Correspondence of Henry Taylor Author:Henry Taylor Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: physics, or piqued myself on any fancied strength of my reasoning faculty. I never knew what it was to have a devotional feeling, and reason, therefore, had noth... more »ing to overcome. My satisfaction with life must rest, I fear, on somewhat precarious foundations. Yet the enjoyments of life are real so long as one puts faith in the objects of human hope and desire, and I have long endeavoured to discipline my mind so as not to trace them too far or consider them too closely. I have earthly interests which I shall not reason away. And if ever aspirations after a future existence shall appear to find footing, and the names, which seem to me now nothing more, shall impress a meaning in my mind or excite a sentiment of happiness and hope, the progress of such a change will not meet with resistance (I trust) from any vain and miserable ambition of philosophising. Yours affectionately, H. T. From Henry Taylor to Edward Villiers. Suffolk Street: October 15, 1827. The matter is that, being buried one morning in the ' Enchiridium Metaphysicum' of H. Morns, and much taken up with the scholastic scorn wherewith he insists that ghosts are ghosts, in opposition to the idle dreams of Cartesius and Vaninus, who took them to be the ' exuviae aut effluvia rerum,' and being all unconscious the while that the fire was out, the window 1827 SCOTT'S CHARACTER. 19 open, and the door ajar, it befel that I was seized with certain shiverings, which were followed by fever and sickness, of which the natural consequences were emetics, diaphoretics, and cathartics, all which reduced me to a condition in which Morus would have showed me in triumph to Cartesius and Vaninus, and assured them of the existence of a ghost, though perhaps they might have retorted that I was clearly an effluvium of myse...« less