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Contents - ResearchSpace@Auckland - The University of Auckland

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In feeling that his voice had not been heard he then resents his ‘neglect’ and in an act <strong>of</strong>strong pride (hubris) is disdainful <strong>of</strong> society. In time this ‘lost man’, cut <strong>of</strong>f from social interactionconsoles himself in his meditations, ‘feeding his fancy’ on visionary views and slowly fades away anddies, leaving behind him ‘this seat, his only monument’. <strong>The</strong> lines left on this ‘seat’ (sedes) present a‘thesis’, an ‘argument’ about the dangers <strong>of</strong> self-love, one that warns young men ‘whose heart theholy forms <strong>of</strong> young imagination have kept pure’ to be wary <strong>of</strong> the sin <strong>of</strong> pride. 31 If they presume thatthey have a special vision <strong>of</strong> things, a special understanding <strong>of</strong> nature – that their own views are thetruth <strong>of</strong> the matter – then they must temper this knowledge with an equally strong sense <strong>of</strong> humilityfor:he, who feels contemptFor any living thing, hath facultiesWhich he has never used; that thought with himIs in its infancy<strong>The</strong> man who looks only on himself, looks only on ‘the least <strong>of</strong> nature’s works’, and is likely to fallvictim to another vice, that <strong>of</strong> scorn. By contrast:true knowledge leads to love,True dignity abides with him aloneWho, in the silent hour <strong>of</strong> inward thought,Can still suspect, and still revere himself,In lowliness <strong>of</strong> heart.<strong>The</strong> solitary’s solipsism can be described as a pathology; one that Freud would later define as‘Narcissism’. But while Wordsworth’s tale can be read by twenty-first century readers as apsychological study it is, in its original context, primarily a moral tale. In Book X <strong>of</strong> <strong>The</strong> Prelude,Wordsworth relates how he had come to appreciate that his reliance on inspired states <strong>of</strong> mind hadplaced him ‘above humanity’. In the 1850 text he uses stronger language, when describing his ‘strongimagination’ – his inflated attitude <strong>of</strong> mind – as a ‘strong disease’ (Prelude 1850: XI 306). But he alsoargued that there were mitigating circumstances; he had genuinely believed that he was a ‘chosenson’, a prophet even – having experienced what he perceived at the time to be an ‘influx’ <strong>of</strong> divinepower as he crossed Salisbury Plain in 1793 and saw visions <strong>of</strong> the past. At Racedown, Wordsworthcame to appreciate that what he thought to be mantic inspiration was in fact manic ‘inflation’– theterm is used by Carl Jung in his Analytical Psychology to define someone in the grip <strong>of</strong> a ‘god’ (anunconscious psychological complex), and who acts out an ‘archetypal’ pattern <strong>of</strong> behaviour in whichpassionate feeling prevails over reasoned thinking. 3231 ‘…if we wish to track down some argument we ought to know the places or topics [locos = locations] - thename given by Aristotle to those ‘regions’ [sedes = literally ‘seats’] so to speak, from which we can drawarguments. <strong>The</strong>refore we may define a place [topos/locos] as a location <strong>of</strong> an argument, and an argument as acourse <strong>of</strong> reasoning that firmly establishes belief about doubtful issues’ Cicero, Topica I. 7-8.32 Jung’s accommodation <strong>of</strong> the ‘spiritual’ in a modern ‘materialist’ worldview has led to the charge that hisapproach is ‘mystical’ in contrast to Freud’s supposedly ‘scientific’ claims. Jung stated that in the modernmaterialist paradigm ‘the gods have become diseases’. Freud’s model <strong>of</strong> the psyche sets up an unendingconflict between reason and emotion, while Jung idealised the relationship, hoping for an accommodation, a160

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