When I was very young (between the ages, I believe, of
three and five years old), being then of delicate health, I was
often in time of night the victim of a strange kind of mental
oppression. I lay in my bed perfectly conscious, and with open
eyes, but without power to speak or to move, and all the while my
brain was oppressed to distraction by the presence of a single and
abstract idea, the idea of solid immensity. It seemed to me in my
agonies that the horror of this visitation arose from its coming
upon me without form or shape, that the close presence of the
direst monster ever bred in hell would have been a thousand times
more tolerable than that simple idea of solid size. My aching mind
was fixed and riveted down upon the mere quality of vastness,
vastness, vastness, and was not permitted to invest with it any
particular object. If I could have done so, the torment would have
ceased. When at last I was roused from this state of suffering, I
could not of course in those days (knowing no verbal metaphysics,
and no metaphysics at all, except by the dreadful experience of an
abstract idea)--I could not of course find words to describe the
nature of my sensations, and even now I cannot explain why it is
that the forced contemplation of a mere quality, distinct from
matter, should be so terrible.
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