impulse or desire. It is not given to every one to succeed in this method, as bearing on the whole compass of desires, however much we may deem it the preferable course. We have now to consider what other solution can be resorted to, of a less severe character as regards the demand for energetic efforts of the will. There is a mode of an easier kind, which may be designated by the general title of ideal or imaginary action. We all know what is meant by day-dreaming, castlebuilding, and such like terms; as implying that one finds scope in an imaginary world for the gratification of longings that are not answered by anything in the realities of one's lot. This method of proceeding, however, is not of the same universal application as the preceding; it is not every desire that can be even partially satisfied by imaginary outgoings. If, for example, we take any of the bodily appetites,-hunger, thirst, sleep, &c., or any of the other organic sensations,-heat, cold,

* I have not introduced into the text any notice of those antidotes common to Desire with all other forms of pain. The uneasiness of ineffectual craving may be appeased by drawing upon some of our stores of pleasure. It is in this way that we appease the longings of infancy, and prevent the mischiefs of a too rampant appetite. It being the prerogative of pleasure to neutralize the sting of pain, we apply it to silence the restlessness secondary to suffering as well as the primary irritation. The mind will often accept a substitute for what is pretty strongly longed for; and we are but too glad to ply this method of compromise for the blessings of peace and content.

Another device of familiar application is the diversion of the thoughts from the subject that has caused the state of craving. When this originates in the conception of some pleasure, and not in a real want or suffering, the remedy may be found where the evil arose; namely, in the intellect. The seeing or hearing of some one's good fortune on a point that we ourselves are susceptible to, quickens our longings if not our envy, and leaves us very much out of sorts with ourselves and the world. It is at such a moment that the advent of a friend, the arrival of some stirring news, the necessity for falling to work at a task, or some other influence suggesting an entire change of subject, will prove a healing balm. New associating links can always more or less turn aside the stream of pre-existing ideas, and there are many occasions when this fact exercises a benign power. The consolation afforded by a spiritual adviser, or a wise friend, has no other basis to proceed upon, and yet great effects may be operated by the skilful management of this resource. Nevertheless, there is nothing of special adaptation to the pains of thwarted desire in the present method any more than in the foregoing.

THE IDEAL GRATIFICATION OF DESIRE.

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nervous depression, we find that no ideal or imagined relief is of any practical avail :

Who can hold a fire in his hand

By thinking on the frosty Caucasus ?

On the other hand, the craving for a return of scenes and days of bygone pleasure, sometimes contains so much of the 'pleasures of memory' of the foregone emotions, as to make it satisfying to a great degree merely to imagine circumstances that shall bring about a return. So, when any one has deeply offended us, being yet beyond the reach of our retaliation, we have still some fraction of the full measure of revenge, by going over in the mind what we should do if the offender were to cross our path. Any sentiment that is naturally luxuriant in the constitution, being not likely to be met in all its fulness by the reality, makes up for the defect by a series of ideal volitions corresponding to its demands. The sentiment of power is a signal example of this. Each one

whose sphere falls below what this feeling leads him to wish, finds in imagined domains an outlet for the insatiable craving; and such may be the peculiarity of the individual, that empire in conception may go a great way to supply the void.

7. The comparison now instituted between the physical wants, and certain of the emotions or sentiments, suggests at once what the circumstance is that enables us to find gratification or relief in imaginary actions. Referring to a former chapter (Emotions, Chap. XIII.), it will be remembered that a feeling persisting after the fact, or recovered by mere association, without the presence of the proper stimulus, can sometimes approach the fulness of the real experience; so much so, that we are content in many instances with this bare conception, or ideal resuscitation. The recollection of a time of gaiety and excitement, of some interesting conversation or discourse, or of a book that we have read, may give such an amount of the feeling of actual experience that we rest satisfied with that, and wish nothing farther. On a matter, therefore, where we have a power of restoring mentally the fulltoned delight of a real experience, it is easy to convert memory

into imagination, and to construct future gratifications of the same sort, with or without a basis of reality. We speak occasionally of some one having a strong imagination, when we mean that such a one can body forth an ideal pleasure, so as to derive from it an entire satisfaction of the want of the moment. In the physical cravings, this is an impossibility. Something may be done to stave off for a little the insupportable agony of thirst, hunger, drowsiness, or cold, or to lull the acute pinch of a neuralgic pain, but the actual in these cases is too strong for the most highly stimulated counter-ideal. We have thus two opposite extremes among our multitudinous sensibilities; the one where actuality alone can fill up the aching void, the other where the mere idea amounts to the full demands of the system; and between those extremes lie the whole range of imaginary volition, put in motion at the instance of pains or pleasures, such as we cannot work for in the regular compass of our voluntary exertion.

8. So wide is the operation of these ideal outgoings, that the chief difficulty lies in selecting a good instance, to show how faithfully a course of voluntary action is repeated in the idea. Take the desire of Wealth. The motive growing out of pleasure secured, and pain turned aside, by worldly abundance, stimulates, perhaps, the largest share of the activity of mankind. To work, to husband the fruits of toil, to combine intelligence with handicraft, to exercise self-denial, and surmount the love of ease, are the genuine manifestations of our volitional nature under this cumulative end. The motive, however, may exist, where the means of attainment are from various causes restricted. A man may feel very keenly the sufferings that wealth could alleviate, and may have an appetizing conception of pleasures that it could command, but may be so situated as to be unable to compass the desirable object. It is then that imagination overleaps the barrier, and fills the mind with the ideas of those transactions that in other circumstances would be reproduced in reality. If the young man's obstacle at starting is the want of a certain capital to trade upon, his imaginings take the form of chalking out his

line of operations, were he in actual possession of the amount desiderated. If the difficulty is to obtain a certain office exactly adapted to his abilities, he is occasionally led to assume this difficulty overcome, and to sketch in his mind the active proceedings consequent thereon. It is still the stimulus. of volition that is the prime mover of the activity; and the activity itself is essentially voluntary, although transferred from the actual operations, to the ideal rehearsal of them. This ideal volition is, in fact, an essential prelude to the lifting of the hand, and the performing of the actual business as it arises. The man that has gained his capital, or his office, has to spend a certain time in the mental work of deliberation under conflicting impulses, before taking the real proceedings ; and the dreamer, moved by the same original motives, goes through these ideal preliminaries, even when they can end in nothing real. And when a man actually has great wealth, his principal enjoyment of it consists in imagining what he might buy with it, but does not buy. Take, again, the very estimable end implied under curiosity, or the desire of rational knowledge, which possesses some minds so intensely as to constitute itself an end of pursuit. Suppose the aspirant occupied with routine toil, and removed from libraries and the converse of the learned. What would such a one do, if suddenly released from confining drudgery, and sent off to the metropolis of letters and science, with freedom to drink in knowledge to the utmost? The urgency of the motive would stimulate a certain deliberation in the first instance, at the close of which he would set out in the full career of execution. Pretty much the same course is described when he allows himself to forget his bonds, and give the rein to his imagination. The train of thought is a train of volitions forecasted as if for being carried into effect, it being possible to become occasionally oblivious to the limits that circumscribe the actual situation. The point to be noted on this subject, is the instrumentality of the voluntary part of our nature, in keeping up the trains of thought that we go through under such circumstances. It is not by mere laws of association

that we expatiate over fields of fancied activity, and reap in idea the fruits of exertion: it is the thought controlled by the will, or by the motives present at the time. The intellect by itself brings up certain trains, some of which are embraced and dwelt upon as suiting the urgency of the moment, while all the rest sink away unheeded. The same process is repeated so often as a choice of objects is before the mind. It is not the magnitude and grandeur of the metropolis, with its shops and shipping, its equipages and crowds, that seize the imagination. of a scholar; these would be suggested by the intellectual links of reproduction, but they are not dwelt upon; they sink away for want of a supporting stimulus in the mind, alive only to the thirst for knowledge. I have said before (Compound Association, § 13) that volition is a determining force in the rise of the thoughts, and I think it is pretty clear in what way the influence works. Now, as our actual conduct can be conceived in memory after the fact, and as this memory of the past can be so altered as to construct an anticipation of the future, which anticipation is essential to the deliberative process, so it is possible to go through the same mental operations for some line of conduct that is never realized, and cannot be realized. The general remembers at the end of a campaign all that he has done; if he is reappointed to a similar post, he makes use of these past experiences, retained in his mind, to construct a future plan; if, laid aside from service, he still cherishes the love of command and military glory,-this sentiment inspires trains of imaginary campaigns, which not being restrained by reality, are apt to take a grander flight, so as to please to the full measure the emotions that sustain them.

9. The kind of feelings most favourable to these constructions of imagined activity, are those that lie midway between the extremes above mentioned, viz., the class that can give no satisfaction, except in actual fruition of the objects, and the class that are satisfactory in the highest degree as mere ideal emotions. The tender affections, complacency, honour, and the sentiment of power, as existing in the average of persons,