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 tyrannise, 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 deprivation 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 imagine 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 effects.
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,” said Imlac, “are the effects of visionary schemes. When we first
form them, we know them to be absurd, but familiarise them by degrees,
and in time lose sight of their folly.”