Thoughts on Man (eBook)

ESSAY VIII. OF HUMAN VEGETATION.

There is another point of view from which we may look at the subject of time as it is concerned with the business of human life, that will lead us to conclusions of a very different sort from those which are set down in the preceding Essay.

Man has two states of existence in a striking degree distinguished from each other:  the state in which he is found during his waking hours; and the state in which he is during sleep.

The question has been agitated by Locke and other philosophers, "whether the soul always thinks," in other words, whether the mind, during those hours in which our limbs lie for the most part in a state of inactivity, is or is not engaged by a perpetual succession of images and impressions.  This is a point that can perhaps never be settled.  When the empire of sleep ceases, or when we are roused from sleep, we are often conscious that we have been to that moment busily employed with that sort of conceptions and scenes which we call dreams.  And at times when, on waking, we have no such consciousness, we can never perhaps be sure that the shock that waked us, had not the effect of driving away these fugitive and unsubstantial images.  There are men who are accustomed to say, they never dream.  If in reality the mind of man, from the hour of his birth, must by the law of its nature be constantly occupied with sensations or images (and of the contrary we can never be sure), then these men are all their lives in the state of persons, upon whom the shock that wakes them, has the effect of driving away such fugitive and unsubstantial images.--Add to which, there may be sensations in the human subject, of a species confused and unpronounced, which never arrive at that degree of distinctness as to take the shape of what we call dreaming.

So much for man in the state of sleep.

But during our waking hours, our minds are very differently occupied at different periods of the day.  I would particularly distinguish the two dissimilar states of the waking man, when the mind is indolent, and when it is on the alert.

While I am writing this Essay, my mind may be said to be on the alert.  It is on the alert, so long as I am attentively reading a book of philosophy, of argumentation, of eloquence, or of poetry.

It is on the alert, so long as I am addressing a smaller or a greater audience, and endeavouring either to amuse or instruct them.  It is on the alert, while in silence and solitude I endeavour to follow a train of reasoning, to marshal and arrange a connected set of ideas, or in any other way to improve my mind, to purify my conceptions, and to advance myself in any of the thousand kinds of intellectual process.  It is on the alert, when I am engaged in animated conversation, whether my cue be to take a part in the reciprocation of alternate facts and remarks in society, or merely to sit an attentive listener to the facts and remarks of others.

This state of the human mind may emphatically be called the state of activity and attention.

So long as I am engaged in any of the ways here enumerated, or in any other equally stirring mental occupations which are not here set down, my mind is in a frame of activity.

But there is another state in which men pass their minutes and hours, that is strongly contrasted with this.  It depends in some men upon constitution, and in others upon accident, how their time shall be divided, how much shall be given to the state of activity, and how much to the state of indolence.

In an Essay I published many years ago there is this passage.

"The chief point of difference between the man of talent and the man without, consists in the different ways in which their minds are employed during the same interval.  They are obliged, let us suppose, to walk from Temple-Bar to Hyde-Park-Corner.  The dull man goes straight forward; he has so many furlongs to traverse.  He observes if he meets any of his acquaintance; he enquires respecting their health and their family.  He glances perhaps the shops as he passes; he admires the fashion of a buckle, and the metal of a tea-urn.  If he experiences any flights of fancy, they are of a short extent; of the same nature as the flights of a forest-bird, clipped of his wings, and condemned to pass the rest of his life in a farm-yard.  On the other hand the man of talent gives full scope to his imagination.  He laughs and cries.  Unindebted to the suggestions of surrounding objects, his whole soul is employed.  He enters into nice calculations; he digests sagacious reasonings.  In imagination he declaims or describes, impressed with the deepest sympathy, or elevated to the loftiest rapture.  He makes a thousand new and admirable combinations.  He passes through a thousand imaginary scenes, tries his courage, tasks his ingenuity, and thus becomes gradually prepared to meet almost any of the many-coloured events of human life.  He consults by the aid of memory the books he has read, and projects others for the future instruction and delight of mankind.  If he observe the passengers, he reads their countenances, conjectures their past history, and forms a superficial notion of their wisdom or folly, their virtue or vice, their satisfaction or misery.  If he observe the scenes that occur, it is with the eye of a connoisseur or an artist.  Every object is capable of suggesting to him a volume of reflections.  The time of these two persons in one respect resembles; it has brought them both to Hyde-Park-Corner.  In almost every other respect it is dissimilar;[14]."

[14] Enquirer, Part 1, Essay V.

 This passage undoubtedly contains a true description of what may happen, and has happened.

But there lurks in this statement a considerable error.

It has appeared in the second Essay of this volume, that there is not that broad and strong line of distinction between the wise man and the dull that has often been supposed.  We are all of us by turns both the one and the other.  Or, at least, the wisest man that ever existed spends a portion of his time in vacancy and dulness; and the man, whose faculties are seemingly the most obtuse, might, under proper management from the hour of his birth, barring those rare exceptions from the ordinary standard of mind which do not deserve to be taken into the account, have proved apt, adroit, intelligent and acute, in the walk for which his organisation especially fitted him[15].

[15] See above, Essay 3.

 Many men without question, in a walk of the same duration as that above described between Temple-Bar and Hyde-Park-Corner, have passed their time in as much activity, and amidst as strong and various excitements, as those enumerated in the passage above quoted.

But the lives of all men, the wise, and those whom by way of contrast we are accustomed to call the dull, are divided between animation and comparative vacancy; and many a man, who by the bursts of his genius has astonished the world, and commanded the veneration of successive ages, has spent a period of time equal to that occupied by a walk from Temple-Bar to Hyde-Park-Corner, in a state of mind as idle, and as little affording materials for recollection, as the dullest man that ever breathed the vital air.

The two states of man which are here attempted to be distinguished, are, first, that in which reason is said to fill her throne, in which will prevails, and directs the powers of mind or of bodily action in one channel or another; and, secondly, that in which these faculties, tired of for ever exercising their prerogatives, or, being awakened as it were from sleep, and having not yet assumed them, abandon the helm, even as a mariner might be supposed to do, in a wide sea, and in a time when no disaster could be apprehended, and leave the vessel of the mind to drift, exactly as chance might direct.

To describe this last state of mind I know not a better term that can be chosen, than that of reverie.  It is of the nature of what I have seen denominated BROWN STUDY[16] a species of dozing and drowsiness, in which all men spend a portion of the waking part of every day of their lives.  Every man must be conscious of passing minutes, perhaps hours of the day, particularly when engaged in exercise in the open air, in this species of neutrality and eviration.  It is often not unpleasant at the time, and leaves no sinking of the spirits behind.  It is probably of a salutary nature, and may be among the means, in a certain degree beneficial like sleep, by which the machine is restored, and the man comes forth from its discipline reinvigorated, and afresh capable of his active duties.

[16] Norris, and Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language.

 This condition of our nature has considerably less vitality in it, than we experience in a complete and perfect dream.  In dreaming we are often conscious of lively impressions, of a busy scene, and of objects and feelings succeeding each other with rapidity.  We sometimes imagine ourselves earnestly speaking:  and the topics we treat, and the words we employ, are supplied to us with extraordinary fluency.  But the sort of vacancy and inoccupation of which I here treat, has a greater resemblance to the state of mind, without distinct and clearly unfolded ideas, which we...