n of experience, precipitated, in spite of all my care, into
some new position, where the feelings which we are led to consider as a
part of our nature, may be so entirely changed that no new world we are
capable of conceiving any notion of, could possibly produce a more
extraordinary disruption of all the old workings of the brain. Oh! it is
a fearful thought, but one seldom entertained by the slaves of
experience. Changes occur daily to all men; but, in the general case,
each mere worldly position of ever-changing circumstances, possesses so
much of the form and character of some prior one, that we are very soon
reconciled to the idea of a variety composed of a mere mutation of the
mixture of old elements. The mind, looked upon as a microcosm peopled by
the representations of things that be--of the past and possible, of the
future and probable--is held to be our own little world, with which, and
all its inhabitants, we are or may be familiar; we forget that there are
recesses in it, or capabilities within it, that may contain or produce
things as new as striking, as horrible as if they were the creations of
an unknown power, out of elements we never saw or heard of. A sane
person, living and acting in the world, may be for a time mad, but with
the difference, that, while ordinary maniacs know not their condition,
he may be conscious of a thinking identity, while all his thoughts seem
to be imposed upon him by other powers than those that regulate this
sphere, and he is himself, what he was, but placed in a new world, and
acted on by new impulses at which he shudders, but which he is sternly
bound to receive and feel. What a view does this open up to the state of
man in this lower world!--how much is there in it of a cause of
humiliation and trembling. I am myself, from what I suffered, altogether
a changed being; having no faith in the stability of things; conceiving
myself placed among dangerous rocks and precipices, from which, in the
next moment, I may fall, I know not where; and eyeing with doubt and
dismay even the most composed and settled of all the circumstances of
life. He is a happy man who is doomed to pass from the cradle to the
grave, without having cause to _experience_ the faithlessness of
experience, who has only read of those dreadful disruptions of the mind
and feelings, that scatter the old elements, in order that some new
consolidating power may throw them into forms and combinations a
thousand times