tions which have given rise to opposite names, and though often there may be no real distinction beyond the name itself,-we are all capable of understanding, that a name which does not include our own sect or party, implies an opposition to us, of some kind or other; and we have all vanity enough to feel such a difference of sentiment,-though it may be on subjects which neither we nor our opponents comprehend,-to be an implied accusation of error, and therefore an insult to the dignity of our own opinion. In the history of ecclesiastical and civil affairs, what crowds of heretics and political partizans do we find whom the change of a few letters of the alphabet would have converted into friends, or have reversed their animosities; and many Homoousians, and Homoiousians, and Tories and Whigs, have reciprocally hated each other, who, but for the invention of the names, would never have known that they differed!

It would be but a small evil, if the vices of the great were confined to that splendid circle which they fill. But how difficult is it for those who are dazzled with that splendour, and who associate it with every thing which it surrounds, to think that the vices of the great are vices :

:

"The broad corruptive plague

Breathes from the city to the farthest but,

That sits serene within the forest shade."

"The obscure citizen," says Masillon, " in imitating the licentiousness of the great, thinks that he stamps on his passions. the seal of dignity and nobility; and thus vanity alone is sufficient to perpetuate disorder, which, of itself, would soon have passed away in weariness and disgust. Those who live far from you," says that eloquent prelate, addressing the great,-"those who live in the remotest provinces, preserve at least some remains of their ancient simplicity. They live in happy ignorance of the greater number of those abuses which your example has converted into laws. But the nearer the country approaches you, the more does morality suffer; innocence grows less pure, excesses more common; and the mere knowledge of your manners and usages, is thus the chief crime of which the people can be guilty."

The Stoics, who were sufficiently aware of the influence of this principle on our moral character, seem, if I rightly under

stand many parts of their works, particularly those of Marcus Au relius, to have supposed that we have the power of managing the combinations of our ideas with each other, in some measure at our will, and of thus indirectly guiding our subsequent moral preferences. It is this, I conceive, which forms that zonos oia deì qavra ov, on which they found so much, for the regulation of our lives. But in whatever mode the regulation of these qavraoiai may take place, it is evident that the sway which they exercise is one of no limited extent :

"For Action treads the path

In which Opinion says, he follows good,
Or flies from evil; and Opinion gives
Report of good or evil, as the scene
Was drawn by Fancy, lovely or deform'd.
Is there a man, who, at the sound of death,
Sees ghastly shapes of terrors, conjured up

And black before him; nought but death-bed groans
And fearful prayers, and plunging from the brink

Of light and being down the gloomy air
An unknown depth?--Alas in such a mind,
If no bright forms of excellence attend
The image of his country ;-nor the pomp
Of sacred senates, nor the guardian voice
Of Justice on her throne, nor aught that wakes
The conscious bosom, with a patriot's flame,--
What band can snatch the dreamer from the toiis
Which Fancy and Opinion thus conspire

To twine around his heart?-Or who shall hush
Their clamour, when they tell him, that to die,

To risk those horrors is a direr curse,

Than basest life can bring?-Though Love, with prayers
Most tender, with Affliction's sacred tears,

Beseech his aid, though Gratitude and Faith

Condemn each step which loiters;-yet let none

Make answer for him, that, if any frown

Of danger thwart his path, he will not stay

Content, and be a wretch to be secure."+

Then what hand

Can snatch this dreamer from the fatal toils.-Orig.

+ Pleasures of Imagination, B. III. v. 23—27—v. 31--41, and Second Form

of the Poem, B. II. v. 432–444.

In the remarks which have now been made, on the influence of peculiar directions of the suggesting principle on the moral and intellectual character, we have seen it, in many instances, producing an effect decidedly injurious. But that power, which in some cases combines false and discordant ideas, so as to pervert the judgment and corrupt the heart, is not less ready to form associations of a nobler kind; and it is consolatory to think, that as error is transient, and truth everlasting, a provision is made in this principle of our nature, for that progress in wisdom and virtue which is the splendid destiny of our race. There is an education of man continually going forward in the whole system of things around him; and what is commonly termed education, is nothing more than the art of skilfully guiding this natural progress, so as to form the intellectual and moral combinations in which wisdom and virtue consist. The influence of this, indeed, may seem to perish with the individual; but when the world is deprived of those who have shed on it a glory as they have journeyed along it in their path to heaven, it does not lose all with which they have adorned and blessed it. Their wisdom,—as it spreads from age to age, may be continually awakening some genius that would have slumbered but for them, and thus indirectly opening discoveries, that, but for them, never would have been revealed to man; their virtue, by the moral influence which it has gradually propagated from breast to breast, may still continue to relieve misery, and confer happiness, when generations after generations shall, like themselves, have passed away.

163

LECTURE XLV.

ON THE PHENOMENA OF RELATIVE SUGGESTION.-ARRANGEMENT OF THEM UNDER THE TWO ORDERS OF COEXIST

In treating of our intellectual states of mind in general, as one great division of the class of its internal affections, which arise without the necessary presence of any external cause, from certain previous states or affections of the mind itself, I subdivided this very important tribe of our feelings into two orders-those of simple suggestion, and of relative suggestion-the one comprehending all our conceptions and other feelings of the past-the other all our feelings of relation. I have already discussed, as fully as our narrow limits will admit, the former of these orderspointing out to you, at the same time, the inaccuracy or imperfection of the analyses which have led philosophers to rank, under distinct intellectual powers, phenomena that appear, on minuter analysis, not to differ in any respect from the common phenomena of simple suggestion. After this full discussion of one order of our intellectual states of mind, I now proceed to the consideration of the order which remains.

Of the feelings which arise without any direct external cause, and which I have, therefore, denominated internal states or affec tions of the mind-there are many then, as we have seen, which arise simply in succession, in the floating imagery of our thought, without involving any notion of the relation of the preceding objects, or feelings, to each other. These, already considered by us, are what I have termed the phenomena of simple suggestion. But there is an extensive order of our feelings which involve this no

tion of relation, and which consist, indeed, in the mere perception of a relation of some sort. To these feelings of mere relation, as arising directly from the previous states of mind which suggest them, I have given the name of relative suggestions—meaning by this term very nearly what is meant by the term comparison, when the will or intention which comparison seems necessarily to imply, but which is far from necessary to the suggestions of relations, is excluded; or what is meant at least in the more important relations by the term judgment—if not used, as the term judgment often is, in vague popular language, to denote the understanding, or mental functions in general; and if not confined, as it usually is in books of logic, to the feeling of relation in a simple proposition, but extended to all the feelings of relation, in the series of propositions which constitute reasoning, since these are, in truth, only a series of feelings of the same class as that which is involved in every simple proposition. Whether the relation be of two, or of many external objects, or of two or many affections of the mind, the feeling of this relation, arising in consequence of certain preceding states of mind, is what I term a relative suggestion; that phrase being the simplest which it is possible to employ, for expressing, without any theory, the mere fact of the rise of certain feelings of relation, after certain other feelings which precede them; and therefore, as involving no particular theory, and simply expressive of an undoubted fact, being, I conceive, the fittest phrase; because the least liable to those erroneous conceptions, from which it is so difficult to escape, even in the technical phraseology of science.

That the feelings of relation are states of the mind essentially different from our simple perceptions, or conceptions of the objects that seem to us related, or from the combinations which we form of these, in the complex groupings of our fancy; in short, that they are not what Condillac terms transformed sensations, I proved, in a former Lecture, when I combated the excessive simplification of that ingenious, but not very accurate philosopher. There is an original tendency or susceptibility of the mind, by which, on perceiving together different objects, we are instantly, without the intervention of any other mental process, sensible of their relation in certain respects, as truly as there is an original tendency or susceptibility of the mind, by which, when external ob