had seen hell;" do they not show by the side of these like the wild, dreary, and incoherent flights of a dreaming or a delirious imagination? How immeasurably below the true and noble creations of a great imagination, rightly cultivated, working calmly under the restraints of law, and revealing its insight and strength in its repose and self-control! Consider the ridiculous height to which Swedenborg exalts himself; he is as much superior to the inhabitants of heaven as he is to the dwellers upon earth, for, while possessing, as a natural man, all the privileges of spiritual insight which the angels have, and easily surpassing them in spiritual knowledge, he can in a moment become invisible to them, by returning to his natural self. That he has found disciples who devoutly accept to the uttermost these pretensions proves that it is impossible to be too bold in speculating on the credulity of mankind. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that among the many absurd things he has written, there are also many words of wisdom, fruitful veins of original thought, and passages profoundly suggestive even to the best of minds. Because a man's mind is unsound, all which he says is not, therefore, folly. It is a vulgar and mischievous error, springing from the grossest ignorance of insanity, to suppose that a person who speaks rationally and behaves with propriety cannot be mad, as it is also to suppose madmen necessarily incapable of rational intellectual exertion; athwart the murky atmosphere of madness lightning-flashes of the deepest insight occasionally shoot, and the light of genius is sometimes only the light of a falling star. The recognition of Swedenborg's hallucinations and delusions, and the rejection of the cardinal doctrines of his later years, on the ground of insanity, by no means warrant the rejection of all that he has developed from his false premises or engrafted on them. Moreover, though he was insane, he was capable of taking care of himself sufficiently well, and of managing his affairs with prudence. Perhaps it was fortunate for the prophet of the Church of the New Jerusalem that he lived in Sweden, and in the last century; for, had he lived at the present day in England, it is very doubtful whether he would have been left in undisturbed possession of his freedom and his property. There might, indeed, have been no small danger of the extinction of his prophetic mission in a lunatic asylum. Whether the world would have suffered loss, or gained any thing by the violent suppression of his doctrines, are questions concerning which conjectures must be futile; but my conviction unquestionably is that it would have suffered loss. In truth, no one has yet sufficiently considered how much originality and individuality are systematically suppressed in lunatic asylums, and how hard it would have gone with some of the most distinguished reformers of past generations if their lots had been cast in these days when there are scattered over the land so many overgrown and overcrowded asylums. Can any one, after reading the Journal of George Fox, believe that he would not, had he lived now, have found his way into a lunatic asylum? Thus would Quakerism have been blasted in its germ, and the world robbed of all the benefit which it has reaped from that form of religious belief. Of autobiographies, one of the most interesting is the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, but the perusal of it cannot fail to convince a candid reader that Benvenuto Cellini, had he lived now, would have been shut up in a lunatic asylum long before he had produced his finest work of art. Had not Comte been removed from Esquirol's asylum when there seemed no prospect of his recovery, and taken home to the care of his wife, it may be deemed certain that the world would never have had the system of the Positive Philosophy. The power of the stepping out of the beaten track of thought, of bursting by a happy inspiration through the bonds of habit and originating a new line of reflection, is most rare, and should be welcomed and profited by, in spite of its oftentimes becoming extravagant, and sometimes degenerating into the vagaries of insanity. The individuals who manifest these impulses of development may not see their true relations, and may carry them to a ridiculous extreme: but they are still, perhaps, the unconscious organs of a new birth of thought, which shall plant itself and become largely fruitful in the minds of others possessed of a larger philosophic capacity, but not, perhaps, capable of the originating inspiration; for the men who perceive and coördinate the tendencies of development are not commonly the men who originate them. The originality is truly an inspiration, coming we know not whence, and the very opposite in action to that power of habit which enthralls the mental life of the majority of mankind. There are antagonistic forces at work in the determination of the orbit of human thought as there are in the determination of the orbits of the planets--a centrifugal or revolutionary force giving the expansive impulse of new ideas, and a centripetal or conservative force manifest in the restraining influence of habit; the resultant of their opposing actions being the determination of the orbit of the evolution of mind. Is it not, then, beyond measure sad to think that precious germs of originality may be blighted by the practice, too prevalent in this era, of treating as insanity any marked deviation from the common standard of thought or action? Nature, we know, shows a most lavish and reckless waste of life, of fifty seeds often bringing not even one to bear, but herein does not set an example which it is man's duty or interest to follow; for the purpose or nisus of his being is to improve upon Nature, to carry it through human nature to a higher evolution. In accomplishing patiently and faithfully this function he must work by a far other method than that which self-inspired seers into self-created spiritual worlds adopt; but, while rejecting their method, he may still gratefully gather the good fruits of their lives, and profit by the instruction which is to be obtained from the study of even the most erratic orbits. Now, as ever, and forever, it is true that the wrath, the folly, the madness of men are made to praise Him whom sun and moon, fire and heat, winter and summer, mountains and hills, seas and floods, the green things of the earth, and the holy and humble men of heart, bless, praise, and magnify forever, but whom systems of theology and the prophets thereof have so much misrepresented and degraded. IT has been the custom of certain disciples of the socalled Positive Philosophy to repudiate as extravagant the well-known opinion of Protagoras, that man was the measure of the universe. If the proposition be understood of man as he is known to himself by the revelations of selfconsciousness, there is unquestionably great reason for its rejection; but, if it be applied to him as an objective study, it is manifest that modern science is tending to prove it by no means so absurd as it has been sometimes deemed. Day by day, indeed, is it becoming more and more clear that, as Sir T. Browne has it, man "parallels Nature in the cosmography of himself;" that, in truth, "we are that bold and adventurous piece of Nature which he that studies wisely learns in a compendium what others labor at in a divided piece and endless volume." The "heaven-descended yvwe σEAUTÓ" acquires new value as a maxim inculcating on man the objective study of himself. The earliest cultivators of Grecian philosophy-Thales, Anaximenes, and Diogenes of Apollonia-did seek objectively for the apxh or first principle of things common to man and the rest of Nature. This primitive kind of induction was soon, however, abandoned for the easier and speedier deduction from the subjective facts of consciousness; so that, as the German philosopher is said to have done with * British and Foreign Medico-Chir, Review, No. 64, 1863. 1. the elephant, man constructed the laws of an external world out of the depths of his own consciousness. Because an individual was conscious of certain passions which influenced his conduct, he fancied that natural bodies were affected in their relations to one another by like passions. Hence the phenomena of Nature were explained by sympathies, antipathies, loves, discords: oil had an antipathy to water; Nature abhorred a vacuum; Love was the creative force which produced development and harmony; Hate, the destructive force which produced disorder and discord. The method was only a phase of the anthropomorphism by which the Dryad was placed in the tree, the Naiad in the fountain, and the gods of mankind were created by man. When in a The result of such a method was inevitable. language there is but one word for two or three different meanings, as happens in all languages before the cultivation of science-when, for example, the loadstone is said to attract iron, the earth to attract heavy bodies, the plant to attract moisture, and one mind to attract another, without further differentiation-there necessarily is an ambiguity about words; disputes thereupon arise, and the unavoidable issue is sophistry and sophists. That was a result which the ingenious and active mind of Greece soon reached. In scientific nomenclature it is constantly becoming necessary to discard words which are in common use, because of their vagueness and want of precision; for as it is with life objectively, and as it is with cognition or life subjectively, so must it be with the language in which the phenomena are expressed. A scientific nomenclature must rightly present a progress from the general to the special, must reflect in its increasing specialization the increased specialization of human adaptation to external Nature. As might be expected, Plato and Aristotle both recognized the evil in Greece, and both tried to check it. The metaphysics, analytics, etc., of the latter have been described as a dictionary of general terms, "the process throughout being first to discover and establish defi. |