To a Friend. By Miss L. VIRGINIA SMITH, The Name of Wife. By Mrs. A. M. F. ANNAN, Thinking of Minna. By ELLIS MARTYN, The Maiden's Lament for her Shipwrecked Lover. By WM. ALBERT SUTLIFFE, The Gift of a Rose. By GEO. D. PRENTICE, The Reconciliation. By L. VIRGINIA SMITH, The Wife's Last Gift. By JULIA C. DORR, Theodora. By GEO. CANNING HILL, To Miss Martha Griffith. By GRANT DANBY - 321 176 Jenny Lind's American Polka, Chant of the Nereides, 195 Barcarole, 222 Ah, Do Not Speak so Coldly The Origin of Music, engraved by Tucker. - 338 The Sisters, engraved by Thomas B. Welch. He Comes Not, engraved by Holl. GRAHAM'S MAGAZINE. VOL. XXXVII. PHILADELPHIA, JULY, 1850. THE VITAL AND THE MECHANICAL. Ir may be universally affirmed that every thing having shape either grows or is put together, is a living organism or a contrived machine; and the radical distinction between minds in all the modes of their operation, and between things in all the forms of their manifestation, is expressed in the antithesis of vitality and mechanism. To suggest, in a manner necessarily imperfect and rambling, some of the important consequences involved in this distinction, is the object of the present essay. No. 1. of thought in which a particular faculty operates on its own account, we assert the existence of death in the mind; what is worse, the assertion is true; and, what is still worse, this mental death often passes for wisdom and common sense, and mental life is stigmatized as fanaticism. Now, this antithesis of life and death, vitality and mechanism, the conception of the spirit of things, and the perception of the forms of things, is a distinction available in every department of human thought and action, and divides minds into two distinct classes, the living and the lifeless. The test of the live mind is, that it communicates life. The only sign here of possession is communication; and life it cannot possess unless life it communicates. Spiritual life implies a combination of force and insight, an indissoluble union of will and intelligence, in which will sees and intelligence acts. A mental operation, in the true meaning of the phrase, is a vital movement of the mind; and although this movement is called a conception or an act according as it refers to meditation or practice, it cannot in either case be a conception without being an act, or an act without being a conception. Conception, in the last analysis, is as truly an act of the mind as volition; both are expressions of one undivided unit and person; and the And first, in regard to minds, it may be asked, to what faculties and operations of the intelligence do you apply the term vital, as distinguished from other faculties and operations indicated as mechanical? The answer to this question may be spiritually true without being metaphysically exact, and we shall hazard a brief one. The soul of man in its essential nature is a vital unit and person, capable of growth through an assimilation of external objects; and its faculties and acquirements are all related to its primitive personality, as the leaves, branches, and trunk of a tree to its root. In the tree there are sometimes dead branches and withered leaves, which constitute a part of the tree's external form without participating in the tree's internal life. The same thing occurs in the human mind. Faculties, originally springing from the soul's vital principle, become dis-only limit of conception, the limit which prevented connected from it, lose all the sap and juice of life, and dwindle from vital into mechanical powers. The customary vocabulary of metaphysics evinces the extent of this decay in its division of the mind into parts, each part with a separate name and performing a different office. It is plain that no organism, vegetable, animal, or human, admits of such a classification of parts, for the fundamental principle of organisms is unity in variety, each part implying the whole, growing out of a common centre and source, and dying the moment it is separated. When, therefore, we say that the mind has faculties which are not vitally related to each other, that the whole mind is not present in every act, that there are processes Kepler from conceiving the law of gravitation, and Ben Jonson from conceiving the character of Falstaff, is a limitation of will, of personality, of individual power, of that innate force which is always the condition and the companion of insight. All the vital movements of the mind are acts whether the product be a book or a battle; and that is a singular philosophy of the will which calls Condé's charge at Rocroi an act, and withholds the name from Shakspeare's conception of Othello. As this spiritual force is ever the characteristic of vital thought, such thought is both light and heat, kindles as well as informs, and acts potently on other minds by imparting life as well as knowledge. There The thoughts of Plato, Dante, Bacon, Shakspeare, are many books which contain more information | trating and animating as well as enlightening power. than Paradise Lost, but Paradise Lost stimulates, dilates and enriches our minds by communicating to them the very substance of thought, while the other books may leave us as poor and weak as they found us, with the addition only of some names and forms of things which we did not know before. The great difference, therefore, between a vital and mechanical mind is this, that from one you obtain the realities of things, and from the other the mere appearances; one influences, the other only informs; one increases our power, the other does little more than increase our words. The action of a live mind upon other minds is chiefly an influence, and the true significance of influence is that it pierces through all the formal frippery of opinion and speculation lying on the surface of consciousness, and touches the tingling and throbbing nerve at its centre and soul; rousing the mind's dormant activity, breathing into it a new motive and fresh vigor, and making it strong as well as wise. As regards the common affairs of the world, this influence is as the blast of an archangel's trumpet, waking us from the death of sloth and custom. In the fire of our newly kindled energies the mean and petty interests in which our thoughts are ensnared wither and consume; and, discerning vitalities where before we only perceived semblances, a strangeness comes over the trite, a new meaning gleams through old appearances, and the forms of common objects are transfigured, as viewed in the vivid vision of that rapturous life. Then, and only then, do we realize how awful and how bright is the consciousness of a living soul; then immortality becomes a faith, and death a delusion; then magnanimous resolves in the heart send generous blood mantling in the cheek, and virtue, knowledge, genius, heroism, appear possibilities to the lazy coward who, an hour before, whined about his destiny in the hopeless imbecility of weakness. Although this still and deep ecstasy, this feeling of power and awe, is to most minds only a transient elevation, it is still a revelation of the vital within them, which should at least keep alive a sublime discontent with the slug-instance from ordinary life. In the common intergish apathy of their common existence. "Show me," says Burke, "a contented slave and I will show you a degraded man,”—a sentence right from the hot heart of an illustrious man, whose own mind glowed with life and energy to the verge of the tomb, and who never knew the slavery of that sleep of mental death, which withers and dries up the very fountains of life in the soul. The usual phrases by which criticism discriminates vital from mechanical minds, are impassioned imagination and logical understanding. This vocabulary, though open to objections, as not going to the root of the matter, is still available for our purpose. It draws a definite line between genius and talent. The man of impassioned imagination is vital in every part. The primitive spiritual energy at the centre of his personality permeates, as with warm life-blood, the whole of his being, vivifying, connecting. fusing into unity, all his faculties, so that his thought comes from him as an act, and is endowed with a pene The principle we have indicated, applies to all matters of human concern, the simplest as well as the most complicated. Let us first take a familiar course of society we are all painfully conscious of art of politeness, as commonly practiced, is employed | emptiness, might not be so grand a thing as to strut to deaden rather than develop nature, from its ambi- about in the worn-out frippery of moral commontion to reduce the finer instincts to mechanical forms. places, but it would expose one fatal fallacy which In the very term of gentleman there is something assists in misguiding public sentiment, distorting huexceedingly winning and beautiful, expressing as it man character, and impelling reasonable men into does a fine union of intelligence and courtesy; but those expeditions after the unreal, which are every in genteel society the word too often means nothing day wrecked on the rocks of nonsense or crime. But more than foppish emptiness, and Sir Philip Sidney to do this requires a vital mind, and in matters of gives way to Beau Nash. morals society is very well content not to be pricked and probed in conscience by the sharp benevolence of truth. The mechanical moralists disturb no robber or murderer, no cheat or miser, no spendthrift or profligate, no man who wishes to get what he is pleased to call a living by preying on his neighbors. They neither expose nor reform wickedness, but simply toss words at it. for a consideration. Yet from such moral machines it is supposed that, in the course of education, ingenuous youth can get moral life; and real surprise is often expressed by parents, when their children return from academies or colleges, that the only vital knowledge, in form and in essence, that the dear boys have mastered, relates to sin and the devil. Even here, however, the moment a person with a genius for society appears, it is curious to see how quickly the different elements are fused together, by a few flashes of genuine social inspiration. Convention is at once abolished, each heart finds a tongue, giggling turns into merriment, conversation occurs and prattle ceases, and a party is really organized. A little sincerity of this sort in social intercourse would infinitely beautify life. If the mechanical moralists are to be judged by their effects-by their capacity to do the thing they attempt-and thus judged, have terrible sins of cmission resting on their work, what shall we say of the mechanical theologians?-There is against each of three liberal professions a time-honored jest, adopted by "gentle dullness," all over the world, and from its universality almost worthy of a place in Dugald Stewart's "fundamental principles of human belief.” The point of these venerable facetiæ consists in associating law with chicane, medicine with homicide, and preaching with Dr. Young's "tired nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep." A joke which seems to be thus endorsed by the human race carries with it some authority, and it would be presumptuous to touch never so gently the subject of theology, without a preliminary remark on this question of dullness. Sin is sarcastic, sin is impassioned, sin is sentimental, sin is fascinating, sin swaggers in rhetoric's most gorgeous trappings and revels in fancy's most enticing images, and why should piety alone have the reputation of being feeble and dull? The charge itself, while it closes to the general reader Jeremy Taylor's wilderness of sweets equally with Dr. Owen's "continent of mud," is not without its be In one of the most important matters connected with the welfare of men, that of practical ethics, we have another example of the despotism of the mechanical and disregard of the vital, in human life. A true writer on morals should understand two things, morality and immorality; but a mechanical mind can do neither. He neither communicates the life of moral ideas, nor discerns the life of vicious ideas, but simply has opinions on morals, and opinions on vice. The consequence is that most of the "do-me-good" books are lifeless as regards effect-are contemptuously abandoned by men to children, and by children are learned only to be violated. At last it becomes the sign of green juvenility to quote an abstract truism against a concrete vice, and no person in active life considers himself at all bound to accommodate his conduct to axioms. Indeed, common writers on ethics have become unenviably notorious for expending the full force of their feebleness in statements of generalities, which are universally assented to, and almost as universally - disregarded. Complacently perched on the chill summits of abstract principles, these gentlemen appear to experience a grim satisfaction in sending down into the warm and living concrete a storm of axiomatic snow and sleet. Having no practical grasp of things, they emphasize duties without possessing any clear insight of practices, and accordingly their indignant | blast of truism whistles shrilly over the heads of the sinners it should lay prostrate. Wanting the power to pass into the substance and soul of existing objects and living men, they content themselves with apply-numbing effect upon the preacher, for bodies of men ing external rules to external appearances, glory in the gift of invective as divorced from the secret of interpretation, and being thus shrews rather than seers, they do that worst of injuries to the cause of morality which results from denouncing the devil without understanding his deviltry. In the republic of delusion and democracy of transgression there are certain errors deserving the name of "popular," errors which mislead three quarters of the human race; and the analysis and exhibition of these should be a leading object of practical morality. Thoroughly to comprehend one of these impish emissaries of Satan, and clearly to demonstrate that the rainbow bubbles he sports in the sun are begotten by froth on | commonly understand the art of adapting their conduct to the public impression of their character, and are not apt to provide stimulants when readers only expect soporifics. The truth is that sermons are never dull as sermons, but because the sermonizer is weak in soul. No man with a vision of the interior beauty and power of spiritual truths, no man whom those truths kindle and animate, no man who is truly alive in heart and brain, and speaks of what he has vitally conceived, can ever be dull in the expression of what is the very substance and doctrine of life. The difficulty is that clergymen are apt to fall into mechanical habits of thinking; then ideas gradually fade into opinions; truths dwindle into truisms; a fine dust is subtly insinuated into the vitalities of their | to generate new thought. Bacon, the greatest name being; the holy passion with which their thoughts in the philosophy of science, was so jealous of the once gushed out subsides, and "good common sense" benumbing and deadening effect of all formal and succeeds to rapture; and thus many an inspiring mechanical arrangement of scientific truth, that he teacher, originally a conductor of heaven's lightning, repeatedly opposes all systematization of science, and and exulting in the consciousness of the immortal in his Natural Philosophy followed his own precepts. life beating and burning within him, has lapsed into In the Advancement of Learning he says: "As young a theological drudge, dull in his sermons because men, when they knit and shape perfectly do seldom dull in his conceptions, neither alive himself nor im- grow to a further stature, so knowledge, while it is parting life to others. This decay often occurs in in aphorisms and observations, it is in growth; but conscientious and religious men, who sufficiently be- when it is once comprehended in exact methods, it wail the torpor of soul which compels them to sub- may perchance be further polished and illustrated, stitute phrases for realities, and to whom this mental and accommodated for use and practice; but it indeath, as they feel it stealing over them, is at once a creases no more in bulk and substance." And again spell and a torment. The clergyman, who does not he remarks: "The worst and most absurd sort of keep his mind bright and keen by constant commu- triflers are those who have pent the whole art in strict nion with religious ideas, is sure to die of utter methods and narrow systems, which men commonly weariness of existence. He has once caught a view | cry up for their regularity and style." In illustraof the promised land from the Pisgah height of con- tion of this we may adduce Whewell's celebrated templation-wo unto him if it “fades into the light works, The History and Philosophy of the Inductive of common day." Sciences. Here are great learning, logical arrangement, a complete superficial comprehension of the whole subject; but life is wanting. Most of the great discoveries and inventions with which such a book would naturally deal have been made since the publication of Bacon's Novum Organon; but more mental nutriment and inspiration, more to advance the cause of science, can be found in one page of the Novum Organon than in Whewell's whole five volumes. Such is the difference between a vital and mechanical mind in the history and philosophy of science; and the difference is more observable still when we come to consider the deep and constant enthusiasm, the persisting, penetrating genius of the practical discoverer, as contrasted with the cold and uncreative memory-monger and reasoning machine, who too often passes himself off as the real savan. The only great man of science who has detailed his processes in connection with his emotions is Kepler, and everybody has heard of the "sacred fury" with which he assaulted the fortresses in which nature long concealed her laws. His page flames with images and exclamations. His operations to conquer the mystery in the motions of the planet Mars are military. His object is as, he says, "to triumph over Mars, and to prepare for him, as one altogether vanquished, tabular prisons and equated eccentric fetters." When "the enemy left at home a despised captive, had burst all the chains of the equations, and broken forth of the prisons of the tables," and it was "buzzed here and there that the victory is vain," the war rages anew as violently as before," and he "suddenly brings into the field a new reserve of physical reasonings on the rout and dispersion of the veterans." A poet can thus vitalize mathematics, and "create a soul under the ribs" of physical death. But leaving such perilous topics as ethics and divinity to wiser heads, and passing on to the subjects of philosophy and science, it may be asked-does not the mechanical understanding hold undisputed sway in these? Has impassioned imagination any thing to do with metaphysics, mathematics, natural philosophy, with the observation and the reasoning of the philosopher who deals with facts and laws? The answer to this question is an emphatic yes. That roused, energetic and energizing state of mind which we have designated as impassioned imagination, is as much the characteristic of Newton as of Homer. The facts, direction and object are different, but the faculty is the same. A man of science without a scientific imagination, vital and creative like the poetical imagination, belongs to the second or third class of scientific men, the Hayleys and Haynes Baileys of science. Men of mechanical understandings never discover laws and principles, but simply repeat and apply the discoveries of their betters. Nothing but the fresh and vigorous inspiration which | comes from the grasp of ideas, could carry such men as Kepler and Newton through the prodigious mass of drudgery, through which ran the path which led to their objects; for genius alone is really victorious over drudgery, and refuses to submit to the weariness and deferred hope which attend upon vast designs. Indeed, in following the processes of scientific reasoning, whether inductive or deductive, we are always conscious of an element of beauty in the impression left on the mind, an element which we never experience in following the steps of the merely formal logician. Take the discussion, for instance, between Butler and Clarke on the à priori argument for the existence of God, and no reader who attends to the progress of the reasoning can fail to feel the same inner sense touched which is more palpably addressed by the poet. All the great thinkers, indeed, in all the branches of speculative and physical science, are vital thinkers, and their thoughts are never abstract generalities, but always concrete conceptions, endowed with the power to work on other minds, and In politics and government, the most practical objects of human interest, the men who organize institutions and wisely conduct affairs, are men of vital minds; while the whole brood of ignorant and scampish politicians, whose vulgar tact is but a caricature of insight, and who are as great proficients |