Classic Poem

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 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.