things, down even to an animated heap of Glass: but to fancy
himself a dead Iron-Balance for weighing Pains and Pleasures on, was
reserved for this his latter era. There stands he, his Universe one huge
Manger, filled with hay and thistles to be weighed against each other;
and looks long-eared enough. Alas, poor devil! spectres are appointed to
haunt him: one age he is hag-ridden, bewitched; the next, priest-ridden,
befooled; in all ages, bedevilled. And now the Genius of Mechanism
smothers him worse than any Nightmare did; till the Soul is nigh choked
out of him, and only a kind of Digestive, Mechanic life remains. In
Earth and in Heaven he can see nothing but Mechanism; has fear for
nothing else, hope in nothing else: the world would indeed grind him
to pieces; but cannot he fathom the Doctrine of Motives, and cunningly
compute these, and mechanize them to grind the other way?

"Were he not, as has been said, purblinded by enchantment, you had but
to bid him open his eyes and look. In which country, in which time, was
it hitherto that man's history, or the history of any man, went on by
calculated or calculable 'Motives'? What make ye of your Christianities,
and Chivalries, and Reformations, and Marseillaise Hymns, and Reigns of
Terror? Nay, has not perhaps the Motive-grinder himself been in _Love_?
Did he never stand so much as a contested Election? Leave him to Time,
and the medicating virtue of Nature."

"Yes, Friends," elsewhere observes the Professor, "not our Logical,
Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might
say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to
lead us hellward. Nay, even for the basest Sensualist, what is Sense
but the implement of Fantasy; the vessel it drinks out of? Ever in the
dullest existence there is a sheen either of Inspiration or of Madness
(thou partly hast it in thy choice, which of the two), that gleams in
from the circumambient Eternity, and colors with its own hues our little
islet of Time. The Understanding is indeed thy window, too clear thou
canst not make it; but Fantasy is thy eye, with its color-giving
retina, healthy or diseased. Have not I myself known five hundred living
soldiers sabred into crows'-meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which
they called their Flag; which, had you sold it at any market-cross,
would not have brought above three groschen? Did not the whole Hungarian
Nation rise, like some tumultuous moon-stirred