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[Transcriber's Note: Footnotes have been numbered sequentially andmoved to the end of the text.]
Frederick J Mason, 444, West Strand
1834
The main purpose of this book is to exhibit a fair delineation of thecredulity of the human mind. Such an exhibition cannot fail to beproductive of the most salutary lessons.
One view of the subject will teach us a useful pride in the abundanceof our faculties. Without pride man is in reality of little value. Itis pride that stimulates us to all our great undertakings. Withoutpride, and the secret persuasion of extraordinary talents, what manwould take up the pen with a view to produce an important work,whether of imagination and poetry, or of profound science, or of acuteand subtle reasoning and intellectual anatomy? It is pride in thissense that makes the great general and the consummate legislator, thatanimates us to tasks the most laborious, and causes us to shrink fromno difficulty, and to be confounded and overwhelmed with no obstaclethat can be interposed in our path.
Nothing can be more striking than the contrast between man and theinferior animals. The latter live only for the day, and see for themost part only what is immediately before them. But man lives in thepast and the future. He reasons upon and improves by the past; herecords the acts of a long series of generations: and he looks intofuture time, lays down plans which he shall be months and years inbringing to maturity, and contrives machines and delineates systemsof education and government, which may gradually add to theaccommodations of all, and raise the species generally into a noblerand more honourable character than our ancestors were capable ofsustaining.
Man looks through nature, and is able to reduce its parts into a greatwhole. He classes the beings which are found in it, both animate andinanimate, delineates and describes them, investigates theirproperties, and records their capacities, their good and evilqualities, their dangers and their uses.
Nor does he only see all that is; but he also images all that is not.He takes to pieces the substances that are, and combines their partsinto new arrangements. He peoples all the elements from the world ofhis imagination. It is here that he is most extraordinary andwonderful. The record of what actually is, and has happened in theseries of human events, is perhaps the smallest part of human history.If we would know man in all his subtleties, we must deviate into theworld of miracles and sorcery. To know the things that are not, andcannot be, but have been imagined and believed, is the most curiouschapter in the annals of man. To observe the actual results of theseimaginary phenomena, and the crimes and cruelties they have caused usto commit, is one of the most instructive studies in which we canpossibly be engaged. It is here that man is most astonishing, and thatwe