Part 6 (1/2)
My dear friends, one and all, I can do nothing but report such remarks as I happen to have made at our breakfast-table. Their character will depend on many accidents,-a good deal on the particular persons in the company to whom they were addressed. It so happens that those which follow were mainly intended for the divinity-student and the school-mistress; though others, whom I need not mention, saw to interfere, with more or less propriety, in the conversation. This is one of my privileges as a talker; and of course, if I was not talking for our whole company, I don't expect all the readers of this periodical to be interested in my notes of what was said. Still, I think there may be a few that will rather like this vein,-possibly prefer it to a livelier one,-serious young men, and young women generally, in life's roseate parenthesis from-years of age to-inclusive.
Another privilege of talking is to misquote.-Of course it wasn't Proserpina that actually cut the yellow hair,-but _Iris_. (As I have since told you) it was the former lady's regular business, but Dido had used herself ungenteelly, and Madame d'Enfer stood firm on the point of etiquette. So the bathycolpian Here-Juno, in Latin-sent down Iris instead. But I was mightily pleased to see that one of the gentlemen that do the heavy articles for the celebrated ”Oceanic Miscellany”
misquoted Campbell's line without any excuse. ”Waft us _home_ the _message_” of course it ought to be. Will he be duly grateful for the correction?]
-The more we study the body and the mind, the more we find both to be governed, not by, but _according to_ laws, such as we observe in the larger universe.-You think you know all about _walking_,-don't you, now?
Well, how do you suppose your lower limbs are held to your body? They are sucked up by two cupping vessels, (”cotyloid”-cup-like-cavities,) and held there as long as you live, and longer. At any rate, you think you move them backward and forward at such a rate as your will determines, don't you?-On the contrary, they swing just as any other pendulums swing, at a fixed rate, determined by their length. You can alter this by muscular power, as you can take hold of the pendulum of a clock and make it move faster or slower; but your ordinary gait is timed by the same mechanism as the movements of the solar system.
[My friend, the Professor, told me all this, referring me to certain German physiologists by the name of Weber for proof of the facts, which, however, he said he had often verified. I appropriated it to my own use; what can one do better than this, when one has a friend that tells him anything worth remembering?
The Professor seems to think that man and the general powers of the universe are in partners.h.i.+p. Some one was saying that it had cost nearly half a million to move the Leviathan only so far as they had got it already.-Why,-said the Professor,-they might have hired an EARTHQUAKE for less money!]
Just as we find a mathematical rule at the bottom of many of the bodily movements, just so thought may be supposed to have its regular cycles.
Such or such a thought comes round periodically, in its turn. Accidental suggestions, however, so far interfere with the regular cycles, that we may find them practically beyond our power of recognition. Take all this for what it is worth, but at any rate you will agree that there are certain particular thoughts that do not come up once a day, nor once a week, but that a year would hardly go round without your having them pa.s.s through your mind. Here is one which comes up at intervals in this way.
Some one speaks of it, and there is an instant and eager smile of a.s.sent in the listener or listeners. Yes, indeed; they have often been struck by it.
_All at once a conviction flashes through us that we have been in the same precise circ.u.mstances as at the present instant_, _once or many times before_.
O, dear, yes!-said one of the company,-everybody has had that feeling.
The landlady didn't know anything about such notions; it was an idee in folks' heads, she expected.
The schoolmistress said, in a hesitating sort of way, that she knew the feeling well, and didn't like to experience it; it made her think she was a ghost, sometimes.
The young fellow whom they call John said he knew all about it; he had just lighted a cheroot the other day, when a tremendous conviction all at once came over him that he had done just that same thing ever so many times before. I looked severely at him, and his countenance immediately fell-_on the side toward me_; I cannot answer for the other, for he can wink and laugh with either half of his face without the other half's knowing it.
-I have noticed-I went on to say-the following circ.u.mstances connected with these sudden impressions. First, that the condition which seems to be the duplicate of a former one is often very trivial,-one that might have presented itself a hundred times. Secondly, that the impression is very evanescent, and that it is rarely, if ever, recalled by any voluntary effort, at least after any time has elapsed. Thirdly, that there is a disinclination to record the circ.u.mstances, and a sense of incapacity to reproduce the state of mind in words. Fourthly, I have often felt that the duplicate condition had not only occurred once before, but that it was familiar and, as it seemed, habitual. Lastly, I have had the same convictions in my dreams.
How do I account for it?-Why, there are several ways that I can mention, and you may take your choice. The first is that which the young lady hinted at;-that these flashes are sudden recollections of a previous existence. I don't believe that; for I remember a poor student I used to know told me he had such a conviction one day when he was blacking his boots, and I can't think he had ever lived in another world where they use Day and Martin.
Some think that Dr. Wigan's doctrine of the brain's being a double organ, its hemispheres working together like the two eyes, accounts for it. One of the hemispheres hangs fire, they suppose, and the small interval between the perceptions of the nimble and the sluggish half seems an indefinitely long period, and therefore the second perception appears to be the copy of another, ever so old. But even allowing the centre of perception to be double, I can see no good reason for supposing this indefinite lengthening of the time, nor any a.n.a.logy that bears it out.
It seems to me most likely that the coincidence of circ.u.mstances is very partial, but that we take this partial resemblance for ident.i.ty, as we occasionally do resemblances of persons. A momentary posture of circ.u.mstances is so far like some preceding one that we accept it as exactly the same, just as we accost a stranger occasionally, mistaking him for a friend. The apparent similarity may be owing perhaps, quite as much to the mental state at the time, as to the outward circ.u.mstances.
-Here is another of these curiously recurring remarks. I have said it, and heard it many times, and occasionally met with something like it in books,-somewhere in Bulwer's novels, I think, and in one of the works of Mr. Olmsted, I know.
_Memory_, _imagination_, _old sentiments and a.s.sociations_, _are more readily reached through the sense of_ SMELL _than by almost any other channel_.
Of course the particular odors which act upon each person's susceptibilities differ.-O, yes! I will tell you some of mine. The smell of _phosphorus_ is one of them. During a year or two of adolescence I used to be dabbling in chemistry a good deal, and as about that time I had my little aspirations and pa.s.sions like another, some of these things got mixed up with each other: orange-colored fumes of nitrous acid, and visions as bright and transient; reddening litmus-paper, and blus.h.i.+ng cheeks;-_eheu_!
”Soles occidere et redire possunt,”
but there is no reagent that will redden the faded roses of eighteen hundred and-spare them! But, as I was saying, phosphorus fires this train of a.s.sociations in an instant; its luminous vapors with their penetrating odor throw me into a trance; it comes to me in a double sense ”trailing clouds of glory.” Only the confounded Vienna matches, _ohne phosphor-geruch_, have worn my sensibilities a little.
Then there is the _marigold_. When I was of smallest dimensions, and wont to ride impacted between the knees of fond parental pair, we would sometimes cross the bridge to the next village-town and stop opposite a low, brown, ”gambrel-roofed” cottage. Out of it would come one Sally, sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy herself, shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and, bending over her flower-bed, would gather a ”posy,” as she called it, for the little boy. Sally lies in the churchyard with a slab of blue slate at her head, lichen-crusted, and leaning a little within the last few years. Cottage, garden-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seedling onions,-stateliest of vegetables,-all are gone, but the breath of a marigold brings them all back to me.
Perhaps the herb _everlasting_, the fragrant _immortelle_ of our autumn fields, has the most suggestive odor to me of all those that set me dreaming. I can hardly describe the strange thoughts and emotions that come to me as I inhale the aroma of its pale, dry, rustling flowers. A something it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it had been brought from the core of some great pyramid, where it had lain on the breast of a mummied Pharaoh. Something, too, of immortality in the sad, faint sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless petals. Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes with tears and carries me in blissful thought to the banks of asphodel that border the River of Life.
-I should not have talked so much about these personal susceptibilities, if I had not a remark to make about them which I believe is a new one.
It is this. There may be a physical reason for the strange connection between the sense of smell and the mind. The olfactory nerve-so my friend, the Professor, tells me-is the only one directly connected with the hemispheres of the brain, the parts in which, as we have every reason to believe, the intellectual processes are performed. To speak more truly the olfactory ”nerve” is not a nerve at all, he says, but a part of the brain, in intimate connection with its anterior lobes. Whether this anatomical arrangement is at the bottom of the facts I have mentioned, I will not decide, but it is curious enough to be worth remembering.
Contrast the sense of taste, as a source of suggestive impressions, with that of smell. Now the Professor a.s.sures me that you will find the nerve of taste has no immediate connection with the brain proper, but only with the prolongation of the spinal cord.