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A Science of mind
in Wordsworths The Prelude
Pauline Ling-Hwai Wu
National Taiwan Normal University
ABSTRACT
Wordsworths The Prelude is a masterpiece of Romantic confession as a
conversion autobiography. It not only exposes the authentic I of the
autobiographer, but also speaks out the affinity between the self and the external
world. The author makes good use of a philosophical eye/one eye to explore and
penetrate the universal truth of things in existence, including nature and human
history, which are endowed with the profound mystery of mutability as well as
permanence. Such a touchstone-like truth, interestingly found, stems from the things
past in the casket of Wordsworths memory in recollection. Under the operation of
his imagination, the spots of time in the past eventually appear to be the instrument
for the Romantic poet/prophet/philosopher/natural being to preach for the revolution
of the human mind. This study is grounded on the imaginative or recollected
moments of the poets experience so as to examine how a poets mind makes its
progress on a true path for the infinite. Emphasis is placed on the explication of the
transformations of the mind in nature and society. In terms of the eighteenth-and
nineteenth-century philosophy, the study also aims to demonstrate the telos of theimagination: One focuses on the objectivity a poet should possess; another, the
renovated virtue of the mind which lies in the observation of itself with a
transcendental way of perceiving.
Keywords: spots of time, centrifugal consciousness, nature, human Nature, and
imagination
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As a philosophical confession whose autobiographer must self-evidently
perform a scientific experiment on two human natures, that is, body and soul as the
theme of self in terms of mechanism, The Prelude deals with the poets various
memorable spots of time as some patterns of humanity. In them the poet examines
and justified his self in time, and is eventually awakened to transcend the self.
Therefore, the spots of time function to endow some prophetic truths, as well as to
help with the growth of the poets mind. From this perspective of confessional
autobiography, the spots of time are the centrifugal force of consciousness the
poets soul produces, the very soul/cogito which collects images-of-thoughts in
continuity or discontinuity in similitude (The Two-Part Prelude 1799. II.
164)/simulacrum which deals with form is Resemblance of idea with a poets
natural power to feel outward things /So moulded, joined, abstracted, so endowed /
With interchangeable supremacy (XVI. 83-90) revealed in The Prelude. Those
centrifugal conscious memories the poets soul recollects can be divided into six
categories, such as human figures, events, objects, scenes, dreams, and four elements,
as the impressive memories in the poets mind. As The Prelude basically has three
versions (1799, 1805, and 1850), only 1799 version is the foundation of the spots of
time; however, other spots of time in 1805 and 1850 are added and revised in his
latter years. Besides, the main part ofThe Prelude only refers to the spots of time
about the positive and negative states of the poets mind city and in nature as a
pendulum structure, that is, to reveal emotionalism aroused by the outer objectswithout: each time and space represents his walking on each point of earth on the
circumference of the earth itself by radii. Here, the author would like to argue that
the circumferential movement of a natural body as the poets involves within and
without in motion is indispensible for the development of the poets cognitive mind
with a virtue in relation to nature, human nature, and imagination.
A. External Nature:
It is known that Wordsworth has often focused on the interaction between the
external nature and the human mind. In The Prelude, the spots of time suggesting
the communion between man and nature can be divided into two periods --- the period
of the child Wordsworth and that of the experienced. Wordsworth. They are all
mystic experiences about nature (Ferry 32). The former period refers to the spots
of time mentioned in Book I and II. In this period, the visionary gleam goes with
each incident.
Even then I feel
Gleams like the flashing of a shield; --- the earth
And common face of Nature spake to me
Rememberable things . (I. 585-88)
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Here an emphasis is placed on the influence of nature on human senses. The
relevant spots of time include Pacing the Level Field, The Lake of Comos,
Landing at Calais, The Circuit of the Lake, The Walk after a Party, etc.
However, the visionary gleam, which refers to a moment in life when the
self and the universe perfectly unify, gradually declines to be exchanged for a vision
on the recognition and acceptance of reality. The spots of time with such a mature
vision refer to Crossing the Alps at Simplon Pass, Return to Lifes Familiar Face,
Discovery of his Poetic Subject, Sight of a New World, A Vision on Mt.
Snowdon, etc.
All these spots of time result from Wordsworths deepest insight which
comes from memorable experiences connected with the external world. Nature and
Wordsworths self seem to form an intimate relationship between an addresser and a
receiver, or the object and the subject. Then what impact does nature have on
Wordsworth?
In Garrods words, Wordsworth starts, from the position not on that
Nature is good, but that it is from the natural goodness of the senses, operating simply
and directly (Havens 99). The senses as the media between the addresser and the
receiver deliver the unspeakable information of nature which nourishes Wordsworth
as a fostered child of beauty and fear.
Besides, in all spots of time about the communion between man and
nature, nature is related with a religious sense as Wordsworth finds Faith in themarvelous things --- / Oft in these moments such a holy calm / Would overspread my
soul, that bodily eyes / Were utterly forgotten (II. 346-49). It seems that nature as a
mirror of self makes Wordsworth see his own nature --- a man of sympathies (II.
175), morality, justice and even divinity. Nature, therefore, incarnates the House of
God (III. 407) where An auxiliary light / Came from my mind (III. 368-69) to
commune with external things. Such spots of time include, Pacing the Level
Fields, The Circuit of the Lake, The Walk After a Party, and Reading Books by
the Boarders of Derwent River.
Moreover, Geometric rules (II. 204) used to observe the orderly system
of the tars offer Wordsworth a way to explore the unknown permanent relations
between natural objects and man, and make him perceive the unity of all (II. 221),
including the cyclical circulation of the four seasons, and the four elements which
repeatedly generate objects of the universe, growing things, inferior animals, minerals,
man, etc. As Wordsworth confesses, nature is for him with its permanent traits of
order and infinite and incapable of change (VII. 222). The spots of time with
such a sense of eternity include Pacing the Level Field, The Convent of Chartreuse
as a spot of earth devoted to eternity (VI. 408-88), etc. Therefore, the scientific
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way to look into nature seems to show that all, including human figures, events,
objects, etc., are prefigurative as Gods word (IV. 222). For Wordsworth, hence,
nature is life, and change, and beauty, solitude / More active even than best society,
one of society made sweet as solitude by inward concords (II. 294-96). Nature is
for him to gain the egotistical sublime (Kant, Judgement, 98). So, such a way to
explore nature also reflects his own personality, just as he says, he must live /
Knowing that he grows wiser every day / or else not live at all (V. 324-25). He
proves to be a man of wisdom in nature.
Nature intends Wordsworth for poet (Wordsworth, The Prelude, 598)
because things that teach as / Nature teaches (V. 231). He inherits one part of its
ministry, beauty, and decides to minister to works of high attempt (III. 389-390)
since his very early life. On the other hand, another part of natures ministry is fear
or awe which may also serve as a stimulus for the poets imagination. In fact, fear as
a dark shadow always obsesses him in life. For example, he fears drift in the
world unknown (V. 239), while he is doomed to loiter mentally due to the loss of his
parents. Once facing problems of the self in time, he gets used to shrinking back to
nature as his temporary spiritual home without end. Henceforth, the ministry of
nature affects the physically homeless child positively as well as negatively.
As far as the above five traits are concerned, nature is a symbol of eternity
or immortality, beauty, truth, hope and faith though it still has a negative influence on
Wordsworth. Therefore, for the mortal being, nature seems to play a crucial role as ashelter for escape from the self in time and space. Regarding this motif, two points
have to be clarified. Firstly, Wordsworth escapes from the self in time and space
only to seek for some transient repose in nature. We may show that Wordsworths
sense of time lies in his awareness of his changing state of mind. Immanuel Kant
supposes that time and space are the two pure forms of sense inherent in our faculty
which enable us to have temporal and spatial experiences; time is the inner sense
and space, the outer sense (Kant, Reason, 68). For Kant, space, as the pure form
of all outer intuition, is so far limited; it serves as an a priori condition only of outer
appearances. But since all representations, whether they have for their objects
outer images or not, belong, in themselves, as determinations of the mind, to our inner
state; and since this inner state stands under the formal condition of inner intuition,
and so belongs to time, time is an a priori condition of all appearances whatever (Kant,
Reason, 77). Therefore, we might figure out that the spots of time in childhood
are a gaining of transcendental vision; the spots of time with a mature vision are at
once a gaining and a losing of time; gaining the secular socially-structured sense of
time but losing the transcendental one.
Secondly, nature is eternity or immortality that lies at both ends of life, and
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the sequence of life is circulous without end: eternity mortality eternity.
However, mans mortality is truly moments in the being / Of the eternal silence
(Ode: Intimations of Immortality, 155-56).1 Therefore, the temporal self in time
and space continuously seeks for eternity since the loss of the vision is the loss of the
feeling of immortality, and thus also an entering into an awareness of death. That is
why he has no fear when he encounters death in such incidents as The Drowned Man
and There Was a Boy. Such incidents all end in mysterious deaths and can be read
as epitaphs, which unquestionably signify continuity: Death is a way of conquering
time and not yielding to time. Nevertheless, it is interesting to find that the device of
arranging the scenes of death in the beautiful landscape serves to eternalize the
time-space-limited idea of death. Nature, henceforth, is endowed with immortality
and death. Nature is no longer an ordinary entity, but what Wordsworth half
perceives and half creates with imagination.
B. Human nature
As the theme of Book VIII is love of nature leading to love of man,
human nature is therein well expounded. In books I and II, it is nature that reflects
Wordsworths nature as sympathetic, just and moral and his personality as fond of
inquiring into the truth of nature. He seems to perfectly understand the eternal
essence of nature and therefore can elevate his mind above the lowest class of the
Chain of Being.
2
The spots of time with a vision on human nature are bestexemplified by The Shepherd in the Mist, from which Wordsworth recognizes the
moral goodness of humanity in nature, and by An Adventure to a Huge Cave where
Wordsworth envisions good and evil hearts (III. 670) in society.
The subject matter of the two incidents deals with different human beings in
nature or society, that is, human life. The Shepherd in the Mist is associated with
his real identity: a man / With the most common; husband, father; learned, / Could
teach, admonish; suffered with the rest / From vice and folly wretchedness and fear
(VIII. 288-91). An Adventure to a Huge Cave, provides Wordsworth with more
elevated view of human nature: Neither vice or guilt (VIII. 645) and Nor all the
misery forced upon my sight (VIII. 647) but the ignorance of human beings. He
also imagines himself to be a solitary with the mind of Adam (VIII. 659) in the Lost
Paradise and has to suffer from and undergo the sad life with everything divine, if
only for the Paradise Regained. Besides, he envisions the huge city where the unity
of man shares One spirit over ignorance and vice / Predominant, in good and evil
hearts (VIII. 669-79). Interesting is it here that he distinguishes himself from others
in society as if the self is the subject and the other are the objects or the mass.
Nevertheless, no matter what nature Wordsworth digs out, the two spots of time
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about human nature are respectively expressive of the general humanity of suffering.
For Wordsworth, the two incidents happening in Grasmere, the chosen vale,
seem to become the standard of human nature when he practices it in the real world,
where he finds some truths about human life. The events of massacres taking place
during the French Revolution, e.g., The September Massacres, reveal the truth of
recurrent history. Concerning this, Wordsworth makes a figurative comparison in
Book X:
The horse is taught his manage, and no star
Of wildest course but treads back his own steps;
For the spent hurricane the air provides
As fierce a successor; the tide retreats
But to return out of its hiding-place
In the great deep: all things have second birth. (X. 76-83)
This passage explicates the developments of human history related to time. J.
Robert Barth evaluates The Prelude from two contrary attitudes toward time: One is a
traditional way of seeing time as a line consisting of an infinite number of points, a
temporal view which constantly produces in one a negative feeling as it often reveals
the emptiness of life. The other attitude, a more positive one, regards time as a sense
of being as one lives through life from one phase to the next (139-50). Time is made
meaningful in this view of life, and it provides on with the opportunity of having an
insight into life. Barth distinguishes between cyclic time and linear time andconcludes that the lattter can be further divided into personal or internal time and
historical time. For Wordsworth, the historical moment to know the events of
massacres, e.g., The September Massacres, refers to not only his personal time but
also the cyclical time. He retrospects the transformation of the French history from
1788 to 1794: Thousands of years of imperialism The Republican Establishment
(1788-1792) The Great Terror (1792-1794). The progress of human history
seems to develop from the dictatorship through democracy and back to dictatorship.
Thus, history proves to be cyclical. Besides, in terms of his personal time,
Wordsworth, sleepless at a night in a hotel, realizes that human sufferings, e.g, The
September Massacres, result from the uncertain change of history. He ascribes the
errors of history to the rulers, such as Louis XVI, Roberpierre, and William Pitt, who
implemented wrong politics against human longing for equity and reason (X. 206).
They are The Shepherds in Societies but Societys unreasoning herd (X. 168)
who, with A domineering instinct, serves at once /Fro way and guide that is mind,
whose it ought to be, in self-restraint, / In circumspection and simplicity, Falls /
Below its aim, or meets with, form without, A treachery (X. 168-178). The
revelation leads Wordsworth to cry out with the human will of revolution (X. 272)
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--- Man has a natural right to defy against the old institutionism, i.e., the civil policy
should be made by man, and tyrannicide is allowed, if necessary.
Wordsworth further attempts to justify the ways of nature (God) to man by
revealing the first cause of human sufferings. Dreams of Imprisonment and Long
Orations is concluded interestingly with Wordsworths traditional thinking of human
original sin as a terrific reservoir of guilt / And ignorance filled up form age to age, /
that could no longer hold its loathsome charge, / But Burst and spread in deluge
through the land (X. 477-80).
However, the cause of human sufferings is not convincing until Wordsworth
anatomizes the frame of social life, as in it he finds the fact that human nature is not
guilty and ignorant but Misguided and Misguiding (XI. 293) by those social beings
in cities.
And the errors into which I fell, betrayed
By present objects, and by reasoning false
From their beginnings, inasmuch as drawn
Out of a heart that had been turned aside
From Natures way by outward accidents,
And which was thus confounded more and more,
Misguided and misguiding. So I feared,
Dragging all percepts, judgments, maxims, and creeds,
Like culprits to the bar . (XI. 287-95)In this passage, we are likely to inter that human sufferings, as we previously
mentioned, spring from the historical experiments of wrong politics the rulers have
adopted, while those rulers are also misguided by some false reasonings, e.g.,
Godwinism, thus misleading their people to suffer more than they deserve. It seems
to conform to the Hegelian theory of history that consciousness of the rulers
determines life (Selden 136). The point may be exemplified in the events about
the political expansionism and the foreign invasions, e.g., The Declaration of War of
France against Holland and England in 1793 or The ancien regime Failed in 1793
with foreign interventions of Prussia and Austria.
Wordsworths distinguish the human heart of the vulgar men (VIII. 545) in
social and in nature: the vulgar as the inferior creatures are characteristic of different
vulgar forms/bodies (XIII. 356) with vulgar eyes as the bodily eyes (X. 444).
The vulgar humans in city have vulgar nature (XIII. 189), both good and evil
hearts (VIII. 670) due to different vulgar passions (VIII. 320) or desire and
ensuing actions of doing evils or being misguided and misled as he says that in a huge
city a unity of man, / One spirit over ignorance and vice / Predominant, in good an
devil hearts; (VIII. 668-70), just as they have different oppressive idea or ignorance
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to be oppressed so that they are lost of their primary nature of universal heart (XIII.
220), living with the deformities of crowded life (VIII. 332), and suffering from a
historical process of collective consciousness, the revolutionary wars taking place
between nations, whose societys unreasoning herd makes the loud distractions of the
world; the city in the same perpetual whirl of trivial objects is reduced to one identity,
by difference and oppression (VII. 725-77): difference makes the world turbulent.
Wordsworths anatomy of the whole body/frame of social life unfolds the absolute
quality of those people in city as sin-and-cosin triangles or a rectangle:
spieces/specimens of man (VII. 221) on earth as the expression of the
mathematical equation of transmuting ratio of the vulgar in city. They are
transitory things (VII. 771) as images-of-thought in motion in similitude and in
continuity and discontinuity present to the poets mind. However, he explicates the
vulgar in nature in the positive goodness of human nature though they still suffer from
their different relative effect of their absolute cause according to objective reality
(Meditation III, 169). As in the chosen Grasmere Vale as the domes of pleasure
(VIII. 84-85), the paradise / Where I was reared; in Natures primitive gifts/
Delicious, seeing that the sun and the sky, / The elements, and seasons as they change
/ Do find a worthy fellow-labourer there --- / Man free, man working for himself, with
choice / Of time, and place, and object; by his wants, / His comforts, native
occupations, cares, / Cheerfully led to individual ends (VIII. 98-108). In the Vale,
the vulgar with less desire live carefree with blisses; therefore, they never lose theirprimary nature of simplicity / And beauty, and inevitable grace (VIII. 110) in the
poets train / unwooed, unthought mind (VIII. 109-110). Those plaintive human
figures include The Old Dame, The Old Man, the solitary figures, the shepherds,
women and children --- all conform to nature in every way and live with content to
work by day and rest at night though they live in meanness and humbleness, and
sometimes may suffer from the unexpected deluge of nature. The establishment of
the Wordsworthian utopia seems to show a-historical sense, a transcendental overturn
of the relation between the subject and the object in society by his distinction of the
vulgar in city and nature in The Prelude.
C. The ImaginationAs far as we have known, the spots of time in nature and society reveal
the truth of nature and human nature. Therefore, we may say that nature and society
serve as the media through which Wordsworth gradually becomes aware of the
metamorphasis within himself in time. Nevertheless, through the imagination that
unifies associations of the spots of time in nature and society, Wordsworth gains his
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poetic power. Who are the spots of time related to the imagination as a theme he
confesses in The Prelude? What is the imagination? Here we want to adopt Kants
idea of time to explore the progress of the imagination in Wordsworths mind.
The 18th-century philosophers, like Hume, share the idea that time is relevant to
an outer object in the external world. The sense of time is still empirical and must be
rooted in sense-perception experience according to the associative connection of
stimulus by an object, motions of the brain, the muscles, ideas, and actions. The
mind itself has associative ideas like time in contiguity, succession, and so forth.
However, Kant against Humes passive mind assumes the automatic mind which
consists of time and space as a priori condition: time, involving a sense of space, is
analyzed as something inherent in our faculties. In Kants philosophy, time is not
even a concept: Time is not a discursive, or what is called a general concept, but a
pure form of sensible intuition (Kant, Reason, 75). For Kant, time is no longer an
object of our knowledge as English Empiricists assume, but a subjective prerequisite
of knowledge; and time is not only independent of external things but independent of
experiences as well. That is, it does not form empirical sources as his predecessors
assume, but is required in evoking a temporal experience. According to Kants
concept of time as a pure form of intuition, we may explicate the fact that our sense of
time is actually not a sense of time but a personal time. Namely, dependent on ones
personal needs and individual sensibility, the imaginative mind as the subject play an
active role to view the object, including human figures, events, objects, etc., fromwhich the subject gains a spiritual relation. That is, as Wordsworth says, The mind
is lord and master (XII. 222). Nevertheless, the concept of the mind-oriental
provides a context in which to interpret the supremacy of the Wordsworthian mind or
imagination. Then, what is the process of the growth of a poets mind? I argue
here that the poets mind grows from passivity since his childhood to automatics after
IX in The Prelude.
In Book II of The Prelude, Wordsworth says, the soul [imagination] ---/
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt / Remembering not --- retains an
obscure sense / of possible sublimity (II. 334-37). From the past tense of felt and
the present tense of retains, we may feel that, through time and space, the sense
sublimity implies love, for Wordsworth says, To fear and love, / To love as prime
and chief, for there fear ends --- By love subsists / All lasting grandeur, by pervading
love (XI. 162-69). Here we may sense that the imagination purposes to reach the
telos of egotistical sublime by confessing all excited negative emotions, like fear,
languish, etc., in those spots of time since childhood from I to IX in The Prelude
where he undergoes experiences in society and in nature and experiences arouse the
subjects different states of mind with different emotions expressed in the spots of
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time as the outer world. Similar to Kants idea of the sublimity, Wordsworths is
the reflective judgement on the object, not the object itself (Kant, Judgement, 97),
through a particular representation of the soul [imagination]. As Descartes in Rules
has already suggested that to think/confess not language but a space of time or
image in motion is to erase itself for perceptions or thoughts, because the
image-of-thought in motion is the hindrance to the innate light primary per se. In
this respect, Wordsworths concept of sublimity results from the automatic mind as it
is expounded in his essay The Sublime and the Beautiful: Power awakens the
sublime when it rouses us to a sympathetic energy & calls upon the mind to grasp
at something towards which it can make approaches but which it is incapable of
attaining (Wordsworth, Prose Works, 354).
Wordsworth in The Prelude points out the automatic mind which originates in
two natures (XIV. 346) as a duality: one is body and another, soul. In Book III,
he says, Nor was I Master of my eyes (III. 11) when looking at a student, clothed
in Gown and tasseled Cap, / Striding along (III. 8-9). Later in Book XII, the two
natures logically develop into the idea that The mind is lord and master --- outward
sense / The Obedient Servant of her will (XII. 222-23). In other works, the relation
of the automatic mind to two natures takes on the process from discordance to
concordance or from passiveness to activeness.
Therefore, the spots of time in nature and society offer the mind a media for
their interchangeable reconciliation to reach the telos of egotistical sublime by settingWordsworth free from a negative sense of fear. To be digression here, what
characteristics the imaginative spots of time can display in The Prelude? Let s
to go further to dig into them respectively.
The spots of time in childhood are what Kant calls subreption ---
substitution of a respect for the Object in place of one for the idea of humanity in our
own self the Subject (Kant, Judgement, 106).
In the childhood experiences of Books I and II, Wordsworth is fostered by
beauty and fear in nature in that he credits genii loci or spirits of nature as the agent of
the childhood incidents, e.g;, Stealing a Boat, Playing by Derwent River a
Playmate, etc.
In The Penrich Beacon and One Christmas Day incidents of Book XII, the
visionary dreariness or the dreary time, seen in the light of the principle of
association and the transfer of emotions, is derivative of the child Wordsworths
anxiety, feverishness, tiredness or restlessness. The poets mind in childhood is
passive because the associative ideas and emotions are derivative of the excitement of
outer objects to sense-perceptions. Descartes calls this stage passivity when the
subject only has a common sense (Rules for the Direction of the Mind, 37).
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Hume assumes that the associative ideas of the subject must be ensuing after seeing
the object so that idea cannot be prior to objects. The crux of the transformation of
these feelings into the visionary dreariness or the dreary time lies in the
imagination in the childs blank misgivings and high instinct (Ode: Intimations
of Immortality, 9.141-46). In the two childhood incidents, Wordsworth seems to
emphasize that the sight or the outward eye is in truth an ordinary one. Nevertheless,
through the working of the imagination from the child, the landscape is expressive of
the childs feelings.
From these childhood events, we may feel that in living a world of life,3 the
subject is destined to be bounded by the outward eye, the outward, potentially
listening to (Hartman 182) the sounds and senses of the external nature ---
subservient strictly to external things / With which is communed (II. 368-69). The
mind of the poet, thus, appears passive to observe the affinities / in objects (II.
385-86). That is, the genii loci or the landscape arouses the poetic imagination.
The child Wordsworth externalizes the internal act of imagination with only a
passionate belief in the influence of genii loci or nature as the agent of the childhood
spots of time.
Therefore, in the first two books, the spots of time are expressive of four
elements of the imagination. At first, the imagination results from Rememberable
thing (Il.588). In recollection, all their forms / And changeful colours by invisible
links / Were fatened to the affection (I. 611-12).Secondly, the imagination results from meditation when A tranquilizing spirit
may press to make Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself / And of same other
Being II, 31-32) conversant with one another.
Thirdly, the imagination, the one great Mind (II. 257), is combined with
imparted power through the growing faculties of sense (II. 256), as the Poetic
spirit of our human life looms up (II. 262).
At last, the imagination results from nature. To unorganic Natures were
transferred / My own enjoyments; or the Power of truth, / Coming in revelation (II.
392-93). That is, the imagination is ever accompanied with the principle of
[intellectual] joy / And purest passion of the soul (II. 451 -520) so as to observe the
affinities / in objects (II. 385-86).
In Book I, the ministry of nature, through beauty and fear, nourishes
Wordsworths nature and his extreme personality as well. This seems to loom up as
a trace that he, since childhood, has had an unknown complex of both positive beauty
and negative fear in the unconscious abyss. In My Heart Leaps Wordsworth
elucidates a theme: The child is father of the Man (Adams 160). If the landscape
or nature which helps delineate the growth of the min, is gradually internalized and
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turned into a sublime image of the imagination, yet society, which might help with the
growth of mind, is also gradually internalized and turned into a fearful image of the
imagination. These two forces of beauty and fear may always oscillate in
Wordsworths mind when he starts to get in touch with society. Edmund Burke, in
analyzing the feeling of the sublime, writes, Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite
the idea of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is
conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror (fear), is
a source of the sublime (39). For Wordsworth the quality of the external, including
human figures, events, objects, or scenes, eventually gives rise to his feeling of the
sublime, while the eternal which may arouse negativism will be gradually clarified by
the automation of his willing mind to procure a sense of sublimity. From Book III to
Book XI, it is clear that the mind is still passive though the truth of life is gained
gradually as a recompense to the poet. This is so partly because the mind of the
subject involves itself so much in the external everywhere in London and France that
it is able to imagine intensely and comprehensively, and partly because the external
spots of time, good or evil, bright or dark, are all gradually internalized to form
imbalance of a fearful sense over a sublime sense in the subjects mind. It can be
proved that before Book VIII, the spots of time in fear only take place eight times,
but most spots of time in France are full of fear to Wordsworth, e.g., The
September Massacres, etc. What these indicate is that with a sense of fear over joy,
the inspired spirit begins to decline due to those spots of time in cities as ahindrance which involves the negative emotions of the soul --- the imaginative gentle
breeze (joy and delight) in the opening book ofThe Prelude is intensified to become
a storm (indignation and fear) in France (Jonathan Wordsworth, The Prelude, 644).
It is very interesting to find that the epic-like poem begins as a search for poetic
identity by bringing together nature, society, memory and the imagination.
Nevertheless, as soon as each spots of time is confessed in it, the inspiration of the
poet is already on decline. The Prelude appears that it is merely a feeble shadow of
the original concept of the poet (Adams 527).
Wordsworth has probably intended to solve the problem concerning the remote
relation between the poet himself and his confessional poem. In the end of Book XI,
a short intimate confession of Wordsworth to Coleridge (XI. 395-460) --- talking
about the ancient poets in Sicily and Etnas summit which survive for inspiration
(XI. 462) --- seems to function as a dues ex machine to save Wordsworth from being
trapped in the loss of his past. Anyway, from Book III to Book XI, the crucial spots
of time are expressive of some characteristics of the imagination.
For Wordsworth, the imagination derives from a sympathetic mind of the poet
while Shellys concept of sympathetic imagination is usually based on morality.
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In Pacing the Level Field, Wordsworth gives a moral life to the in-animated stone
(III. 30). Most critics, like Raymond Dexter Havens, might describe the poets
attitude toward natural bodies or things as a device of animism/personification (68)
of the imagination to represent the poets equal mind towards the external. He is
sympathetic with the Military Soldier as the poor friendless man, saying in pity,
Come with me (V. 426). The similar spots of time include: The Blind Beggar,
Some Unhappy Woman, The Hunger-Bitten Crept Girl, A Father Eyes a Sickly
Babe in His Arms with love unutterable, etc.
The imagination is related to the external objects which display different traits.
The poets mind in creation is compared to an inconstant wind as in Pacing the Level
Field Wordsworth says, I was obedient as a lute / That waits upon the touches of the
win (III. 141-42).
Besides, some spots of time show that the imagination is something divine.
They include The Circuit of the Lake, the Walk after a Party, The Dream of the
Arab, The Convent of Chartreuse, The Lake of Comos, etc. Especially, in The
Dream of the Arab, the shell, which articulate sounds / A loud prophetic blast of
harmony (V. 95-96), seems to suggest that the imagination is the fountain of all
thoughts and knowledge.
In There Was a Boy, the imagination is described in a figurative term as the
steady lake which is associated with memory. That is, once a poet starts to recollect
the past, some ripples are evoked in the bosom of the steady lake.The Walks with his Terror has the idea that the imagination may spring from
an intimate animal with stormy joy (IV. 416).
These spots of time are likely to suggest that the external objects exist in the
mind the poet, which is itself the image of all other minds. In arousing the
Visionary Power a poet is able to perpetuate them in a metaphorical way of writing
Embodied in the mystery of words (V. 599).
Moreover, the imagination may also have nothing to do with great nature, The
Drowned Man in a beautiful landscape does not evoke Wordsworths emotion in that
he is preoccupied with the Greco-Roman classics at the first spot. In addition, the
imagination is like a mirror which makes something distorted and then beautiful.
Such spots of time as The Shepherd in the Mist and Adventure to a Huge Cave
mirror the good and the evil of human nature. This seems to show that the
immediate fancy, arising from the real shepherd n a distance and the art on the cave,
turns out to be imaginative infinity.
Apart from the above-mentioned four traits, the imagination may result from an
unexpected immediacy which may be found at that transient moment. In Crossing
the Alps at Simplon Pass, the poet is ambitious to climb the Alps and feels lost on the
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emergence of the imagination. When crying out, I recognize thy glory (VI. 600),
Wordsworth realizes that the reality failed to live up to Wordsworths anticipation.4
On the other hand, in A vision on Mt. Snowdon, he at once feels that the moonlight
is like a flash (XIV. 38) of the imagination.
Book XII and Book XIII deal with how the imagination is impaired and
restored. The most vital factor of it lies in the measure of recollection which helps
the mind of the subject review the spots of time respectively as expressive images.
In recollection, his mind seems to go back to the first spots, good and evil, bright or
dark, positive or negative, but form them he finds the roof of its sick confusion. As
Descartes says in The Passions of the Soul where he inquiries into the root of desire
from the desiring machine of the body once unified to the soul, he assumes that due to
animal spirits strongest to be forced to enter the soul, desire not only comes from
sense-perceptions on the outer objects, but also from the impressions of the
perceptions within because of the mind intoxicate / With present object (XIII. 30)
and latter their images wanderings deeply or impressions within from the soul or the
quantity of spirits: the one has the soul as a cause and the other the body; those which
have the soul as a cause are the perceptions of our desires, and of all the imaginations
or other thoughts which depend on them (340), since the imagination of children as
a tabula rasa on which our ideas, which resemble portraits of each object taken from
nature, should depict themselves and all imperfect senses, blind instinct are the
first to mingle themselves with our intelligence (The Search after Truth, 311-12).Desire comes from the quantity of spirits toward the brain, the soul, and the body to
fortify the idea of the wish, that is, through the organs of the senses and all the
muscles to be employed in obtaining that which one desires (The Passions of the
Soul, 378) since any memory of things past remaining and imprint on a childs brain
in a mothers womb to the end of his life (391). Therefore, the outer and the inner
perceptions must arouse different emotions or passions, in referring to desire, which
involve the actions to be good or evil: as the cause of the good or evil, present as
well as past; the good which has been done give an internal satisfaction which is the
sweetest of all the passions; while the evil excite repentance, which is the most bitter
(The Passions of the Soul, 360). However, Descartes also assumes that pains
might be suffered with joy or pleasurable sensations received to cause displeasure.
Positive and negative passions are not so distinctive but due to any arousal of the idea
in immediacy. Like Ode: Intimations of Immortality, Book XII and Book XIII
emphasize the fact that the subject is elevated to be a transcendental being Nor Man
nor Boy (George, 209. 158) because truths that wake, / To perish never; (George,
208. 155-56). In this respect, we find that recollection is a way of psychological
treatment. General patients need narcosis for a treatment of mental obsessions
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(Wolman 71). The main basis of the treatment aims to search for the cause of the
patients sick history. Recollection offers a similar way to recover the fearful mind
of the subject. But the case is different here in that the poet himself is his patent and
his own doctor as well. He first cures himself by means of the confessional
composition of his spots of time in the poem. Nevertheless, through recollection,
he finds back his soul: a storm is appeased to go back to ye breezes and soft airs
(XII. 10) so as to envision his future with hope.
Actually, nature as a positive power can overturn the negative power in the
society. The relation between the former and the latter seems to take on a mental
stormy war between the extreme passion ad the extreme reason in the mind of the
poet. However, it is at the moment of mental crisis that the subjects original nature
(sympathy, wisdom and even divinity) is reborn to arbitrate and harmonize the mental
battle. As in Return to a Familiar Face, the imagination of the subject levels down
the Chain of Being: Present objects --- a temperate shew / Of objects that endure
(XIII. 31-32) and In Man, in the frame of social life --- desirable and good / Of
kindred permanence, unchanged in form / And function, or through strict vicissitude /
Of life and death revolving (XIII. 35-39). Therefore, in the illuminative spot of
time the horizon of this mind enlarges because his intellectual love overflows to gain
an insight into the equalitarianism between external objects and man as an object of
delight, / Of imagination, and love (XIII. 49-50). This may imply that as he
acquires self-understanding and self-confidence, fear in mind no longer exists. Hismind starts to become its own master, as Descartes assumes that the infinitude of
innate ideas of natural things only from the mind by nature because those ideas of
nature which accords with my nature (Meditation V, 179). At Sight of a New
World, the mind the subject no longer drifts but abides by the fixed laws (XIII. 371)
of nature to interact with the outward eye.
By those fixed laws
Whence spiritual dignity originates,
Which do both give it being and maintain
A balance, an ennobling interchange
Of action from within, and from without;
The excellence, pure function, and best power
Both of the object seen, and eye that sees. (XIII. 371-77).
Therefore, in A Vision of Mt. Snowdon, Wordsworth speaks of the
imagination which can not be divided with the intellectual love (XIV. 207) as the
higher mind (XIV. 90) which emphasizes the importance of the synthesis between
the he extreme passions and extreme reason. As Descartes says in The Passions of
the Soul, the soul has two parts: one is the inferior, the sensuous [the irrational];
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another, the superior which is rational (The Passions of the Souls, 353), between
the natural appetites and the will of the soul itself. He also indicates the origin of
desire coming from spirits, The passion of desire is an agitation of the soul caused by
the spirits which dispose it to wish for the future the things which it represents to itself
as agreeable (The Passions of the Soul, 369). Only in a composed and moderate
state to synthesize both can the mind be a master to dominate the outward eyes
(sense-perceptions) and to operate faculties of the subject because sense-perceptions
of the outer objects must arouse the fancy of the imagination which the body with
nerves must excite. Thus, the mind finds out its spiritual home, that is, a sublime,
composed and poetic mind, but it does not depend on nature for its external home.
What is the spiritual home?
One thing needs to be clarified here. Wordsworth believes that there is a
certain healing power lying in nature and the imagination. Crossing the Alps at
Simplon Pass and A Vision on Mt. Snowdon show that the telos of the imagination:
The poet involves himself in nature, the eternal, the infinite, and even identifies
himself with the one life. The two spots of nature display the progress of the mind.
The former event only shows that the mind is still dominated by the outward eyed;
therefore, it is merely has a quasi-apocalyptic vision of the exterior (Harman 242).
However, the latter event takes place after Wordsworths being a very down of life so
that it further gives a full vision of man, nature and human life. In The Prospectus
to The Recluse, Wordsworth remain Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, love and Hope,/ And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith (767-68). It is implied here that there
exists some relations among them. For Wordsworth, impressive natural scenes
conceal some truths about man and human life: human nature is based on goodness as
the Shepherd in the Mist and human life in society is good or evil as An Adventure
to a Huge Cave. Thomas Mcfarland points out: Wordsworths On Man
corresponds to Coleridges idea of having first to mediate the faculties of Man in the
abstract --- On Human Life corresponds to Coleridges understanding that You
would take the Human Race in the concrete --- And the middle term of Wordsworths
progression, On Nature, is rendered by Coleridges plan for Reconciliation from
this Enmity with Nature (McFarland 609). Actually, this critique might lose an
angle to know what and how the aesthetic experience is formed and penetrated
through the pure/ spiritual mind, including archetype, rectangle triangle, or other
absolute truth of natural things.
Henceforth, Wordsworth seems to expound that once returning to nature, man
becomes a primitive native or The transitory Being with genuine insight (The
Prospectus to The Recluse, 95). In nature, one may have a Heart in genuine
freedom: --- all pure thoughts --- so shall they unfailing love / Guide, and support, and
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cheer me to the end (The Prospectus to The Recluse, 105-08). Therefore, nature
is a healing power for the man of mind. So in I Wander Lonely as a Cloud, a
vision of the beautiful daffodils immediately bestows the perceivers inward eye with
a sense of joy and beauty. Such a benevolent power from nature seems to prove
Keats maxim, Beauty is truth, truth beauty (Ode to the Nightingale, V. 49). 5 In
Tintern Abbey Wordsworth says that in nature he can hear the still, sad music of
humanity; in the mind of man: / A motion of a spirit, that impels /All thinking
things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things (Tinern Abbey,
92-103). In this regard, nature or the landscape is internalized through the
imagination which then externalizes the perfect image of a might mind (XIII. 69) as
suggested in the Prelude: In Natures presence stood, as I stand now, / A sensitive,
and a creative soul (XI. 255-56). In The Prelude, Wordsworth creates a heroic
argument --- the autonomy of the imaginative mind. For him the triumph of the
mind is at the same time an affirmation of his poetic identity.
It is interesting that in The Prelude, Wordsworth attempts to escape himself in
time from the world of Poor human vanity (V. 329), but he sees the transformation
of his mind in the face of it. He does not, thus, succeed in is escape but succeeds in
communing with all in love. It is likely to show a dialectical view of the growth of
Wordsworthian mental history: positivism (nature) negativism (society)
imaginative synthesis of both to go beyond; passive mind active mind; gain of
inspiration (in nature)
loss of inspiration (in society)
gain of a transcendentalinspiration (in nature). The negativism in society is therefore indispensable for the
chosen son to search the truths of the fallen earth and the truth of inner state
(Lindenberger 142). The philosophical development of the poets mind results, as
Keith G. Thomas assumes, from an oscillating tension between that hard-won
transcendentalism and a reemergent, reenergized, atavistic empiricism (15).
So far, in The Prelude, it is seen that a progress of the poets thought is achieved
from sensing, imagining, thinking, perceiving, understanding, cognitive intuition,
without intuition the innate light appear as a virtue is repaired (XII. 215). However,
imagination is just an aid of a process of thoughts. Imagination comes from
passivity in the poets childhood due to the stimulus of the outer objects present to
the poets mind: the imagination is produced due to illusion of my heart (George,
Elegiac Stanzas, 189. 29). His adultlescent age to be framed by body in those
spots of time in city, his loss of imagination is that of the gleam of light endowed
by nature since the poets birth in relation to the theory of gravity. The lost as dark
folds of the soul, after confession, become most active (XIII. 259) to read the
invisible soul (XIII.. 256) for the impaired virtue as the nourishment of a good taste
of the poets body and a good sense of his mind, as heart and mind / Renighted: but,
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the dawn beginning now / To re-appear and the mind intoxicate / With present
objects, and the busy dance / Of things that pass away (XIII. 17-31). The
imagination is accompanied with spiritual Love (XVI. 188-89) and the light of
right reason (XVI. 92-93) With an absolute power and clear insight, the higher
mind is a spiritual mind to have a pure understanding of the platonic ideas of forms,
as the emblem of a mind / That feeds upon infinity that broods/ Over the dark
abyss, intent to hear / Its voices issuing froth to silent light / In one continuous stream;
a mindsustained/ In [good] sense conducting to ideas form, / In soul of more than
mortal [body] privilege (XIII. 70-77). It is image-deleting/confessing makes the
poets virtue renovated and the condition of renovated health in his physics (XVI.
26-28) through the whole spots of time revealed in The Prelude.
Moreover, we also verified the progress of the poets mind coming from the
spots of time functioning as a circumferential movement of the Romantic poet as a
natural being on earth by a radii; simultaneously as a renovating virtue (XII. 210) of
his mind: a virtue is without fear by deleting all emotional or desiring spots of time
in motion within due to without as absolute presence of reality (VII. 234). Such a
virtue is a natural power of just, courageous, moderate as Descartes defines (The
Principle of Philosophy, 217) in this chapter. Nevertheless, the spots of time in
confessional recollection reveals a subjective time of the poet through the operation
of his imagination in terms of Kants aesthetic theory because all spots of time
involve the poets different emotions, positive or negative, distinction, distraction,errors of false reasoning until the last two chapters (XIII and XIV) he starts to explain
the higher/automatic mind from the passive one. Even from natural spots of time
the mind of the poet is renovated with a virtue so that the higher mind can be
endowed with the intellectual beauty without fear and can have the understanding
faculty of the epistemology of natural things, like the external heaven as the other
Being of consciousness (1805. The Prelude XVI. 119). However, in the end ofThe
Prelude he is still in the worldly states of mind even he chooses to live a moderated,
thus composed/disinterested (XIII. 48) state of mind an objet of delight / Of pure
imagination, and of love (XIII. 49-50) without fear and emotions as desire though he
has already confessed all errors he has made as self-anniallation he has made since
childhood (frame of the mind, including body and soul or heart as I-image, social
life, external things, the schemes for revolutionary wars, as images-of-thought); under
the circumstance it means that the cosmopolitan poet walking on the earth is just at a
fixed point of circumference as a moderate point in relation to the theory of gravity
according to the principle of mechanism; the moderate point is the only fixing point to
the central point as 1/absolute motion rather than 2/relative motion, in referring to the
circumferential movement of the poet walking on the surface of the earth; that is, he
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has become a saint or a natural being with a virtue of brevity (without fear) in face of
human destiny of transference which attracted to the good or the evil path as The
end of life (VIII. 529) he might go to. It means that his virtue is not completely
recovered still in the end ofThe Prelude, as in the Snowdon where he confesses he
is still A meditative, oft a suffering man (XVI. 143) though the poets spiritual mind
can deal with the compass of the universe (XVI. 92) and penetrate the innate ideas
of things, In one continuous streams; a mind sustained / By recognitions of
transcendent power, / In sense conducting to ideal form, / In soul of more than mortal
privilege (XVI. 14. 74-77) in the awful and sublime circumstances. In Snowdon
where the poets nature, the sea of mist by analogous to the power of the human
imagination, has transformed the Snowdon landscape, the revolutionary poet is still a
subject who falls in and feels his own suffering state of mind, which is emotions as
desire does not really enter the central point of absolute motion/1, the point beyond
duality (good and evil, right and wrong, positive and negative) because dualism is
produced by the poets spiritual mind due to the arousal of imagination as fancy; his
lost in fancy on images-of-thought might be correspondence with different regions of
the material world, the earth, the infernal or any state of mind the poet is in and
presents without truly transcendence of his spiritual mind.
Love object and beauteous form of architecture are also images-of-thought as a
hindrance to the poets mind. A love object as a sexual-image might arouse
illusions of heart and feelings in the spots of time about Lucy Gray, like in ITravelled Among Unknown Men where he reveals his love more and more to her as
joy of desire; / And she I cherished turned her wheel (George, 34. 10-11). In Three
Years She Grew in Sun and Shower where he confesses that he wishes to live with
her While she and I together live / Here in his happy dell (George, 36. 35-36),
however, She died, and left to me / This hearth, this calm and quiet scene; / The
memory of what has be, / And never more will be (George, 36. 39-42). The love
object, Lucy Gray, as a sexual image of thought, is deleted so that the poets spirit
within commences to be in motion. The absolute motion is 1 rather 2/relative, as in
A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal as the innate space/spot of time out of the mind,
the poet confesses the absolute motion within, the spirit No motion has she now, no
force; / She neither hears nor sees; / Rolled round in earths diurnal course, / With
rocks and stones and trees (George, 36. 5-8). The illusion of the poets heart also
comes from the beauteous form of the rugged and hoary Pile as a castle which
aroused a trembled passion of the poet without passing away; however, after the soul
of truth penetrates its every part with steadfast peace and he has submitted to a
new control in Elegiac Stanzas (George, 188-89). The image of Pile as a picture
he makes produces a power which now is gone, which nothing can restore and
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deleted so that he is not hindered by the any outer object/image of thought with its
form to arouse any emotions as desire, he becomes a Character of the Happy Warrior
where he affirms the quality of virtue as best / Does seldom on a right foundation
rest, / He labors good on good to fix (George, 195. 31-34). From the illustrative
above, it is deduced that the circumferential movement of the poet on the surface of
the earth involves the relative motion with-out contaminates the poets mind as an
absolute motion within due to A balance, an ennobling interchange / Of action from
without and from within; The excellence, pure function, and best power / Both the
object seen, and eye that sees (XIII. 75-78). Actually, Wordsworth does not wheel
about the clock or nature as he reveals in the beginning ofThe Prelude until he is able
to confess/delete all images-of-thought so that his renovated/evolutionary/progressive
cognitive mind with a virtue is a divine quality of a peaceful, pure, and more
beautiful than the earth (XIIII. 451) so that such a spiritual mind of the poet is able
to wheel all as The village clock tolled six; I wheeled about /Proud and exulting, like
an untried horse / That cares not for its home (Two-Part Prelude 1799, I. 154-55)
because of those spots of time as spots in the poets life presence, time limited,
make his humanity a dark (XVI. 73) mist (The Prelude 462) as a hindrance to his
innate light as a primary and existing per se: the emblem of the mind / That feeds
upon infinity that broods / Over the dark abyss, intent to hear / Its voices issuing forth
to silent light (XVI. 71-74).
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Notes1. In this thesis, references to My Heart Leaps Up, The Prospectus to the Recluse,
and Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood are
from Jack Shillinger, William Wordsworth: Selected Poems and Prefaces (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1965), pp.160 and 186-90.)2. Raymond Dexter Havens offers a clue that Wordsworth did theorize about nature
until he met Coleridge at twenty three. See his The Mind of The Poet, p.107.3. Havens, p. 234. The word is cited form W.R.ingos Studies of Englsih Mystics,
1967, p.174.4. See William Wordsworths The Prelude: 1790, 1805, 1850, p.656. The idea is
from Herbert Lindenberger, On Wordsworths Prelude (Princeton: Princeton UP,
1963) chapter III, pp. 69-98).
5. See John Keats Ode to the Nightingale in Bennett a. Cerf, John Keats and Percy
Bysshe Shelley: Complete Poetical Works (New York: Random House, 1820), pp.
185-86)
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About the Author
Miss Pauline Ling-Hwai Wu was once a lecturer at Tatung Senior High School and at
the branch of Taiwan Normal University, and is now a graduate student in the Ph. D
program in the Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University. Her
research interests are confessional autobiography, Romanticism, the philosophy of
science (Rationalism, English Empiricism, and so forth), globalization, cultural
studies, and specific education. Her works include Wordsworths Plaintive and
Gratulant Voice: A Study of the Prelude as Confessional Literature (1997), The
Development of Quasi-Conversation Poetry (2000), Mind As a Pendulum: Poetic
Mind and Human Mind(October 2000), andBakhtins Existence as Dialogue and
Wordsworths Confession (2002).