I trust you are very happy in your domestic being—very; because, alas! I know that to a man of sensibility and more emphatically if he be a literary man, there is no medium between that and "the secret pang that eats away the heart." ... Hence, even in dreams of sleep, the soul never is, because it either cannot or dare not be any one thing, but lives in approaches touched by the outgoing pre-existent ghosts of many feelings. It feels for ever as a blind man with his protruded staff dimly through the medium of the instrument by which it pushes off, and in the act of repulsion—(O for the eloquence of Shakspere, who alone could feel and yet know how to embody those conceptions with as curious a felicity as the thoughts are subtle!)—as if the finger which I saw with eyes, had, as it were, another finger, invisible, touching me with a ghostly touch, even while I feared the real touch from it. What if, in certain cases, touch acted by itself, co-present with vision, yet not coalescing? Then I should see the finger as at a distance, and yet feel a finger touching which was nothing but it, and yet was not it. The two senses cannot co-exist without a sense of causation. The touch must be the effect of that finger [which] I see, and yet it is not yet near to me, and therefore it is not it, and yet it is it. Why it is is in an imaginary pre-duplication!
N.B.—There is a passage in the second part of Wallenstein expressing, not explaining, the same feeling. "The spirits of great events stride on before the events"—it is in one of the last two or three scenes:—
"As the sun,
Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image
In the atmosphere, so often do the spirits
Of great events, stride on before the events."
[Wallenstein, Part II., act v. sc. 1. P. W., 1893, p. 351.]
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CLERICAL ERRORS
It is worth noting and endeavouring to detect the Law of the Mind, by which, in writing earnestly while we are thinking, we omit words necessary to the sense. It will be found, I guess, that we seldom omit the material word, but generally the word by which the mind expresses its modification of the verbum materiale. Thus, in the preceding page, 7th line, medium is the materiale: that was its own brute, inert sense—but the no is the mind's action, its use of the word.
I think this a hint of some value. Thus, the is a word in constant combination with the passive or material words; but to is an act of the mind, and I had written the detect instead of to detect. Again, when my sense demanded "the" to express a distinct modification of some verbum materiale, I remember to have often omitted it in writing. The principle is evident—the mind borrows the materia from without, and is passive with regard to it as the mere subject "stoff"—a simple event of memory takes place; but having the other in itself, the inward Having with its sense of security passes for the outward Having—or is all memory an anxious act, and thereby suspended by vivid security? or are both reasons the same? or if not, are they consistent, and capable of being co-or sub-ordinated? It will be lucky if some day, after having written on for two or three sheets rapidly and as a first copy, without correcting, I should by chance glance on this note, not having thought at all about it during or before the time of writing; and then to examine every word omitted.
BIBLIOLOGICAL MEMORANDA