1805
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide, wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
S. T. C.
THE SENSE OF MAGNITUDE Tuesday, Jan. 15, 1805
This evening there was the most perfect and the brightest halo circling the roundest and brightest moon I ever beheld. So bright was the halo, so compact, so entire a circle, that it gave the whole of its area, the moon itself included, the appearance of a solid opaque body, an enormous planet. It was as if this planet had a circular trough of some light-reflecting fluid for its rim (that is the halo) and its centre (that is the moon) a small circular basin of some fluid that still more copiously reflected, or that even emitted light; and as if the interspatial area were somewhat equally substantial but sullen. Thence I have found occasion to meditate on the nature of the sense of magnitude and its absolute dependence on the idea of substance; the consequent difference between magnitude and spaciousness, the dependence of the idea on double-touch, and thence to evolve all our feelings and ideas of magnitude, magnitudinal sublimity, &c., from a scale of our own bodies. For why, if form constituted the sense, that is, if it were pure vision, as a perceptive sense abstracted from feeling in the organ of vision, why do I seek for mountains, when in the flattest countries the clouds present so many and so much more romantic and spacious forms, and the coal-fire so many, so much more varied and lovely forms? And whence arises the pleasure from musing on the latter? Do I not, more or less consciously, fancy myself a Lilliputian to whom these would be mountains, and so, by this factitious scale, make them mountains, my pleasure being consequently playful, a voluntary poem in hieroglyphics or picture-writing—"phantoms of sublimity," which I continue to know to be phantoms? And form itself, is not its main agency exerted in individualising the thing, making it this and that, and thereby facilitating the shadowy measurement of it by the scale of my own body?
Yon long, not unvaried, ridge of hills, that runs out of sight each way, it is spacious, and the pleasure derivable from it is from its running, its motion, its assimilation to action; and here the scale is taken from my life and soul, and not from my body. Space is the Hebrew name for God, and it is the most perfect image of soul, pure soul, being to us nothing but unresisted action. Whenever action is resisted, limitation begins—and limitation is the first constituent of body—the more omnipresent it is in a given space, the more that space is body or matter—and thus all body necessarily presupposes soul, inasmuch as all resistance presupposes action. Magnitude, therefore, is the intimate blending, the most perfect union, through its whole sphere, in every minutest part of it, of action and resistance to action. It is spaciousness in which space is filled up—that is, as we well say, transmitted by incorporate accession, not destroyed. In all limited things, that is, in all forms, it is at least fantastically stopped, and, thus, from the positive grasp to the mountain, from the mountain to the cloud, from the cloud to the blue depth of sky, which, as on the top of Etna, in a serene atmosphere, seems to go behind the sun, all is graduation, that precludes division, indeed, but not distinction; and he who endeavours to overturn a distinction by showing that there is no chasm, by the old sophism of the cumulus or the horse's tail, is still diseased with the formication,[B] the (what is the nosological name of it? the hairs or dancing infinites of black specks seeming always to be before the eye), the araneosis of corpuscular materialism.—S. T. .
STRAY THOUGHTS FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"
The least things, how they evidence the superiority of English artisans! Even the Maltese wafers, for instance, that stick to your mouth and fingers almost so as to make it impossible to get them off without squeezing them into a little pellet, and yet will not stick to the paper.