THE DANGEROUS PREVALENCE OF IMAGINATION
"Disorders of intellect," answered Imlac, "happen much more often than
superficial observers will easily believe. Perhaps, if we speak with
rigorous exactness, no human mind is in its right state. There is no man
whose imagination does not sometimes predominate over his reason, who
can regulate his attention wholly by his will, and whose ideas will come
and go at his command. No man will be found in whose mind airy notions
do not sometimes tyrannize, and force him to hope or fear beyond the
limits of sober probability. All power of fancy over reason is a degree
of insanity; but while this power is such as we can control and repress,
it is not visible to others, nor considered as any depravation of the
mental faculties: it is not pronounced madness but when it becomes
ungovernable and apparently influences speech or action.
"To indulge the power of fiction, and send imagination out upon the
wing, is often the sport of those who delight too much in silent
speculation. When we are alone we are not always busy; the labour of
excogitation is too violent to last long; the ardour of inquiry will
sometimes give way to idleness or satiety. He who has nothing external
that can divert him, must find pleasure in his own thoughts, and must
conceive himself what he is not; for who is pleased with what he is? He
then expatiates in boundless futurity, and culls from all imaginable
conditions that which for the present moment he should most desire,
amuses his desires with impossible enjoyments, and confers upon his
pride unattainable dominion. The mind dances from scene to scene, unites
all pleasures in all combinations, and riots in delights, which nature
and fortune, with all their bounty, cannot bestow.
"In time some particular train of ideas fixes the attention; all other
intellectual gratifications are rejected; the mind, in weariness or
leisure, recurs constantly to the favourite conception, and feasts on
the luscious falsehood whenever she is offended with the bitterness of
truth. By degrees the reign of fancy is confirmed; she grows first
imperious, and in time despotic. Then fictions begin to operate as
realities, false opinions fasten upon the mind, and life passes in
dreams of rapture or of anguish.
"This, sir, is one of the dangers of solitude, which the hermit has
confessed not always to promote goodness, and the astronomer's misery
has proved to be not always propitious to wisdom."
"I will no more," said the favourite, "imagine myself the queen of
Abyssinia. I have often spent the hours which the princess gave to my
own disposal, in adjusting ceremonies and regulating the court; I have
repressed the pride of the powerful and granted the petitions of the
poor; I have built new palaces in more happy situations, planted groves
upon the tops of mountains, and have exulted in the beneficence of
royalty, till, when the princess entered, I had almost forgotten to bow
down before her."
"And I," said the princess, "will not allow myself any more to play the
shepherdess in my waking dreams. I have often soothed my thoughts with
the quiet and innocence of pastoral employments, till I have in my
chamber heard the winds whistle, and the sheep bleat; sometimes freed
the lamb entangled in the thicket, and sometimes with my crook
encountered the wolf. I have a dress like that of the village maids,
which I put on to help my imagination, and a pipe on which I play
softly, and suppose myself followed by my flocks."
"I will confess," said the prince, "an indulgence of fantastic delight
more dangerous than yours. I have frequently endeavoured to image the
possibility of a perfect government, by which all wrong should be
restrained, all vice reformed, and all the subjects preserved in
tranquillity and innocence. This thought produced innumerable schemes of
reformation, and dictated many useful regulations and salutary edicts.
This has been the sport, and sometimes the labour, of my solitude; and I
start when I think with how little anguish I once supposed the death of
my father and my brothers."
"Such," says Imlac, "are the effects of visionary schemes. When we first
form them, we know them to be absurd, but familiarize them by degrees,
and in time lose sight of their folly."