in one nation, and it is argued that similar effects may be expected from the same measures now, and in other nations. But the antecedents may be altogether different now. The measures proposed are not the whole of the antecedents. The changes that may have taken place in society, the advance of education and information, the previous history of the nation, may be altogether different from the previous history of that in which the measures in question produced their effects. The laws of Lycurgus, for example, could not be established in any modern state of Europe or Asia. The military tenures of land of the middle ages would be impracticable in the present day. A public provision for the poor which has succeeded in one country may be ruinous in another. From thus confounding partially similar antecedents with the same antecedents, laws have frequently been enacted which have produced the very opposite effects from those that were intended.

Reasoning.

Moral reasonings are liable to the same uncertainties in a greater degree than simple moral inductions: namely, those which arise from the difficulty of ascertaining how far former antecedents and consequents, on which the reasoning is founded, are identical with those which are employed as media, and how far the antecedents and consequents in the media are identical with those in the conclusion. When the characters and motives of men enter as elements into any process of reasoning, they necessarily, from the impossibility of ascertaining and defining them exactly, and reducing them to accurately defined classes, communicate uncertainty to a greater or less extent to all such reasonings. There are some motives by which men generally are influenced, which may, in ordinary circumstances, be reckoned upon with tolerable certainty. The sciences

of political economy and of legislation proceed upon the influence of such motives, and frequently the sequences which they predict are found to be realised according to the prediction. But frequently, in consequence of the erroneous estimates which legislators form of human character, and of the motives likely to influence men, the laws which they enact produce effects very different from those which they intended and expected; and sometimes not different from them merely, but directly the reverse of them. This observation has been verified very frequently in British laws referring to Ireland. It has been verified in innumerable instances in laws enacted for the controlling or regulating of religious principle. Legislators, judging of other minds by their own, have generally taken it for granted, that all men would sacrifice any principle for their temporal interest, especially when not only property, but liberty and life were threatened. They seldom have been aware, that in dealing with religious principle, they were dealing with an element which, when earnestly and honestly held, is infinitely more powerful than the highest and most urgent temporal interests; and have attempted to get rid of some religious belief or practice by confiscations, imprisonments, fire, and sword; often, alas! by the most inhuman tortures. They were not aware that they were only impressing the people with a deeper sense of the importance of their religious belief, and more thoroughly convincing them that they could not abandon it without exposing themselves to the horrors of eternal damnation. And they have usually found, to their dismay, that the more they persecuted, the more firm hold did the proscribed religious tenets take of the minds of the people; and that, when they succeeded, by an extensive unscrupulous system of murder and torture, to quash them for a time, it was only like a smouldering fire, ready to break out with greater fury on the first favourable opportunity.

Imagination.

The name imagination is given to various operations of the mind, which seem to consist of very different elements; it is, therefore, impossible to give any accurate definition or description of it, further than giving the meaning and various applications of the English word.

The idea originally conveyed by the word imagination, as its etymology indicates, was an image of some external object in the mind. If that was an object that really existed, and was perceived by the senses, the representing the image of it to the mind does not differ from remembrance as regulated by the laws of suggestion. The vividness of the remembrance depends on the degree of attention which it attracted when it was perceived; and that degree of attention, we have seen, would be regulated by the intensity of the feeling of pain or pleasure, or of emotion, such as wonder, desire, or fear that accompanied the perception of it.

Of this kind are those vivid images that rise in the mind, caused by a morbid state of the brain, as in fevers and delirium tremens. Of the same kind, probably, were those visions, called in the Highlands of Scotland "Second-sight," and in Ireland "Ban Shee." They seem to have had their origin in an over-excited nervous system, caused by the unsettled state of the country; the incessant feuds between neighbouring clans or families, the constant dangers to which the people were exposed; the frequency of violent deaths, or deaths caused by traversing a mountainous country under covert of night-deaths by snow, by drowning in swollen torrents, by falls from precipices, by wolves or other wild animals. Under such circumstances, the minds of sensitive and timid persons were kept in constant dread and anxiety for their own safety, and for the safety of near relations; and when that habitual anxiety was

increased by any actual danger, it was no more wonderful that visions connected with their anxieties and terrors, should occur, than it is that such visions are seen in fevers affecting the brain.

To the same cause are to be traced all those superstitious terrors, or, as they are often called, imaginary terrors, that have been found to affect the minds, and even the health and the lives, of ignorant people, such as the dread of witches, wizards, priests of various tribes of the most degraded of the heathen. The dread of witches in Europe seems to have taken its rise from poisoning having been practised by old women in the corrupt times of the Roman empire. The feats of the poisoners are very much the same as those ascribed by popular tradition to witches. The Venefica and Canidia of Horace would form a good corresponding group to the witches in Shakspeare's Macbeth. The priests and sorcerers of various tribes of savages probably established the terror of their mysterious power by poison, till their threats, their malignant look, or evil eye, as it was called in Scotland, called up such a host of terrible objects to their minds-lingering, painful, horrible deaths, that the terror excited often effected the work of death without the actual administration of poison.

If the object called up to the mind by suggestion be not a real object, perhaps an object which could have no real existence, as when the qualities of one object, or class of objects, are ascribed to other objects, or, as when scenes of one locality are transferred to another, we have already expressed our persuasion that this operation of what is called imagination is chiefly, if not wholly, dependent on the use of language. Many of the objects described by poets and others could raise up no vivid image before the mind; because the qualities or attributes ascribed to the objects could not co-exist in the same object. We conceive that these irreconcilable

qualities, never seen together in the same natural object, are brought together in the mind solely by the use of language. And very frequently the vague, dim, uncertain, wavering image that is thus made to float before the mind, constitutes its chief attraction; more vividness would impair its effect.

Another operation of the mind, usually called imagination, is the ascribing of mental qualities and operations to inanimate objects, or to inferior animals. Much of the effect of poetry is produced in this way. Mountains frown, valleys smile, waters repose, or rage, or dance, the hills rejoice, a desolate land mourns,—and thus all nature becomes instinct with life and feeling. From the same source we have some of the most attractive descriptions of inferior animals: Wilson's Ornithology derives its chief charm from this exercise of imagination. From the same source we have the commonwealths of bees and of ants; their workers, their soldiers, their drones, their officers and engineers, their queen, with her guards, her royal residence, and her nurseries for the young. We have also, from the some source, the tender care of insects for their prospective young; their providence in laying their eggs only where their young when hatched shall find food; in short, imagination representing their movements as being instigated by the motives and feelings which impel men to similar acts.

The converse of this, namely, the ascribing to mind qualities of inanimate matter, is another operation called imagination; as when we speak or hear of men of iron, hearts of stone, or of steel, the sinking and rising of the spirits, and innumerable others.

We have already seen that this exercise of imagination is not different from the discovery of points of similarity or difference among our sensations, or the objects of our perceptions. It may be supposed that these resemblances, being not real, but the creation of the mind, a power of the mind distinct from memory