CHAPTER VII

Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory--Of the original

mistake or equivocation which procured its admission--Memoria technica.

We will pass by the utter incompatibility of such a law--if law it may

be called, which would itself be a slave of chances--with even that

appearance of rationality forced upon us by the outward phaenomena of

human conduct, abstracted from our own consciousness. We will agree

to forget this for the moment, in order to fix our attention on that

subordination of final to efficient causes in the human being, which

flows of necessity from the assumption, that the will and, with the

will, all acts of thought and attention are parts and products of this

blind mechanism, instead of being distinct powers, the function of

which it is to control, determine, and modify the phantasmal chaos

of association. The soul becomes a mere ens logicum; for, as a real

separable being, it would be more worthless and ludicrous than the

Grimalkins in the cat-harpsichord, described in the Spectator. For these

did form a part of the process; but, to Hartley’s scheme, the soul is

present only to be pinched or stroked, while the very squeals or purring

are produced by an agency wholly independent and alien. It involves all

the difficulties, all the incomprehensibility (if it be not indeed, os

emoige dokei, the absurdity), of intercommunion between substances

that have no one property in common, without any of the convenient

consequences that bribed the judgment to the admission of the Dualistic

hypothesis. Accordingly, this caput mortuum of the Hartleian process has

been rejected by his followers, and the consciousness considered as a

result, as a tune, the common product of the breeze and the harp

though this again is the mere remotion of one absurdity to make way

for another, equally preposterous. For what is harmony but a mode of

relation, the very esse of which is percipi?--an ens rationale, which

pre-supposes the power, that by perceiving creates it? The razor’s edge

becomes a saw to the armed vision; and the delicious melodies of Purcell

or Cimarosa might be disjointed stammerings to a hearer, whose partition

of time should be a thousand times subtler than ours. But this obstacle

too let us imagine ourselves to have surmounted, and “at one bound high

overleap all bound.” Yet according to this hypothesis the disquisition,

to which I am at present soliciting the reader’s attention, may be as

truly said to be written by Saint Paul’s church, as by me: for it is the

mere motion of my muscles and nerves; and these again are set in motion

from external causes equally passive, which external causes stand

themselves in interdependent connection with every thing that exists or

has existed. Thus the whole universe co-operates to produce the minutest

stroke of every letter, save only that I myself, and I alone, have

nothing to do with it, but merely the causeless and effectless beholding

of it when it is done. Yet scarcely can it be called a beholding; for

it is neither an act nor an effect; but an impossible creation of a

something nothing out of its very contrary! It is the mere quick-silver

plating behind a looking-glass; and in this alone consists the poor

worthless I! The sum total of my moral and intellectual intercourse,

dissolved into its elements, is reduced to extension, motion, degrees

of velocity, and those diminished copies of configurative motion, which

form what we call notions, and notions of notions. Of such philosophy

well might Butler say--

The metaphysic’s but a puppet motion

That goes with screws, the notion of a notion;

The copy of a copy and lame draught

Unnaturally taken from a thought

That counterfeits all pantomimic tricks,

And turns the eyes, like an old crucifix;

That counterchanges whatsoe’er it calls

By another name, and makes it true or false;

Turns truth to falsehood, falsehood into truth,

By virtue of the Babylonian’s tooth.

The inventor of the watch, if this doctrine be true, did not in reality

invent it; he only looked on, while the blind causes, the only true

artists, were unfolding themselves. So must it have been too with my

friend Allston, when he sketched his picture of the dead man revived by

the bones of the prophet Elijah. So must it have been with Mr. Southey

and Lord Byron, when the one fancied himself composing his Roderick, and

the other his Childe Harold. The same must hold good of all systems of

philosophy; of all arts, governments, wars by sea and by land; in short,

of all things that ever have been or that ever will be produced. For,

according to this system, it is not the affections and passions that are

at work, in as far as they are sensations or thoughts. We only fancy,

that we act from rational resolves, or prudent motives, or from impulses

of anger, love, or generosity. In all these cases the real agent is a

something-nothing-everything, which does all of which we know, and knows

nothing of all that itself does.

The existence of an infinite spirit, of an intelligent and holy will,

must, on this system, be mere articulated motions of the air. For as the

function of the human understanding is no other than merely to appear to

itself to combine and to apply the phaenomena of the association; and

as these derive all their reality from the primary sensations; and the

sensations again all their reality from the impressions ab extra; a

God not visible, audible, or tangible, can exist only in the sounds and

letters that form his name and attributes. If in ourselves there be no

such faculties as those of the will, and the scientific reason, we must

either have an innate idea of them, which would overthrow the whole

system; or we can have no idea at all. The process, by which Hume

degraded the notion of cause and effect into a blind product of delusion

and habit, into the mere sensation of proceeding life (nisus vitalis)

associated with the images of the memory; this same process must be

repeated to the equal degradation of every fundamental idea in ethics or

theology.

Far, very far am I from burthening with the odium of these consequences

the moral characters of those who first formed, or have since adopted

the system! It is most noticeable of the excellent and pious Hartley,

that, in the proofs of the existence and attributes of God, with which

his second volume commences, he makes no reference to the principle or

results of the first. Nay, he assumes, as his foundations, ideas which,

if we embrace the doctrines of his first volume, can exist no where but

in the vibrations of the ethereal medium common to the nerves and to the

atmosphere. Indeed the whole of the second volume is, with the fewest

possible exceptions, independent of his peculiar system. So true is it,

that the faith, which saves and sanctifies, is a collective energy, a

total act of the whole moral being; that its living sensorium is in the

heart; and that no errors of the understanding can be morally arraigned

unless they have proceeded from the heart. But whether they be such, no

man can be certain in the case of another, scarcely perhaps even in his

own. Hence it follows by inevitable consequence, that man may perchance

determine what is a heresy; but God only can know who is a heretic. It

does not, however, by any means follow that opinions fundamentally

false are harmless. A hundred causes may co-exist to form one complex

antidote. Yet the sting of the adder remains venomous, though there

are many who have taken up the evil thing, and it hurted them not. Some

indeed there seem to have been, in an unfortunate neighbour nation at

least, who have embraced this system with a full view of all its moral

and religious consequences; some--

------who deem themselves most free,

When they within this gross and visible sphere

Chain down the winged thought, scoffing ascent,

Proud in their meanness; and themselves they cheat

With noisy emptiness of learned phrase,

Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences,

Self-working tools, uncaus’d effects, and all

Those blind omniscients, those almighty slaves,

Untenanting creation of its God!

Such men need discipline, not argument; they must be made better men,

before they can become wiser.

The attention will be more profitably employed in attempting to discover

and expose the paralogisms, by the magic of which such a faith could

find admission into minds framed for a nobler creed. These, it appears

to me, may be all reduced to one sophism as their common genus; the

mistaking the conditions of a thing for its causes and essence; and

the process, by which we arrive at the knowledge of a faculty, for the

faculty itself. The air I breathe is the condition of my life, not its

cause. We could never have learned that we had eyes but by the process

of seeing; yet having seen we know that the eyes must have pre-existed

in order to render the process of sight possible. Let us cross-examine

Hartley’s scheme under the guidance of this distinction; and we shall

discover, that contemporaneity, (Leibnitz’s Lex Continui,) is the limit

and condition of the laws of mind, itself being rather a law of matter,

at least of phaenomena considered as material. At the utmost, it is to

thought the same, as the law of gravitation is to loco-motion. In every

voluntary movement we first counteract gravitation, in order to avail

ourselves of it. It must exist, that there may be a something to be

counteracted, and which, by its re-action, may aid the force that is

exerted to resist it. Let us consider what we do when we leap. We first

resist the gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then by

another act, voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to alight on the

spot, which we had previously proposed to ourselves. Now let a man watch

his mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case,

while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process

completely analogous. Most of my readers will have observed a small

water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted

shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook;

and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the

stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting

the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a

momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of

the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently

two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and

passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which

is at once both active and passive. In philosophical language, we

must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and

determinations, the IMAGINATION. But, in common language, and especially

on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the name to a superior degree

of the faculty, joined to a superior voluntary control over it.

Contemporaneity, then, being the common condition of all the laws of

association, and a component element in the materia subjecta, the

parts of which are to be associated, must needs be co-present with all.

Nothing, therefore, can be more easy than to pass off on an incautious

mind this constant companion of each, for the essential substance of

all. But if we appeal to our own consciousness, we shall find that

even time itself, as the cause of a particular act of association, is

distinct from contemporaneity, as the condition of all association.

Seeing a mackerel, it may happen, that I immediately think of

gooseberries, because I at the same time ate mackerel with gooseberries

as the sauce. The first syllable of the latter word, being that which

had coexisted with the image of the bird so called, I may then think

of a goose. In the next moment the image of a swan may arise before

me, though I had never seen the two birds together. In the first two

instances, I am conscious that their co-existence in time was the

circumstance, that enabled me to recollect them; and equally conscious

am I that the latter was recalled to me by the joint operation of

likeness and contrast. So it is with cause and effect: so too with

order. So I am able to distinguish whether it was proximity in time, or

continuity in space, that occasioned me to recall B on the mention of A.

They cannot be indeed separated from contemporaneity; for that would

be to separate them from the mind itself. The act of consciousness is

indeed identical with time considered in its essence. I mean time per

se, as contra-distinguished from our notion of time; for this is always

blended with the idea of space, which, as the opposite of time, is

therefore its measure. Nevertheless the accident of seeing two objects

at the same moment, and the accident of seeing them in the same place

are two distinct or distinguishable causes: and the true practical

general law of association is this; that whatever makes certain parts of

a total impression more vivid or distinct than the rest, will determine

the mind to recall these in preference to others equally linked together

by the common condition of contemporaneity, or (what I deem a more

appropriate and philosophical term) of continuity. But the will itself

by confining and intensifying [25] the attention may arbitrarily give

vividness or distinctness to any object whatsoever; and from hence we

may deduce the uselessness, if not the absurdity, of certain recent

schemes which promise an artificial memory, but which in reality can

only produce a confusion and debasement of the fancy. Sound logic, as

the habitual subordination of the individual to the species, and of

the species to the genus; philosophical knowledge of facts under the

relation of cause and effect; a cheerful and communicative temper

disposing us to notice the similarities and contrasts of things, that

we may be able to illustrate the one by the other; a quiet conscience;

a condition free from anxieties; sound health, and above all (as far as

relates to passive remembrance) a healthy digestion; these are the best,

these are the only Arts of Memory.