Mental hygiene: or, an examination of the intellect and passions, designed to illustrate their influence on health and the duration of life / by William Sweetser.

  • Sweetser, William, 1797-1875.
Date:
1844
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Mental hygiene: or, an examination of the intellect and passions, designed to illustrate their influence on health and the duration of life / by William Sweetser. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    60/64 (page 56)
    lied step and careworn countenances, or at their plenteous tables, despatching their meals scarce chewed or even tasted, everywhere haunted by their restless and ambitious desires—the question could not but force itself upon me, Are we really any nearer the great aim of our being than these heedless beggars ? and when each lias attained the final goal, is it impossible even that the latter may have actually had the advantage in the sum total of human enjoyment 1 The casual pains of cold and hunger which make up their chief suffering, will hardly compare in severity with those which continually agitate the discontented breast. To the force of the same passion, to the uneasy cravings of ambition, is it that the rash specu¬ lations so common among us, and so destructive both to peace of mind and health of body, are in a great measure imputable. This commercial gambling, for such may it be justly termed, will oftentimes be even more widely ruinous in its consequences than that more humble sort to which our moral laws affix a penalty of so deep disgrace. For while the private gamester trusts to the fall of a die, or the turn of a card, but his own gold, the gambler on change risks on the hazards of the market, not wffiat belongs to himself only, but too often the fortunes of those who had reposed their confidence in his honour ; and may thus involve in one common ruin whole circles of kindred and friends. And yet such are the ethics of social life, that whilst the latter is respected, courted, and elevated to high places, civil and religious, the former is shut out of all virtuous society. No truth probably has been more generally enforced and admitted, both by ancient and modern wisdom, while none has received less regard in practice, than that happiness is equally removed from either extreme of fortune ; that health and enjoyment are most frequently found associated with the aurea mediocritas, the golden mean. CHAPTER XXVIII. THE IMAGINATION, IF NOT PROPERLY RESTRAINED, MAY EXERCISE A DANGEROUS INFLUENCE ON OUR BODILY HEALTH.-THE SOBER REALITIES OF LIFE ACCORD BETTER WITH OUR PRESENT NATURE THAN THE FALSE VISIONS OF FANCY. An ill regulated and unbridled imagination, associated, as it necessarily is, with strong and varying emotions, must be inimical to the health both of body and mind. In regard to their effect, it matters, in truth, but little whether the passions have their incentive in the creations of fancy, or the sterner truths of reality. “ It was undoubtedly the intention of nature,” says Professor Stewart, “ that the objects of perception should produce much stronger im¬ pressions on the mind than its own operations. And, accordingly, they always do so, when proper care has been taken, in early life, to exercise the different principles of our constitution. But it is possible, by long habits of solitary reflection, to reverse this order of things, and to weaken the attention to sensible objects to so great a degree, as to leave the conduct almost wholly under the influence of imagination. Removed to a distance from society, and from the pursuits of life, when we have been long accustomed to converse with our own thoughts, and have found our activity gratified by intel¬ lectual exertions, which afford scope to all our powers and affections, without exposing us to the inconveniences resulting from the bustle of the world, we are apt to contract an unnatural predilection for meditation, and to lose all inter¬ est in external occurrences. In such a situation, too, the mind gradually loses that command which education, when properly conducted, gives it over the train of its ideas ; till at length the most extravagant dreams of imagination acquire as powerful an influence in exciting all its passions, as if they were realities.”—Philoso¬ phy of the Human Mind. There is a class of individuals always to be met with in society, who, unsatisfied with the tameness of real life, create for themselves new conditions, and please themselves with im¬ possible delights in the worlds of imagination ; who riot amid the false hopes and unnatural joys of entrancing day-dreams, till at last the unreal acquires absolute dominion over their minds—till wholesome truth is sacrificed to sickly mockeries— “ And nothing is. But what is not.” Such persons are apt to be characterized by a certain sentimental melancholy, mingled with a deep and refined enthusiasm, and are not un- frequently distinguished by superior mental endowments, particularly by a genius for poetry, whose license is to range at discretion through fancy’s boundless and enchanting fields. There are few of us, in truth, even of the most sober imaginations, but must sometimes have experienced the ecstasy of revelling among the delights of the unreal ; of forgetting our own dull sphere, and indulging in dreams of unearthly felicity,—dreams, alas ! which must soon be dispelled by some stern reality, leaving us, like the child who has been enrapt by some fairy show at the theatre, only the more dis¬ satisfied with our actual condition. Of Rousseau, wrho affords a strong example of the unhealthy character of the imagination I am describing, and of the unhappy nervous infirmities to which it so constantly leads, Madame de Stael says, “ He dreamed rather than existed, and the events of his life might be said more properly to have passed in his mind than without him.” Picturing his own morbid excess of sensibility when at Vevay, on the banks of the lake of Geneva, he says, “ My heart rushed with ardour from my bosom into a thousand innocent felicities ; melting to tender¬ ness, I sighed and wept like a child. How fre¬ quently, stopping to indulge my feelings, and seating myself on a piece of broken rock, did I amuse myself with seeing my tears drop into the stream !” Such a disposition of the imagination may