Roll as it listeth thee--I measure not
By months or moments thy ambiguous course.
By months or moments thy ambiguous course.
Shelley
Mortalia corda
Artificem texere poli, latuitque sub uno
Pectore, qui totum late complectitur orbem. --Claudian, "Carmen Paschale".
Does not so monstrous and disgusting an absurdity carry its own infamy
and refutation with itself?
8. 203-207:--
Him, still from hope to hope the bliss pursuing
Which from the exhaustless lore of human weal
Draws on the virtuous mind, the thoughts that rise
In time-destroying infiniteness, gift
With self-enshrined eternity, etc.
Time is our consciousness of the succession of ideas in our mind. Vivid
sensation, of either pain or pleasure, makes the time seem long, as the
common phrase is, because it renders us more acutely conscious of our
ideas. If a mind be conscious of an hundred ideas during one minute, by
the clock, and of two hundred during another, the latter of these spaces
would actually occupy so much greater extent in the mind as two exceed
one in quantity. If, therefore, the human mind, by any future
improvement of its sensibility, should become conscious of an infinite
number of ideas in a minute, that minute would be eternity. I do not
hence infer that the actual space between the birth and death of a man
will ever be prolonged; but that his sensibility is perfectible, and
that the number of ideas which his mind is capable of receiving is
indefinite. One man is stretched on the rack during twelve hours;
another sleeps soundly in his bed: the difference of time perceived by
these two persons is immense; one hardly will believe that half an hour
has elapsed, the other could credit that centuries had flown during his
agony. Thus, the life of a man of virtue and talent, who should die in
his thirtieth year, is, with regard to his own feelings, longer than
that of a miserable priest-ridden slave, who dreams out a century of
dulness. The one has perpetually cultivated his mental faculties, has
rendered himself master of his thoughts, can abstract and generalize
amid the lethargy of every-day business;--the other can slumber over the
brightest moments of his being, and is unable to remember the happiest
hour of his life. Perhaps the perishing ephemeron enjoys a longer life
than the tortoise.
Dark flood of time!
Roll as it listeth thee--I measure not
By months or moments thy ambiguous course.
Another may stand by me on the brink
And watch the bubble whirled beyond his ken
That pauses at my feet. The sense of love,
The thirst for action, and the impassioned thought
Prolong my being: if I wake no more,
My life more actual living will contain
Than some gray veteran's of the world's cold school,
Whose listless hours unprofitably roll,
By one enthusiast feeling unredeemed. --
See Godwin's "Pol. Jus. " volume 1, page 411; and Condorcet, "Esquisse
d'un Tableau Historique des Progres de l'Esprit Humain", epoque 9.
8. 211, 212:--
No longer now
He slays the lamb that looks him in the face.
I hold that the depravity of the physical and moral nature of man
originated in his unnatural habits of life. The origin of man, like that
of the universe of which he is a part, is enveloped in impenetrable
mystery. His generations either had a beginning, or they had not. The
weight of evidence in favour of each of these suppositions seems
tolerably equal; and it is perfectly unimportant to the present argument
which is assumed. The language spoken, however, by the mythology of
nearly all religions seems to prove that at some distant period man
forsook the path of nature, and sacrificed the purity and happiness of
his being to unnatural appetites. The date of this event seems to have
also been that of some great change in the climates of the earth, with
which it has an obvious correspondence. The allegory of Adam and Eve
eating of the tree of evil, and entailing upon their posterity the wrath
of God and the loss of everlasting life, admits of no other explanation
than the disease and crime that have flowed from unnatural diet. Milton
was so well aware of this that he makes Raphael thus exhibit to Adam the
consequence of his disobedience:--
Immediately a place
Before his eyes appeared, sad, noisome, dark;
A lazar-house it seemed; wherein were laid
Numbers of all diseased--all maladies
Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms
Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds,
Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs,
Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs,
Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy,
And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy,
Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence,
Dropsies and asthmas, and joint-racking rheums.
Artificem texere poli, latuitque sub uno
Pectore, qui totum late complectitur orbem. --Claudian, "Carmen Paschale".
Does not so monstrous and disgusting an absurdity carry its own infamy
and refutation with itself?
8. 203-207:--
Him, still from hope to hope the bliss pursuing
Which from the exhaustless lore of human weal
Draws on the virtuous mind, the thoughts that rise
In time-destroying infiniteness, gift
With self-enshrined eternity, etc.
Time is our consciousness of the succession of ideas in our mind. Vivid
sensation, of either pain or pleasure, makes the time seem long, as the
common phrase is, because it renders us more acutely conscious of our
ideas. If a mind be conscious of an hundred ideas during one minute, by
the clock, and of two hundred during another, the latter of these spaces
would actually occupy so much greater extent in the mind as two exceed
one in quantity. If, therefore, the human mind, by any future
improvement of its sensibility, should become conscious of an infinite
number of ideas in a minute, that minute would be eternity. I do not
hence infer that the actual space between the birth and death of a man
will ever be prolonged; but that his sensibility is perfectible, and
that the number of ideas which his mind is capable of receiving is
indefinite. One man is stretched on the rack during twelve hours;
another sleeps soundly in his bed: the difference of time perceived by
these two persons is immense; one hardly will believe that half an hour
has elapsed, the other could credit that centuries had flown during his
agony. Thus, the life of a man of virtue and talent, who should die in
his thirtieth year, is, with regard to his own feelings, longer than
that of a miserable priest-ridden slave, who dreams out a century of
dulness. The one has perpetually cultivated his mental faculties, has
rendered himself master of his thoughts, can abstract and generalize
amid the lethargy of every-day business;--the other can slumber over the
brightest moments of his being, and is unable to remember the happiest
hour of his life. Perhaps the perishing ephemeron enjoys a longer life
than the tortoise.
Dark flood of time!
Roll as it listeth thee--I measure not
By months or moments thy ambiguous course.
Another may stand by me on the brink
And watch the bubble whirled beyond his ken
That pauses at my feet. The sense of love,
The thirst for action, and the impassioned thought
Prolong my being: if I wake no more,
My life more actual living will contain
Than some gray veteran's of the world's cold school,
Whose listless hours unprofitably roll,
By one enthusiast feeling unredeemed. --
See Godwin's "Pol. Jus. " volume 1, page 411; and Condorcet, "Esquisse
d'un Tableau Historique des Progres de l'Esprit Humain", epoque 9.
8. 211, 212:--
No longer now
He slays the lamb that looks him in the face.
I hold that the depravity of the physical and moral nature of man
originated in his unnatural habits of life. The origin of man, like that
of the universe of which he is a part, is enveloped in impenetrable
mystery. His generations either had a beginning, or they had not. The
weight of evidence in favour of each of these suppositions seems
tolerably equal; and it is perfectly unimportant to the present argument
which is assumed. The language spoken, however, by the mythology of
nearly all religions seems to prove that at some distant period man
forsook the path of nature, and sacrificed the purity and happiness of
his being to unnatural appetites. The date of this event seems to have
also been that of some great change in the climates of the earth, with
which it has an obvious correspondence. The allegory of Adam and Eve
eating of the tree of evil, and entailing upon their posterity the wrath
of God and the loss of everlasting life, admits of no other explanation
than the disease and crime that have flowed from unnatural diet. Milton
was so well aware of this that he makes Raphael thus exhibit to Adam the
consequence of his disobedience:--
Immediately a place
Before his eyes appeared, sad, noisome, dark;
A lazar-house it seemed; wherein were laid
Numbers of all diseased--all maladies
Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms
Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds,
Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs,
Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs,
Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy,
And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy,
Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence,
Dropsies and asthmas, and joint-racking rheums.
