Narrative and Miscellaneous PapersDe Quincey, Thomas
General
Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers
De Quincey, Thomas
English essays; English fiction
And the ignorant by-stander prays that the
doctor may have grace given him and time for repentance; whilst his
more liberal companion reproves his want of charity, observing that
travellers into far countries have always had a license for lying, as
a sort of tax or fine levied for remunerating their own risks; and
that great astronomers, as necessarily far travellers into space, are
entitled to a double per centage of the same Munchausen privilege.
Great is the mystery of Space, greater is the mystery of Time; either
mystery grows upon man, as man himself grows; and either seems to be a
function of the godlike which is in man. In reality the depths and the
heights which are in man, the depths by which he searches, the heights
by which he aspires, are but projected and made objective externally in
the three dimensions of space which are outside of him. He trembles at
the abyss into which his bodily eyes look down, or look up; not knowing
that abyss to be, not always consciously suspecting it to be, but by an
instinct written in his prophetic heart feeling it to be, boding it to
be, fearing it to be, and sometimes hoping it to be, the mirror to a
mightier abyss that will one day be expanded in himself. Even as to
the sense of space, which is the lesser mystery than time, I know not
whether the reader has remarked that it is one which swells upon man
with the expansion of his mind, and that it is probably peculiar to the
mind of man. An infant of a year old, or oftentimes even older, takes no
notice of a sound, however loud, which is a quarter of a mile removed,
or even in a distant chamber. And brutes, even of the most enlarged
capacities, seem not to have any commerce with distance: distance is
probably not revealed to them except by a _presence_, viz., by some
shadow of their own animality, which, if perceived at all, is perceived
as a thing _present_ to their organs. An animal desire, or a deep
animal hostility, may render sensible a distance which else would not be
sensible; but not render it sensible _as_ a distance. Hence perhaps is
explained, and not out of any self-oblivion from higher enthusiasm, a
fact that often has occurred, of deer, or hares, or foxes, and the
pack of hounds in pursuit, chaser and chased, all going headlong over a
precipice together. Depth or height does not readily manifest itself to
_them_; so that any _strong_ motive is sufficient to overpower the sense
of it. Man only has a natural function for expanding on an illimitable
sensorium, the illimitable growths of space. Man, coming to the
precipice, reads his danger; the brute perishes: man is saved; and the
horse is saved by his rider.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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