Chapter III: Part 3

Of the two theories of religion,—that which starts with the idea of a Tribe or Church, and that which starts with the unit of the individual soul,—Judaism has hitherto held the former. It has been essentially a corporate religion; and to be “cut off from the congregation,” like Spinoza, has been deemed tantamount to spiritual destruction. It is surely time that Reformed Judaism should now adopt the far higher theory of religious individualism, and teach men to seek those sacred private and personal relations with the Lord of Spirits which, when once enjoyed, cause the notions of any mere corporate privileges to appear childish. Had the deep experiences which belong to such personal piety been often felt by modern Jews (as they certainly were by many of the old Psalmists), it could not have happened that modern Jewish literature should have been so barren as it is of devotional works and of spiritual poetry. To a serious reverential spirit (a sentiment far above the level of that of the majority of Christians), Jews too rarely join those more ardent religious affections and aspirations which it is the glory of Christianity to inspire in the hearts of her saints. Had they known these feelings vividly and often, we must have had a Jewish Thomas à Kempis, a Jewish Saint Theresa, a Jewish Tauler, Fénelon, Taylor, Wesley. It will not suffice to say in answer that Jews did not need such treatises of devotion and such hymns of ecstatic piety, having always possessed the noblest of the world in their own Scriptures. Feelings which really rise to the flood do not keep in the river-bed for a thousand years.

Again, the Christian idea of Love to Man possesses an element of tenderness not perceptible in Jewish philanthropy. Jews are splendidly charitable not alone to their own poor, but also to Christians. Their management of their public and private charities has long been recognized as wiser and more liberal than that of Christians at home or abroad. They are faithful and affectionate husbands and wives; peculiarly tender parents; pious children; kindly neighbors. The cruel wrongs of eighteen centuries have neither brutalized nor imbittered them. Well would it be if whole classes of drunken, wife-beating Englishmen would take example in these respects from them! But of certain claims beyond these, claims always recognized by Christian teachers, and not seldom practically fulfilled by Christian men and women,—the claims of the erring to be forgiven, of the fallen to be lifted out of the mire,—Jews have hitherto taken little account. The parable of the Lost Sheep is emphatically Christian; and among Christians only, till quite recently, have there been active agencies at work to seek and save ruined women, drunkards, criminals, the “perishing and dangerous classes.”[22] Mary Magdalene did well to weep over the feet of Jesus Christ. It was Christ who brought into the world compassion for her and for those like her. And for the forgiveness of enemies, also, the Christian spirit, if not absolutely unique, is yet supreme. The very core of the Christian idea fitly found its expression on the Cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” That divinest kind of charity, which renounces all contests for rights, and asks not what it is _bound_ to do, but what it may be _permitted_ to do, to bless and serve a child of God,—that charity may, I think, justly be historically named Christian. Of course, every pure Theism is called on to teach it likewise.

With regard to women, the attitude of Judaism is peculiar. It has always recognized some “Rights of Women,” and has never fallen into the absurdity of cherishing mental or physical weakness in them as honorable or attractive. As Mrs. Cyril Flower (then Miss Constance de Rothschild) showed in an interesting article published some years ago, the “Hebrew Woman,” so magnificently described in the last chapter of Proverbs, has always been the Jewish ideal: “Strength and honor are her clothing. She openeth her mouth with wisdom.” No jealousy, but, on the contrary, joyful recognition, awaited in each age the vigorous actions of Miriam and Deborah, of Judith and Esther, and of the mother of the seven martyrs in the Book of Maccabees. Jewish marriages (till quite recently formed always on the Eastern rather than on the Western system) are proverbially faithful and affectionate; and the resolution of Jews never to permit their wives to undertake labor outside their homes (such as factory work and the like) has undoubtedly vastly contributed to the health and welfare of the nation. Yet, notwithstanding all this, something appears to be lacking in Jewish feeling concerning women. Too much of Oriental materialism still lingers. Too little of Occidental chivalry and romance has yet arisen. In this respect, strange to say, the East is prose, the West poetry. The relations of men and women, above all of husband and wife, cannot be ranked as perfect till some halo of tender reverence be added to sturdy good-will and fidelity.[23]

And, beyond their human brethren and sisters, Christians have found (it is one of those late developments of the fertile Christian idea of which I have spoken) that the humbler races of living creatures have also claims upon us,—moral claims founded on the broad basis of the right of simple sentiency to be spared needless pain; religious claims founded on the touching relation which we, the often forgiven children of God, bear to “the unoffending creatures which he loves.” This tender development of Christianity, and the discovery consequent on it, that “he prayeth well who loveth well both man and bird and beast,” is assuredly worthy of the regard of those Reformers who would make Judaism a universal religion. Semitic literature has hitherto betrayed a hardness and poverty on this side which it is needful should now be remedied, if Judaism is to ride on the full tide of Aryan sympathies.

And, lastly, the Christian sentiment concerning Immortality deserves special attention from Reforming Jews. The adoption of the dogma of a Future Life has scarcely even yet, after some fifty generations, imprinted on the Jewish mind the full consciousness of

“That great world of light which lies
Behind all human destinies.”

Jews have, it would appear, essentially the _esprit positif_. They are content to let the impenetrable veil hang between their eyes and the future world,—that veil which the Aryan soul strives impatiently, age after age, to tear away, or on which it throws a thousand phantasms from the magic-lanthorn of fancy. Millions of Christians have lived with their “treasures” truly placed in that world where moth and rust do not corrupt, nor thieves break through and steal. Especially have the bereaved among us dwelt on earth with their hearts already in heaven where their beloved ones await them. To too great an extent, no doubt, has this “other-worldliness” been carried, especially among ascetics; but, on the whole, the firm anchorage of Christian souls beyond the tomb has been the source of infinite comfort and infinite elevation. Of this sort of projection of the spirit into the darkness, this rocket-throwing of ropes of faith over the deeps of destruction, whereby the mourner’s shipwrecked soul is saved and reinstated, the Jewish consciousness seems yet scarcely cognizant. Perhaps these days of pessimism and mental fog are not those wherein any one is likely to find his faith in immortality quickened. As Dr. Johnson complained that he was “injured” by every man who did not believe all that he believed, so each of us finds his hope of another life chilled by the doubts which, like icebergs, float in the sea of thought we are traversing. But, for those Jews who thoroughly accept the dogma of immortality, it would surely be both a happiness and a source of moral elevation to give to such a stupendous fact its place in the perspective of existence. There is infinite difference between the molelike vision which sees nothing beyond the grassroots and the worms of earth, though dimly aware of a world of sunlight above, and the eagle glance which can measure alike things near and afar; between the man who counts his beloved dead as lost to him because he beholds and hears and touches them no more, and the man who can say calmly amid his sorrow,—

“Take them, thou great Eternity!
Our little life is but a gust,
Which bends the branches of thy tree,
And trails its blossoms in the dust.”

Turning now from the results on Judaism itself and on Christianity at large of a great Jewish Reformation, we may indulge in some reflections on the possible bearings of such an event on that not inconsiderable number of persons who, all over Europe, are hanging loosely upon or dropping silently away from the Christian Churches. I am not speaking of those who become Atheists or Agnostics and renounce all interest in religion, but of those who, like Robert Elsmere, pass into phases of belief which may be broadly classed under the head of Theism. These persons believe still in God and in the life to come, and hold tenaciously by the moral and spiritual part of Christianity, perhaps sometimes feeling its beauty and truth more vividly than some orthodox Christians who deem the startling, miraculous, and “apocalyptic” part to constitute the essence of their faith. But this “apocalyptic part,” and all which Dr. Martineau has called the “Messianic mythology,” they have abandoned. Of the number of these persons, it is hard to form an estimate. Some believe that the Churches are all honeycombed by them, and that a panic would follow could a census of England be taken in a Palace of Truth. Not a few in the beginning and middle of this century quitted their old folds, and under the names of “Unitarians,” “Free Christians,” and “Theists” have thenceforth stood confessedly apart.[24] But of late years the disposition to make any external schism has apparently died away. The instinct, once universal, to build a new nest for each brood of faith seems perishing among us. The Church-forming spirit, so vigorous of old in Christianity and in Buddhism, is visibly failing, and making way for new phases of development, of which the Salvation Army may possibly afford us a sample. Among cultivated people subtle discrimination of differences and fastidiousness as regards questions of taste are indefinitely stronger than that desire for a common worship which, in the breasts of our forefathers, who “rolled the psalm to wintry skies,” and dared death merely to pray together, must have mounted to a passion. Englishmen generally still cling to public worship, but it is chiefly where an ancient liturgy supplies by old and holy words a dreamy music of devotion, into which each feels at liberty to weave his own thoughts. Wherever the demand is made for prayers which shall definitely express the faith and aspirations of the modern-minded worshipper, there the subtleties and the fastidiousness come into play, and, instead of being drawn together, men sorrowfully discover that they are made conscious by common worship of a hundred discrepancies of opinion, a thousand disharmonies of taste and feeling. In all things, we men and women of the modern Athens are not “too superstitious,” but too critical; and in religion, which necessarily touches us most vitally, our critical spirit threatens to paralyze us with shyness. The typical English gentleman and lady of to-day are at the opposite pole of sentiment in this respect from the Arab who kneels on his carpet on the crowded deck for his evening orison, or from the Italian _contadina_ who tells her beads before the wayside Madonna. Doubtless, here is one reason among many why such multitudes remain without any definite place in the religions of the land. They hang languidly about the old hive, feebly humming now and then, but feeling no impulse to swarm, and finding no queen-spirit to lead them to another home where they might build their proper cells and make their own honey.

But, whether embodied in any religious sect or Church, or hanging loosely upon one, the persons of whom we have been speaking, as believers in God and in the spiritual, but not the apocalyptic side of Christianity,—_Christian Theists_, as we may best call them,—are of course nearer in a theological point of view than any others to those Reformed Jews whom we may call _Jewish Theists_. The intellectual creeds of each, in fact, might, without much concession on either side, be reduced to identical formulæ. Now, Christian Theists have hitherto wanted a rallying point, and have been taunted with the lack of any historic basis for their religion. Why (it will be asked by many) should not this Reformed Judaism afford such a rallying point, and the old rocky foundations laid by Moses support a common temple of Christian and Jewish Theism?

It may prove that such a consummation may be among the happy reunitings and reconstructions of the far future. But for the present hour, and for the reasons I have given in the beginning of this paper, I do not believe it can be near at hand. I am also quite sure that it would be the extreme of unwisdom to hamper and disturb the progress of Reformed Judaism along its own lines by any hasty efforts at amalgamation with outsiders, who would bring with them another order of religious habits and endless divergencies of opinion.

Let Reformed Judaism relight the old golden candlestick, and set it aloft, and it will give light unto all which are in the house,—not only the House of Israel, but in the House of Humanity. A glorious future may in God’s Providence await such purified, emancipated Judaism. It is true, it may not exhibit the special form of religion which one party or another among us altogether desires to see extended in the world. Some radical reformers who sympathize in its general scope would wish to find it stripping off altogether its Jewish character, and torn up from the root of Mosaism. Many more orthodox Christians will undervalue it because it shows no indication of a tendency to adopt from Christianity such doctrines as the Trinity, the Incarnation, or the Atonement, even while, on the spiritual side, it is imbued with the essential ideas of him whom it will doubtless recognize as the great Jewish Rabbi and Prophet, Jesus of Nazareth. But it is not for us to seek to modify, scarcely even to criticise, such a movement as this. A respectful interest and a hopeful sympathy seem to me the only sentiments wherewith Christians and Christian Theists should stand aside and watch this last march forward of that wondrous patriarchal faith, whereof Christianity itself is the firstborn son, and Islam the younger; and which now in the end of the ages prepares to cross a new Jordan, and take possession of a new Holy Land.

⁂ NOTE.—It is proper to mention, in republishing this essay at the
desire of Jewish friends, that it was received on its first
appearance with the utmost possible disfavor by the Jewish press.

ESSAY IV.
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING.

Endless books have been written about the Laws of Thought, the Nature of Thought, and the Validity of Thought. Physiologists and metaphysicians have vied with one another to tell us in twenty different ways how we think and why we think and what good our thinking may be supposed to be as affording us any real acquaintance with things in general outside our thinking-machine. One school of philosophers tells us that Thought is a secretion of the brain (_i.e._, that Thought is a form of Matter), and another that it is purely immaterial, and the only reality in the universe,—_i.e._, that Matter is a form of Thought. The meekest of men “presume to think” this, that, and the other; and the proudest distinction of the modern sage is to be a “Thinker,” especially a “free” one. But with all this much ado about Thought, it has not occurred to any one, so far as I am aware, to attempt a fair review of what any one of us thinks in the course of the twenty-four hours; what are the number of separable thoughts which, on an average, pass through a human brain in a day; and what may be their nature and proportions in the shape of Recollections, Reflections, Hopes, Contrivances, Fancies, and Reasonings. We are all aware that when we are awake a perpetual stream of thoughts goes on in “what we are pleased to call our minds,” sometimes slow and sluggish, as the water in a ditch; sometimes bright, rapid, and sparkling, like a mountain brook; and now and then making some sudden, happy dash, cataract-wise, over an obstacle. We are also accustomed to speak as if the sum and substance of all this thinking were very respectable, as might become “beings endowed with the lofty faculty of thought”; and we always tacitly assume that our thoughts have logical beginnings, middles, and endings—commence with problems and terminate in solutions—or that we evolve out of our consciousness ingenious schemes of action or elaborate pictures of Hope or Memory. If our books of mental philosophy ever obtain a place in the Circulating Libraries of another planet, the “general reader” of that distant world will inevitably suppose that on our little Tellus dwell a thousand millions of men, women, and children, who spend their existence as the interlocutors in Plato’s Dialogues passed their hours under the grip of the dread Socratic elenchus, arguing, sifting, balancing, recollecting, hard at work as if under the ferule of a schoolmaster.

The real truth about the matter seems to be that, instead of taking this kind of mental exercise all day long, and every day, there are very few of us who ever do anything of the kind for more than a few minutes at a time; and that the great bulk of our thoughts proceed in quite a different way, and are occupied by altogether less exalted matters than our vanity has induced us to imagine. The normal mental locomotion of even well-educated men and women, save under the spur of exceptional stimulus, is neither the flight of an eagle in the sky nor the trot of a horse upon the road, but may better be compared to the lounge of a truant school-boy in a shady lane, now dawdling pensively, now taking a hop-skip-and-jump, now stopping to pick blackberries, and now turning to right or left to catch a butterfly, climb a tree, or make dick-duck-and-drake on a pond; going nowhere in particular, and only once in a mile or so proceeding six steps in succession in an orderly and philosophical manner.

It is far beyond my ambition to attempt to supply this large lacune in mental science, and to set forth the truth of the matter about the actual Thoughts which practically, not theoretically, are wont to pass through human brains. Some few observations on the subject, however, may perhaps be found entertaining, and ought certainly to serve to mitigate our self-exaltation on account of our grand mental endowments, by showing how rarely and under what curious variety of pressure we employ them.

The first and familiar remark is that every kind of thought is liable to be colored and modified in all manner of ways by our physical conditions and surroundings. We are not steam thinking-machines, working evenly at all times at the same rate, and turning out the same sort and quantity of work in the same given period, but rather more like windmills, subject to every breeze, and whirling our sails at one time with great impetus and velocity, and at another standing still, becalmed and ineffective. Sometimes it is our outer conditions which affect us, sometimes it is our own inner wheels which are clogged and refuse to rotate; but, from whatever cause it arises, the modification of our thoughts is often so great as to make us arrive at diametrically opposite conclusions on the same subject and with the same _data_ of thought, within an incredibly brief interval of time. Some years ago, the President of the British Association frankly answered objections to the consistency of his inaugural address by referring to the different aspects of the ultimate problems of theology in different “moods” of mind. When men of such eminence confess to “moods,” lesser mortals may avow their own mental oscillations without painful humiliation, and even put forward some claim to consistency if the vibrating needle of their convictions do not swing quite round the whole compass, and point at two o’clock to the existence of a Deity and a Life to come, and at six to a nebula for the origin, and a “streak of morning cloud” for the consummation of things. Possibly, also, the unscientific mind may claim some praise on the score of modesty if it delay for the moment to instruct mankind in either its two o’clock or its six o’clock creed, and wait till it has settled down for some few hours, weeks, or months, to any one definite opinion.

Not to dwell for the present on these serious topics, it is only necessary to carry with us through our future investigations that every man’s thoughts are continually fluctuating and vibrating, from inward as well as outward causes. Let us glance for a moment at some of these. First, there are the well-known conditions of health and high animal spirits, in which every thought is rose-colored; and corresponding conditions of disease and depression, in which everything we think of seems to pass, like a great bruise, through yellow, green, blue, and purple to black. A liver complaint causes the universe to be enshrouded in gray; and the gout covers it with an inky pall, and makes us think our best friends little better than fiends in disguise. Further, a whole treatise would be needed to expound how our thoughts are further distempered by food, beverages of various kinds, and narcotics of great variety. When our meals have been too long postponed, it would appear as if that Evil Personage who proverbially finds mischief for idle hands to do were similarly engaged with an idle digestive apparatus, and the result is that, if there be the smallest and most remote cloud to be seen in the whole horizon of our thoughts, it sweeps up and over us just in proportion as we grow hungrier and fainter, till at last it overwhelms us in depression and despair. “Why?” we ask ourselves, “why has not A. written to us for so long? What will B. think of such and such a transaction? How is our pecuniary concern with C. to be settled? What is the meaning of that odd little twitch we have felt so often here or there about our persons?” The answer to our thoughts, prompted by the evil genius of famine, is always lugubrious in the extreme. “A. has not written because he is dead. B. will quarrel with us forever because of that transaction. C. will never pay us our money, or we shall never be able to pay C. That twitch which we have so thoughtlessly disregarded is the premonitory symptom of the most horrible of all human maladies, of which we shall die in agonies and leave a circle of sorrowing friends before the close of the ensuing year.” Such are the _idées noires_ which present themselves when we want our dinner; and the best-intentioned people in the world, forsooth! recommend us to summon them round us by fasting, as if they were a company of cherubim instead of imps of quite another character! But the scene undergoes a transformation bordering on the miraculous when we have eaten a slice of mutton and drunk half a glass of sherry. If we revert now to our recent meditations, we are quite innocently astonished to think what could possibly have made us so anxious without any reasonable ground. Of course, A. has not written to us because he always goes grouse-shooting at this season. B. will never take the trouble to think about our little transaction. C. is certain to pay us, or we can readily raise money to pay him; and our twitch means nothing worse than a touch of rheumatics or an ill-fitting garment.

Beyond the alternations of fasting and feasting, still more amazing are the results of narcotics, alcoholic beverages, and of tea and coffee. Every species of wine exercises a perceptibly different influence of its own, from the cheery and social “sparkling grape of Eastern France” to the solemn black wine of Oporto, the fit accompaniment of the blandly dogmatic post-prandial prose of elderly gentlemen of orthodox sentiments. A cup of strong coffee clears the brain and makes the thoughts transparent, while one of green tea drives them fluttering like dead leaves before the wind. Time and learning would fail to describe the yet more marvellous effects of opium, hemlock, henbane, hashish, bromide, and chloral. Every one of these narcotics produces a different hue of the mental window through which we look out on the world; sometimes distorting all objects in the wildest manner (like opium), sometimes (like chloral) acting only perceptibly by removing the sense of disquiet and restoring our thoughts to the white light of commonsense cheerfulness; and again acting quite differently on the thoughts of different persons, and of the same persons at different times.

Only secondary to the effects of inwardly imbibed stimulants or narcotics are those of the outward atmosphere, which in bracing weather makes our thoughts crisp like the frosted grass, and in heavy November causes them to drip chill and slow and dull, like the moisture from the mossy eaves of the Moated Grange. Burning, glaring Southern sunshine dazes our minds as much as our eyes, and a London fog obfuscates them, so that a man might honestly plead that he could no more argue clearly in the fog than the Irishman could spell correctly with a bad pen and muddy ink.

Nor are mouths, eyes, and lungs by any means the only organs through which influences arrive at our brain, modifying the thoughts which proceed from them. The sense of Smelling, when gratified by the odors of woods and gardens and hay-fields, or even of delicately perfumed rooms, lifts all our thoughts into a region wherein the Beautiful, the Tender, and the Sublime may impress us freely; while the same sense, offended by disgusting and noxious odors, as of coarse cookery, open sewers, or close chambers inhabited by vulgar people, thrusts us down into an opposite stratum of feeling, wherein poetry entereth not, and our very thoughts smell of garlic. Needless to add that in a still more transcendent way Music seizes on the thoughts of the musically-minded, and bears them off in its talons over sea and land, and up to Olympus like Ganymede. Two easily distinguishable mental influences seem to belong to music, according as it is heard by those who really appreciate it or by others who are unable to do so. To the former it opens a book of poetry, which they follow word for word after the performer, as if he read it to them, thinking the thoughts of the composer in succession with scarcely greater uncertainty or vagueness than if they were expressed in verbal language of a slightly mystical description. To the latter the book is closed; but though the listener’s own thoughts unroll themselves uninterrupted by the composer’s ideas, they are very considerably colored thereby. “I delight in music,” said once Sir Charles Lyell to me: “I am always able to think out my work better while it is going on!” As a matter of fact, he resumed at the moment a disquisition concerning the date of the Glacial Period at the precise point at which it had been interrupted by the performance of a symphony of Beethoven, having evidently mastered in the interval an intricate astronomical knot. To ordinary mortals with similar deficiency of musical sense, harmonious sound seems to spread a halo like that of light, causing every subject of contemplation to seem glorified, as a landscape appears in a dewy sunrise. Memories rise to the mind and seem infinitely more affecting than at other times, affections still living grow doubly tender, new beauties appear in the picture or the landscape before our eyes, and passages of remembered prose or poetry float through our brains in majestic cadence. In a word, the sense of the Beautiful, the Tender, the Sublime, is vividly aroused, and the atmosphere of familiarity and commonplace, wherewith the real beauty and sweetness of life are too often veiled, is lifted for the hour. As in a camera-obscura or mirror, the very trees and grass which we had looked on a thousand times are seen to possess unexpected loveliness. But all this can only happen to the non-musical soul when the harmony to which it listens is really harmonious, and when it comes at an appropriate time, when the surrounding conditions permit and incline the man to surrender himself to its influences; in a word, when there is nothing else demanding his attention. The most barbarous of the practices of royalty and civic magnificence is that of employing music as an accompaniment to feasts. It involves a confusion of the realm of the real and ideal, and of one sense with another, as childish as that of the little girl who took out a peach to eat while bathing in the sea. Next to music during the dinner-time comes music in the midst of a cheerful evening party, where, when every intellect present is strung up to the note of animated conversation and brilliant repartee, there is a sudden _douche_ of solemn chords from the region of the pianoforte, and presently some well-meaning gentleman endeavors to lift up all the lazy people, who are lounging in easy-chairs after a good dinner, into the empyrean of emotion “sublime upon the seraph wings of ecstasy” of Beethoven or Mozart; or some meek damsel, with plaintive note, calls on them, in Schubert’s _Addio_, to break their hearts at the memory or anticipation of those mortal sorrows which are either behind or before every one of us, and which it is either agony or profanation to think of at such a moment. All this is assuredly intensely barbarous. The same people who like to mix up the ideal pleasure of music with incongruous enjoyments of another kind would be guilty of giving a kiss with their mouths full of bread and cheese. As to what we may term extra-mural music, the hideous noises made by the aid of vile machinery in the street, it is hard to find words of condemnation strong enough for it. Probably the organ-grinders of London have done more in the last twenty years to detract from the quality and quantity of the highest kind of mental work done by the nation than any two or three colleges of Oxford or Cambridge have effected to increase it. One mathematician alone, as he informed the writer, estimated the cost of the increased mental labor they have imposed upon him and his clerks at several thousand pounds’ worth of first-class work, for which the State practically paid in the added length of time needed for his calculations. Not much better are those church bells which now sound a trumpet before the good people who attend “matins” and other daily services at hours when their profane neighbors are wearily sleeping or anxiously laboring at their appointed tasks.

Next to our bodily Sensations come in order of influence on our thoughts the Places in which we happen to do our thinking. Meditating like the pious Harvey “Among the Tombs” is one thing; doing the same on a breezy mountain side among the gorse and the heather, quite another. Jostling our way in a crowded street or roaming in a solitary wood, rattling in an English express train or floating by moonlight in a Venetian gondola or an Egyptian dahabieh, though each and all favorable conditions for thinking, create altogether distinct classes of lucubrations. If we endeavor to define what are the surroundings among which Thought is best sustained and most vigorous, we shall probably find good reason to reverse not a few of our accepted and familiar judgments. The common idea, for example, that we ponder very profoundly by the seashore, is, I am persuaded, a baseless delusion. We _think_ indeed that we are thinking, but for the most part our minds merely lie open, like so many oysters, to the incoming waves, and with scarcely greater intellectual activity. The very charm of the great Deep seems to lie in the fact that it reduces us to a state of mental emptiness and vacuity, while our vanity is soothed by the notion that we are thinking with unwonted emphasis and perseverance. Amphitrite, the enchantress, mesmerizes us with the monotonous passes of her billowy hands, and lulls us into a slumberous hypnotism wherein we meekly do her bidding, and fix our eyes and thoughts, like biologized men, on the rising and falling of every wave. If it be tempestuous weather, we watch open-mouthed till the beautiful white crests topple over and dash in storm and thunder up the beach; and, if it be a summer evening’s calm, we note with placid, never-ending contentment how the wavelets, like little children, run up softly and swiftly on the golden strand to deposit their gifts of shells and seaweed, and then retreat, shy and ashamed of their boldness, to hide themselves once again under the flowing skirts of Mother Ocean.

Again, divines and poets have united to bolster up our convictions that we do a great deal of important thinking at night when we lie awake in bed. Every preacher points to the hours of the “silent midnight,” when his warnings will surely come home, and sit like incubi on the breast of sinners who, too often perhaps, have dozed in the day-time as they flew, bat-wise, over their heads from the pulpit. Shelley, in “Queen Mab,” affords us a terrible night scene of a king who, after his dinner of “silence, grandeur, and excess,” finds sleep abdicate his pillow (probably in favor of indigestion); and Tennyson, in “Locksley Hall,” threatens torments of memory still keener to the “shallow-hearted cousin Amy” whenever she may happen to lie meditating—

“In the dead, unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.”

Certainly, if there be any time in the twenty-four hours when we might carry on consecutive chains of thought, it would be when we lie still for hours undisturbed by sight or sound, having nothing to do, and with our bodies so far comfortable and quiescent as to give the minimum of interruption to our mental proceedings. Far be it from me to deny that under such favorable auspices some people may think to good purpose. But, if I do not greatly err, they form the exception rather than the rule among bad sleepers. As the Psalmist of old remarked, it is generally “mischief” which a man—wicked or otherwise—“devises upon his bed”; and the truth of the observation in our day is proved from the harsh Ukases for domestic government which are commonly promulgated by Paterfamilias at the breakfast table, and by the sullenness _de parti pris_ which testifies that the sleepless brother, sister, or maiden aunt has made up his or her mind during the night to “have it out” with So-and-so next morning. People are a little faint and feverish when they lie awake, and nothing occurs to divert their minds and restore them to equanimity, and so they go on chewing the bitter cud of any little grudge. Thus it comes to pass that, while Anger causes Sleeplessness, Sleeplessness is a frequent nurse of Anger.[25]

Finally, among popular delusions concerning propitious conditions of Thoughts, must be reckoned the belief (which has driven hermits and philosophers crazy) that thinking is better done in abnormal isolation than in the natural social state of man. Of course there is benefit quite incalculable in the reservation of some portion of our days for solitude. How much excuse is to be made for the shortcomings, the ill-tempers, the irreligion of those poor people who are scarcely alone for half an hour between the cradle and the grave, God alone can tell. But, with such reasonable reservation of our hours and the occasional precious enjoyment of lonely country walks or rides, the benefits of solitude, even on Zimmermann’s showing, come nearly to an end; and there is little doubt that, instead of thinking more, the more hours of loneliness we devote to doing it, the _less_ we shall really think at all, or even retain capacity for thinking and not degenerate into cabbages. Our minds need the stimulus of other minds, as our lungs need oxygen to perform their functions. After all, if we analyze the exquisite pleasure afforded us by brilliant and suggestive conversation, one of its largest elements will be found to be that it has quickened our thoughts from a heavy amble into a gallop. A really fine talk between half a dozen well-matched and thoroughly cultivated people, who discuss an interesting subject with their manifold wealth of allusions, arguments, and illustrations, is a sort of mental Oaks or Derbyday, wherein our brains are excited to their utmost speed, and we get over more ground than in weeks of solitary mooning meditation. It is superfluous to add that if our constitutional mental tendency be that of the gentleman who naïvely expressed his feelings by saying impressively to a friend, “I take _great_ interest in my own concerns, I _assure_ you I do,” it seems doubly desirable that we should overstep our petty ring-fence of personal hopes, fears, and emotions of all kinds, and roam with our neighbors over their dominions, and into further outlying regions of public and universal interest. Of all ingenious prescriptions for making a miserable moral hypochondriac, it is difficult to imagine a better than the orthodox plan of the “Selig-gemachende Kirche” for making a Saint. Take your man or woman, with a morbidly tender conscience and a pernicious habit of self-introspection. If he or she have an agonizing memory of wrong, sin, or sorrow overshadowing the whole of life, so much the better. Then shut the individual up in a cell like a toad in a stone, to feed on his or her own thoughts, till death or madness puts an end to the experiment.

But if the seaside and solitude and the midnight couch have been much overrated as propitious conditions of thought, there are, _per contra_, certain other conditions of it the value of which has been too much ignored. The law of the matter seems to be that real hard Thought, like Happiness, rarely comes when we have made elaborate preparation for it; and that the higher part of the mind which is to be exercised works much more freely when a certain lower part (concerned with “unconscious cerebration”) is busy about some little affairs of its own department and its restless activity is thus disposed of. Not one man in fifty does his best thinking quite motionless, but instinctively employs his limbs in some way when his brain is in full swing of argument and reflection. Even a trifling fidget of the hands with a paper-knife, a flower, a piece of twine, or the bread we crumble beside our plate at dinner, supplies in a degree this _desideratum_, and the majority of people never carry on an animated conversation involving rapid thought without indulging in some such habit. But the more complete employment of our unconscious cerebration in walking up or down a level terrace or quarter-deck, where there are no passing objects to distract our attention and no need to mark where we plant our feet, seems to provide even better for smooth-flowing thought. The perfection of such conditions is attained when the walk in question is taken of a still, soft November evening, when the light has faded so far as to blur the surrounding withered trees and flowers, but the gentle gray sky yet affords enough vision to prevent embarrassment. There are a few such hours in every year which appear absolutely invaluable for calm reflection, and which are grievously wasted by those who hurry indoors at dusk to light candles and sit round a yet unneeded fire.

There is also another specially favorable opportunity for abstruse meditation, which I trust I may be pardoned for venturing to name. It is the grand occasion afforded by the laudable custom of patiently listening to dull speakers or readers in the lecture-room or the pulpit. A moment’s reflection will surely enable the reader to corroborate the remark that we seldom think out the subject of a new book or article, or elaborate a political or philanthropic scheme, a family compact, or the _menu_ of a large dinner, with so much precision and lucidity as when gazing with vacant respectfulness at a gentleman expatiating with elaborate stupidity on theology or science. The voice of the charmer as it rises and falls is almost as soothing as the sound of the waves on the shore, but not quite equally absorbing to the attention; while the repose of all around gently inclines the languid mind to alight like a butterfly on any little flower it may find in the arid waste, and suck it to the bottom. This beneficent result of sermon and lecture-hearing is, however, sometimes deplorably marred by the stuffiness of the room, the hardness and shallowness of the seats (as in that place of severe mortification of the flesh, the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street), and lastly by the unpardonable habit of many orators of lifting their voices in an animated way, as if they really had something to say, and then solemnly announcing a platitude,—a process which acts on the nerves of a listener as it must act on those of a flounder to be carried up into the air half a dozen times in the bill of a heron and then dropped flat on the mud. Under trials like these, the tormented thoughts of the sufferer, seeking rest and finding none, are apt to assume quite unaccountable and morbid shapes, and indulge in freaks of an irrational kind, as in a dream. The present writer and some sober-minded acquaintances have, for example, all felt themselves impelled at such hours to perform aërial flights of fancy about the church or lecture-room in the character of stray robins or bats. “Here,” they think gravely (quite unconscious for the moment of the absurdity of their reflection), “here, on this edge of a monument, I might stand and take flight to that cornice an inch wide, whence I might run along to the top of that pillar; and from thence, by merely touching the bald tip of the preacher’s head, I might alight on the back of that plump little angel on the tomb opposite, while a final spring would take me through the open pane of window and perch me on the yew-tree outside.” The whole may perhaps be reckoned a spontaneous mythical self-representation of the Psalmist’s cry: “Oh that I had wings like a dove, for then would I flee away and be at rest.”

Another kind of meditation under the same aggravated affliction is afforded by making fantastic pictures out of the stains of damp and tracks of snails on the wall, which often (in village churches especially) supply the young with a permanent subject of contemplation in “the doctor with his boots,” the “old lady and her cap,” and the huge face which would be quite perfect if the spectator might only draw an eye where one is missing, as in the fresco of Dante in the Bargello. Occasionally, the sunshine kindly comes in and makes a little lively entertainment on his own account by throwing the shadow of the preacher’s head ten feet long on the wall behind him, causing the action of his jaws to resemble the vast gape of a crocodile. All these, however, ought perhaps to be counted as things of the past; or, at least, as very “Rural Recreations of a Country Parishioner,” as A. K. H. B. might describe them. It is not objects to distract and divert the attention which anybody can complain of wanting in the larger number of modern churches in London.

But, if our thoughts are wont to wander off into fantastic dreams when we are bored, they have likewise a most unfortunate propensity to swerve into byways of triviality no less misplaced when, on the contrary, we are interested to excess, and our attention has been fixed beyond the point wherein the tension can be sustained.

Every one has recognized the truth of Dickens’s description of Fagin, on his trial, thinking of the pattern of the carpet; and few of us can recall hours of anguish and anxiety without carrying along with their tragic memories certain objects on which the eye fastened with inexplicable tenacity. In lesser cases, and when we have been listening to an intensely interesting political speech, or to a profoundly thoughtful sermon (for even _Habitans in Sicco_ may sometimes meet such cases), the mind seems to “shy” suddenly, like a restive horse, from the whole topic under consideration, and we find ourselves, intellectually speaking, landed in a ditch.

Another singular phenomenon under such circumstances is that, on returning, perhaps after the interval of years, to a spot wherein such excessive mental tension has been experienced, some of us are suddenly vividly impressed with the idea that we have been sitting there during all the intervening time, gazing fixedly on the same pillars and cornices, the same trees projected against the evening sky, or whatever other objects happen to be before our eyes. It would appear that the impression of such objects made on the retina, while the mind was wholly and vehemently absorbed in other things, must be somehow photographed on the brain in a different way from the ordinary pictures to which we have given their fair share of notice as they passed before us, and that we are dimly aware they have been taken so long. The sight of them once again bringing out this abnormal consciousness is intensely painful, as if the real self had been chained for years to the spot, and only a phantom “I” had ever gone away and lived a natural human existence elsewhere.

Passing, now, from the external conditions of our Thinking, if we attempt to classify the Thoughts themselves, we shall arrive, I fear, at the painful discovery that the majority of us think most about the least things, and least about the greatest; and that, in short, the mass of our lucubrations is in the inverse ratio of their value. For example, a share of our thoughts, quite astonishing in quantity, is occupied by petty and trivial Arrangements. Rich or poor, it is an immense amount of thought which all (save the most care-engrossed statesmen or absorbed philosophers) give to these wretched little concerns. The wealthy gentleman thinks of how and where and when he will send his servants and horses here and there, of what company he shall entertain, of the clearing of his woods, the preservation of his game, and twenty matters of similar import; while his wife is pondering equally profoundly on the furniture and ornaments of her rooms, the patterns of her flower-beds or her worsted-work, the _menu_ of her dinner, and the frocks of her little girls. Poor people need to think much more anxiously of the perpetual problem, “How to make both ends meet,” by pinching in this direction and earning something in that, and by all the thousand shifts and devices by which life can be carried on at the smallest possible expenditure. One of the very worst evils of limited means consists in the amount of thinking about sordid little economies which becomes imperative when every meal, every toilet, and every attempt at locomotion is a battle-field of ingenuity and self-denial against ever-impending debt and difficulty. Among men, the evil is most commonly combated by energetic efforts to _earn_ rather than to _save_; but among women, to whom so few fields of honest industry are open, the necessity for a perpetual guard against the smallest freedom of expense falls, with all its cruel and soul-crushing weight, and on the faces of thousands of them may be read the sad story of youthful enthusiasm all nipped by pitiful cares, anxieties, and meannesses, perhaps the most foreign of all sentiments to their naturally liberal and generous hearts.

Next to actual arrangements which have some practical use, however small, an inordinate quantity of thought is wasted by most of us on wholly unreal plans and hypotheses which the thinker never even supposes to bear any relation with the living world. Such are the endless moony speculations, “_if_ such a thing had not happened” which did happen, or “_if_ So-and-so had gone hither” instead of thither, or “_if_ I had only said or done” what I did not say or do, “there would have followed”—heaven knows what. Sometimes we pursue such endless and aimless guessings with a companion, and then we generally stop short pretty soon with the vivid sense of the absurdity of our behavior; unless in such a case as that of the celebrated old childless couple, who, looking back over their fireside on forty years of unbroken union, proceeded to speculate on what they should have done _if_ they had had children, and finally quarrelled and separated for ever on a divergence of opinion respecting the best profession for their (imaginary) second son. But, when alone, we go on weaving interminable cobwebs out of such gossamer threads of thought, like poor Perrette with her pot of milk,—a tale the ubiquity of which among all branches of the Aryan race sufficiently proves the universality of the practice of building _châteaux en Espagne_.

Of course, with every one who has a profession or business of any kind, a vast quantity of thought is expended necessarily upon its details, insomuch that to prevent themselves, when in company from “talking shop” is somewhat difficult. The tradesman, medical man, lawyer, soldier, landholder, have each plenty to think of in his own way; and in the case of any originality of work—such as belongs to the higher class of literature and art—the necessity for arduous and sustained thought in composition is so great that (on the testimony of a great many wives) I have come to the conclusion that a fine statue, picture, or book is rarely planned without at least a week of domestic irritation and discomfort, and the summary infliction of little deserved chastisement on the junior branches of the distinguished author or artist’s family.

Mechanical contrivances obviously give immense occupation to those singular persons who can love Machines, and do not regard them (as I must confess is my case) with mingled mistrust, suspicion, and abhorrence, as small models of the Universe on the Atheistic Projection. Again, for the discovery of any chemical _desideratum_, ceaseless industry and years of thought are expended; and a Palissy deems a quarter of a lifetime properly given to pondering upon the best glaze for crockery. Only by such sacrifices, indeed, have both the fine and the industrial arts attained success; and happy must the man be counted whose millions of thoughts expended on such topics have at the end attained any practical conclusion to be added to the store of human knowledge. Not so (albeit the thoughts are much after the same working character) are the endless meditations of the idle on things wholly personal and ephemeral, such as the inordinate care about the details of furniture and equipage now prevalent among the rich in England, and the lavish waste of feminine minds on double acrostics, art, embroidery, and, above all, Dress! A young lady once informed me that, after having for some hours retired to repose, her sister, who slept in the same room, had disturbed her in the middle of the night: “Eugénie, waken up! I have thought of a trimming for our new gowns!” Till larger and nobler interests are opened to women, I fear there must be a good many whose “dream by night and thought by day” is of trimmings.

When we have deducted all these silly and trivial and useless thoughts from the sum of human thinking,—and evil and malicious thoughts, still worse by far,—what small residuum of room is there, alas, for anything like real serious reflection! How seldom do the larger topics presented by history, science, or philosophy engage us! How yet more rarely do we face the great questions of the whence, the why, and the whither of all this hurrying life of ours, pouring out its tiny sands so rapidly! To some, indeed, a noble philanthropic purpose or profound religious faith gives not only consistency and meaning to life, but supplies a background to all thoughts,—an object high above them, to which the mental eye turns at every moment. But this is, alas! the exception far more than the rule; and, where there is no absorbing human affection, it is on trifles light as air and interests transitory as a passing cloud that are usually fixed those minds whose boast it is that their thoughts “travel through eternity.”