remembrance of many a delightful evening walk with friends whom we loved. But this, certainly, is far from proving that the softness of moonshine would not be delightful, in any degree, if it had not excited such analogous conceptions. The sun, bursting in all his majesty, like the sovereign of the ethereal world, through the clouds, which he seems to annihilate with the very brightness of his glory, presents unquestionably many moral analogies which add to our delight, when we gaze, above or below, on that instant change which all nature seems to feel : Denso velamine nubis Obsitus, et tetrâ pressus caligine Titan, The similitude which these beautiful verses develop, is unquestionably most pleasing. But would there, indeed, be no delight in the contemplation of so magnificent an object, if some moral analogy were not excited, and if the sun itself, with the instant succession of darkness and splendour, and the light diffused over every object beneath, were all of which our mind. could be said to be conscious? Though, in this question of probabilities which we have been considering, the preponderance seems to me to be in favour of the belief of some original tendencies to the emotion of beauty, on the contemplation of certain objects; I have already said, that it is only a small part of this order of emotions which we can ascribe to such a source; and these, as I conceive, of very humble value, in relation to other more important emotions of the order, which are truly the product of associations of various kinds. Though all objects might not have been originally indifferent, the objects of our livelier emotions at present, are certainly those which speak to us of moral analogies and happy remembrances. It will not be an uninteresting inquiry, then, in what way these associations operate, in giving birth to the emotions, or in aiding them with such powerful accessions of delight. Let us pass, then, from the question of original beauty, to this still more important investigation. The investigation, when we first enter on it, may seem a very easy one. It is, as we have found from our examination of the laws of mind, the nature of one object, either perceived or conceived, to suggest, by the common laws which regulate our trains of thought at all times, some other object or feeling, that has to it some one of many relations; and this again may suggest others related to it in like manner. Each suggestion, during a long train of thought, may be the suggestion of some delightful object, and thus indirectly of the delightful emotions which such objects were of themselves capable of inducing; and though the amount of gratification additional, in each separate suggestion, may be slight, the gratification afforded by a long series of such images, all delightful in themselves, and all harmonizing with the object immediately before us, may be very considerable, so considerable as to be sufficient not to favour merely, but absolutely to constitute that emotion, to which we give the name of beauty. Such is the view of the origin of this emotion, which has been given, with much felicity of language, and with much happy illustration of example and analysis, by my very ingenious and very eloquent friend, the author of the Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste. The continued suggestion of trains of harmonizing images, Mr Alison considers as essential to the emotion; which consists, according to him, not more in the kindred associate feelings themselves, that are recalled to the mind, than in the peculiar delight attending what he terms the exercise of the imagination in recalling them; that is to say, according to the view which I have given you of our mental functions, the delight which he supposes to attend the mere suggestion of image after image in associate and harmonizing trains of thought. This opinion, as to the delight of the mere exercise of imagination, seems to be founded on the belief of a sort of voluntary exertion of the mind, in such trains, when all which truly takes place in them, as I endeavoured, in former lectures, to explain to you, is the operation of the common laws of suggestion, that may be pleasing or painful in their influence, precisely as the separate feelings that rise by suggestion are themselves pleasing or painful. The exercise of imagination, in such a case, is nothing more than these separate states themselves. When we gaze on a beautiful object, we do not call up the analogous images that may arise, but they arise of themselves unwilled; and if the images were of an opposite kind, the process would itself be painful. Indeed, if the supposed exercise of imagination were in itself, as an exercise of the mind, necessarily pleasing, this exercise, Mr Alison should have remembered, is not confined to objects that are beautiful, but is common to these with the objects that excite emotions opposite to those of beauty; in which, therefore, it would not be very easy for him to account for its different effect. Since, according to his theory, the same species of exercise of imagination is involved in these likewise, it is very evident that, if necessarily pleasing, it should tend, not to increase, but to lessen the disagreeable feelings, and to convert ugliness itself into a minor sort of beauty. On the fallacy of this supposed part of the process, however, it is unnecessary for us to dwell. I allude to the supposed delight of the mere exercise at present, only to show how necessary it has been felt, in this theory, to account, by a multitude of images, for an amount of delight which seems too great for any single image or suggestion. Here, then, lies the great difficulty, which that theory has to overcome. To him who reflects on the circumstances that have attended the emotion, in cases in which it has been most strongly felt, does it appear, on this review, that a series of images succeeding images have passed through his mind? When we turn our eye, for example, on a beautiful living form, is there no immediate or almost immediate feeling of delight whatever? but do we think of many analogies, -and, till these analogies have all been scanned, and the amount of enjoyment which may have attended the different objects of them been measured, is the countenance of smiles, or the form of grace, only a mass of coloured matter to our eyes? There are cases, surely, in which the feeling of beauty is immediately consequent on the very perception of the beautiful form, so immediately consequent, that it would be difficult to convince the greater number of those who have not been accustomed to reflect on such subjects, that there is any subsequence whatever, and that the delightful emotion is not itself the very glance which gives that happy feeling in instant sequence to the soul. I have no hesitation even in saying, that the more intense the feeling of beauty may be, the less is the tendency of the mind to pass from the delightful form, which fills the heart as it fills the eyes, to images of distant analogy; that this transition takes place chiefly where the emotion is of a slight kind; and that what is said to constitute beauty has thus an inverse and not a direct proportion to that very beauty which it is said directly to constitute. There can be no question, at least, that, in the language of every poet, and of every impassioned describer of these impassioned feelings, the total suspension of all our faculties, but of that which is fixed on the contemplation of the dazzling object itself, is stated as an essential character of excess of this emotion. There is uniformly described a sort of rapturous stupefaction, which overwhelms every other thought or feeling; and though this, in its full extent, may be true only in those excessive emotions which belong rather to poetry than to sober life, even in sober life there is assuredly an approach to it; and we may safely, therefore, venture to assert, that the beauty which scarcely allows the mind to wander for a moment from itself, is not less than the beauty which allows its happy admirer to run over the thousand kind and gentle qualities which it expresses, or to wander, still more widely, over a thousand analogies in other objects. If we attend, then, to the whole course of our feelings, during our admiration of the objects which we term beautiful, we are far from discovering the process of which Mr Alison speaks. We do not find that there is, at least that there is necessarily, any wide combination, or rapid succession, of trains of those associate images or feelings which he terms ideas of emotion; and yet we have seen reason to believe, that the chief part of beauty is truly derived from that mental process which has been termed association,— the suggestion of some feeling or feelings, not involved in the primary perception, nor necessarily flowing from it. In what manner, then, does the suggestion act? The modes in which it acts, seem to me to be what |