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 ...

IMAGINATION. 7
wonderful effects of popular eloquence on the lower orders;
effects which are much more remarkable than what it ever pro.
duces on men of education.*
V. Ineconveniences resultingy from a ill-regulated imagination.
- It was undoubtedly the intention of nature, that the objects
of perception should produce much stronger impressions 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 long been accustomed to converse with our own thoughlts, and have found our
activity gratified by intellectual 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
interest 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. A wild and mountainous country, which presents but
a limited variety of objects, and these only of such a sort as
"awake to solemn thought," has a remarkable effect in cherishing this enthusiasm.
Remedies for a disordered imagination. - When such disorders of the imagination have been long confirmed by habit, the
evil may, perhaps, be beyond a remedy; but in their inferior
* "The province of eloquence is to reign over minds of slow perception
and little imcgination; to set things in lights they never saw them in; to
engage their attention by details and circumstances gradually unfolded;
to adorn and heighten them with images and colors unknown to them;
and to raise and engage their rude passions to the point to which the
speaker wishes to bring them." - Gray's Letters, p. 394.