STATES OF DEPRESSION.

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were at hand. The general, believing that a certain force would infallibly enable him to defeat the enemy, makes his attack when he has got the force; and when he is sure of that force reaching him, he feels already the excitement of victory; at least such would be the tests of a perfect confidence.

17. These observations apply not simply to the passion of fear and its opposite, but to the emotions generally, so far as they may be classified under the contrasting heads of elators and depressors of the mental tone. Whatever cause raises the animal spirits, raises at the same time the confident side of the uncertain future. It is the nature of some constitutions to maintain the high buoyant tone as a prevailing quality through all vicissitudes of events. Physical causes may co-operate or may be in antagonism with this happy disposition; and there are also what is termed 'moral' causes, meaning the mental emotions. Success and failure in enterprises may be mentioned as familiar examples of the lastnamed class. With regard to matters of experimental or demonstrative certainty, these fluctuations of mental tone are at the lowest point of influence; they neither confirm, nor impair our confidence in the refreshing power of food and sleep, or in an arithmetical computation. As we pass from the highest order of certainty, through the stages of probability, down to the depths of total uncertainty, we come more and more under the domination of the physical and moral causes that maintain or destroy the cheerful, buoyant, and happy frame of mind. The man of much knowledge and experience, inured to reflection and the handling of evidence, with habits of submission to proof, carries his tone of rational conviction a considerable way into the region of probability, reclaiming a larger track from the domain where the feeling of the moment gives the cue; but in this, as in other things, there is only an approximation to the absolutely perfect. The soldier in a campaign, cherishing and enjoying life, is unmoved by the probability of being soon cut off. If he still continues to act in every respect as if destined to a good old age, in spite of the perils of the field, his conviction is purely

a quality of his temperament, and will be much less strong at those moments when hunger and fatigue have depressed his frame, or when the sight of dying and dead men has made him tremble with awe. I formerly quoted a happy expression of Arthur Helps, 'where you know nothing, place terrors;' but, given the sanguine, buoyant, and courageous temperament-given youth, spirits, and intoxication-given a career of prosperity and success-and where you know nothing, you will place high hopes. Under this hypothesis of no positive evidence, elevation of tone and belief of good to come, are the same fact. Where the acquired trust in evidence does not find its way in any degree, belief is no other than happy emotion. Ply the resources that sustain the bright class of feelings, and you sustain a man's trust in the favourable view of the unknown; let the system sink down to nervous and mental depression, and hope passes to despondency. The condition of belief thus has two great opposite poles, Evidence and Feeling. The nature of the subject, and the character of the individual mind, determine which is to predominate; but in this life of ours, neither is the exclusive master.

18. There are various other points of the present subject that must be despatched with a brief notice, although some of them are worthy of a more extended illustration. Belief in Testimony contains all the elements of intuition, experience, and emotion, in varying degrees. We are disposed to accept as true in the first instance whatever we are told to act upon, until we incur the shock of an opposing experience. After many trials, we ascertain the persons whose testimony exposes us to no collision with fact; the intuitive tendency to believe is in their case consolidated by repetition into a strong assurance. So far the case of testimony, therefore, is in no respect different from any other mode of deriving conviction from the actual facts of the world. But there is in testimony an additional source of influence, arising from the peculiar force exerted by one man upon another. All those circumstances that lend impressiveness to a speaker, and render the orator an artist, dispose the hearers to accept his statements

with more than the deference due to the mere testimony of a single person. Emotion here exercises an interference of its own kind. In like manner, the loud asseveration of a multitude operates beyond its intrinsic worth, by virtue of an emotional ascendancy.

19. There can be now little difficulty in comprehending the agency of Desire in producing conviction. When anything strongly excites our feelings, making us long for the full possession of it, the mind is so much under the sway of the emotion as to suffer the blinding effect peculiar to such a situation. We then refuse to entertain the obstacles in the way of our desire, and eagerly embrace every view and appearance favourable to our wishes. Such is the tendency of any intense longing, and such is the result in a mind not strongly disciplined to hunt out all sides of a question, in spite of the feelings. Desire may, however, be accompanied with even unreasonable doubt as to success; the tone and temper of the individual being unduly depressed, as at other times too much elated.

20. Hope is the well-known name for belief in some contingent future bringing good. Whatever object intensely pleases us, is thought of by us; and if the mere idea is not all-satisfying, the reality is desired. There may be as yet nothing of the nature of a conviction. When an event happens to put this object within reach, so that we have only to put forth some effort of our own to attain it, or to wait a certain time, at the lapse of which we shall possess it, the state of belief is generated. We then make the effort with the same ardour as we perform any voluntary act under immediate realization of the end, and we already enjoy in foretaste the full fruition. The hard-worked official, with no prospect of liberation, has a certain gloomy satisfaction in merely conceiving a holiday. He may allow himself to fall into the state of desire with imaginary gratification, and rehearse in his mind all the delights that he would follow out if he had the reality. But let him be told by authority, that on the execution of a certain task he shall gain a release, he, believing

this declaration, proceeds to the work with the alacrity of a person gaining at every moment the very sensations of the future. Or let him be told simply that on a certain day he shall be set free, and instantly the ideal picture brightens, and he feels already as if he began to realize what he has just been imagining. If, instead of a promise on good authority, he has merely a surmise with some probability, he makes very little progress towards the elated tone of full realization. The strong desire and the sanguine temper may make up to him for the want of unexceptionable evidence; but in either way, the transition from a mere imagined delight to the elation corresponding to a reality in hand, is the measure of the power of belief.

The opposite condition is usually named fear; the proper title is Despondency, of which the highest degree is Despair. The belief in approaching evil is an unhinging and depressing condition of mind, as the belief in approaching good causes a joyous elation. Likewise, as the joyful mood, already in existence, disposes to that confidence of good on the way constituting Hope, so a mind depressed from any cause is disposed to the belief in coming evil. The exhaustion of long watching by a sick bed is unfavourable to a hopeful view of the patient; whence the advent of the physician is a moral support to an afflicted household. The perturbation of fear is related to despondency, only as being a depressing agency. The one state passes into the other through this community of character.

21. Faith, in the religious sense, is mainly supplied from the fountains of human feeling, and is, in fact, cherished as itself a mode of consoling, cheering, and elating emotion. Direct experience can have but little to do with the subjectmatter of spiritual essences. Testimony, and the accordance of fellow-beings, may go far to stir up the state of confidence in a present, presiding, and benignant Deity, and in a state of future blessedness. Nevertheless, the culture of strong feelings and affections must ever be the main instrumentality of gaining the comfort of such assurances. Religious truth cannot, there

fore, be imparted, as has sometimes been supposed, by an intellectual medium of verbal exposition and theological demonstration. Being an affair of the feelings, a method must be sought adapted to heighten the intensity of these.

As in other things, the belief here also may refer to the side of evil, and consist in realizing strongly the threatenings of future misery. The terms 'faith' and 'believer,' are commonly used to express the comforting aspect of religion, but the fact of belief is as much exemplified in the opposite side. The strongest conviction there is what casts on the mind the deepest gloom.

It

22. It remains to consider the line of demarcation between belief and mere conceptions involving no belief-there being instances where the one seems to shade into the other. seems to me impossible to draw this line without referring to action, as the only test, and the essential import of the state of conviction. Even in cases the farthest removed in appearance from any actions of ours, there is no other criterion. We believe a great many truths respecting the world, in the shape of general propositions, scientific statements, affirmations on testimony, &c., which are so much beyond our own little sphere that we can rarely have occasion to involve them in our own procedure, or to feel any hopeful elation on their account. We likewise give credit to innumerable events of past history, although the greater number of them have never any consequences as regards ourselves. Yet, notwithstanding such remoteness of interest, the criterion assigned in this chapter must hold; otherwise there is no real conviction in any one instance.

Every one recognises the old distinction of potentiality and actuality (posse and esse) as a true account of two states of mind that we practically assume. Besides actually doing a thing, we know what it is to be in an attitude or disposition of preparedness to act, before the emergency has arisen, or while the emergency is still at a distance and uncertain. When I say, if ever I go to America I will visit Niagara, I have put myself into an ideal attitude, perhaps never to be realized,