Evening thoughts / by a physician.

  • Bullar Joseph, 1808-1869.
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Evening thoughts / by a physician. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    mind, and suddenly awakened by an impres- sion of the sense, and nourished hy a repe- tition of the impressions, enables one, who has thus experienced it, to understand the meaning of those who contend that ideas are innate. He has the conviction, fi’om personal experience, that such impressions on the nerve of sight is one fact, the feeling of their beauty another, and that this later awakened sense is a new source of pleasure, as a new sense would be. He will be unable to convey his con- viction to another wdio has not gone through the same experience; but that other may be convinced of the principle by experiences to which he is a stranger. Thus the idea or sense of inimortality may supply another mind with an experimental fact. “ A man,” says Jean Paul Richter, “ may be- lieve in the immortality of the soul for twenty years ; but only in tbe twenty-first—in some great moment, is be astonished at the rich substance of his belief, at tbe warmth of this naphtha-spring.” His sense of immortality is awakened by perhaps a deeper reflection on some instance of mortality. He feels that he is immortal,—that he can never perish, and he has exchanged a mere notion for an idea:—