This would have been doing a service to all
those who might wish to see a digest of his peculiar opinions cleared from
the perplexities of his peculiar diction and brought into a narrow compass
from the great number of volumes through which they are at present
dispersed. However, like many another plan of mine, it went unexecuted.
On the whole, if Walking Stewart were at all crazy, he was so in a way
which did not affect his natural genius and eloquence--but rather exalted
them. The old maxim, indeed, that 'Great wits to madness sure are near
allied,' the maxim of Dryden and the popular maxim, I have heard disputed
by Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Wordsworth, who maintain that mad people are the
dullest and most wearisome of all people. As a body, I believe they are
so. But I must dissent from the authority of Messrs. Coleridge and
Wordsworth so far as to distinguish. Where madness is connected, as it
often is, with some miserable derangement of the stomach, liver, &c. and
attacks the principle of pleasurable life, which is manifestly seated in
the central organs of the body (i.e. in the stomach and the apparatus
connected with it), there it cannot but lead to perpetual suffering and
distraction of thought; and there the patient will be often tedious and
incoherent. People who have not suffered from any great disturbance in
those organs are little aware how indispensable to the process of thinking
are the momentary influxes of pleasurable feeling from the regular goings
on of life in its primary function; in fact, until the pleasure is
withdrawn or obscured, most people are not aware that they _have_ any
pleasure from the due action of the great central machinery of the system:
proceeding in uninterrupted continuance, the pleasure as much escapes the
consciousness as the act of respiration: a child, in the happiest state of
its existence, does not _know_ that it is happy.
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