duction of a common effect, such as that now described, by two agencies opposed to one another in their general influence on the conduct. It is only the natural and proper operation of the will, when we are arrested and detained by objects that give us delight. I keep my eyes directed upon a pleasing picture, exactly as I drink an agreeable beverage; but the carrying out of the same law of volition would lead me to turn away from a painful spectacle, and, if it had already impressed me before I was aware, make me attempt to dismiss it for ever from my thoughts; so that the greater the pain, the deeper the forgetfulness. Here, however, the action of the will is liable to be crossed and rendered impotent; not from any exception to the general principle of courting the agreeable and repelling the disagreeable, but because of the property belonging even to neutral emotions-namely, the power of possessing the mind and remaining in the recollection. Whether a feeling be pleasing, painful, or neither, it holds the attention for the time being, and leaves a trace behind it, the effect being greater according to the intensity of the excitement. In the case of pleasure, there is the additional force of the voluntary detention, whereby all things having any charm receive an additional stamp. In pain, on the other hand, the will operates to withdraw the active regards and diminish the time allowed for taking in an impression, but does not annihilate the one already received. I go away as fast as I am able from what revolts my view, but I cannot divest myself of all thought and recollection of what I have seen. If the disgust I experienced was intense, I have a more abiding remembrance of it than of most things that give me pleasure, although the will would be stimulated, in the one case, to resist the impression, and, in the other, to nurse and deepen it. Given equal degrees of delight and suffering, the occasion of delight would acquire the deepest hold, the volition making the difference; but volition does not give to the first all its impressiveness, and endeavours, but in vain, to deprive the last of any.

The same thing applies to neutral emotions, which the will

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neither favours nor discourages. They all have the power of stamping the memory as well as occupying the present attention, in proportion as they are intense, or exciting. An effect of the marvellous may neither please or displease, but it will impress. Unaided by a volitional spur, these emotions will detain us less than pleasing emotions equally exciting, and more than painful emotions discountenanced by the will.

20. We see, therefore, that it is a property of feeling to attract and detain the observation upon certain objects by preference, the effect of which is to possess the mind with those objects, or to give them a prominent place among our acquisitions. The abundance of the associations thereby formed leads to their recurrence in the trains of thought; and the same fascination causes them to be dwelt upon in recollection, and largely employed in the mind's own creations. The poet, and the man of science, if they are so by natural disposition, dwell each respectively in their own region of objects and conceptions; and a stinted place is left in the mind for all other things. Whence it is that the direction taken by the spontaneous gaze, and the easily recurring trains of the intellect, afford a clue to the predominant emotions.

The interested, charmed, or stimulated attention to things, is frequently seen in contrast with what may be called the natural retentiveness of the brain, which often inclines towards a different region from the other. It is a true and common remark that Taste and Faculty, or power, do not always go together. The objects that please and fascinate us may not be those that take the deepest hold of our minds, so as to constitute our highest intellectual grasp. One may feel a deep charm for the conceptions of science, without possessing that tenacity of mind in scientific matters which is indispensable to high attainments in them; and the same person may have a really powerful intellect in some other department without experiencing a corresponding charm. We may exert real power in one field, and derive pleasure in another. A great statesman like Richelieu finds a superior fascination in composing bad tragedies; an artist of incontestible genius is

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supremely happy in abortive mechanical inventions. Granted that a certain pleasure must always flow from the exercise of our strongest faculties, it still may happen that we take a far higher delight in a class of things where we could hardly attain even to mediocrity. There is no law of mind to connect talent and taste, or yet to make them uniformly exclude each other; all varieties of relationship may exist, from the closest concurrence to wide separation. When the two happen to coincide very nearly, or when the thing that fascinates the attention most, also coheres in the intellect best independently of this fascination, we have then the most effective combination that can exist for producing a great genius. Throughout the exposition of the law of contiguity, there was assumed, in the first instance, a natural adhesiveness for each different species of objects; and, in the second place, the efficacy of the emotions to inspire the attention.

21. Influence of Feeling on Belief.-In a subsequent chapter we shall have to enter fully into the nature of the state of mind denominated Belief. The full investigation of the subject would be premature in this place; still it would be a great omission not to allude here in explicit terms to the property of swaying our convictions common to all kinds of strong emotion.

The influence is of a mixed character. In the first place, it would arise in the ordinary action of the Will. A thing strongly desired, in other words, an object of intense pleasure, is pursued with corresponding urgency; obstacles are made light of, they are disbelieved. We cannot easily be induced to credit the ill effects of a favourite dish. If I am right in my view of belief, it is strictly a phase of action; to act strongly cannot be separated from believing strongly for the time.

In the second place, the influence is farther connected with the power of the Feelings over the Trains of Thought. When we are under a strong emotion, all things discordant with it are kept out of sight. A strong volitional urgency will subdue an opposing consideration actually before the

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mind; but intense feeling so lords it over the intellectual trains that the opposing considerations are not even allowed to be present. One would think it were enough that the remote considerations should give way to the near and pressing ones, so that the 'video meliora' might still remain with the 'deteriora sequor;' but in truth the flood of emotion sometimes sweeps away for the moment every vestige of the opposing absent, as if that had at no time been a present reality. Our feelings not merely play the part of rebels or innovators against the canons of the past, they are like destroying Vandals, who efface and consume the records of what has been. In a state of strong excitement, no thoughts are allowed to present themselves except such as concur in the present mood; the links of association are paralyzed as regards everything that conflicts with the ascendant influence; and it is through this stoppage of the intellectual trains that we come into the predicament of renouncing, or, as it is called, disbelieving, for the moment, what we have formerly felt and acted on. Our feelings pervert our convictions by smiting us with intellectual blindness, which we need not have even when committing great imprudence in action. It depends upon many circumstances what intensity of emotion shall be required to produce this higher effect of keeping utterly back the faintest recollection of whatever discords with the reigning fury. The natural energy of the emotional temper on the one hand, and, on the other, the feebleness of the forces of effective resuscitation, conspire to falsify the views entertained at the moment.

22. Intense Pleasure or Pain, while inspiring the actions and influencing the intellectual acquisitions, also tells upou the judgment of truth and falsehood. The emotion of Terror proves the greatness of its power, by inducing the most irrational beliefs. In the extreme manifestations of Anger, a man will be suddenly struck blind to his most familiar experiences of fact, and will for the moment deny what at other times he would most resolutely maintain. Take also Selfcomplacency. The habitual dreamer is not instructed by a

thousand failures of pet projects; he enters upon each new attempt as full of confidence as if all the rest had succeeded. We note with surprise, in everyday life, that an individual goes on promising to himself and to others, with sincere conviction, what he has never once been known to execute; the feeling of self-confidence lords it over the experience of a life. He has not stated to himself in a proposition the conflicting experience. He does not know that he never fulfils his purposes. So with the Affections that have others for their objects; love's blindness is the world's oldest proverb.

The falsehood, mistakes, confusion, and fatality growing out of this property of the feelings, ramify in every province of affairs and every relation of human life. I speak not at present of the conscious lie-to that our illus. tration does not now extend. The perverted views of matters of common business, the superstructure of fable that envelopes the narration of the past, the incubus of superstition and blind faith, have their foundation and source in the power of emotion to bar out the impressions of reality.

The deep-seated intellectual corruption due to the ascendancy of the Feelings has been a theme for reflecting minds to dilate upon, and yet we cannot say that it has been sufficiently set forth. The cloud of legend and fable, unhesitatingly accepted for ages as the genuine history of foregone times, has only just begun to be dispersed. The pages of early Greek and Roman story had been filled with narratives relying solely on faith and feeling; and the introduction of the canons of evidence appealed to in all matters of recent date, is felt as a cruel and remorseless operation, by which the keenest susceptibilities, and most favourite fancies, are cut to the quick. Warm emotion had bred and nursed those ancient stories; and in an early uninquiring age, the realities of nature were set at naught by the very minds that had to face them as the experience of every hour; such experience being unable to restrain the creations of an unbridled fancy,