heaviest task upon, the vigilance of reason; and to bear those faculties
with unerring rectitude or invariable propriety, requires a degree of
firmness and of cool attention, which does not always attend the higher
gifts of the mind. Yet, difficult as nature herself seems to have
reduced the task of regularity to genius, it is the supreme consolation
of dullness, to seize upon those excesses, which are the overflowings of
faculties they never enjoyed."[111] Are not the _gifts of imagination_
mistaken here for the strength of passions? Doubtless, where strong
passions accompany great parts, as perhaps they often do, the
imagination may encrease their force and activity: but, where passions
are calm and gentle, imagination of itself should seem to have no
conflict but speculatively with reason. There, indeed, it wages an
eternal war; and, if not contracted and strictly regulated, it will
carry the patient into endless extravagancies. The term patient is here
properly used, because men, under the influence of imagination, are most
truly distempered. The degree of this distemper will be in proportion to
the prevalence of imagination over reason, and, according to this
proportion, amount to more or less of the whimsical; but when reason
shall become, as it were, extinct, and imagination govern alone, then
the distemper will be madness under the wildest and most fantastic
modes. Thus, one of those invalids, perhaps, shall be all sorrow for
having been most unjustly deprived of the crown; though his vocation,
poor man! be that of a school-master. Another, like Horace's madman, is
all joy; and it may seem even cruelty to cure him.

The operations and caprices of the imagination are various and endless;
and, as they cannot be reduced to regularity or system, so it is highly
improbable that any certain method of cure should ever be found out for
them. It has generally been thought, that matter of fact might most
successfully be opposed to the delusions of imagination, as being proof
to the senses, and carrying conviction unavoidably to the understanding;
but we rather suspect, that the understanding or reasoning faculty, has
little to do in all these cases: at least so it should seem from the two
following facts, which are by no means badly attested.

Fienus, in his curious little book, _de Viribus Imaginationis_, records
from Donatus the case of a man, who fancied his body encreased to such a
size, that he durst not attempt to p