is also paid for by the atrophy of other tastes, pursuits, and powers.  Carlyle might have contracted an interest in frogs, and spiders, and bees, and the other denizens of the wayside, but it would have been with the surrender of some other interest, the diversion of his genius out of its present channels.  The strong emotions of the mind are not to be turned off and on, to this subject and to that.  If you begin early with a human being, you may impress a particular direction upon the feelings, you may even cross a natural tendency, and work up a taste on a small basis of predisposition.  Place any youth in the midst of artists, and you may induce a taste for art that shall at length be decided and strong.  But if you were to take the same person in middle life and immure him in a laboratory, that he might become an enthusiastic chemist, the limits of human nature would probably forbid your success.

Such very strong tastes as impart a high and perennial zest to one’s life are merely the special direction of a natural exuberance of feeling or emotion.  A spare and thin emotional temperament will undoubtedly have preferences, likings and dislikings, but it can never supply the material for fervour or enthusiasm in anything.

The early determining of natural tastes is a subject of high practical interest.  We shall only remark at present that a varied and broad groundwork of early education is the best known device for this end.

* * * * *

[Relation of feelings to imagination.]

III.  A third error, deserving of brief comment, is a singular inversion of the relationship of the Feelings to the Imagination.  It is frequently affirmed, both in criticism and in philosophy, that the Feelings depend upon, or have their basis in, the Imagination.

An able and polished writer, discussing the character of Edmund Burke, remarks:  “The passions of Burke were strong; this is attributable in great measure to the intensity of the imaginative faculty”.  Again, Dugald Stewart, observing upon the influence of the Imagination on Happiness, says:  “All that part of our happiness or misery which arises from our hopes or our fears derives its existence entirely from the power of imagination”.  He even goes the length of affirming that “cowardice is entirely a disease of the imagination”.  Another writer accounts for the intensity of the amatory sentiments in Robert Burns by the strength of his imagination.

[IMAGINATION GROUNDED IN FEELING.]