can lay up no store of ideas; the judgment draw forth no comparisons; the imagination must become blighted and barren; and where there is not attention whatever, the case must necessarily verge upon fatuity." I conceive that persons in whom the organ of Concentrativeness is very small, are peculiarly apt to fall into reverie.

The following is a remarkable instance of reverie arising from excessive application:-The subject of it was Mr. Spalding, a gentleman well known as an eminent literary character in Germany, and much respected by those who knew him. The case was drawn up by himself, and published in the Psychological Magazine.

"I was this morning engaged with a great number of people who followed each other quickly, and to each of whom I was obliged to give my attention. I was also under the necessity of writing much; but the subjects, which were various and of a trivial and uninteresting nature, had no connexion the one with the other; my attention, therefore, was constantly kept on the stretch, and was continually shifting from one subject to another. At last it became necessary that I should write a receipt for some money I had received on account of the poor. I seated myself and wrote the two first words, but in a moment found that I was incapable of proceeding, for I could not recollect the words which belonged to the ideas that were present in my mind. I strained my attention as much as possible, and tried to write

me.

one letter slowly after the other, always having an eye to the preceding one, in order to observe whether they had the usual relationship to each other; but I remarked, and said to myself at the time, that the characters I was writing were not those which I wished to write, and yet I could not discover where the fault lay. I therefore desisted, and partly by broken words and syllables, and partly by gesture, I made the person who waited for the receipt understand he should leave For about half an hour there reigned a kind of tumultuary disorder in my senses, in which I was incapable of remarking any thing very particular, except that one series of ideas forced themselves involuntarily on my mind. The trifling na. of these thoughts I was perfectly aware of, and was also conscious that I made several efforts to get rid of them, and supply their place by better ones, which lay at the bottom of my soul. I endeavored as much as lay in my power, considering the great crowd of confused images which presented themselves to my mind, to recall my principles of religion, of conscience, and of future expectation; these I found equally correct, and fixed as before. There was no deception in my external senses, for I saw and knew every thing around me; but I could not free myself from the strange ideas which existed in my head. I endeavored to speak in order to discover whether I was capable of saying any thing that was connected; but although I made the greatest

efforts of attention, and proceeded, with the utmost caution, I perceived that I uniformly spoke other words than those I intended. My soul was at present as little master of the organs of speech, as it had been before of my hand in writing. Thank God, this state did not continue very long, for, in about half an hour, my head began to grow clearer, the strange and tiresome ideas became less vivid and turbulent, and I could command my own thoughts with less interruption.

"I now wished to ring for my servant, and desire him to inform my wife to come to me; but I found it still necessary to wait a little longer to exercise myself in the right pronunciation of the few words I had to say: and the first half hour's conversation I had with her was, on my part, preserved with a slow and anxious circumspection, until at last I gradually found myself as clear and serene as in the beginning of the day, all that now remained was a slight headache. I recollected the receipt I had begun to write, and in which I knew I had blundered; and upon examining it, I observed to my great astonishment, that instead of the words fifty dollars, being one half year's rate, which I ought to have written, the words were fifty dollars through the salvation of Bra-, with a break after it, for the word Bra was at the end of a line. I cannot recollect any perception, or business which I had to transact, that could, by means of an obscure influence, have produced this phenomenon.”

Reverie, when proceeding, as in this case, from excessive application, will seldom be difficult of cure the removal of the exciting cause will of itself naturally constitute the remedy. When it arises from such a defect in education as that already mentioned, the cure will be more difficult, although even then it is not always impracticable. In such a case, the person should be strongly directed to those subjects in which he feels most interest, and never be made to study what he has not a positive liking for. Active employment and gay and pleasant society, may effect much in restoring the intellectual balance. In all cases, whatever, he should never be left long alone; as nothing has such a tendency to foster this state of mind as solitude.

CHAPTER XVII.

ABSTRACTION.

ABSTRACTION, or absence of mind, has been confounded with reverie, but it is, in reality, a different intellectual operation; for as in the latter a difficulty is experienced in making the mind bear strongly on any one point, in the former its whole energies are concentrated towards a single focus, and every other circumstance is, for the time, utterly forgotten. Such was the case with Sir Isaac Newton when, in a fit of absence, he made a tobacco stopper of the lady's finger, and with Archimedes, who remained unconscious and unmoved during the noise and slaughter of captured Syracuse. Though, in general, abstraction is easily broken by outward impressions, there have been instances where it has been so powerful as to render the individuals laboring under it insensible to pain. Pinel in his Nosographie Philosophique speaks of a priest who in a fit of mental absence was unconscious of the pain of burning; and