The

learning what has already been proved, and following in the steps of those who have gone before us; and this being the case, the explanation of what I have just mentioned is sufficiently obvious. Mere attention is an act of volition. Thinking implies more than this, and a still greater and more constant exercise of volition. It is with the mind as it is with the body. Where the volition is exercised there is fatigue; there is none otherwise and in proportion as the volition is more exercised, so is the fatigue greater. muscle of the heart acts sixty or seventy times in a minute, and the muscles of respiration act eighteen or twenty times in a minute, for seventy or eighty, or in some rare instances even for a hundred, successive years; but there is no feeling of fatigue. The same amount of muscular exertion under the influence of volition induces fatigue in a few hours. I am refreshed by a few hours' sleep. I believe that I seldom, if ever, sleep without dreaming. But in sleep there is a suspension of volition. If there be occasions on which I do not

enjoy the full and complete benefit of sleep, it is when my sleep is imperfect; when my dreams are between waking and sleeping, and a certain amount of volition may be supposed to be mixed up with the phantoms,of the imagination.

CRITES. But are you right in limiting the capability of the higher kind of intellectual labour in ordinary cases to so low an average as from four to five hours daily? You referred to the instance of Sir Walter Scott; but, if I remember rightly, Sir Walter has a remark in his diary that, "as to his composition, it was seldom five minutes out of his head during the whole day."

EUBULUS. This remark was made after his misfortunes, and when it is well known that he

powers.

was exerting himself beyond his
let us refer to the whole passage.

But

He says,

"If any one asks me what time I take to think of the composition, I might say, in one point of view, it was seldom five minutes out of my head in the whole day; in another, it was never the subject of serious consideration.

at all, for it never occupied my thoughts for five minutes together except when I was dictating."

This brings us to the consideration of another faculty of the mind, a faculty than which there is none more important: in which I will not say that there is no thinking at all, but certainly nothing like intense thought. The imagination is here more at work than the reasoning powers, and it is to this faculty, which in a greater or less degree every one possesses, the child as well as the man, I might even say the idiot as well as the philosopher, that, being properly employed, we owe the greatest contributions of genius to literature and science. As you have already referred to Sir Walter Scott, I will take him for an example. The fictions of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," or of "Waverley," cannot be supposed to have been the result of any exercise of volition. They presented themselves to his mind with no more effort than that which precedes the visions of a dream.

* "Diary," February 1831.

CRITES.

Then

Then you consider his novels and poems to have been the result of a sort of

waking dream.

EUBULUS. By no means. In sleep there is an absence of volition. If it be not wholly suspended, it is because the sleep is imperfect. The phantoms of the imagination are never stationary. They succeed each other with such rapidity, that they can never be made the subject of contemplation; and very often there is no connection (that is, none that we can trace,) between that which comes first and that which follows. That there really are certain laws which regulate their production, I do not doubt, as there are laws which regulate all the phenomena of the creation; but whatever these laws may be, we know little, and generally nothing, of them. But when awake we have. the power of arresting the current of the imagination; we can make the objects which it presents to us the subject of attention; we can view them under different aspects, and thus perceive in them resemblances, relations, and analogies which we could not have perceived

C

otherwise. Hence new objects are presented

to us, not at random, but having a certain connection with those by which they were preceded; and from these we can reject one and select another, and go back to that which we had previously rejected. Our minds are so constructed, that we can keep the attention fixed on a particular object until we have, as it were, looked all around it; and the mind that possesses this faculty in the greatest degree of perfection will take cognizance of relations of which another mind has no perception. It is this, much more than any difference in the abstract power of reasoning, which constitutes the vast difference which exists between the minds of different individuals. This is the history alike of the poetic genius and of the genius of discovery in science. "I keep the subject," said Sir Isaac Newton, "constantly before me, and wait until the first dawnings open by little and little into a full light." It was thus that, after long meditation, he was led to the invention of fluxions, and to the anticipation of the modern discovery of the combustibility of