Page:Observations on Man 1834.djvu/181

 many of our intellectual pleasures must be illuminated and augmented by them. And on the contrary, harsh, irregular, and violently loud noises must add something to the disagreeableness of the objects and ideas with which they are often associated.

The pleasures of music are composed, as has been already observed, partly of the original, corporeal pleasures of sound, and partly of associated ones. When these pleasures are arrived at tolerable perfection, and the several compounding parts cemented sufficiently by association, they are transferred back again upon a great variety of objects and ideas, and diffuse joy, good-will, anger, compassion, sorrow, melancholy, &c. upon the various scenes and events of life; and so on reciprocally without perceptible limits.

The corporeal pleasures from articulate sounds are either evanescent from the first, or, however, become so very early in life. By this means we are much better qualified to receive information, with mental pleasure and improvement, from them; and the ear becomes, like the eye, a method of perception suited to the wants of a spiritual being. And indeed when we compare the imperfections of such as have never heard, with those of persons that have never seen, it appears, that the ear is of much more importance to us, considered as spiritual beings, than the eye. This is chiefly owing to the great use and necessity of words for the improvement of our knowledge, and enlargement of our affections; of which I shall have particular occasion to treat hereafter. An accurate inquiry into the mental progress of persons deprived of the advantages of language, by being born deaf, would be a still better test of the theory of these papers, than a like inquiry concerning persons born blind.



ideas which audible impressions leave in the region of the brain, that corresponds to the auditory nerves, are, next to the ideas of sight, the most vivid and definite of any; and all the observations above made upon the ideas of sight may be applied to those of hearing, proper changes and allowances being made. Thus, after hearing music, conversing much with the same person, in general disorders of the brain, or particular ones of the nervous spasmodic kind in the stomach, after taking opium, in dreams, in madness, trains of audible ideas force themselves upon the fancy, in nearly the same manner, as trains of visible ideas do in like cases. And it may be, that in passing over words with our eye, in viewing objects, in thinking, and particularly in writing and speaking, faint miniatures of the sounds of words pass over the ear. I even suspect, that in speaking, these miniatures are the associated circumstances which excite the action, be it voluntary, or secondarily automatic. For children