Elements of the philosophy of the human mind. By Dugald Stewart. Rev. and abridged, with critical and explanatory notes, for the use of colleges and schools. By Francis Bowen ...

O0 2 IMAGINATIONB
sensibility increases, and he weeps, not for what he sees, but for
what he imagines. It will be said that it was his sensibility
which originally roused his imagination; and the observation is
undoubtedly true; but it is equally evident, on the other hand,
that the warmth of his imagination increases and prolongs his
sensibility.
This is beautifully illustrated in the Sentimental Journey of
Sterne. While engaged in a train of reflections on the stateprisons in France, the accidental sight of a starling in a cage
suggests to him the idea of a captive in his dungeon. He indulges his imagination, " and looks through the twilight of the
grated door to take the picture."
"I beheld," says he, "his body half wasted away with long
expectation and confinement, and felt what kind of sickness of
the heart it is, which arises from hope deferred. Upon looking
nearer, I saw him pale and feverish: in thirty years, the western
breeze had not once fanned his blood: he had seen no sun, no
moon, in all that time, nor had the voice of friend or kinsman
breathed through his lattice. His children - But here my
heart began to bleed, and I was forced to go on with another
part of the portrait.
"Hle was sitting upon the ground, in the furthest corner of
his dungeon, on a little straw, which was alternately his chair
and bed: a little calendar of small sticks was laid at the head,
notched all over with the dismal days and nights he had passed
there; he had one of these little sticks in his hand, and with a
rusty nail, was etching another day of misery to add to the heap.
As I darkened the little light he had, he lifted up a hopeless
eye towards the door, then cast it down, shook his head, and
went on with his work of affliction."
Why pity is excited by fiction more than by reality. —The
foregoing observations may account, in part, for the effect which
exhibitions of fictitious distress produce on some persons, who
do not discover much sensibility to the distresses of real life.
In a novel or a tragedy, the picture is completely finished in all
its parts; and we are made acquainted not only with every cir