In nature; there opinion will be true,
And action right. For action treads the path
In which opinion says he follows good,
render his imagination more liable to be struck with some particular objects, consequently dispose him to form opinions of good and ill, and entertain passions of a particular turn. Some men, for instance, by the original frame of their minds, are more delighted with the vast and magnificent, others on the contrary with the elegant and gentle aspects of nature. And it is very remarkable, that the disposition of the moral powers is always similar to this of the imagination; that those who are most inclined to admire prodigious and sublime objects in the physical world, are also most inclined to applaud examples of fortitude and heroic virtue in the moral. While those who are charm'd rather with the delicacy and sweetness of colours, and forms, and sounds, never fail in like manner to yield the preference to the softer scenes of virtue, and the sympathies of a domestic life. And this is sufficient to account for the objection.
Among the ancient philosophers, tho' we have several hints concerning this influence of the imagination upon morals among the remains of the Socratic school, yet the Stoics were the first who paid it a due attention. Zeno, their founder, thought it impossible to preserve any tolerable regularity in life, without frequently inspecting those pictures or appearances of things which the imagination offers to the mind. [Diog. Laert. l. vii.) The meditations of M. Aurelius, and the discourses of Epictetus, are full of the same sentiments; insomuch that this latter makes the Χρῆσις οια δεῖ, φαντασιῶν, or right management of the fancies, the only thing for which we are accountable to providence, and without which a man is no other than stupid or frantic. Arrian. l. i. c. 12. & l. ii. c. 22. See also the Characteristics, vol. I. from p. 313, to p. 321. where this Stoical doctrine is embellished with all the eloquence of the graces of Plato.
