NATURAL HISTORY OF ENTHUSIASM.
SECTION I.
ENTHUSIASM, SECULAR AND RELIGIOUS.
Some form of beauty, engendered by the imagination, or some semblance of dignity or grace, invests almost every object that excites desire. These illusions, if indeed they ought so to be called, serve the purpose of blending the incongruous materials of human nature, and by mediating between body and spirit, reconcile the animal and intellectual propensities, and give dignity and harmony to the character of man. By these unsubstantial impressions it is that the social affections are enriched and enlivened; by these, not less than by the superiority of the reasoning faculties, mankind is elevated above the brute; and it is these that, as the germinating principles of all improvement and refinement, distinguish civilized from savage life.
The constitutional difference between one man and another is to be traced, in great measure, to the quality and vigor of the imagination. Thus it will be found that eminently active and energetic spirits are peculiarly susceptible to those natural exaggerations by which the mind enhances the value of whatever it pursues. At the same time an efficient energy implies always the power of control over such impressions. Yet it is enough that these creations of fancy should be under the command of reason; for good sense by no means demands a rigid scrutiny into the composition or mechanism of common motives, or asks that whatever is not absolutely substantial in the objects of desire should be spurned. He who is not too wise to be happy, leaves the machinery of human nature to accomplish its revolutions unexplored, and is content to hold the mastery over its movements. Whoever, instead of simply repressing the irregularities of the imagination, and forbidding its predominance, would altogether exclude its influence, must either sink far below the common level of humanity, or rise much above it.
The excesses of the imagination are of two kinds; the first is when, within its proper sphere, it gains so great a power that every other affection and motive belonging to human nature is overborne and excluded. It is thus that intellectual or professional pursuits seems sometimes to annihilate all sympathy with the common interests of life, and to render man a mere phantom, except within the particular circle of his favorite objects.
The second kind of excess (one species of which forms the subject of the present work) is of much more evil tendency, and consists in a trespass of the imagination upon ground where it should have little or no influence, and where it can only prevent or disturb the operation of reason and right feeling. Thus, not seldom, it is seen that, on the walks of common life, the sobrieties of good sense, and the counsels of experience, and the obvious motives of interest, and perhaps even the dictates of rectitude, are set at naught by some fiction of an exorbitant imagination, which, overstepping its proper function, invests even the most ordinary objects, either with preposterous charms or with unreal deformities.
Very few minds seem to be altogether free from such constitutional errors of the intellectual sight, which, to a greater or less extent, intercept our view of things as they are. And from the same cause it is that we so greatly miscalculate the amount of happiness or of suffering that belongs to the lot of those around us; which happens, not so much because their actual circumstances are unknown, as because the habitual illusions are not perceived by us amidst which they live. And if the coloring medium through which every man contemplates his own condition were exposed to the eyes of others, the victims of calamity might sometimes be envied; and still oftener would the favorites of fortune become the objects of pity. Or if every one were in a moment to be disenchanted of whatever is ideal in his permanent sensations, every one would think himself at once much less happy, and much more so, than he had hitherto supposed.
The force and extravagance of the imagination is in some constitutions so great, that it admits of no correction from even the severest lessons of experience, much less from the advices of wisdom: the enthusiast passes through life in a sort of happy somnambulency—smiling and dreaming as he goes, unconscious of whatever is real, and busy with whatever is fantastic: now he treads with naked foot on thorns; now plunges through depths; now verges the precipice, and always preserves the same impassible serenity, and displays the same reckless hardihood.
But if the predominance of the imagination do not approach quite so near to the limits of insanity, and if it admit of correction, then the many checks and reverses which belong to the common course of human life usually fray it away from present scenes, and either send it back in pensive recollections of past pleasures, or forwards in anticipation of a bright futurity. The former is, of the two, the safer kind of constitutional error; for as the objects upon which the imagination fixes its gaze, in this case, remain always unchanged, they impart a sort of tranquillity to the mind, and even favor its converse with wisdom; but the visions of hope being variable, and altogether under the command of the inventive faculty, bring with them perpetual agitations, and continually create new excitements. Besides; as these egregious hopes come in their turn to be dispelled by realities, the pensioner upon futurity lives amid the vexations of one who believes himself always plundered; for each day as it comes robs him of what he had fondly called his own. Thus the real ills of life pierce the heart with a double edge.