Objects too diftant, or too near,* To visual sense, cannot appear; In mental ones, how well 'tis known, No one gains credit of his own; Is his; like objects of the mind: In t'other how much less you find, The measure form'd within your mind! 30 40 * Shakespeare, with his accuflomed reflectiveness, makes Caffius, in Julius Cafar, say, "Tell me, good Brutus, can you fee your face?" Like 50 Like either of these mirrors, then, * I remember long ago to have read in that great naturalift Buffon, to whose authority even the learned must bend, much more the ignorant like myself, (and I should be forry indeed not to give him credit in every information of things I cannot judge of myself) that, among other deceptions of the eye-fight, there is this, viz. "That in fact our eyes see all their objects both double and reversed; but knowing from experience they are neither, we get a habit of feeing them fingle and upright." And this he infers to be fure from the Camera Obfcura, (which the eye may be faid to be) that reverses each object, and from that object being represented in each eye, confequently giving two pictures to the two eyes. Now this, nothing can make me believe, nor is it a matter of science, but of fact; and the fact being, that I fee but one object, and erect, that fact I believe. Experience might tell me it was a mistake, but never make me fee the thing different from what it is. A stick in the water I fee crooked, though I know it is straight; but in a hundred years should I ever see it as ftraight? Surely not. Besides, we often see objects double from fome bad glafs, &c. but surely Nature has contrived within us, fomehow, a correction, though not known how. Might not (it just occus to me) Mons. Buffon be asked too, if he believes that the animals fee objects, as he says, or reafon likewise, as we do, on them? How is it young children fee them too? All this to me appears so strong, it should seem fo that this was not confented to by others; yet I at least never heard it contradicted, and have seen the doctrine quoted from Buffon in other writers.-But as to my ownself, not only the theory of this poem, but of my life, fhall ever be followed up by practice, and no authority whatever make me yield the evidence of my fenfes and fenfe to it. Some * POPE has in this train of thinking, fome very beautiful lines, (which often broke from him, all unconnected as his ideas manifeftly were, and poor and colloquial, I agree with Johnson, as too many were alfo:) they begin by these, viz. "Mean while, opinion gilds with varying rays, "Those painted clouds that beautify our days;" &c. + It is well known that the Bishop of Cloyne wrote a book to fhew that there was no existence of matter, but only the idea of it in our own minds, and only Spirit, or fomething very like that, as far as I have heard or know of his book. Howe'er * Sir Ifaac Newton, it seems, computed the comet of 1600, when nearest the fun, to be 2000 times hotter than red-hot iron, and that it must retain its heat for 20,000 years. Its revolution round the fun, which revolution with us is 12 months, is it seems 575 years, and its distance beyond Saturn, in his journey into empty space before it turns, a period and distance I do not remember. It is not to the present purpose, yet as it occurs to me I will mark my difficulty (to be sure of ignorance) first, how, with this heat at every turn so much increased, it is not, even in very few turns, quite burnt up; and secondly, if (as I understand it does) it comes nearer and nearer the fun at every turn, how it escapes either falling into it, or else doing a mischief to the general heavenly system before that event. Age |