[87]. See Preface to Wordsworth’s Poems.
[88]. I do not mean that Helvetius was the first who conceived the hypothesis here spoken of (for I do not think he had wit enough to invent even an ingenious absurdity) but it was through him I believe that this notion has attained it’s present popularity, and in France particularly it has had, I am certain, a very general influence on the national character. It was brought forward in the most forcible manner by the writers of the last century, and it is expressly stated, and clearly answered by Bishop Butler in the Preface to his Sermons at the Rolls’ Chapel. After Berkeley’s Essay on Vision, I do not know of any work better worth the attention of those who would learn to think than these same metaphysical Discourses preached at the Rolls’ Chapel.
[89]. No doubt the picture is always looked at with a very different feeling from what it would have been, if the idea of the person had never been distinctly associated with it.
[90]. Consciousness is here and all along (where any particular stress is laid upon it) used in it’s etymological sense, as literally the same with conscientia, the knowing or perceiving many things by a simple act.
[91]. Those of the touch admit of the greatest variety in this respect from the general diffusion of that sense over the whole body, and those which depend on hearing from the small part of the ear which is in general distinctly affected by sound at the same time. As to the taste and smell, the stimulants applied to these senses are such as for the most part to act on a large proportion of the organ at once, though only at intervals. The direction of smells is hardly distinguishable like that of sounds.
[92]. The method taken by Hartley in detailing the associations, which take place between the ideas of each of the senses one by one, saves him the trouble of explaining those which take place between the ideas of different senses at the same time.
[93]. I have always had the same feeling with respect to Hartley (still granting his power to the utmost) which is pleasantly expressed in an old author, Roger Bacon, quoted by Sir Kenelm Digby in his answer to Brown. ‘Those students,’ he says, ‘who busy themselves much with such notions as relate wholly to the fantasie, do hardly ever become idoneous for abstracted metaphysical speculations; the one having bulky foundation of matter or of the accidents of it to settle upon, (at the least with one foot:) the other flying continually, even to a lessening pitch, in the subtil air. And accordingly, it hath been generally noted, that the exactest mathematicians, who converse altogether with lines, figures, and other differences of quantity, have seldom proved eminent in metaphysicks or speculative divinity. Nor again, the professors of these sciences in the other arts. Much less can it be expected, that an excellent physician, whose fancy is always fraught with the material drugs that he prescribeth his apothecary to compound his medicines of, and whose hands are inured to the cutting up, and eyes to the inspection of anatomized bodies, should easily and with success, flie his thoughts at so towring a game, as a pure intellect, a separated and unbodied soul.’—I confess I feel in reading Hartley something in the way in which the Dryads must have done shut up in their old oak trees. I feel my sides pressed hard, and bored with points of knotty inferences piled up one upon another without being able ever to recollect myself, or catch a glimpse of the actual world without me. I am somehow wedged in between different rows of material objects, overpowering me by their throng, and from which I have no power to escape, but of which I neither know nor understand any thing. I constantly see objects multiplied upon me, not powers at work, I know no reason why one thing follows another but that something else is conjured up between them, which has as little apparent connection with either as they have with one another;—he always reasons from the concrete object, not from the abstract or essential properties of things, and in his whole book I do not believe that there is one good definition. It would be a bad way to describe a man’s character to say that he had a wise father or a foolish son, and yet this is the way in which Hartley defines ideas by stating what precedes them in the mind, and what comes after them. Thus he defines the will to be ‘that idea, or state of mind which precedes action,’ or ‘a desire, or aversion sufficiently strong to produce action,’ &c. He gives you the outward signs of things in the order in which he conceives them to follow one another, never the demonstration of certain consequences from the known nature of their causes, which alone is true reasoning. Nevertheless, it is not to be forgotten, that he was also a great man. See his Chapter on Memory, &c.
[94]. See Priestley’s Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever.
[95]. See Essays by T. Cooper of Manchester. This very curious analysis was also delivered with great gravity by Mr. Mac-Intosh to the metaphysical students of Lincoln’s-Inn. I confess I like ingenuity, however misapplied, if it is but a man’s own: but the dull, affected, pompous repetition of nonsense is not to be endured with patience. In retailing what is not our own, the only merit must be in the choice, or judgment. A man, however, without originality may yet have common sense and common honesty. To be a hawker of worn-out paradoxes, and a pander to sophistry denotes indeed a desperate ambition.
[96]. This subject of consciousness, the most abstruse, the most important of all others, the most filled with seeming inexplicable contradictions, that which bids the completest defiance to the matter-of-fact philosophy and can only be developed by the patient soliciting of a man’s own spirit has been accordingly passed over by the herd of philosophers from Locke downwards. There is a short note about it in Hartley in which he flatly denies the possibility of any such thing. Lest what I have already said should therefore be insufficient to fix the attention of the reader on a subject which he may think quite exploded, I will add the account which Rousseau has given of the same subject, whose authority does not weigh the less with me because it is unsupported by the Logic of Condillac, or the book De l’Esprit.