42 BEING AND FACULTIES OF MAN. 



our senses by these is compounded no doubt with previously- 

 formed mental associations, and a strong instinctive and 

 perfectly natural tendency to view and study all things 

 with some reference more or less to ourselves ; just as by 

 our eye we so readily measure every sudden appearance with 

 reference to our personal safety, and always protectively 

 assume danger where there is no time to judge. That this 

 tendency teaches us beneficially to know, and keeps us in 

 a lively present Consciousness of our dependence upon, 

 our connection with, and our obligations to events, can 

 hardly be doubted ; and therefore the fact that the EGO 

 dominates very much throughout these currents of thought 

 is not so reprehensible as we might blushingly be inclined 

 to admit were our day-dreams open to the contemplation 

 of other eyes. While therefore the illusions sometimes pro- 

 duced upon the senses such as Sir Walter Scott describes 

 in his " Demonology and Witchcraft " (Letter I., the " case 

 of an eminent Scottish lawyer, deceased "), and that re- 

 ferred to by Sir David Brewster in the present Work 

 (Letter III., " Spectral illusions, recent and interesting 

 case of Mrs. A.," and which Sir David has admirably 

 explained by the impressibility of the retina with perma- 

 nent images by overstraining, as exemplified in the case 

 of Sir Isaac Newton and the phantasm of the sun, Letter 

 II.) may be nothing more than the over-intensifying 

 of a power natural to the whole senses as much as to the 

 eye, the phenomena they have described and referred to 

 are scarcely so wonderful as the fact that most of our 

 ordinary human life is passed in a state of fiction, or 

 romance, in connection with the current of our ideas 

 and our day-dreams, while the proportion of our existence 

 which is real and passed in contact with actual events and 

 facts is a mere fragment of our history in comparison. 

 That the imaginings of the current of ideas, and the 

 pictures they present to us, do not intensify them- 



