ary power. It is true that some
persons in castle-building both reason and invent, and therefore must
exert some degree of volition; even in the wildest reverie, there may
be traced some species of consistency, some connection amongst the
ideas; but this is simply the result of the association of ideas.
Inventive castle-builders are rather nearer the state of insanity than
of reverie; they reason well upon false principles; their airy fabrics
are often both in good taste and in good proportion; nothing is
wanting to them but a foundation. On the contrary, nothing can be more
silly than the reveries of silly people; they are not only defective
in consistency, but they want all the unities; they are not
extravagant, but they are stupid; they consist usually of a listless
reiteration of uninteresting ideas; the whole pleasure enjoyed by
those addicted to them consists in the facility of repetition.

It is a mistaken notion, that only people of ardent imaginations are
disposed to reverie; the most indolent and stupid persons waste their
existence in this indulgence; they do not act always in consequence of
their dreams, therefore we do not detect their folly. Young people of
active minds, when they have not sufficient occupation, necessarily
indulge in reverie; and, by degrees, this wild exercise of their
invention and imagination becomes so delightful to them, that they
prefer it to all sober employments.

Mr. Williams, in his Lectures upon Education, gives an account of a
boy singularly addicted to reverie. The desire of invisibility had
seized his mind, and for several years he had indulged his fancy with
imagining all the pleasures that he should command, and all the feats
that he could perform, if he were in possession of Gyges's ring. The
reader should, however, be informed, that this castle-builder was not
a youth of strict veracity; his confession upon this occasion, as upon
others, might not have been sincere. We only state the story from Mr.
Williams.

To prevent children from acquiring a taste for reverie, let them have
various occupations both of mind and body. Let us not direct their
imagination to extraordinary future pleasures, but let us suffer them
to enjoy the present. Anticipation is a species of reverie; and
children, who have promises of future pleasures frequently made to
them, live in a continual state of anticipation.

To cure the habit of reverie when it has once been formed, we must
take diffe