wisely learns in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece or endless volume.[1]" Let us observe, however, that in studying man it is our duty, as philosophers, and if we would perceive and understand his real wonders, to study him in his sound and normal state, and not in any of the eccentricities or aberrations of his nature. Next to physiological metaphysics, pathological metaphysics, or the study of man as he appears when divested of his usual intellectual health, are the most profitless and false. In preference to such things, it were better for us to go at once and study what Sir Thomas Browne so unceremoniously condemns as far less worthy of admiration than the great wonders of ourselves—"the increase of Nile,"—"the magnetic needle,"—"Africa and her prodigies," her magicians, and her impostures. Let us then turn to better things—to the contemplation of a fact in human nature, common indeed, but really miraculous—common, inasmuch as it is the universal privilege of man to evolve it; but miraculous inasmuch as it directly violates (as shall be shown) the great and otherwise universal law which regulates the whole universe besides:—we mean of the law of causality—Oh ye admirers of somnambulism, and other depraved and anomalous conditions of humanity! ye worshippers at the shrine of a morbid and deluded wonder! ye seers of marvels where there are none, and ye blindmen to the miracles which really are! tell us no more of powers put forth, and processes unconsciously carried on within the dreaming soul, as if these were one-millionth part so extraordinary and inexplicable as even the simplest conscious on-goings of our waking life. In the wonders ye tell us of, there is comparatively no mystery at all. That man should feel and act, and bring about all his operations without consciousness, is just what we would naturally and at once expect from the whole analogy of creation, and the wide dominion of the law of cause and effect. And wherever he is observed to act thus, he is just to be looked upon as having fallen back under the general rule. But come ye forward and explain to us the true miracle of man's being, how he ever, first of all, escaped therefrom, and how he acts, and feels, and goes through intelligent processes with consciousness, and thus stands alone, a contradiction in nature, the free master and maker of himself, in a world where everything else is revolved, blind and unconscious, in the inexorable mechanism of fate.
- ↑ Religio Medici, § 15.
