My own shadow, too, on the wall not far from Mr. D.'s chair--the white paper, the sheet of Harbour Reports lying spread out on the table on the other side of the bottles--influence of mere colour, influence of shape--wonderful coalescence of scattered colours at distances, and, then, all going to some one shape, and the modification! Likewise I am more convinced by repeated observation that, perhaps, always in a very minute degree but assuredly in certain states and postures of the eye, as in drowsiness, in the state of the brain and nerves after distress or agitation, especially if it had been accompanied by weeping, and in many others, we see our own faces, and project them according to the distance given them by the degree of indistinctness--that this may occasion in the highest degree the Wraith (_vide_ a hundred Scotch stories, but better than all, Wordsworth's most wonderful and admirable poem, Peter Bell, when he sees his own figure), and, still oftener, that it facilitates the formation of a human face out of some really present object, and from the alteration of the distance among other causes never suspected as the occasion and substratum.
N.B.--This is a valuable note, re-read by me, Tuesday morning, May 14.
[Compare _Table Talk_ for January 3 and May 1, 1823, Bell & Co., 1884, pp. 20, 31-33. See, too, _The Friend_, First Landing Place Essay, iii., _Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brothers, 1853, ii. 134-137.]
Mem. always to bear in mind that profound sentence of Leibnitz that men's intellectual errors consist chiefly in _denying_. What they _affirm_ with _feeling_ is, for the most part, right--if it be a real affirmation, and not affirmative in form, negative in reality. As, for instance, when a man praises the French stage, meaning and implying his dislike of Shakspere [and the Elizabethan dramatists].
"Facts--stubborn facts! None of your theory!" A most entertaining and instructive essay might be written on this text, and the sooner the better. Trace it from the most absurd credulity--_e.g._, in Fracastorius' _De Sympathiâ_, cap. i. and the Alchemy Book--even to that of your modern agriculturists, relating their own facts and swearing against each other like ships' crews. O! it is the relation of the facts--not the facts, friend!