[132] Pleasures of Imagination, Book II. v. 137–140.
[LECTURE XXXII.]
ON THE EXTERNAL AFFECTIONS OF MIND COMBINED WITH DESIRE, CONTINUED.—ON THE INTERNAL AFFECTIONS OF MIND.—CLASSIFICATION OF THEM.
In my last Lecture, Gentlemen, I concluded my sketch of the different hypotheses of philosophers with respect to perception, with an account of that Pre-established Harmony, by which Leibnitz, excluding all reciprocal agency of mind and matter, endeavoured to account for the uniform coincidence of our mental feelings with our bodily movements,—an hypothesis which, though it does not seem to have gained many followers out of Germany, produced the most enthusiastic admiration in the country of its author. I may remark by the way,—as a very striking example of the strange mixture of seemingly opposite qualities, which we frequently find in the character of nations,—that, while the country, of which I speak, has met with ridicule,—most unjust in degree, as national ridicule always is,—for the heaviness of its laborious erudition, it must be allowed to surpass all other countries in the passionate enthusiasm of its philosophy, which, particularly in metaphysics, from the reign of Leibnitz to the more recent worship paid to the transcendentalism of Kant, seems scarcely to have admitted of any calm approbation, or to have known any other inquirers than violent partisans and violent foes.
After my remarks on this hypothesis, which closed my view of our external affections of mind, as they exist simply, I next proceeded to consider them, as they exist, combined with desire, in that state of the mind, which is termed attention,—a state which has been supposed to indicate a peculiar intellectual power, but which, I endeavoured to shew you, admits of being analyzed into other more general principles.
It is to our consciousness, of course, that we must refer for the truth of any such analysis; and the process which it reveals to us, in attention, seems, I think, to justify the analysis which I made, indicating a combination of simpler feelings, but not any new and distinct species of feeling, to be referred to a peculiar faculty.
We see many objects together, and we see them indistinctly. We wish to know them more accurately,—and we are aware, that this knowledge can be acquired only in detail. We select some one more prominent object, from the rest,—or rather, without any selection on our part, this object excites, in a higher degree, our desire of observing it particularly, merely by being more prominent, or, in some other respect, more interesting than the rest. To observe it particularly, we fix our body, and our eyes,—for it is a case of vision which I have taken for an example,—as steadily as possible, that the light from the same points of the object may continue to fall on the same points of the retina. Together with our wish, we have an expectation, the natural effect of uniform past experience, that the object will now be more distinctly perceived by us; and, in accordance with this expectation, when the process, which I have described, is completed, the object, as if it knew our very wish, and hastened to gratify it, does become more distinct; and, in proportion as it becomes thus more vivid, the other objects of the group become gradually fainter, till at length they are scarcely felt to be present. Such, without the intervention of any new and peculiar state of mind, is the mental process, as far as we are conscious of it; and, if this be the process, there is no reason to infer in it the operation of any power of the mind different from those which are exercised in other cases. The general capacities of perception, and desire, and expectation, and voluntary command of certain muscles, which, on every view of the phenomena of attention, we must allow the mind to possess, are, of themselves, sufficient to explain the phenomena, and preclude, therefore, any further reference.
The brightening of the objects to which we attend, that is to say, of the objects which have interested us, and which we feel a desire of knowing, and the consequent fading of the other coexisting objects, I explained, by the well known influence, not of desire merely, but of all our emotions, in rendering more vivid those objects of perception or fancy, with which they harmonize; and I illustrated this influence by various examples.
The phantasms of imagination, in the reveries of our waking hours, when our external senses are still open, and quick to feel, are, as mere conceptions, far less vivid than the primary perceptions, from which they originally flowed; and yet, under the influence of any strong emotion, they become so much more bright and prominent than external things, that, to the impassioned muser, on distant scenes and persons, the scenes and persons truly around him, are almost, as if they were not in existence. If a mere conception, then, faint as it must always be by its own nature, can thus be rendered more vivid than reality, by the union of any strong desire, it is surely less wonderful, that the same cause should communicate the same superior vividness to the brighter realities of perception. If what we remember with interest, and wish to see again, become so much more vivid in our fancy, merely by this very wish, that we scarcely perceive any one of the innumerable objects before our eyes, what we truly see, in its own lively colouring, and feel a strong desire of knowing more intimately, may well be supposed to render us less sensible to the other coexisting objects, which the very shadows of our imagination, when brightened by a similar desire, were able mutually to annihilate or eclipse.