DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.48954#0109
Parti. EMOTIONS AND PASSIONS. 93
troops ; and in that manner I attend them through
the battle, every incident of which appears to be
passingin my sight.
I have had occasion to observe 1 , that ideas
both of memory and os speech , produce emotions
of the same kind with what are produced by an
immediate view of the objeft ; only fainter, in
proportion as an idea is fainter than an original
perception. The insight we have now got, un-
folds that mystery : ideal presence supplies the
want of real presence ; and in idea we perceive
persons ailing and suffering , precisely as in an ori-
ginal survey : if our lympathy be engaged by the
latter, itmust also in some degree be engaged by
the former, especially if the distinilness of ideal
presence approach to that of real presence. Hence
the pleasure of a reverie , where a man , forget-
ting himself, is totally occupied with the ideas
palling in his mind, the obje&s of which he con-
ceives to be really exisling in his presence. The
power of language to raise emotions , depends en-
tirely on the railing such lively and distind images
as are here described : the reader’s passions are
never sensibly moved, till he be thrown into a kind
of reverie : in which hate, forgetting that he is
reading , he conceives every incident as palling
in his presence , precisely as if he were an eye-wit-
uess. A general or reflexive remembrance cannot
’ Part I. seft., j. ©f the present chapter.
troops ; and in that manner I attend them through
the battle, every incident of which appears to be
passingin my sight.
I have had occasion to observe 1 , that ideas
both of memory and os speech , produce emotions
of the same kind with what are produced by an
immediate view of the objeft ; only fainter, in
proportion as an idea is fainter than an original
perception. The insight we have now got, un-
folds that mystery : ideal presence supplies the
want of real presence ; and in idea we perceive
persons ailing and suffering , precisely as in an ori-
ginal survey : if our lympathy be engaged by the
latter, itmust also in some degree be engaged by
the former, especially if the distinilness of ideal
presence approach to that of real presence. Hence
the pleasure of a reverie , where a man , forget-
ting himself, is totally occupied with the ideas
palling in his mind, the obje&s of which he con-
ceives to be really exisling in his presence. The
power of language to raise emotions , depends en-
tirely on the railing such lively and distind images
as are here described : the reader’s passions are
never sensibly moved, till he be thrown into a kind
of reverie : in which hate, forgetting that he is
reading , he conceives every incident as palling
in his presence , precisely as if he were an eye-wit-
uess. A general or reflexive remembrance cannot
’ Part I. seft., j. ©f the present chapter.