Let Reformed Judaism relight the old golden candlestick, and set it aloft, and it will give light unto all which are in the house,—not only the House of Israel, but in the House of Humanity. A glorious future may in God’s Providence await such purified, emancipated Judaism. It is true, it may not exhibit the special form of religion which one party or another among us altogether desires to see extended in the world. Some radical reformers who sympathize in its general scope would wish to find it stripping off altogether its Jewish character, and torn up from the root of Mosaism. Many more orthodox Christians will undervalue it because it shows no indication of a tendency to adopt from Christianity such doctrines as the Trinity, the Incarnation, or the Atonement, even while, on the spiritual side, it is imbued with the essential ideas of him whom it will doubtless recognize as the great Jewish Rabbi and Prophet, Jesus of Nazareth. But it is not for us to seek to modify, scarcely even to criticise, such a movement as this. A respectful interest and a hopeful sympathy seem to me the only sentiments wherewith Christians and Christian Theists should stand aside and watch this last march forward of that wondrous patriarchal faith, whereof Christianity itself is the firstborn son, and Islam the younger; and which now in the end of the ages prepares to cross a new Jordan, and take possession of a new Holy Land.
⁂ Note.—It is proper to mention, in republishing this essay at the desire of Jewish friends, that it was received on its first appearance with the utmost possible disfavor by the Jewish press.
ESSAY IV.
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING.
Endless books have been written about the Laws of Thought, the Nature of Thought, and the Validity of Thought. Physiologists and metaphysicians have vied with one another to tell us in twenty different ways how we think and why we think and what good our thinking may be supposed to be as affording us any real acquaintance with things in general outside our thinking-machine. One school of philosophers tells us that Thought is a secretion of the brain (i.e., that Thought is a form of Matter), and another that it is purely immaterial, and the only reality in the universe,—i.e., that Matter is a form of Thought. The meekest of men “presume to think” this, that, and the other; and the proudest distinction of the modern sage is to be a “Thinker,” especially a “free” one. But with all this much ado about Thought, it has not occurred to any one, so far as I am aware, to attempt a fair review of what any one of us thinks in the course of the twenty-four hours; what are the number of separable thoughts which, on an average, pass through a human brain in a day; and what may be their nature and proportions in the shape of Recollections, Reflections, Hopes, Contrivances, Fancies, and Reasonings. We are all aware that when we are awake a perpetual stream of thoughts goes on in “what we are pleased to call our minds,” sometimes slow and sluggish, as the water in a ditch; sometimes bright, rapid, and sparkling, like a mountain brook; and now and then making some sudden, happy dash, cataract-wise, over an obstacle. We are also accustomed to speak as if the sum and substance of all this thinking were very respectable, as might become “beings endowed with the lofty faculty of thought”; and we always tacitly assume that our thoughts have logical beginnings, middles, and endings—commence with problems and terminate in solutions—or that we evolve out of our consciousness ingenious schemes of action or elaborate pictures of Hope or Memory. If our books of mental philosophy ever obtain a place in the Circulating Libraries of another planet, the “general reader” of that distant world will inevitably suppose that on our little Tellus dwell a thousand millions of men, women, and children, who spend their existence as the interlocutors in Plato’s Dialogues passed their hours under the grip of the dread Socratic elenchus, arguing, sifting, balancing, recollecting, hard at work as if under the ferule of a schoolmaster.
The real truth about the matter seems to be that, instead of taking this kind of mental exercise all day long, and every day, there are very few of us who ever do anything of the kind for more than a few minutes at a time; and that the great bulk of our thoughts proceed in quite a different way, and are occupied by altogether less exalted matters than our vanity has induced us to imagine. The normal mental locomotion of even well-educated men and women, save under the spur of exceptional stimulus, is neither the flight of an eagle in the sky nor the trot of a horse upon the road, but may better be compared to the lounge of a truant school-boy in a shady lane, now dawdling pensively, now taking a hop-skip-and-jump, now stopping to pick blackberries, and now turning to right or left to catch a butterfly, climb a tree, or make dick-duck-and-drake on a pond; going nowhere in particular, and only once in a mile or so proceeding six steps in succession in an orderly and philosophical manner.
It is far beyond my ambition to attempt to supply this large lacune in mental science, and to set forth the truth of the matter about the actual Thoughts which practically, not theoretically, are wont to pass through human brains. Some few observations on the subject, however, may perhaps be found entertaining, and ought certainly to serve to mitigate our self-exaltation on account of our grand mental endowments, by showing how rarely and under what curious variety of pressure we employ them.
The first and familiar remark is that every kind of thought is liable to be colored and modified in all manner of ways by our physical conditions and surroundings. We are not steam thinking-machines, working evenly at all times at the same rate, and turning out the same sort and quantity of work in the same given period, but rather more like windmills, subject to every breeze, and whirling our sails at one time with great impetus and velocity, and at another standing still, becalmed and ineffective. Sometimes it is our outer conditions which affect us, sometimes it is our own inner wheels which are clogged and refuse to rotate; but, from whatever cause it arises, the modification of our thoughts is often so great as to make us arrive at diametrically opposite conclusions on the same subject and with the same data of thought, within an incredibly brief interval of time. Some years ago, the President of the British Association frankly answered objections to the consistency of his inaugural address by referring to the different aspects of the ultimate problems of theology in different “moods” of mind. When men of such eminence confess to “moods,” lesser mortals may avow their own mental oscillations without painful humiliation, and even put forward some claim to consistency if the vibrating needle of their convictions do not swing quite round the whole compass, and point at two o’clock to the existence of a Deity and a Life to come, and at six to a nebula for the origin, and a “streak of morning cloud” for the consummation of things. Possibly, also, the unscientific mind may claim some praise on the score of modesty if it delay for the moment to instruct mankind in either its two o’clock or its six o’clock creed, and wait till it has settled down for some few hours, weeks, or months, to any one definite opinion.
Not to dwell for the present on these serious topics, it is only necessary to carry with us through our future investigations that every man’s thoughts are continually fluctuating and vibrating, from inward as well as outward causes. Let us glance for a moment at some of these. First, there are the well-known conditions of health and high animal spirits, in which every thought is rose-colored; and corresponding conditions of disease and depression, in which everything we think of seems to pass, like a great bruise, through yellow, green, blue, and purple to black. A liver complaint causes the universe to be enshrouded in gray; and the gout covers it with an inky pall, and makes us think our best friends little better than fiends in disguise. Further, a whole treatise would be needed to expound how our thoughts are further distempered by food, beverages of various kinds, and narcotics of great variety. When our meals have been too long postponed, it would appear as if that Evil Personage who proverbially finds mischief for idle hands to do were similarly engaged with an idle digestive apparatus, and the result is that, if there be the smallest and most remote cloud to be seen in the whole horizon of our thoughts, it sweeps up and over us just in proportion as we grow hungrier and fainter, till at last it overwhelms us in depression and despair. “Why?” we ask ourselves, “why has not A. written to us for so long? What will B. think of such and such a transaction? How is our pecuniary concern with C. to be settled? What is the meaning of that odd little twitch we have felt so often here or there about our persons?” The answer to our thoughts, prompted by the evil genius of famine, is always lugubrious in the extreme. “A. has not written because he is dead. B. will quarrel with us forever because of that transaction. C. will never pay us our money, or we shall never be able to pay C. That twitch which we have so thoughtlessly disregarded is the premonitory symptom of the most horrible of all human maladies, of which we shall die in agonies and leave a circle of sorrowing friends before the close of the ensuing year.” Such are the idées noires which present themselves when we want our dinner; and the best-intentioned people in the world, forsooth! recommend us to summon them round us by fasting, as if they were a company of cherubim instead of imps of quite another character! But the scene undergoes a transformation bordering on the miraculous when we have eaten a slice of mutton and drunk half a glass of sherry. If we revert now to our recent meditations, we are quite innocently astonished to think what could possibly have made us so anxious without any reasonable ground. Of course, A. has not written to us because he always goes grouse-shooting at this season. B. will never take the trouble to think about our little transaction. C. is certain to pay us, or we can readily raise money to pay him; and our twitch means nothing worse than a touch of rheumatics or an ill-fitting garment.
Beyond the alternations of fasting and feasting, still more amazing are the results of narcotics, alcoholic beverages, and of tea and coffee. Every species of wine exercises a perceptibly different influence of its own, from the cheery and social “sparkling grape of Eastern France” to the solemn black wine of Oporto, the fit accompaniment of the blandly dogmatic post-prandial prose of elderly gentlemen of orthodox sentiments. A cup of strong coffee clears the brain and makes the thoughts transparent, while one of green tea drives them fluttering like dead leaves before the wind. Time and learning would fail to describe the yet more marvellous effects of opium, hemlock, henbane, hashish, bromide, and chloral. Every one of these narcotics produces a different hue of the mental window through which we look out on the world; sometimes distorting all objects in the wildest manner (like opium), sometimes (like chloral) acting only perceptibly by removing the sense of disquiet and restoring our thoughts to the white light of commonsense cheerfulness; and again acting quite differently on the thoughts of different persons, and of the same persons at different times.
Only secondary to the effects of inwardly imbibed stimulants or narcotics are those of the outward atmosphere, which in bracing weather makes our thoughts crisp like the frosted grass, and in heavy November causes them to drip chill and slow and dull, like the moisture from the mossy eaves of the Moated Grange. Burning, glaring Southern sunshine dazes our minds as much as our eyes, and a London fog obfuscates them, so that a man might honestly plead that he could no more argue clearly in the fog than the Irishman could spell correctly with a bad pen and muddy ink.