vourable or unfavourable judgment from the mere circumstance of good or ill success alone.

While there is no SOPHISM more calculated to lead astray and perplex, there is none more common than this; so much so, that it has almost passed into a proverb, that a hero must not only be brave, but fortunate. Hence it is that Alexander is called Great because he gained victories and overran kingdoms; while Charles XII. of Sweden, who the most nearly resembles him in the characteristics of bravery, perseverance, and chimerical ambition, but had his projects cut short at the fatal battle of Pultowa, is called a madman.

"Machiavel has justly animadverted," says Dr. Johnson, "on the different notice taken by all succeeding times of the two great projectors Catiline and Cæsar. Both formed the same project, and intended to raise themselves to power by subverting the commonwealth. They pursued their design, perhaps, with equal abilities and equal virtue; but Catiline perished in the field, and Cæsar returned from Pharsalia with unlimited authority; and from that time, every monarch of the earth has thought himself honoured by a comparison with Cæsar; and Catiline has never been mentioned but that his name might be applied to traitors and incendiaries."

§ 202. Of adherence to our opinions.

Whenever the rules laid down have been followed, and conclusions have been formed with a careful and candid regard to the evidence presented, those opinions are to be asserted and maintained with a due degree of confidence. It would evince an unjustifiable weakness to be driven from our honest convictions by the effrontery, or even by the upright though misguided zeal, of an opponent. Not that a person is to set himself up for infallible, and to suppose that new accessions of evidence are impossible, or that it is an impossibility for him to have new views of the evidence already examined. But a suitable degree of stability is necessary in order to be respected and useful and, in the case supposed, such stability can be exhibited without incurring the charge, which is sometimes thrown out, of doggedness and intolerance.

T

It is further to be observed, that we are not always to relinquish judgments which have been formed in the way pointed out, when objections are afterward raised which we cannot immediately answer. The person thus attacked can, with good reason, argue in this way: I have once examined the subject carefully and candidly; the evidence, both in its particulars and in its multitude of bearings, has had its weight; many minute and evanescent circumstances were taken into view by the mind, which have now vanished from my recollection; I therefore do not feel at liberty to alter an opinion thus formed, in consequence of an objection now brought up, which I am unable to answer, but choose to adhere to my present judgment, until the whole subject, including this objection, can be re-examined.-This reasoning would in most cases be correct, and would be entirely consistent with that love of truth and openness to conviction which ought ever to be maintained.

◊ 203. Effects on the mind of debating for victory instead of truth. By way of supporting the remarks under the first rule, we here introduce the subject of contending for victory merely. He who contends with this object, takes every advantage of his opponent which can subserve his own purpose. For instance, he will demand a species of proof or a degree of proof which the subject in dispute does not admit; he gives, if possible, a false sense to the words and statements employed by the other side; he questions facts which he himself fully believes and everybody else, in the expectation that the opposite party is not furnished with direct and positive evidence of them. In a word, wherever an opening presents, he takes the utmost advantage of his opponent, however much against his own internal convictions of right and justice.

Such a course, to say nothing of its moral turpitude, effectually unsettles that part of our mental economy which concerns the grounds and laws of belief. The practice of inventing cunningly devised objections against arguments known to be sound, necessarily impairs the influence which such arguments ought to exert over us. Hence the remark has been made with justice, that per

sons who addict themselves to this practice frequently end in becoming skeptics. They have so often perplexed, and apparently overthrown what they felt to be true, that they at last question the existence of any fixed ground of belief in the human constitution, and begin to doubt of everything.

This effect, even when there is an undoubted regard for the truth, will be found to follow from habits of ardent disputation, unless there be a frequent recurrence to the original principles of the mind which relate to the nature and laws of belief. The learned Chillingworth is an instance. The consequences to which the training up of his vast powers to the sole art of disputation finally led, are stated by Clarendon.-" Mr. Chillingworth had spent all his younger time in disputations, and had arrived at so great a mastery that he was inferior to no man in those skirmishes; but he had, with his notable perfection in this exercise, contracted such an irresolution and habit of doubting, that, by degrees, he became confident of nothing. Neither the books of his adversaries nor any of their persons, though he was acquainted with the best of both, had ever made great impression on him. All his doubts grew out of himself, when he assisted his scruples with all the strength of his own reason, and was then too hard for himself."

CHAPTER XIII.

IMAGINATION.

◊ 204. Imagination an intellectual rather than a sensitive process. LEAVING the subject of reasoning, we next proceed to the consideration of the Imagination; which, as well as the reasoning power, obviously comes under the general head of the Intellect rather than of the Sensibilities. It is true, we are apt to associate the exercises of the heart with those of the imagination, and undoubtedly we have some reason for doing so; but in doing this we are liable

not merely to associate, but to identify and confound them. But they are, in fact, essentially different. An exercise of the Imagination, in itself considered, is purely an intellectual process. The process may, indeed, be stimulated and accelerated by a movement of the sensibilities; there may be various extraneous influences operating either to increase or to diminish its vivacity and energy; but the process itself, considered separately from contingent circumstances, is wholly intellectual. So that he who possesses a creative and well-sustained imagination, may be said, with no small degree of truth, to possess a powerful intellect, whatever torpidity may characterize the region of the affections.

§ 205. The imagination closely related to the reasoning power. The imagination is not only entitled to be ranked under the general head of the Intellect, in distinction from the Sensibilities; but it is to be remarked further, which may perhaps have escaped the notice of some, that it possesses, especially in the process or mode of its action, a close affinity with the reasoning power. It is a remark ascribed to D'Alembert, whose great skill in the mathematics would seem to justify his giving an opinion on such a subject, that the imagination is brought into exercise in geometrical processes; which is probably true, so far as some of the mental acts involved in imagination, such as association and the perception of relations, are concerned. And, in illustration of his views, he intimates, in the same connexion, that Archimedes the geometrician, of all the great men of antiquity, is best entitled to be placed by the side of Homer. Certain it is, that, in some important respects, there is an intimate relationship between the powers in question, the deductive and imaginative. They both imply the antecedent exercise of the power of abstraction; they are both occupied in framing new combinations of thought from the elements already in possession; they both put in requisition, and in precisely the same way, the powers of association and relative suggestion. But, at the same time, they are separ

1 from each other and characterized by the two cirinces, that their objects are different, and that they Stewart's Historical Dissertation.-Prefatory Remarks.

operate, in part, on different materials.

Reasoning, as it aims to give us a knowledge of the truth, deals exclusively with facts more or less probable. Imagination, as it aims chiefly to give pleasure, is at liberty to transcend the limits of the world of reality, and, consequently, often deals with the mere conceptions of the mind, whether they correspond to reality or not. Accordingly, the one ascertains what is true, the other what is possible; the office of the one is to inquire, of the other to create; reasoning is exercised within the limits of what is known and actual, while the appropriate empire of the imagination is the region of the conjectural and conceivable.

206. Definition of the power of imagination.

Without delaying longer upon the subject, which, however, is not without its importance, of the place which imagination ought to occupy in a philosophical classification of the mental powers, we next proceed to consider more particularly what imagination is, and in what manner it operates. Imagination is a complex exercise of the mind, by means of which various conceptions are combined together, so as to form new wholes. The conceptions have properly enough been regarded as the materials from which the new creations are made; but it is not until after the existence of those mental acts which are implied in every process of the imagination, that they are fixed detained, and brought out from their state of singleness into happy and beautiful combinations.

upon,

Our conceptions have been compared to shapeless stones, as they exist in the quarry, "which require little more than mechanic labour to convert them into common dwellings, but that rise into palaces and temples only at the command of architectural genius." That rude and little more than mechanic effort, which converts the shapeless stones of the quarry into common dwellings, may justly be considered, when divested of its metaphorical aspect, a correct representation of this mental property as it exists among the great mass of mankind; while the architectural genius which creates palaces and temples is the well-furnished and sublime imagination of poets, painters, and orators.