Solitude Considered with Respect to Its Influence Upon the Mind and the Heart (Volume 2) - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1798 Excerpt: ... CHAPTER THE FOURTH. THE ILL EFFECTS OF SOLITUDE ON THE IMAGINATION. Men of extraordinary characters, and actuated by strange and uncommon passions, have shrunk from the pleasures of the world info joyless gloom and desolation. In savage and dreary deserts they have lived a solitary and destitute lise, subjecting themselves to voluntary self-denials and mortisications almost incredible; sometimes expofed in nakedness to the chilling blasts of the winter cold, or the scorching breath of summer's heat, till their brains, distempered by the joint operation of tortured sense and overstrained imagination, swarmed with the wildest and most frantic visions. Whatever is extraordinary, moves, agitates, and overwhelms us in the sirst moments of surprise and astonishment; but its enchantment vanishes before the eye of steady and sirm reason, when she examines its apparent effects, and explores its latent causes. What at sirst appeared wonderful, then ceases to be supernatural. The hermit, Antony, in his gloomy and painful Solitude, was the dupe of his inflamed imagination, and the prey of his rebellious rebellious fenses. His nerves were irritated, hisblood combustible, his mind was full of wild and riotous desires. In this lawless tumult of the fenses, he conceived that Beelzebub appeared to him in the form of a beautiful woman, and tempted him to acts of sin, with wanton gestures, inflammatory caresses, and seductive and endearing words. But this captivating siend was only a dream of his distempered fancy, which ministered to his luxurious desires; and presented to him, with unnatural force and vivacity, the shadows of thofe gratisications of which he panted for the reality. Solitude acts with continual and mighty forceon the imagination, whofe empire over the mind i...