AND BODILY STATES UPON THE IMAGINATION. 221 



the size of their angles — it is trammelling immaterial mind with 

 the gross fetters of material agents — it is looking for the phenomena 

 of mind in metaphysics, without taking the workings of the former 

 as the hase of all the data of the most bewildering and falsest of 

 sciences. " When I turn over the pages of the metaphysician, I 

 perceive a science that deals in words instead of facts. Arbitrary 

 axioms lead to results that violate reason ; imaginary principles 

 establish systems that contradict the common sense of mankind. 

 All is dogma, no part is demonstration. Wearied, perplexed, 

 doubtful, I throw down the volume in disgust. It is from this 

 cause that we are the slaves of false knowledge ; our imaginations 

 being filled with ideas that have no origin in truth. We learn 

 nothing from ourselves. The sum of our experience is but a dim 

 dream of the conduct of past generations that lived in a total igno- 

 rance of the real nature of the objects which surrounded them, and 

 of the laws by which they were governed. Our instructors are the 

 unknowing and the dead. We study human nature in a charnel 

 house, and, like the nations of the east, pay divine honours to the 

 maniac and the fool.''* A series of systems have mystified existence, 

 have clogged the simple and beautiful operations of nature with a 

 thick and filthy colour, which has deformed and concealed her truths. 

 We believe what our fathers credited, whilst they were convinced 

 without a cause. They took an idea for a reality, were prevented, 

 from popular superstition or ridiculous enactment, both civil and 

 religious, from examining that which they were required to take 

 upon record, and believe because the cloud of fanatics that preceded 

 them had pronounced it true. In this remark I refer solely to the 

 mistaken systems which have been formed to explain the various 

 operations of nature, whether they regard the laws of mind or mat- 

 ter. The hallucinations of the senses have, perhaps, given birth to 

 the most numerous and monstrous absurdities that have ever de- 

 formed the page of science. I have referred to some of these points 

 in previous lectures, and therefore shall pass over them now, choos- 

 ing rather to speak of the true which is, than of the false which has 

 been. To return to the hallucinations of that state of excitation of 

 the mind which borders upon mania. It is well known that the 

 most vivid dreams attend commonly the approach to insanity, and 

 so perfectly deceptive are they that persons cannot shake from 

 their minds a conviction of their reality. This state of mind like- 

 wise occurs in the same persons during the waking state. Their 



* DTsraeli. 



