Читать книгу Life's Progress Through the Passions; Or, The Adventures of Natura - Eliza Fowler Haywood - Страница 5

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Shews, in the example of Natura, how from our very birth, the passions, to which the human soul is incident, are discoverable in us; and how far the organs of sense, or what is called the constitution, has an effect over us.

The origin of Natura would perhaps require more time to trace than the benefit of the discovery would attone for: it shall therefore suffice to say, that his ancestors were neither of the highest rank:—that if no extraordinary action had signalized the names of any of them, so none of them had been guilty of crimes to entail infamy on their posterity: and that a moderate estate in the family had descended from father to son for many generations, without being either remarkably improved or embezzled. — His immediate parents were in very easy circumstances, and he being their first son, was welcomed into the world with a joy usual on such occasions. — I never heard that any prodigies preceded or accompanied his nativity; or that the planets, or his mother's cravings during her pregnancy, had sealed him with any particular mark or badge of distinction: but have been well assured he was a fine boy, sucked heartily of his mother's milk, and what they call a thriving child. His weaning, I am told, was attended by some little ailments, occasioned by his pining after the food to which he had been accustomed; but proper means being found to make him lose the memory of the breast, he soon recovered his flesh, increased in strength, and could go about the room at a year and some few months old, without the help of a leading-string.

Hitherto the passions, those powerful abettors, I had almost said sole authors of all human actions, operated but faintly, and could shew themselves only in proportion to the vigour of the animal frame. Yet latent as they are, an observing eye may easily discover them in each of their different propensities, even from the most early infancy. The eyes of Natura on any new and pleasing object, would denote by their sparkling a sensation of joy:—Fear was visible in him by clinging to his nurse, and endeavouring to bury himself as it were in her bosom, at the sound of menaces he was not capable of understanding:—That sorrow has a place among the first emotions of the soul, was demonstrable by the sighs which frequently would heave his little heart, long before it was possible for him either to know or to imagine any motives for them:—That the seeds of avarice are born with us, by the eagerness with which he catched at money when presented to him, his clinching it fast in his hand, and the reluctance he expressed on being deprived of it:—That anger, and impatience of controul, are inherent to our nature, might be seen in his throwing down with vehemence any favourite toy, rather than yield to resign it; and that spite and revenge are also but too much so, by his putting in practice all such tricks as his young invention could furnish, to vex any of the family who had happened to cross him:—Even those tender inclinations, which afterwards bear the name of amorous, begin to peep out long before the difference of sex is thought on; as Natura proved by the preference he gave the girls over the boys who came to play with him, and his readiness to part with any thing to them.

In a word, there is not one of all the various emotions which agitate the breast in maturity, that may not be discerned almost from the birth, hope, jealousy, and despair excepted, which, tho' they bear the name in common with those other more natural dispositions of the mind, I look upon rather as consequentials of the passions, and arising from them, than properly passions themselves: but however that be, it is certain, that they are altogether dependant on a fixation of ideas, reflection, and comparison, and therefore can have no entrance in the soul, or at least cannot be awakened in it, till some degree of knowledge is attained.

Thus do the dispositions of the infant indicate the future man; and though we see, in the behaviour of persons when grown up, so vast a difference, yet as all children at first act alike, I think it may be reasonably supposed, that were it not for some change in the constitution, an equal similitude of will, desires, and sentiments, would continue among us through maturity and old age; at least I am perfectly perswaded it would do so, among all those who are born in the same climate, and educated in the same principles: for whatever may be said of a great genius, and natural endowments, there is certainly no real distinction between the soul of the man of wit and the ideot; and that disproportion, which we are apt to behold with so much wonder, is only in fact occasioned by some or other of those innumerable and hidden accidents, which from our first coming into the world, in a more or less degree, have, an effect upon the organs of sense; and they being the sole canals through which the spirit shews itself, according as they happen to be extended, contracted, or obstructed, the man must infallibly appear.