confession, and the declarations so commonly made by criminals of their guilt, are effects of the involuntary power exerted by the imagination over the feelings. Nothing can be more untrue, than that the whole course of our ideas, passions, and pursuits, is regulated by a regard to self-interest. Our attachment to certain objects is much oftener in proportion to the strength of the impression they make on us, to their power of rivetting and fixing the attention, than to the gratification we derive from them. We are perhaps more apt to dwell upon circumstances that excite disgust and shock our feelings, than on those of an agreeable nature. This, at least, is the case where this disposition is particularly strong, as in people of nervous feelings and morbid habits of thinking. Thus the mind is often haunted with painful images and recollections, from the hold they have taken of the imagination. We cannot shake them off, though we strive to do it: nay, we even court their company; we will not part with them out of our presence; we strain our aching sight after them; we anxiously recal every feature, and contemplate them in all their aggravated colours. There are a thousand passions and fancies that thwart our purposes and disturb our repose. Grief and fear are almost as welcome inmates of the breast as hope or joy, and more obstinately cherished. We return to the objects which have excited them, we brood over them, they become almost inseparable from the mind, necessary to it; they assimilate all objects to the gloom of our own thoughts, and make the will a party against itself. This is one chief source of most of the passions that prey like vultures on the heart, and embitter human life. We hear moralists and divines perpetually exclaiming, with mingled indignation and surprise, at the folly of mankind in obstinately persisting in these

tormenting and violent passions, such as envy, revenge, sullenness, despair, &c. This is to them a mystery; and it will always remain an inexplicable one, while the love of happiness is considered as the only spring of human conduct and desires.

We shall resume this subject in a future paper.1

THE LOVE OF POWER OR ACTION AS MAIN A PRINCIPLE IN THE HUMAN MIND AS SENSIBILITY TO PLEASURE OR PAIN

The Examiner.]

[April 9, 1815. THE love of power or action is another independent principle of the human mind, in the different degrees in which it exists, and which are not by any means in exact proportion to its physical sensibility. It seems evidently absurd to suppose that sensibility to pleasure or pain is the only principle of action. It is almost too obvious to remark, that sensibility alone, without an active principle in the mind, could never produce action. The soul might lie dissolved in pleasure, or be agonised with woe; but the impulses of feeling, in order to excite passion, desire, or will, must be first communicated to some other faculty. There must be a principle, a fund of activity somewhere, by and through which our sensibility operates; and that this active principle owes all its force, its precise degree and direction, to the sensitive faculty, is neither self-evident nor true. Strength of will is not always nor generally in proportion to strength of feeling. There are different degrees of activity as of sensibility in the mind; and our passions, characters, and pursuits, often depend no less upon the one than on the other. We continually make a distinction in common discourse between sensibility and irritability, between passion and feeling, between the nerves and muscles; and we find that the most voluptuous people are in general the most indolent. Every one who has looked closely into human nature must have observed persons who are naturally and habitually restless in the extreme, but without any extraordinary susceptibility to pleasure or pain, always making or finding excuses to do something,-whose actions constantly outrun

1 As a contrast to the story at the beginning of this article, it will be not amiss to mention that of Sir Isaac Newton, on a somewhat similar occasion. He had prepared some papers for the press with great care and study, but happening to leave a lighted candle on the table with them, his dog Diamond overturned the candle, and the labour of several years was destroyed. This great man, on seeing what was done, only shook his head, and said with a smile, 'Ah, Diamond, you don't know what mischief you have done!'

the occasion, and who are eager in the pursuit of the greatest trifles, -whose impatience of the smallest repose keeps them always employed about nothing, and whose whole lives are a continued work of supererogation. There are others again who seem born to act from a spirit of contradiction only, that is, who are ready to act not only without a reason, but against it, who are ever at crosspurposes with themselves and others, who are not satisfied unless they are doing two opposite things at a time,-who contradict what you say, and if you assent to them, contradict what they have said,-who regularly leave the pursuit in which they are successful to engage in some other in which they have no chance of success,-who make a point of encountering difficulties and aiming at impossibilities, that there may be no end of their exhaustless task: while there is a third class whose vis inertia scarcely any motives can overcome, who are devoured by their feelings, and the slaves of their passions, but who can take no pains and use no means to gratify them,-who, if roused to action by any unforeseen accident, require a continued stimulus to urge them on,-who fluctuate between desire and want of resolution,-whose brightest projects burst like a bubble as soon as formed,-who yield to every obstacle,-who almost sink under the weight of the atmosphere,-who cannot brush aside a cobweb in their path, and are stopped by an insect's wing. Indolence is want of will -the absence or defect of the active principle-a repugnance to motion; and whoever has been much tormented with this passion, must, we are sure, have felt that the inclination to indulge it is something very distinct from the love of pleasure or actual enjoyment. Ambition is the reverse of indolence, and is the love of power or action in great things. Avarice, also, as it relates to the acquisition of riches, is, in a great measure, an active and enterprising feeling ; nor does the hoarding of wealth, after it is acquired, seem to have much connection with the love of pleasure. What is called niggardliness, very often, we are convinced from particular instances that we have known, arises less from a selfish principle than from a love of contrivance, from the study of economy as an art, for want of a better, from a pride in making the most of a little, and in not exceeding a certain expense previously determined upon; all which is wilfulness, and is perfectly consistent, as it is frequently found united, with the most lavish expenditure and the utmost disregard for money on other occasions. A miser may in general be looked upon as a particular species of virtuoso. The constant desire in the rich to leave wealth in large masses, by aggrandising some branch of their families, or sometimes in such a manner as to accumulate for centuries, shews that the imagination has a considerable share in this passion.