“I promised, that when I possessed the power, I would use it with inflexible integrity; and he dismissed me, pressing my hand.  ‘My heart,’ said he, ’will be now at rest, and my benevolence will no more destroy my quiet:  I have found a man of wisdom and virtue, to whom I can cheerfully bequeath the inheritance of the sun.’”

The prince heard this narration with very serious regard; but the princess smiled, and Pekuah convulsed herself with laughter.  “Ladies,” said Imlac, “to mock the heaviest of human afflictions, is neither charitable nor wise.  Few can attain this man’s knowledge, and few practise his virtues; but all may suffer his calamity.  Of the uncertainties of our present state, the most dreadful and alarming is the uncertain continuance of reason.”

The princess was recollected, and the favourite was abashed.  Rasselas, more deeply affected, inquired of Imlac, whether he thought such maladies of the mind frequent, and how they were contracted.

CHAP.  XLIV.

THE DANGEROUS PREVALENCE OF IMAGINATION.

“Disorders of intellect,” answered Imlac, “happen much more often than superficial observers will easily believe.  Perhaps, if we speak with rigorous exactness, no human mind is in its right state[a].  There is no man, whose imagination does not, sometimes, predominate over his reason, who can regulate his attention wholly by his will, and whose ideas will come and go at his command.  No man will be found, in whose mind airy notions do not, sometimes, tyrannize, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability.  All power of fancy over reason, is a degree of insanity; but, while this power is such as we can control and repress, it is not visible to others, nor considered as any deprivation of the mental faculties:  it is not pronounced madness, but when it becomes ungovernable, and apparently influences speech or action.

“To indulge the power of fiction, and send imagination out upon the wing, is often the sport of those who delight too much in silent speculation.  When we are alone we are not always busy; the labour of excogitation is too violent to last long; the ardour of inquiry will, sometimes, give way to idleness or satiety.  He who has nothing external that can divert him, must find pleasure in his own thoughts, and must conceive himself what he is not; for who is pleased with what he is?  He then expatiates in boundless futurity, and culls, from all imaginable conditions, that which, for the present moment, he should most desire; amuses his desires with impossible enjoyments, and confers upon his pride unattainable dominion.  The mind dances from scene to scene, unites all pleasures in all combinations, and riots in delights, which nature and fortune, with all their bounty, cannot bestow.

“In time, some particular train of ideas fixes the attention; all other intellectual gratifications are rejected; the mind, in weariness or leisure, recurs constantly to the favourite conception, and feasts on the luscious falsehood, whenever she is offended with the bitterness of truth.  By degrees, the reign of fancy is confirmed; she grows first imperious, and in time despotick.  Then fictions begin to operate as realities, false opinions fasten upon the mind, and life passes in dreams of rapture or of anguish.