REASON AND IMAGINATION. English Opium-Eater.-THERE are two principal ways, Mr. Hogg, in which every object can be considered-two chief aspects under which they present themselves to us-the philosophical and the poetical-as they are to reason, as they seem to imagination. Shepherd.-Can you, sir, make that great distinction good? English Opium-Eater.-Perhaps there is no absolute distinction in the world of nature, or in the human soul. But let me say, we may consider all things, either as intellect without feeling tends to consider them, or intellect with feeling, i. e. causatively and passionately. The great, the most earnestly desiring inquiry that pure reason makes, is of the causes of things. For this end it comes into the world. To intellect thus working, what it sees is nothing-for what it sees are 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. 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. ye Shepherd.-Plawto pour'd out his pheelosophy in Dialogues-and sae, sir, do you-and I'll back again' the auld Trojan-that is, Grecian-for a barrel o' eisters. Í never understood metafeezixs 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' Agamemnon. 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 color 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 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 been made were but fuel for this 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 truthexcept 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 dews-and 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 finite : this is earth, and the strength of earth. This is natural man the child-the daydarger-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 new fire to burn-a crop to be English Opium-Eater.-That ingenious man, John Fearn, 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 net-work, if net-work 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.-Aye, thus it is, sir, that metaphysicians and physicians concur in overthrowing and absolving our sensible knowledge. 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 be ginning! To nature, Mr. Hogg, the earth is flat-the sky a domeShepherd. 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 colored 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, burning, aspiring spark in our thoughts-it is stifled and smothered-and therefore we hope neither for ourselves nor others. But see how those judge of others who feel on their own shoulders the untamed eagle-pinions. See how Christians judge, expect, require-the Saints, the Anchorites, the Holy Men who have walked on this world more present with another-for whom the veil of flesh has been lifted up or rent. Is it not strange that Brahmins, Christians, and Stoics, all come to one conclusion? English Opium-Eater.-A low philosophy, tending more and more to the elevation of the External, is prevalent among us at this day in England. Jeremy Bentham is preferred to Jeremy Taylor-and Paley has triumphed over Plato. All good and all evil is in the Will. The mind that can see the vulgar distinction between Faith and Works, must think that roots and fruits are not parts of the same tree and expect to see the " golden balls" on a rotten stump. North.-Yes! that doctrine, while it exacts the most scrupulous adherence to the moral law, is at the same time the most cheering and consolatory of any in a world constituted as this is-far more so than any laxer doctrines contrived to flatter human weakness, and thereby encouraging vice, and causing misery. For, according to this doctrine, virtue and its ineffable rewards may be in the spirits of all, be their lot what it may. The slave in bonds may be a glorious freeman. He that seems to sit in darkness and the shadow of death, may be soaring in light and in life eternal. The sphere of action varies from the theatre of a kingdom the world-to some obscure and narrow nameless nook; and if the future doom of men were to be ac cording to the magnitude of their deeds, what would become of that portion of the race that passes away silently and unknown into seeming oblivion! But once allow that as the Will of a man's spirit has been, so shall he be judged by Him who gave it into his keeping, and the gates of heaven are flung wide open to all the uprisen generations of mankind, and the beggar that sat by the waysides of this dreary earth, blind, paralytic, most destitute-but patient, unrepining, contented before the All-seeing eye with his lot of affliction, for him will the heavens lift up their everlasting gates that he may enter in, even like a king in glory,-because his Will was good; while the conqueror, at whose name the world grew pale, may stand shivering far aloof, because while he had wielded the wills of others, he was most abject in his own, and, dazzled with outward pomp and shows, knew not that there was a kingdom in his own soul, in which it would have been far better to reign, because he who has been monarch there, exchanges an earthly for a spiritual crown, and when summoned from his throne on earth, awakens at the feet of a throne in heaven. But the epithet circulator, in its Latin invidious signification (quack), was applied to him by many in derision, and his researches and discoveries were treated by his adversaries with contempt and reproach. To an intimate friend he himself complained, that after his book of the circulation came out he fell considerably in his practice, and it was believed by the vulgar that he was crack-brained: all his contemporary physicians were against his opinion, and envied him the fame he was There didst thou trace the blood, and first likely to acquire by his discovery. That behold What dreanis mistaken sages coin'd of old; And veins became its channel, not its chaine. With Drake and Ca'ndish hence thy bays are curl'd, Famed circulator of the lessor world. reputation he did, however, ultimately enjoy; about twenty-five years after the publication of his system, it was received in all the universities of the world-and Hobbes has observed, that Harvey was the only man perhaps who ever lived to see his own doctrine established in his lifetime. Chinese Policy.-In China all is at a stand still; succeeding ages add not to the knowledge of those that have gone before; no one must presume to be wiser than his fathers: around the Son of Heaven, as they designate their emperor, assemble the learned of the land as his council; so in the provinces the learned in their several degrees around the governor; and laws and rules are passed from the highest down to the lowest, to be by them given to the people. Every, even the most minute, circumstance of common life, is regulated by law. It matters not, for example, what may be the wealth of an individual; he must wear the dress and build his house after the mode prescribed by ancient regulations. In China everything bears the stamp of antiquity; immoveableness seems to be the characteristic of the nation; every implement retains its primitive rude form; every invention has stopped at the first step. Quin's Siamese Soup.-Quin in his old age, every one knows, became a great gourmand, and, among other things, invented a composition, which he called his "Siamese Soup," pretending that its ingredients were principally from the " East." The peculiarity of its flavor became the topic of the day. The " rage at Bath was Mr. Quin's soup; but as he would not part with the recipe, this state of notice was highly inconvenient; every person of taste was endeavoring to dine with him; every dinner he was at, an apology was made for the absence of the "Siamese soup." His female friends Quin was forced to put off with promises; the males received a respectful but manly denial. A conspiracy was accordingly projected by a dozen bons vivans of Bath, against his peace and comfort. At home he was flooded with anonymous letters; abroad, beset with applications under every form. The possession of this secret was made a canker to all his enjoyments. Collecting the names of the principal confederates, he invited them to dinner, promising to give them the recipe before they departed -an invitation, as my reader will suppose, which was joyfully accepted. Quin then gave a pair of his old boots to the housemaid to scour and soak, and, when sufficiently seasoned, to chop up into fine particles, like minced meat. On the appointed day, he took these particles, and pouring them into a copper pot, with sage, onions, spice, ham, wine, water, and other ingredients, composed a mixture of about two gallons, which was served up at his table as his "Siamese soup." 12 The company were in transports at its flavor; but Quin, pleading a cold, did not taste it. A pleasant evening was spent, and when the hour of departure arrived, each person pulled out his tablets to write down the recipe. Quin now pretended that he had forgot making the promise; but his guests were not to be put off; and closing the door, they told him in plain terms, that neither he nor they should quit the room 66 66 till his pledge had.been redeemed. Quin stammered and evaded, and kept them from the point as long as possible; but when their patience was bearing down all bounds, his reluctance gave way. "Well, then, gentlemen," said he, “in the first place, take an old pair of boots-! "What! an old pair of boots!" "The older the better;"-(they stared at each other)" cut off their tops and soles, and soak them in a tub of water"-(they hesitated)-" chop them into fine particles, and pour them into a pot with two gallons and a half of water.' Why, d-n it. Quin," they simultaneously exclaimed, you don't mean to say that the soup we've been drinking was made of old boots!" "I do, gentlemen," he replied, seriously, "my cook will assure you she chopped them up." They required no such attestation; his cool, inflexible expression was sufficient: in an instant, horror and despair were depicted on each countenance, in the full conviction they were individually poisoned. Quin, observing this, begged them not to be alarmed, since he could contemplate no dangerous results from their dinner; but if they thought it would sit uneasy on their stomachs, there was an apothecary's shop in the next street. The hint was taken an idea of personal safety subdued the rising throbs of indignation. Seizing their hats, away flew the whole bevy down stairs, and along the street to the place advised, where ipecacuanha and other provocatives were speedily procured, and the "Siamese soup (and all its concomitants) was speedily disgorged. Present State of History.-In the south of Europe, as if for a warning to others to shun the evil, civil and religious despotism are still suffered by Providence to display their hideous forms; but in the New World, the incipient and chaotic state of freedom is travailing in the birth of a purer and more regular order of things. The "march sublime" of liberty is, we trust, not to be retarded for ages to come. England has led the way in this glorious career; and the last blemish which stained her fair fame, and afforded a topic of reproach to her enemics, has been removed, while her councils were directed by the warrior who so often had led her armies to victory. Esto perpetua. Vandyke, Titian, and Reynolds.-Northcote began by saying, "You don't much like Sir Joshua, I know; but I think that is one of your prejudices. If I was to compare him with Vandyke and Titian, I should say that Vandyke's portraits are like pictures (very perfect ones, no doubt), Sir Joshua's like the reflection in a looking-glass, and Titian's like the real people. There is an atmosphere of light and shade about Sir Joshua's, which neither of the others have in the same degree, together with a vagueness that gives them a visionary and romantic character, and makes |
