ure, may be traced the law that
exercised faculties are ever tending to resume their original state. Not
only after continued rest, do they regain their full power not only do
brief cessations partially reinvigorate them; but even while they are
in action, the resulting exhaustion is ever being neutralized. The
two processes of waste and repair go on together. Hence with faculties
habitually exercised--as the senses of all persons, or the muscles of
any one who is strong--it happens that, during moderate activity, the
repair is so nearly equal to the waste, that the diminution of power
is scarcely appreciable; and it is only when the activity has been long
continued, or has been very violent, that the repair becomes so far
in arrear of the waste as to produce a perceptible prostration. In
all cases, however, when, by the action of a faculty, waste has been
incurred, _some_ lapse of time must take place before full efficiency
can be reacquired; and this time must be long in proportion as the waste
has been great.

ii Explanation of Climax, Antithesis, and Anticlimax.

Sec. 61. Keeping in mind these general truths, we shall be in a condition
to understand certain causes of effect in composition now to be
considered. Every perception received, and every conception realized,
entailing some amount of waste--or, as Liebig would say, some change of
matter in the brain; and the efficiency of the faculties subject to
this waste being thereby temporarily, though often but momentarily,
diminished; the resulting partial inability must affect the acts of
perception and conception that immediately succeed. And hence we may
expect that the vividness with which images are realized will, in many
cases, depend on the order of their presentation: even when one order is
as convenient to the understanding as the other.

Sec. 62. There are sundry facts which alike illustrate this, and are
explained by it. Climax is one of them. The marked effect obtained
by placing last the most striking of any series of images, and the
weakness--often the ludicrous weakness--produced by reversing this
arrangement, depends on the general law indicated. As immediately after
looking at the sun we cannot perceive the light of a fire, while by
looking at the fire first and the sun afterwards we can perceive both;
so, after receiving a brilliant, or weighty, or terrible thought, we
cannot appreciate a less brilliant, less weighty, or less terrible one,
w