tailment perfectly conceivable, and one which sometimes actually takes place; for instance, in that abnormal condition of humanity denominated somnambulism. In the case we are supposing, then, man's reason or intelligence would still be left to him. He would still be a mathematician like the bee, and like the beaver a builder of cities. He might still, too, have a language and a literature of a certain kind, though destitute, of course, of all allusions and expressions of a conscious or personal character. But the "Goddess" or the "Muse" might and would still infuse into his heart the gift of song; and then an unconscious Homer, blind in soul as well as blind insight, filled by the transmitted power of some foreign afflatus, might have sung the wrath of an unconscious Achilles, and the war waged against Troy by heroic somnambulists from Greece. For poetry represents the derivative and unconscious, just as philosophy represents the free and conscious, elements of humanity; and is itself, according to every notion of it entertained and expressed from the earliest times down to the present, an inspired or fatalistic development, as is evident from the fact, that all great poets, in the exercise of their art, have ever referred away their power from themselves to the "God," the "Goddess," the "Muse," or some similar source of inspiration always foreign to themselves.[1]"Est Deus," says the poet,
"Est Deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo."
Listen, also, to the testimony of our own Milton, who, in one of his elegies, gives voice to the belief that he owed his genius to the spring, and, like a tree in the budding woods, was wont to blossom into song beneath the vivifying spirit of that genial time. "Fallor?" he asks,
"Fallor? an et nobis redeunt in carmina vires,
Ingeniumque mihi munere veris adest?"[2]
The sublimest works of intelligence, then, are quite possible; and may be easily conceived to be executed without any consciousness of them on the part of the apparent and immediate agent. Suppose man to be actuated throughout his whole nature by the might of some foreign agency; and he may realize the most stupendous operations, and yet remain in darkness, and incognizant of them all the while. A cognizance of these operations certainly does not necessarily go hand in hand with their performance. What is there in the workings of human passion that consciousness should necessarily accompany it, any more than it does the tossings of the stormy sea? What is there in the radiant emotions which issue forth in song, that consciousness should naturally and necessarily accompany them, any more than it does the warblings and the dazzling verdure of the sun-lit woods? What is there in the exercise of reason, that consciousness should inevitably go along with it, any more than it accompanies the mechanic skill with which the spider spreads his claggy snares? There is obviously nothing. The divorce, then, between consciousness, and all these powers and operations, may be conceived as perfectly complete; and this conception is all that is here necessary for the purposes of our coming argument.
Existence, then, together with all the powers and operations just indicated, might be truly predicated of man, even in his unconscious state. And even more than this might be affirmed of him. We could not, indeed, with propriety, say (the reason of which will appear by-and-by) that man, without consciousness, would be invested in any degree with a moral character. Yet even here, according to the moral philosophy of Paley and his school, in which morality is expounded as the mere adaptation of means to ends in the production of the social welfare—which adaptation might be perfectly well effected without any consciousness on the part of man, just as bees and other animals adapt means to ends without being aware of what they are about—according to this view, man, although unconscious, would still be a moral creature. Neither, without consciousness, would
