Class Book ^ABO \S>3\ THE FRIEND: & c, &c., &c. BY S. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ. THE F M I A SERIES OF ESSA-YS, TO AID IN THE FORMATION OF FIXED PRINCIPLES IN POLITICS, MORALS, AND RELIGION, WITH LITE RARYAM USE MENTS INTERSPERSED. BY S. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ. Accipe Dcsere principiimi rursus, formamque coactam : mutata melior procede figura. claudian. FIRST AMERICAN, FROM THE SECOND LONDON EDITION, COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME. BURLINGTON: CIIAUNCEY GOODRICH. 1831. I 0-2 ] Au^JS avajV^'S) 's'pP AOm t'pyov evwtfaj. ZQP0A'2TP0X Aoyi'a. PREFACE TO THE AMERICAPr EDITION. The general character and purpose of the work here offered to the American public are to some extent already known among us. Many, to whom it has itself been inaccessible, have learned enough of it to form a high estimate of its value, and the demand for it of late is such as to show that their num- ber is increasing. This state of things renders a republication of the work obviously desirable, and must be gratifying to those who are concerned for the advancement of truth, and who be- lieve this work to contain a valuable exhibition of some of its great and vital principles. When nearly two years ago the " Aids to Reflection," another work of the same author, came before the public, there were many occasions of doubt with re- gard to its probable reception. Those doubts are now remo- ved. The result has justified the most flattering anticipations, and furnishes abundant proof, that the " fit audience" to be found among us for works of this kind is not so small as had been apprehended. Indeed the manner in which that work has been received, the sentiments which it has awakened, and the class of persons whose attention has been specially direct- ed to it, are such as furnish the best security ior the success of similar works in future. The work now republished, though not fitted in some respects to excite so deep an interest, will be found, like that, concerned with the developement of funda- mental principles, and essentially connected with the same views of truth. It was designed obviously for more general circulation, and great pains were taken by the author, both to render his views intelligible, and to gain the attention of all, who were capable of understanding them. To those who have become acquainted with the " Aids to Reflection," it will be acceptable both for its own sake and as a help in the study of that work. To every scholar, and indeed to every man, who would rightly apprehend the general principles and grounds of obligation in politics, morals, and religion, it will be found a safe and invaluable guide. The edition nov/ offered is simply a reprint of the English. It was indeed intended to prefix an Essay of a general charac- ter on the philosophical system of the author ; but the design was abandoned, from a conviction that nothing worthy of the subject could be given in the limits contemplated, or without more time and labour than could now be devoted to its prepa- ration. I shall therefore merely take the occasion to remark, that his system is by no means, as some have alleged, essen- tially the same with that of Kant. Although he acknowledges his obligations to the writings of that philosopher, he is himself sufficiently careful to inform us, that in regard to points of the highest importance he follows a very different teacher. He dif- ers from him, as Cudworth and More and the Platonizing divines of the same age generally would have differed, and as some of ,the most eminent German philosophers, as well as Tholuck and other evangelical divines, of the present day, differ from him in their philosophical and theological views. Between the views of Prof. Tholuck and those of Coleridge, indeed, there is a very striking coincidence, as must have been obvious to all, who are acquainted with the writings of both. This fact, con- sidering the high reputation which Prof. Tholuck has in this country, as an evangelical and zealous divine, I trust may serve in some degree to diminish the fears, which good men still in- dulge respecting the tendency of such speculations. The pre- Vll sent volume however contains little to excite the lears ol" any w4th regard to the doctrines of religion. But in its bearing upon the general principles of philosophy received among us, it will be found of the same character Avith all the works of its author, and I trust may be instrumental in hastening the change, which is already taking place, in our views of logic and meta- physics. The Essays in which he vindicates the philosophy of Lord Bacon from the prevailing misapprehensions of its charac- ter, by showing its coincidence with that of Plato, are especially valuable in this point of view ; and I could only wish, that those who read them would examine for themselves and without pre- judice the language of Lord Bacon in regard to the great princi- ples of philosophy. It is now no longer hazardous to one's reputation to call in question the authority of those philoso- phers who have been most popular among us; and the aiticle on Brown's theory of perception in a late number of the Edin- burgh Review shows, that language and thoughts derived from German metaphysics may now be used to a much greater ex- tent, than they have been done by Coleridge — in a work, where formerly they would have been rejected with contumely. It shows, too — what is more important — the ignorance and incon- sistency betrayed in a system, that is still received in some of our schools, but which it is to be hoped will give place to works less exposed to critical reproach. A perusal of that article, and a little reflection upon this and other things of a like kind, as indicating the tendency of present inquiries in Great Britian and this country, may convince us, that one who would be thought not ignorant of philosophy hereafter, must acquaint himself with something beyond the empiricism, which has so long assumed its name among us. It need not now be inqui- red, whether the Friend and other works of Coleridge are fit- ted in the best possible manner to supply our deficiencies and guide us to a better knowledge. They are believed by many, who are well qualified to judge, to be the best we have, and calculated at least to cherish an ingenuous and earnest love Vlll of the truth for the truth's sake. As such, the present volume commends itself to all who will attentivelj peruse it, but es- pecially to the young men of our Colleges and higher schools. At that period, when — more than at any other — they are forming principles both of thought and action, and establishing — if they ever do so — a character of their own, they will find it a wise monitor and a faithful " Friend." J. Marsh. University of Vermont, November., 1831. EPISTLE DEDICATORY. Friend ! were an Author privileged to name his own judge — in addition to moral and intellectual competence, I should look round for some man, whose knowledge and opinions had for the greater part been acquired experimentally : and the practi- cal habits of whose life had put him on his guard with respect to all speculative reasoning, without rendering him insensible to the desirableness of principles more secure than the shifting rules and theories generalized from observations merely empi- rical, or unconscious in how many departments of knowledge, and with how large a portion even of professional men, such principles are still a desideratum. I would select too one who felt kindly, nay, even partially, toward me ; but one whose par- tiality had its strongest foundations in hope, and more prospec- tive than retrospective would make him quick-sighted in the detection, and unreserved in the exposure of the deficiencies and defects of each present work, in the anticipation of a more developed future. In you, honored Friend ! I have found all these requisites combined and realized : and the improvement, which these Essays have derived from your judgment and ju- dicious suggestions, would, of itself, have justified me in ac- companying them with a public acknowledgment of the same. 1 2 But knowing, as you cannot but know, that I owe in great measure the power of having written at all to your medical skill, and to the characteristic good sense which directed its exertion in my behalf; and whatever I may have written in happier vein, to the influence of your society and to the daily proofs of your disinterested attachment — knowing too, in how entire a sympathy with your feelings in this respect the partner of your name has blended the affectionate regards of a sister or daughter with almost a mother's watchful and unwearied soli- citude alike for my health, interest, and tranquillity ; — you will not, I trust, be pained, you ought not, I am sure, to be surpris- ed that 'IBml TO MR. ANB MU8. OIJLI.MAN, OF HIGHGATE, THESE VOLUMES ARE DEDICATED, IN TESTIMONY OF HIGH RESPECT AND GRATEFUL AFFEOTIOIV, BV THEIR FRIEIVD, S. T. COLERIDGE. October 7, 1818. Highgate. THE FRIEND, ESSAY I. Crede rnihi, non est pai-vm fducia, pollicen opem decertantibus, consilium duhiis, lumen ccecis, spem dejedis, refrigerium fessis. Magna quidem hcec sunt sijiant; parva, si promittantur. Verum ego non tarn aliis legem ponam, quam legem vobis mew propria mentis exponam : quam qui probaverit, teneat ; cui non pla- cueritf abjiciat. Optarem,fateor, talis esse, qui prodesse possem quam plunmis. Petrarch: "De Vita Solitaria." Antecedent to all History, and long glimmering through it as a holy Tradition, there presents itself to our imagination an indefinite period, dateless as Eternity, a State rather than a Time. For even the sense of succession is lost in the unifor- mity of the stream. It was toward the close of this golden age (the memory of which the self-dissatisfied Race of Men have everywhere pre- served and cherished) when Conscience acted in Man with the ease and uniformity of Instinct ; when Labor was a sweet name for the activity of sane Minds in healthful Bodies, and all enjoyed in common the bounteous harvest produced, and gathered in, by common effort ; when there existed in the Sexes, and in the Individuals of each Sex, just variety enough to permit and call forth the gentle restlessness and final union of chaste love and individual attachment, each seeking and finding the beloved one by the natural afiinity of their Beings ; when the dread Sovereign of the Universe was known only as the universal Parent, no Altar but the pure Heart, and Thanks- giving and grateful Love the sole Sacrifice In this blest age of dignified Innocence one of their honored Elders, whose absence they were beginning to notice, entered with hurrying steps the place of their common assemblage at noon, and instantly attracted the general attention and wonder by the perturbation of his gestures, and by a strange trouble both in his eyes and over his whole countenance. After a short but deep silence, when the first buzz of varied inquiry was be- coming audible, the old man moved toward a small eminence, and having ascended it, he thus addressed the hushed and lis- tening company. " In the warmth of the approaching mid-day, as I was repo- sing in the vast cavern, out of which, from its northern portal, issues the river that winds through our vale, a voice powerful, yet not from its loudness, suddenly hailed me. Guided by my ear I looked toward the supposed place of the sound for some Form, from which it had proceeded. I beheld nothing but the glimmering walls of the cavern. Again, as I was turning round, the same voice hailed me : and whithersoever I turned my face, thence did the voice seem to proceed. I stood still therefore, and in reverence awaited its continuation. ' Sojourner of Earth! (these were its words) hasten to the meeting of thy Brethren, and the words which thou now hearest, the same do thou re- peat unto them. On the thirtieth morn from the morrow's sun- rising, and during the space of thrice three days and thrice three nights, a thick cloud will cover the sky, and a heavy rain fall on the earth. Go ye therefore, ere the thirtieth sun ariseth, retreat to the cavern of the river and there abide, till the clouds have passed away and the rain be over and gone. For know ye of a certainty that whomever that rain wetteth, on him, yea, on him and on his children's children will fall — the spirit of Madness.' Yes ! Madness was the word of the voice : what this be, I know not ! But at the sound of the word trembling came upon me, and a feeling which I would not have had ; and I remained even as ye beheld and now behold me." The old man ended, and retired. Confused murmurs suc- ceeded, and wonder, and doubt. Day followed day, and every day brought with it a diminution of the awe impressed. They could attach no image, no remembered sensations to the threat. The ominous morn arrived, the Prophet had retired to the ap- pointed cavern, and there remained alone during the appointed time. On the tenth morning, he emerged from his place of shelteiC, and sought his friends and brethren. But alas ! how affrightful the change ! Instead of the common children of one great family, working towards the same aim by reason, even as the bees in their hives by instinct, he looked and beheld, here a miserable wretch watching over a heap of hard and unnutri- tious substances, which he had dug out of the earth, at the cost of mangled limbs and exhausted faculties. This he appeared to worship, at this he gazed, even as the youths of the vale had been accustomed to gaze at their chosen virgins in the first season of their choice. There he saw a former companion speeding on and panting after a butterfly, or a withered leaf whirling onward in the breeze ; and another with pale and dis- torted countenance following close behind, and still stretching forth a dagger to stab his precursor in the back. In another place he observed a whole troop of his fellow-men famishing and in fetters, yet led by one of their brethren who had ensla- ved them, and pressing furiously onwards in the hope of fam- ishing and enslaving another troop moving in an opposite direc- tion. For the first time, the Prophet missed his accustomed power of distinguishing between his dreams and his waking perceptions. He stood gazing and motionless, when several of the race gathered around him, and enquired of each other, who is this man ? how strangely he looks ! how wild ! — a worth- less idler ! exclaims one : assuredly, a very dangerous madman! cries a second. In short, from words they proceeded to vio- lence : till harassed, endangered, solitary in a world of forms like his own, without sympathy, without object of love, he at length espied in some foss or furrow a quantity of the madden- ing water still unevaporated, and uttering the last words of reason, It is in vain to be sane in a world of madmen, plunged and rolled hiniself in the liquid poison, and came out as mad and not more wretched than his neighbors and acquaint- ance. The plan of The friend is comprized in the motto to this Essay.* This tale or allegory seems to me to contain the ob- * [Translation.) — Believe me, it requires no little confidence, to promise Help to the Struggling, Counsel to the Doubtful, Light to tha Blind, Hope to the Despondent, Rcfieshment to the Weary. These are indeed great things, if they be accomplished ; trifles if they exist but in a promise. I however aim not so much to prescribe a Law for others, as to set forth the Law of my own Mind ; which let the man, who shall have approved of it, abide by ; jections to its practicability in all their strength. Either, says the Sceptic, you are the Blind offering to lead the Blind, or you are talking the language of Sight to those who do not pos- sess the sense of seeing. If you mean to be read, try to en- tertain and do not pretend to instruct. To such objections it would be amply sufficient, on my system of faith, to answer, that we are not all blind, but all subject to distempers of " the mental sight," differing in kind and in degree ; that though all men are in error, they are not all in the same error, nor at the same time ; and that each therefore may possibly heal the other, even as two or more physicians, all diseased in their general health yet under the immediate action of the disease on dif- ferent days, may remove or alleviate the complaints of each other. But in respect to the entertainingness of moral writings, if in entertainment be included whatever delights the imagi- nation or affects the generous passions, so far from rejecting such a mean of persuading the human soul, my very system compels me to defend not only the propriety but the absolute necessity of adopting it, if we really intend to render our fel- low-creatures better or wiser. But it is with dullness as with obscurity. It may be posi- tive, and the author's fault ; but it may likewise be relative, and if the author has presented his bill of fare at the portal, the reader has himself only to blame. The main question then is, of what class are the persons to be entertained ? — " One of the later schools of the Grecians (says Lord Bacon) is at a stand to think what should be in it that men should love lies, where neither they make for pleasure, as with poets ; nor for advan- tage, as with the merchant ; but for the lie's sake. I cannot tell why, this same truth is a naked and open day-light, that doth not shew the masques and mummeries and triumphs of the present world half so stately and daintily, as candle-lights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that sheweth best by day ; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, which sheweth best in varied lights. A mixture of lies doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt, that if there mid let him, to whom it shall appear not reasonable, reject it. It is uiy earn- est wish, I confess, to employ my understanding and acquirements in that mode and direction, in which I may be enabled to benefit the largest number possible of my foUow-creatures, 9 were taken from men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like vinum Daemonum (as a Father calleth poetry) but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of me- lancholj'^ and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves ?" A melancholy, a too general, but not, 1 trust, a universal truth ! — and even where it does apply, yet in many instances not irremediable. Such at least must have been my persuasion : or the present volumes must have been wittingly written to no purpose. If I belived our nature fettered to all this wretched- ness of head and heart by an absolute and innate necessity, at least by a necessity which no human power, no efforts of rea- son or eloquence could remove or lessen ; I should deem it even presumptuous to aim at other or higher object than that of amusing a small portion of the reading public. And why not'? whispers wordly prudence- To amuse though only to amuse our visitors is wisdom as well as good- nature, where it is presumption to attempt their amendment. And truly it Avould be most convenient to me in respects of no trifling importance, if I could persuade myself to take the ad- vice. Relaxed by these principles from all moral obligation, and ambitious of procuring pastime and self-oblivion for a race, which could have nothing noble to remember, nothing desirable to anticipate, I might aspire even to the praise of the critics and dilettante of the higher circles of society ; of some trusty guide of blind fashion ; some pleasant Analyst of Taste, as it exists both in the palate and the soul ; some living guage and mete-wand of past and present genius. But alas ! my former studies would still have left a wrong bias ! If instead of per- plexing my common sense with the flights of Plato, and of stiff"en- ing over the meditations of the imperial Stoic, I had been labor- ing to imbibe the gay spirit of a Casti, or h^d employed my erudition, for the benefit of the favored few, in elucidating the interesting deformities of ancient Greece and India, what might I not have hoped from the suffi-age of those, who turn in weari- ness from the Paradise Lost, — because compared with the pru- rient heroes and grotesque monsters of Italian Romance, or even with the narrative dialogues of the melodious Metastasio, — that — "Adventurous Song, , " Which justifies the ways of God to Man" <5! 10 has been found a poor substitute for Griraaldi, a most inapt medicine for an occasional propensity to yawn ? For, as hath been decided, to fill up pleasantly the brief intervals of fash- ionable pleasures, and above all to charm away the dusky Gnome of Ennui, is the chief and appropriate business of the Poet and — the Novelist ! This duty unfulfilled, AppoUo will have lavished his best gifts in vain ; and Urania henceforth must be content to inspire Astronomers alone, and leave the Sons of Verse to more amusive Patronesses. And yet — and yet — but it will be time to be serious, when my visitors have sat down. ESSAY II. Sic oportet ad librum, presertim miscellanei generis, legendum accedere lectorem, ut solet ad convivium conviva civilis. Convivator annititur oinnihus satisfacere : et tamen si quid apponitw; quod huju^ aid illins palato non respondeat, et hie et ille urbane dissimulant, et alia fercida probant, ne quid contristent convivafo- rem. (^uis enim eum convivam J'erat, qui tantum hoc animo venial ad mensam, ut carpens quce apponuntur nee vescatur ipse, nee alios vesci sinat ? et tamen his quoque reperias inciviliores, qui palam, qui sine fine damnent ac lacerent opus, quod nunquam legerint. Ast hoc plusquam sycoi)\\an\xc\im. est damnare quad nescias. ' Erasmus. The musician may tune his instrument in private, ere his audience have yet assembled ; the architect conceals the foun- dation of his building beneath the superstructure. But an au- thor's harp must be tuned in the hearing of those, who are to understand its after harmonies ; the foundation stones of his edifice must lie open to common view, or his friends will hesi- tate to trust themselves beneath the roof. From periodical Literature the general Reader deems him- self entitled to expect amusement, and some degree of infor- mation ; and if the Writer can convey any instruction at the same time and without demanding any additional thought (as the Irishmen, in the hackneyed jest, is said to have passed off a light guinea between two halfpence) this supererogatory merit will not perhaps be taken amiss. Now amusement in and for itself may be afforded by the gratification either of the curiosity or of the passions. I use the former word as distin- guished from the love of knowledge, and the latter in distinc- tion from those emotions which arise in well-ordered minds, from the perception of truth or falsehood, virtue or vice : — emotions, which are always preceded by thought, and linked with improvement. Again, all information pursued without any wish of becoming wiser or better thereby, I class among the gratifications of mere curiosity, whether it be sought for 12 in a light Novel or a grave History. We may therefore omit the word Information, as included either in Amusement or In- struction. The present Work is an experiment; not whether a writer may honestly overlook the one, or successfully omit the other, of the two elements themselves, which serious Readers at least persuade themselves, they pursue ; but whether a change might not be hazarded of the usual order ^ in which periodical writers have in general attempted to convey them. Having myself experienced that no delight either in kind or degree, was equal to that which accompanies the distinct perception of a fundamental truth, relative to our moral being ; having, long after the completion of what is ordinarily called a learned edu- cation, discovered a new world of intellectual profit opening on me — not from any new opinions, but lying, as it were, at the roots of those which I had been taught in childhood in my Cate- chism and Spelling-book ; there arose a soothing hope in my mind that a lesser Public might be found, composed of persons susceptible of the same delight, and desirous of attaining it by the same process. I heard a whisper too from within, (1 trust that it proceeded from Conscience not Vanity) that a duty was performed in the endeavor to render it as much easier to them, than it had been to me. as could be effected by the united ef- forts of my understanding and imagination.* * In conformity Avith this anxious wish' I shall make no apology for sub- joining a Translation of my Motto to this Essay. (Translation.) A reader slioukl sit down to a book, especially of the mis- cellaneous kind as a wrll-bohaved visitor does to a banquet. Tiie master of the feasts exeits himself to satisfy all his guests; but if after all his care and pains there should still be something or other put on the table that does not suit this or that person's taste, they politely pass it over without noticing the circumstance, and commend other dishes, that they may not distress their kind host, or throw any damp on his spirits. For who could tolerate a guest that accepted an invitation to your table with no other purpose but that of finding fault with evciy thing put before him, neither eating himself, or suffer- ing others to eat in comfort. And yet you jnay fall in with a still worse set than even these, — witli churls that in all companies and without stop or stay will condenjn and ])ull to pieces a work which they had never read. But this sinks below the baseness of an Informer, yea, though he were a false wit- ness to boot ! The man, who abuses a thing of which he is utterly ignorant, unites the infamy of both— and in addition to this, makes himself the pander and sycophant of his own and other men's envy and malignity. 13 Actuated by-this impulse, the Writer wishes, in the follow- ing Essays, to convey not instruction merely, but fundamental instruction ; not so much to shew my Reader this or that fact, as to kindle his own torch for him, and leave it to himself to choose the particular objects, which he might wish to examine by its light. The Friend does not indeed exclude from his plan occasional interludes; and vacations of innocent entertain- ment and promiscuous information, but still in the main he pvo- poses to himself the communication of such delight as rewards the march of Truth, rather than to collect the flowers which di- versify its track, in order to present them apart from the home- ly yet foodful or medicinable herbs, among which they had grown. To refer men's opinions to their absolute principles, and thence their feelings to the appropriate objects, and in their due degrees ; and finally, to apply the principles thus ascertain- ed, to the formation of steadfast convictions concerning the most important questions of Politics, Morality, and Religion — these are to be the objects and the contents of this work. Themes like these not even the genius of a Plato or a Ba- con could render intelligible, ^without demanding from the reader thought sometimes, and attention generally. By THOUGHT I here mean the voluntary production in our own minds of those states of consciousness, to which, as to his fun- damental facts, the Writer has referred us ; while attention has for its object the order and connection of Thoughts and Images, each of which is in itself already and familiarly known. Thus the elements of Geometry require attention only ; but tlie analysis of our primary faculties, and the investigation of all the absolute grounds of Religion and Morals, are impossible without energies of thought in addition to the effort of Atten- tion. The Friend will not attempt to disguise from his Readers that both Attention and Thought are Efforts, and the latter a most difficult and laborious Effort ; nor from himself, that to require it often or for any continuance of time is incompatible with the nature of the present Publication, even were it less incongruous than it unfortunately is with the present habits and pursuits of Englishmen. Accordingly I shall be on my guard to make the Numbers as few as possible, which would require from a well educated Reader any energy of thought and volun- tary abstraction. But Attention, I confess, will be requisite throughout, except 14 in the excursive and miscellaneous Essays that will be found interposed between each of the three main divisions of the Work. On whatever subject the mind feels a lively interest, attention though always an effort, becomes a delightful effort. I should be quite at ease, could I secure for the whole Work as much of it, as a card party of earnest whist-players often ex- pend in a single evening, or a lady in the making-up of a fash- ionable dress. But where no interest previously exists, atten- tion (as every schoolmaster knows) can be procured only by terror : which is the true reason why the majority of mankind learn nothing systematically, except as school-boys or apprenti- ces. Happy shall I be, from other motives besides those of self- interest, if no fault or deficiency on my part shall prevent the Work from furnishing a presumptive proof, that there are still to be found among us a respectable number of Readers who are desirous to derive pleasure from the consciousness of be- ing instructed or ameliorated , and who feel a sufficient interest as to the foundations of their own opinions in Literature, Poli- tics, Morals, and Religion, to afford that degree of attention, without which, however men may deceive themselves, no ac- tual progress ever was or ever can be made in that knowledge, which supplies at once both strength and nourishment. ESSAY III. *^Ar '(i)c TTctqiXa^ov nfv t^xv^v naqu aov~ totiquTtov fiev Bv'^&v'e OlSov'aav'vno" xofiTtuafxaTWVy xai 'grjiiitt'TWV, inax^ofv^ " la^vava fis'v nqu'tiajov u^vtrfv, xal to' ^a' Qog'acpsiXov, ^ Envllioig xal neQinu'roig xai jeviXioiai juixQOig XvWv didov^g aTCOfivl/uu'icov, ^ano" ^c^lioiv, 'amj&bfv. Aristoph. Ranje. Imitation.* When I received the Muse from you, I found her puffed and pampered. With pompous sentences and terms, a cumb'rous huge virago. My first attention w^as applied to make her look genteelly, And bring her to a moderate bulk by dint of lighter diet. I fed ner with plain household phrase, and cool familiar sallad, With water-gruel episode, with sentimental jelly, With moral mince-meat: till at length I brought her within compass. Frere- In the preceding Number I named the present undertaking an Experiment. The explanation will be found in the follow- ing Letter, written to a Correspondent during the first attempt, and before the plan was discontinued from an original error in the mode of circulation, as noticed in the Preface. To R. L. Dear Sir, When I first undertook the present Publication for the sake *This Imitation is printed here by permission of the Author, from a Series of free Translations of selected Scenes from Aristophanes: a work, of which (should the Author be persuaded to make it public) it is my most delib^ate judgment, and inmost conviction, that it will form an important epoch in En- glish Literature, and open out sources of metrical and rhythmical wealth in ^'e very heart of our language, of which few, if any, among us are aware. a. S. T. C. 16 and with the avowed object of referring men in all things to Princfples or fundamental truths, I was well aware of the ob- stacles which the plan itself would oppose to my success. For in order to the regular attainment of this object, all the driest and least attractive Essays must appear in the first fif- teen or twenty Numbers, and thus subject me to the neces- sity of demanding effort or solicting patience in that part of the Work, where it was most my interest to secure the confi- dence of my readers by winning their favor. Though I dared warrant for the pleasantness of the journey on the whole ; though I might promise that the road would, for the far greater part of it, be found plain and easy, that it would pass through countries of various prospect, aud that at every stage there would be a change of company ; it still remained a heavy disadvantage, that I had to start at the foot of a high and steep hill : and I foresaw, not without occasional feelings of despondency, that during the slow and laborious ascent it would require no common management to keep my passengers in good humor with the vehicle and its driver. As far as this incon- venience could be palliated by sincerity and previous confes- sions, I have no reason to accuse myself of neglect. In the prospectus of The Friend, which for this cause I re-printed and annexed to the first Number, I felt it my duty to inform such as might be inclined to patronize the publication, that I must submit to be esteemed dull by those who sought chiefly for amusement: and this I hazarded as a ^eneraZ confession, though in my own mind I felt a cheerful confidence that it W'Ould apply almost exclusively to the earlier Numbers. I could not therefore be surprised, however much I may have been depressed, by the frequency with which you hear The Friend complained of for its abstruseness and obscurity ; nor did the highly flattering expressions, with which you accompa- nied your communication, prevent me from feeling its truth to the whole extent. An author's pen, like children's legs, improves by exercise. That part of the blame which rests on myself, I am exerting my best faculties to remove. A man long accustomed to silent and solitary meditation, in proportion as he increases the powd- er of thinking in long and connected trains, is apt to lose or lessen the talent of communicating his thoughts with grace and perspicuity. Doubtless too, I have in some measure ' 17 jured my style, in respect to its facility and popularity, from having almost confined my reading, of late years, to the works of the Ancients and those of the elder Writers in the modern languages. We insensibly imitate what we habitually admire ; and an aversion to the epigrammatic, unconnected periods of the fashionable Anglogallican taste has too often made me wil- ling to forget, that the stately march and difficult evolutions, which characterize the eloquence of Hooker, Bacon, Milton, and Jeremy Taylor, are notwithstanding their intrinsic excel- lence, still less suited to a periodical Essay. This fault I am now endeavoring to correct ; though I can never so far sacrifice my judgment to the desire of being immediately popular, as to cast my sentences in the French moulds, or affect a style which an ancient critic would have deemed purposely invented for persons troubled with the asthma to read, and for those to comprehend who labor under the more pitiable asthma of a short-witted intellect. It cannot but be injurious to the hu- man mind never to be called into effort ; the habit of receiving pleasure without any exertion of thought, by the mere excite-^ ment of curiosity and sensibility, may be justly ranked among the worst effects of habitual novel reading. It is true that these short and unconnected sentences are easily and instanly under- stood : but it is equally true, that wanting all the cement of thoughts as well as of style, all the connections, and (if you will forgive too trivial a metaphor) all the hooks-and-eyes of the memory, they are as easily forgotten : or rather, it is scarcely possible that they should be remembered. — Nor is it less true^ that those who confine their reading (o such books dwarf their own faculties, and finally reduce their understandings to a de- plorable imbecility : the fact you mention, and which I shall hereafter make use of, is a fair instance and a striking illustra- tion. Like idle morning visitors, the brisk and breathless pe- riods hurry in and hurry off in quick and profitless succession ;, each indeed for the moments of its stay prevents the pain of vacancy, while it indulges the love of sloth ; but all together they leave the mistress of the house (the soul I mean) flat and exhausted, incapable of attending to her own concerns, and un- fitted for the conversation of more rational guests. I know you will not suspect me of fostering so idle a hope, as that of obtaining acquittal by recrimination ; or think that I am attacking one fault, in order that its opposite may escape notice 18 in the noise and smoke of the battery. On the contrary, I shall do my best, and even make all allowable sacrifices, to ren- der my manner more attractive and my matter more generally interesting. In the establishment of principles and fundamen- tal doctrines, I must of necessity require the attention of my reader to become my fellow-laborer. The primary facts essen- tial to the intelligibility of my principles I can prove to others only as far as I can prevail on them to retire into themselves and make their own minds the objects of their steadfast attention. But, on the other hand, I feel too deeply the importance of the convictions, which first impelled me to the present undertaking, to leave unattempted any honorable means of recommending them to as wide a circle as possible. Hitherto, my dear Sir, I have been employed in laying the foundation of my work. But the proper merit of a foundation is its massiveness and solidity. The conveniences and orna- ments, the gilding and stucco work, the sunshine and sunny prospects, will come with the superstructure. Yet I dare not flatter myself, that any endeavors of mine, compatible with the duty I owe to truth and the hope of permanent utility, will render The Friend agreeable to the majority of what is call- ed the reading public. I never expected it. How indeed could I, when I was to borrow so little from the influence of passing events, and when I had absolutely excluded from my plan all appeals to personal curiosity and personal interests ? Yet even this is not my greatest impediment. No real information can be conveyed, no important enors rectified, no widely injurious prejudices rooted up, without requiring some effort or thought on the part of the reader. But the obstinate (and toward a contemporary Writer, the contemptuous) aversion to all intel- lectual efibrt is the mother evil of all which I had proposed to war against, the Queen Bee in the hive of our errors and mis- fortunes, both private and national. To solicit the attention of those, on whom these debilitating causes have acted to their full extent, would be no less absurd than to recommend exer- cise with the dumb bells, as the only mode of cure, to a patient paralytic in both arms. You, my dear Sir, well know, that my expectations were more modest as well as more rational. I hoped, that my readers in general would be aware of the im- practicability of suiting every Essay to every taste in any pe- riod of the work ; and that they would not attritbute wholly to 19 the author, but in part to the necessity of his plan, the austeri- ty and absence of the lighter graces in the first iifteen or twenty numbers. In my cheerful moods I sometimes flattered myself, that a few even among those, who foresaw that my lucubrations would at all times require more attention than from the nature of their own employments they could afford them, might yet find a pleasure in supporting the Friend during its infancy, so as to give it a chance of attracting the notice of others, to whom its style and subjects might be better adapted. But my main anchor was the Hope, that when circumstances gradually enabled me to adopt the ordinary means of making the publica- tion generally known, there might be found throughout the Kingdom a sufficient number of meditative minds, who, enter- taining similar convictions with myself, and gratified by the prospect of seeing them reduced to form and system, would take a warm interest in the work from the very circumstance that it wanted those allurements of transitory interests, which render particular patronage superfluous, and for the brief season of their blow and fragrance attract the eye of thousands, who would pass unregarded -Flowers Of sobei- tint, and Herbs of medicinal powers. S. T. C. In these three introductory Numbers, The Friend has en- deavored to realize his promise of giving an honest bill of fare, both as to the objects and the style of the Work. With refer- ence to both I conclude with a prophecy of Simon Grynaeus, from his premonition to the candid Reader, prefixed to Fi- cinus's translation of Plato, published at Leyden, 1557. How far it has been gradually fulfilled in this country since the revo- lution in 1688, I leave to my candid and intelligent Readers to determine. ' Ac dolet mihi quidem deliciis literarum inescatos subito jam homines adeo] esse, prsesertim qui Christianos esse profitentur, ut legere nisi quod ad presentem gustum facit, sustineant nihil : unde et disciplina et philosophia ipsa jam fere prorsus etiam a doctis negliguntur. Quod quidem propositum studiorum nisi mature corrigetur, tam magnum rebus incommodum dabit, quam dedit barbaries olim. Pertinax res barbaries est fate or ; sed minus potest tamen, quam ilia persuasa literarum, prudentior si 20 RATioNK caret, sapientiae virtutisque specie misere lectores cir- cumducens. Succedet igitur, ut arbitror, baud ita multo post, pro rus- ticana sseeuli nostri ruditate captatrix ilia blandi-loquentia, ro- bur animi virilis oiune, omnem virtutem masculum profligatura, nisi cavetur.' (Translation.) — In very truth, it grieveth me that men, those especially who profess themselves to be Christians, should be so taken with the sweet Baits of Literature that they can endure to read nothing but what gives them imme- diate gratification, no matter how low or sensual it may be. Consequently, the more austere and disciplinary branches of philosophy itself, are almost wholly neglected, even by the learned. — A course of study (if such reading, with such a pur- pose in view, could deserve that name) which, if not correct- ed in time, will occasion worse consequences than even bar- barism did in the times of our forefathers. Barbarism is, I own, a wilful headstrong thing ; but with all its blind obstina- cy it has less power of doing harm than this self-sufficient, self-satisfied plain good common-sense sort of writing, this pru- dent saleable popular style of composition, if it be deserted by Reason and scientific Insight; pitiably decoying the minds of men by an imposing shew of aimableness, and practical Wisdom, so that the delighted Reader knowing nothing knows all about almost every thing. There will succeed therefore in my opinion, and that too within no long time, to the rude- ness and rusticity of our age, that ensnaring meretricious popu- larness in Literature, with all the tricksy humilities of the am- bitious candidates for the favorable suffrages of the judicious Public, which if we do not take good care will break up and scatter before it all robustness and manly vigor of intellect, all masculine fortitude of virtue. ESSAY IV. Si modo quae JVaturd et Ratione concessa sint, assumpserimus, Pr^sumtionis sus- pido a nobis quam longissime abesse debet. Multa Antiquitati, nobismet ni- hil, arrogamus. JStihilne vos 7 JVUiil inehercule, nisi quod omnia omni animo Veritati arrogamus et Sanctimonice. Ulr. Rinov. De Coniroversiis. (Translation.) — If we assume only what Nature and Reason have granted, with no shadow of riglit can we be suspected of Presumption. To Antiquity we arrogate many things, to ourselves nothing. Nothing? Aye nothing: unless indeed it be, that with all our strength we arrogate all things to Truth and Moral Purity. It has been remarked by the celebrated Haller, that wc are deaf while we are yawning. The same act of drowsiness that stretches open our mouths closes our ears. It is much the same in acts of the understanding. A lazy half-attention amounts to a mental yawn. Where then a subject, that de- mands thought, has been thoughtfully treated, and with an ex- act and patient derivation from its principles, we must be wil- ling to exert a portion of the same effort, and to think with the author, or the author will have thought in vain for us. It makes little difference for the time being, whether there be an hiatus oscitans in the reader's attention, or an hiatus lacry- mabilis in the author's manuscript. When this occurs during the persual of a work of known authority and established/ame, we honestly lay the fault on our own deficiency, or on the un- fitness of our present mood ; but when it is a contemporary production, over which we have been nodding, it is far more pleasant to pronounce it insufferably dull and obscure. Indeed, as charity begins at home, it would be unreasonable to expect 22 that a reader should charge himself with lack of intellect, when the effect may be equally well accounted for by declar- ing the author unintelligible ; or that he should accuse his own inattention, when by half a dozen phrases of abuse, as " hea- vy stuff, metaphorical j £17' gon, &c., he can at once excuse his laziness, and gratify his pride, scorn, and envy. To similar impulses we must attribute the praises of a true modern rea- der, when he meets with a work in the true modern taste : videlicet, either in skipping, unconnected, short-winded asth- matic sentences, as easy to be understood as impossible to be remembered, in which the merest common-place acquires a monientary poignancy, a petty titillating sting, from affected point and wilful antithesis ; or else in strutting and rounded periods, in which the emptiest truisms are blown up into illus- trious bubbles by help of film and inflation. "Aye!" (quoth the delighted reader) " this is sense, this is genius ! this I un- derstand and admire ! / have thought the very same a hundred times myself !^^ in other words, this man has reminded me of my own cleverness, and therefore I admire him. ! for one piece of egotism that presents itself under its own honest bare face of " I myself I," there are fifty that steal out in the mask of tuisms and ille-isms. It has ever been my opinion, that an excessive solicitude to avoid the use of our first personal pronoun more often has its source in conscious selfishness than in true self-oblivion. A quiet observer of human follies may often amuse or sadden his thoughts by detecting a perpetual feeling of purest egotism through a long masquerade of Disguises, the half of which, had old Proteus been master of as many, would have wearied out the patience of Menelaus. I say, the patience only: for it would ask more than the simplicity of Polypheme, with his one eye extinguished to be deceived by so poor a repetition of Nobody. Yet I can with strictest truth assure my Readers that with a pleasure combined with a sense of weariness I see the nigh approach of that point of my labors, in which I can convey my opinions and the workings of my heart without reminding the Reader obtrusively of myself. But the frequency, with which I have spoken in my own person, recalls my apprehensions to the second danger, which it was my hope to guard against ; the probable charge of Arrogance, or presumption, both for daring to dissent from the opinions of great authorities, and, in 2S my following numbers perhaps, from the general opinion con- cerning the true value of certain authorities deemed great. The word, Presumption, I appropriate to the internal feeling, and Arrogance to the way and manner of outwardly expressing ourselves. As no man can rightfully be condemned without reference to some definite law, by the knowledge of which he might have avoided the given fault, it is necessary so to define the constituent qualities and conditions of arrogance, that a reason may be assignable why we pronounce one man guilty and ac- quit another. For merely to call a person arrogant or most arro- gant can convict no one of the vice except perhaps the ac- cuser. I was once present, when a young man who had left his books and a glass of water to join a convivial party, each of whom had nearly finished his second bottle, was pronounced very drunk by the whole party — " he looked so strange and pale !" Many a man, who has contrived to hide his ruling pas- sion or predominant defect from himself, will betray the same to dispassionate observers, by his proneness on all occasions to suspect or accuse others of it. Now arrogance and Presump- tion, like all other moral qualities, must be shewn by some act or conduct : and this too must be an act that implies, if not an immediate concurrence of the Will, yet some faulty constitution of the Moral Habits. For all criminality supposes its essentials to have been within the power of the Agent. Either therefore the facts adduced do of themselves convey the whole proof of the charge, and the question rests on the truth or accuracy with which they have been stated ; or they acquire their char- acter from the circumstances. I have looked into a ponderous Review of the Corpuscular Philosophy by a Sicilian Jesuit, in which the acrimonious Father frequently expresses his doubt whether he should pronounce Boyle or Newton more impious than presumptuous, or more presumptuous than impious. They had both attacked the reigning opinions on most important sub- jects, opinions sanctioned by the greatest names of antiquity, and by the general suffrage of their learned Contemporaries or immediate Predecessors. Locke was assailed with a full cry for his presumption in having deserted the philosophical system at that time generally received by the Universities of Europe ; and of late years Dr. Priestly bestowed the epithets of arrogant and insolent on Reid, Beattie, &c., for presuming to arraign 24 certain opinions of Mr. Locke, himself repaid in kind by many of his own countrymen for his theological novelties. It will scarcely be afl&rmed, that these accusations were all of them just, or that any of them were fit or courteous. Must we there- fore say, that in order to avow doubt or disbelief of a popular persuasion without arrogance, it is required that the dissentient should know himself to possess the genius, and foreknow that he should acquire the reputation, of Locke, Newton, Boyle, or even of a Reid or Beattie ? But as this knowledge and pre- science are impossible in the strict sense of the words, and could mean no more than a strong inward conviction, it is manifest that such a rule, if it were universally established, would encourage the presumptuous, and condemn modest and humble minds alone to silence. And as this silence could not acquit the individual's own mind of presumption, unless it were accompanied by conscious acquiescence ; Modesty itself must become an inert quality, which even in private society never displays its charms more unequivocally than in its mode of reconciling moral deference with intellectual courage, and general diffidence with sincerity in the avowal of the particular conviction. We must seek then elsewhere for the true marks, by which Presumption or Arrogance may be detected, and on which the charge may be grounded with little hazard of mistake or in- justice. And as I confine my present observations to litera- ture, I deem such criteria neither difficult to determine or to apply. The first mark, as it appears to me, is a frequent bare assertion of opinions not generally received, without condescen- ding to prefix or annex the facts and. reasons on which such opinions were formed ; especially if this absence of logical cour- tesy is supplied by contemptuous or abusive treatment of such as happen to doubt of, or oppose, the decisive ipse dixi. But to assert, however nakedly, that a passage in a lewd novel, in which the Sacred Writings are denounced as more likely to pollute the young and innocent mind than a romance notorious for its indecency— to assert, I say, that such a passage argues equal impudence and ignorance in its author, at the time of w ri- ting and publishing it — this is not arrogance ; although to a vast majority of the decent part of our countrymen it would be su- perfluous as a truism, if it were exclusively an author's business to convey or revive knowledge, and not sometimes his duty to 25 awaken the indignation of his Reader by the expression of his own. A second species of this unamiable quality, which has been often distinguished by the name of Wcwhurtonian arrogance, betrays itself, not as in the former, by proud or petulant omis- sion of proof or argument, but by the habit of ascribing weakness of intellect, or wantof taste and sensibility, or hardness of heart, or corruption of moral principle, to all who deny the truth of the doctrine, or the sufficiency of evidence, or the fairness of the reasoning adduced in its support. This is indeed not es- sentially diiferent from the first, but assumes a separate charac- ter from its accompaniments : for though both the doctrine and its proofs may have been legitimately supplied by the under- standing, yet the bitterness of personal crimination will resolve itself into naked assertion. We are, therefore, authorized by experience, and justified on the principle of self-defence and by the law of fair retaliation, in attributing it to a vicious tem- per, arrogant from irritability, or irritable from arrogance. This learned arrogance admits of many gradations, and is palliated or aggravated, accordingly, as the point in dispute has been more or less controverted, as the reasoning bears a greater or smaller proportion to the virulence of the personal detraction, and as the persons or parties, who are the objects of it, are more or less respected, more or less worthy of respect.* * Had the author of the Divine Legation of Moses more skilfully appro- priated his coarse eloquence of abuse, his customaiy assurance of the idiotcy, both in head and heart, of all his opponents; if he had employed those vigor- ous arguments of his own vehement humor in the defence of Truths ac- knowledged and reverenced by learned men in general ; or if he had confi- ned them to the names of Chubi), Woolston, and other precui-sors of Mr. Thom- as Payne; we should perhaps still characterize his mode of controversy by its rude violence, but not so often have heard his name used, even by those who have never read his writings, as a proverbial expression of learned An-o- gance. But when a novel and doubtful hypothesis of his own formation was the citadel to be defended, and his niephitic hand-granados were thrown with the fury of lawless despotism at the fair reputation of a Sykes and a Lardner, we not only confirm the verdict of his independent contemporaries, but cease to wonder, that arrogance should render man an object of contempt in many, and of aversion in all instances, when it was capable of hurrying a Christian teacher of equal talents and learning into a slanderous vulgarity, which escapes our disgust only when we see the writer's own reputation the sole victim. But throughout his great work, and the pamphlets in which he 4 2G Lastly, it must be admitted as a just imputation of presump- tion when an individual obtrudes on the public eye, with all the high pretensions of originality, opinions and observations, in regard to which he must plead wilful ignorance in order to be acquitted of dishonest plagiarism. On the same seat must the writer be placed, who in a disquisition on any important subject proves, by falsehoods either of omission or of positive error, that he has neglected to possess himself, not only of the information requisite for this particular subject, but even of those acquirements, and that general knowledge, which could alone authorize him to commence a public instructor : this is an office which cannot be procured gratis. The industry, necessary for the due exercise of its functions, is its purchase-money ; and the absence or insufficiency of the same is so far a species of dishonesty, and implies a presumption in the literal as well as the ordinary sense of the word. He has taken a thing before he had acquired any right or title thereto. If in addition to this unfitness which every man possesses the means of ascertaining, his aim should be to unsettle a gen- eral belief closely connected with public and private quiet ; and if his language and manner be avowedly calculated for the illiterate (and perhaps licentious) part of his contrymen ; dis- gusting as his presumption must appear, it is yet lost or evan- escent in the close neighbourhood of his guilt. That Hobbes translated Homer in English verse and published his translation, furnishes no positive evidence of his self-conceit, though it implies a great lack of self-knowldege and of acquaintance with the nature of poetry. A strong wish often imposes itself on the mind for an actual power; the mistake is favored by the innocent pleasure derived from the ^exercise of versification, perhaps by the approbation of intimates ; and the canditate asks from more impartial readers that sentence, which Nature has not enabled him to anticipate. But when the philosopher of Malmsbury waged war with Wallis and the fundamental truths of pure geometry, every instance of his gross ignorance and supported it, lie always seems to write as if he had deemed it a duty of deco- rum to i)ublish his fancies on the Mosaic Law, as the Law itself was delivered, that is, "in thunders and lightnings;" or as if he had aj)pliedto his own book intsead of the sacred mount, the menace — There shall not a hand touch it but he shall surely he stoned or shot through. 27 utter misconception of the very elements of the science he pro- posed to confute, furnished an unanswerable fact in proof of his high presumption ; and the confident and insulting language of the attack leaves the judicious reader in as little doubt of his gross arrogance. An illiterate mechanic, when mistaking some disturbance of his nerves for a miraculous call proceeds alone to convert a tribe of savages, whose language he can have no natural means of acquiring, may have been misled by impulses very dilTerent from those of high self-opinion ; but the illite- rate perpetrator of " the Age of Reason," must have had his very conscience stupified by the habitual intoxication of pre- sumptuous arrogance, and his common-sense over-clouded by the vapors from his heart. As long therefore as I obtrude no unsupported assertions on my Readers ; and as long as I state my opinions and the evidence which induced or compelled me to adopt them, with calmness and that diffidence in myself, which is by no means incompatible with a firm belief in the justness of the opinions themselves; while I attack no man's private life from any cause, and detract from no man's honors in his public character, from the truth of his doctrines, or the merits of his compositions, without detail- ing all my reasons and resting the result solely on the argu- ments adduced ; while I moreoA^er explain fully the motives of duty, which influenced me in resolving to institute such inves- tigation ; while I confine all asperity of censure, and all expres- sions of contempt, to gross violations of truth, honor, and de- cency, to the base corrupter and the detected slanderer ; while I write on no subject, which I have not studied with my best at- tention, on no subject which my education and acquirments have incapacitated me from properly understanding ; and above all while J approve myself, alike in praise and in blame, in close reasoning and in impassioned declamation, a steady friend to the two best and surest friends of all men. Truth and Honesty ; I will not fear an accusation of either Presumption or Arrogance from the good and the wise : I shall pity it from the weak, and despise it from the wicked. ESSAY V. In eodempedore milium est honestorum turpiumque consortium: et cogitare optima simul et deter rima non niagis est unius aniinm quam ejusdem hominis honum esse ac malum. Quintiliajv. There is no fellowship of honor and baseness in the same breast; and to com- bine the best and the worst designs is no more possible in one mind, than it is for the same man to be at the same instant virtuous and vicious. Cognitio veritatis 07nnia falsa, si mode pro/erantur, etiam quce priiis inaudita crant, et dijudicare et suhvertere idonca est. Augustinus. A knowledge of the truth is equal to the task both of discerning and of con- futing all false assertions and erroneous arguments, though never before met with, if only they may freely be brought forward. I have said, that my very system compels me to make every fair appeal to the feelings, the imagination and even the fancy. If these are to be withheld from the service of truth, virtue, and happiness, to what purpose were they given ? in whose service are they retained ? I have indeed considered the disproportion of human passions to their ordinary objects among the strongest internal evidences of our future destination, and the attempt to restore them to their rightful claimants, the most imperious duty and the noblest task of genius. The verbal enunciation of this master-truth could scarcely be new to me at any period of my life since earliest youth ; but I well remember the particular time, when the words first became more than words to me, when they incorporated with a living conviction, and took their place among the realties of my being. On some wide com- mon or open heath, peopled with Ant-hills, during some one of the grey cloudy days of the late Autumn, many of my Rea- ders may have noticed the effect of a sudden and momentary flash of sunshine on all the countless little animals within his view, aware too that the self-same influence was darted co-in- 29 stantaneously over all their swarming cities as far as his eye could reach ; may have observed, with what a kindly force the gleazn stirs and quickens them all! and will have experienced no unpleasureable shock of feeling in seeing myriads of myriads of living and sentient beings united at the same moment in one gay sensation, one joyous activity ! But awful indeed is the same appearance in a multitude of rational beings, our fellow- men, in whom too the effect is produced not so much by the ex- ternal occasion as from the active quality of their own thoughts. 1 had walked from Gottingen in the year 1799, to witness the arrival of the Queen of Prussia, on her visit to the Baron Von Hartzberg's seat, five miles from the University. The spa- cious outer court of the palace was crowded with men and women, a sea of heads, with a number of children rising out of it from their father's shoulders. Affer a buzz of two hours ex- pectation, the avant-courier rode at full speed into the Court. At the loud cracks of his long whip and the trampling of his horse's hoofs, the universal shock and thrill of emotion — I have not language to convey it — expressed as it was in such manifold looks, gestures, and attitudes, yet with one and the same feeling in the eyes of all ! Recovering from the first inevitable conta- gion of sympathy, I involuntarily exclaimed, though in a language to myself alone intelligible, " O man ! ever nobler than thy circumstances ! Spread but the mist of obscure feeling over any form, and even a woman incapable of blessing or of injury to thee shall be welcomed with an intensity of emotion ade- quate to the reception of the Redeemer of the world!" To a creature so highly, so fearfully gifted, who, alienated as he is by a sorcery scarcely less mysterious than the nature on which it is exercised, yet like the fabled son of Jove in the evil day of his sensual bewitchment, lifts the spindles and dis- taffs of Omphale with the arm of a giant. Truth is self-restora- tion : for that which is the correlative of Truth, the existence of absolute Life, is the only object which can attract towards it the whole depth and mass of his fluctuating Being, and alone therefore can unite Calmness with Elevation. But it must be Truth without alloy and unsophisticated. It is by the agency of indistinct conceptions, as the counterfeits of the Ideal and Transcendent, that evil and vanity exercise their tyranny on the feelings of man. The Powers of Darkness are politic i( not wise ; but surely nothing can be more irrational in the pre- 96 tended children of Light, than to enlist themselves under the banners of Truth, and yet rest their hopes on an alliance with Delusion. Among the numerous artifices, by which austere truths are to be softened down into palateable falsehoods, and Virtue and Vice, like the atoms of Epicurus, to receive that insensible clinamen which is to make them meet each other half way, I have an especial dislike to the expression. Pious Frauds. Piety indeed shrinks from the very phrase, as an attempt to mix poison with the cup of Blessing: while the expediency of the measures which this phrase was framed to recommend or palliate, appears more and more suspicious, as the range of our experience widens, and our acquaintance with the records of History becomes more extensive and accurate. One of the most seductive arguments of Infidelity grounds itself on the numerous passages in the works of the Christian Fathers, as- serting the lawfulness of Deceit for a good purpose. That the Fathers held, almost without exception, " That wholly without breach of duty it is allowed to the Teachers and heads of the Christian Church to employ artifices, to intermix falsehoods with truths, and especially to deceive the enemies of the faith, provided only they hereby serve the interests of Truth and the advantage of mankind,"* is the unwilling confession of Ribof: (Program, de Oeconomia Patrum.) St. Jerom, as is shewn by the citations of this learned Theologian, boldly attributes this management (falsitatem dispensativam) even to the Apostles themselves. But why speak I of the advantage given to the opponents of Christianity ? Alas ! to this doctrine chiefly, and to the practices derived from it, we must attribute the utter ^Integrum omnino Doctoribus et ccetus Ch'istiani AntistUihus esse, ut dolos vtrsent, falsa veiis intermiscant et {ijiprimis religionis hostes fallant, dummodo verilatis commodis et idilitati inservant. — I ti'ust, I need not add, that the ini- ])utation of such jirincijjles of action to the first inspired Propagators of Christianity, is founded on the gross misconstruction of those passages in the writings of St. Paul, in which the necessity of employing different argu- ments to men of different capacities and prejudices, is supposed and acceded to. In other words, St. Paul strove to si)eak intelligibly, Avillingly sacrificed indifferent things to matters of importance, and acted courteously as a man, in order to win attention as an Apostle. A traveller prefers for daily use the coin of the nation through which he is passing, to bullion or the mintage of bis own countiy: and is this to justify a sticceeding traveller in the use of counterfeit coin ? 31 corruption of the Religion itself for so many ages, and even now over so large a portion of the civilized world. By a sys- tem of accommodating Truth to Falsehood, the Pastors of the Church gradually changed the life and light of the Gospel into the very superstitions which they were commissioned to disperse, and thus paganized Christianity in order to christen Paganism. At this very hour Europe groans and bleeds in consequence. So much in proof and exemplification of the probable expedi- ency of pious deception, as suggested by its known and record- ed consequences. An honest man, however, possesses a clear- er light than that of History. He knows, that by sacrificing the law of his reason to the maxim of pretended prudence, he purchases the sword with the loss of the arm that is to wield it. The duties which we owe to our own moral being, are the ground and condition of all other duties ; and to set our nature at strife with itself for a good purpose, implies the same sort of prudence, as a priest of Diana would have manifested, who should have proposed to dig up the celebrated charcoal foun- dations of the mighty Temple of Ephesus, in order to furnish fuel for the burnt-offerings on its altars. Truth, Virtue and Happiness, may be distinguished from each other, but cannot be divided. They subsist by a mutual co-inherance, which gives a shadow of divinity even to our human nature. " Will ye speak deceitfully for God ?" is a searching question, which most affectingly represents the grief and impatience of an un- corrupted mind at perceiving a good cause defended by ill means : and assuredly if any temptation can provoke a well-regu- lated temper to intolerance, it is the shameless assertion, that Truth and Falsehood are indifferent in their own natures ; that the former is as often injurious (and therefore criminal) and the latter on many occasions as beneficial (and consequently meri- torious) as the former. I feel it incumbent on me, therefore, to place immediately be- fore my Readers in the fullest and clearest light, the whole question of moral obligation respecting the communication of Truth, its extent and conditions. I would fain obviate all ap- prehensions either of my incaution on the one hand, or of any insincere reserve on the other, by proving that the more strictly we adhere to the Letter of the moral law in this respect, the more completely shall we reconcile the law with prudence ; thus securing a purity in the principle without mischief from 32 the practice. I would not, I could not dare, address my coun- trymen as a Friend, if I might not justify the assumption of that sacred title by more than mere veracity, by open-heartedness. Pleasure, most often delusive, may be born of delusion. Pleas- ure, herself a sorceress, may pitch her tents on enchanted ground. But Happiness (or, to use a far more accurate as well as more comprehensive term, solid Well-being) can be built on Virtue alone, and must of necessity have Truth for its foundation. Add to the known fact that the meanest of men feels himself insulted by an unsuccessful attempt to deceive him ; and hates and despises the man who had attempted it. What place then is left in the heart for Virtue to build on, if in any case we may dare practice on others what we should feel as a cruel and con- temptuous wrong in our own persons ? Every parent possesses the opportunity of observing, how deeply children resent the injury of a delusion ; and if men laugh at the falsehoods that were imposed on themselves during their childhood, it is be- cause they are not good and wise enough to contemplate the past in the present, and so to produce by a virtuous and thought- ful sensibility that continuity in their self-consciousness, which Nature has made the law of their animal life. Ingratitude, sen- suality, and hardness of heart, all flow from this source. Men are ungrateful to others only when they have ceased to look back on their former selves with joy and tenderness. They exist in fragments. Annihilated as to the Past, they are dead to the Future, or seek for the proofs of it everywhere, only not (where alone they can be found) in themselves. A contem- poraiy Poet has expressed and illustrated this sentiment with equal fineness of thought and tenderness of feeling : My heart leaps up when I behold A rain-bow in the sky ? So was it, wlien my life began ; So is it now I am a man ; So let it be, when I grow old, Or let me die. The Child is Father of the Man, And I would wish my days to be Bound each to each hy natur-al piety.* W^ORDSWORTH. * I am infonned, that these very lines have been cited, as a specimen of despicable puerility. So much the worse for the citer. Not willingly in Jus 33 Alas ! the pernicious influence of this lax morality extends from the nursery and the school to the cabinet and senate. It is a common weakness with men in power, who have used dis- simulation successfully, to form a passion for the use of it, dupes to the love of duping ! A pride is flattered by these lies. He who fancies that he must be perpetually stooping down to the prejudices of his fellow-creatures, is perpetually reminding and re-assuring himself of his own vast superiority to them. But no real greatness can long co-exist with deceit. The whole faculties of man must be exerted in order to noble ener- gies ; and he who is not earnestly sincere, lives in but half his being, self-mutilated, self-paralyzed. The latter part of the proposition, which has drawn me into this discussion, that 1 mean in which the morality of intention- al falsehood is asserted, may safely be trusted to the Reader's own moral sense. Is it a groundless apprehension, that the patrons and admirers of such publications may receive the pun- ishment of their indiscretion in the conduct of their sons and daughters ? The suspicion of methodism must be expected by every man of rank and fortune, who carries his examination respecting the books which are to lie on his breakfast-table, farther than to their freedom from gross verbal indecencies, and broad avowals of atheism in the title-page. For the existence of an intelligent first cause may be ridiculed in the notes of one poem, or placed doubtfully as one of two or three possible hypotheses, in the very opening of another poem, and both be considered as works of safe promiscuous reading " virginibus puerisque :" and this too by many a father of a family, who would hold himself highly culpable in permitting his child to presence would I behold the sun setting behind our mountains, or listen to a tale of distress or virtue; I should be ashamed of the quiet tear on iny own cheek. But let the dead bury the dead ! The Poet sang for the Uvms Of what value mdeed, to a sane mind, are the hkings or dislikings of one man grounded on the mere assertions of another ? Opinions formed from opin' lons-whatare they, but clouds sailing under clouds, which in,press shadows upon shadows ? Fungum pelle procul, jubeo! nam quid mihi fungo? Conveniunt stomacho non minus ista suo. I was aiways pleased with the motto placed under the figure of the Rose marj' in old Herbals : Siis, apage ! Hand tibi spiro. 5 34 form habits of familiar acquaintance with a person of loose ha- bits, and think it even criminal to receive into his house a private tutor without a previous inquiry concerning his opin- ions and principles, as well as his manners and outward conduct. How little I am an enemy to free inquiry of the boldest kind, and where the authors have differed the most widely from my own convictions and the general faith of mankind, provided only, the enquiry be conducted with that seriousness, which naturally accompanies the love of truth, and that it is evidently intended for the perusal of those only, who may be presumed to be capable of weighing the arguments, I shall have abund- ant occasion of proving, in the course of this work. Quin ipsa philosophia talibus e disputationibus non nisi beneficium recijnt. Nam si vera proponit homo ingeniosus veritatisque amans, nova ad earn accessio fiet : sin falsa, refiitatione eorum priores tanto magis stabilientur .* Galilei Syst. Cosm. p. 42. The assertion, that truth is often no less dangerous than falsehood, sounds less offensively at the first hearing, only be- cause it hides its deformity in an equivocation, or double mean- ing of the word truth. What may be rightly affirmed of truth, used as synonymous with verbal accuracy, is transferred to it in its higher sense of veracity. By verbal truth we mean no more than the correspondence of a given fact to given words. In moral truth, we involve likewise the intention of the speak- er, that his words should correspond to his thoughts in the sense in which he expects them to be understood by others : and in this latter import we are always supposed to use the word, whenever we speak of truth absolutely, or as a possible subject of a moral merit or demerit. It is verbally true, that in the sacred Scriptures it is written : " As is the good, so is the sinner, and he that sweareth as he that feareth an oath. A man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry. For there is one event unto all : the living know they shall die, but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward," But he who should * (Translation.) — Moreover, Philosophy itself cannot but derive benefit from such discussion!?. For if a man of genius and a lover of Truth brings just positions before the Public, there is a fi'esh acrcr-sion to the stock of Philo- sophic Insight; but if eirroneous positions, the former Truths will by their confutation be established so much the juore firmly. 35 repeat these words, with this assurance, to an ignorant man in the hour of his temptation, lingering at the door of the ale- house, or hesitating as to the testimony required of him in the court of justice, would, spite of this verbal truth, be a liar, and the murderer of his brother's conscience. Veracity, there- fore, not mere accuracy; to convey truth, not merely to say it ; is the point of duty in dispute : and the only difficulty in the mind of an honest man arises from the doubt, whether more than veracity (i. e. the truth and nothing but the truth) is not demanded of him by the law of conscience ; whether it does not exact simplicity ; that is, the truth only, and the whole truth. If we can solve this difficulty, if we can deter- mine the conditions under which the law of universal reason commands the communication of the truth independently of con- sequences altogether, we shall then be enabled to judge wheth- er there is any such probability of evil consequences from such communication, as can justify the assertion of its occasional criminality, as can perplex us in the conception, or disturb us in the performance, of our duty. The conscience, or effective reason, commands the design of conveying an adequate notion of the thing spoken of, when this is practicable : but at all events a right notion, or none at all. A school-master is under the necessity of teaching a certain rule in simple arithmetic empirically, (do so and so, and the sum will always prove true ) the necessary truth of the rule (i. e. that the rule having been adhered to, the sum must al- ways prove true) requiring a knowledge of the higher mathe- matics for its demonstration. He, however, conveys a right notion, though he cannot convey the adequate one. ESSAY VT. Tlolvfia&ir] xtt'Qxa jiiEP ojifelest,, y.uQTu de ^Iu'tcxei to^v exovra 'wcpeAs'et juef jo'v Se^io'v "avSqa, (HuTnet ds to> ^y^idiojg . Xgr/' 8e xuiqov' fieiqa eiddvui- aocpirjg yuQ ov^rog, "oQog, "oi de i'^oj xuiqov' grfaiv [lovaixTj^v Tienvv/nEvwg " ukiaojat,v, o'u nuQadexovxai iv aqyiij yvw'fiTjv, alreiv d' (melius uiiiijv) i'xovat. fiojqiag. Heraclitus apud Stobceum, (Serm. xxxiv. Ed. Lgd. p. 216.) (Translation.) — General Knowledge and ready Talent maybe of verygi-eat benefit, but they may likewise be of very great disservice to the possessor. They are highly advantageous to the man of sound judgment, and dexterous in applying them ; but they injure your fluent holder-forth on all subjects in all companies. It is necessary to know the measures of the time and occa- sion: for this is the veiy boundary of wisdom — (that by which it is defined, and distinguished from mere ability.) But he, who without regard to the un- fitness of the time and the audience " will soar in the high reason of his fan- cies with his garland and singing robes about him," will not acquire the credit of seriousness amidst frivolity, but will be condemned for his silliness, as the greatest idler of the company because the most unseasonable. The Moral Law, it has been shewn, permits an inadequate communication of unsophisticated truth, on the condition that it alone is practicable, and binds us to silence when neither is in our power. We must first enquire then, What is necessary to constitute, and what may allowably accompany, a right though inadequate notion ? And secondly, what are the circumstances, from which we may deduce the impracticability of conveying even a right notion ; the presence or absence of which circum- stances it therefore becomes our duty to ascertain ? In answer to the first question, the conscience demands : 1. That it should be the wish and design of the mind to convey the truth only ; 37 that if in addition to the negative loss implied in its inadequate- ness, the notion communicated should lead to any positive error, the cause should lie in the fault or defect of the Recipient, not of the Communicator, whose paramount duty, whose inaliena- ble right it is to preserve his own Integrity,* the integral char- acter of his own moral Being. Self-respect ; the reverence which he owes to the presence of Humanity in the person of his neighbor ; the reverential upholding of the faith of man in man ; gratitude for the particular act of confidence ; and reli- gious awe for the divine purposes in the gift of language ; are duties too sacred and important to be sacrificed to the guesses of an individual, concerning the advantages to be gained by the breach of them. 2. It is further required, that the suppos- ed error shall not be such as will pervert or materially vitiate the imperfect truth, in communicating which we had unwilling- ly, though not perhaps unwittingly, occasioned it. A Barbari- an so instructed in the power and intelligence of the Infinite Being as to be left wholly ignorant of his moral attributes, would have acquired none but erroneous notions even of the former. At the very best, he would gain only a theory to sa- tisfy his curiosity with ; but more probably, would deduce the belief of a Moloch or a Baal. (For the idea of an irresistible *The best and most forcible sense of a word is often that, which is con- tained in its Etymology. The Author of the Poems ( The Synagogue) fre- quently affixed to Herbert's " Temple," gives the original purport of the word Integrity, in the following lines (fourth stanza of the eighth Poem.) Next to Sincerity, remember still, Thou must resolve upon Integiity. God will have all thou hast, thy mind, thy will, Thy thoughts, thy words, thy works. And again, after some verses on Constancy and Humility, the Poem con- cludes with — He that desires to see The face of God, in his rehgion must Sincere, entire, constant and humble be. Having mentioned the name of HerbeH, that model of a man, a Gentle- man, and a Clergj'man, let me add, that the quaintness of some of his thoughts not of his diction, than which nothing can be more pure, manly, and unaffected, has blinded modern readers to the great general merit of his Poems, which are for the most part exquisite in their kind. 38 invisible Being naturally produces terror in the mind of unin- structed and unprotected man, and with terror there will be associated whatever had been accustomed to excite it, as anger, vengeance, &c. ; as is proved by the Mythology of all barba- rous nations.) This must be the case with all organized truths; the component parts derive their significance from the idea of the whole. Bolingbroke removed Love, Justice, and Choice, from Power and Intelligence, and yet pretended to have left unimpaired the conviction of a Deity. He might as consistent- ly have paralyzed the optic nerve, and then excused himself by aflSrming, that he had, however, not touched the eye. The third condition of a right though inadequate notion is, that the error occasioned be greatly outweighed by the impor- tance of the truth communicated. The rustic would have little reason to thank the philosopher, who should give him true con- ceptions of the folly of believing in ghosts, omens, dreams, &c. at the price of abandoning his faith in Providence and in the continued existence of his fellow-creatures after their death. The teeth of the old serpent planted by the Cadmuses of French Literature, under Lewis XV. produced a plenteous crop of Philosophers and Truth-trumpeters of this kind, in the reign of his Successor. They taught many truths, historical, political, physiological, and ecclesiastical, and diffused their notions so widely, that the very ladies and hair-dressers of Paris became fluent EncyclopcBdists : and the sole price which their scholars paid for these treasures of new information, was to believe Christianity an imposture, the Scriptures a forgery, the worship (if not the belief) of God superstition, hell a fable, heaven a dream, our life without Providence, and our death without hope. They became as gods as soon as the fruit of this Upas tree of knowledge and liberty had opened their eyes to perceive that they were no more than beasts — somewhat more cunning per- haps, and abundantly more mischievous. What can be conceiv- ed more natural than the result, — that self-acknowledged beasts should first act, and next suffer themselves to be treated as beasts. We judge by comparison. To exclude the great is to magnify the little. The disbelief of essential wisdom and good- ness, necessarily prepares the imagination for th€ supremacy of cunning with malignity. Folly and vice have their appropriate religions, as well as virtue and true knowledge ; and in some 39 way or other fools will dance round the golden calf, and wicked men beat their timbrels and kettle-drums To Moloch, horrid king, besmeared with blood Of human sacrifice and pai'ent's tears. My feelings have led me on, and in my illustration I had almost lost from my \iew the subject to be illustrated. One condition yet remaims : that the error foreseen shall not be of a kind to prevent or impede the after acquirement of that knowledge which will remove it. Observe, how graciously Nature instructs her human children. She cannot give us the knowledge derived from sight without occasioning us at first to mistake images of reflection for substances. But the very con- sequences of the delusion lead inevitably to its detection ; and out of the ashes of the error rises a new flower of knowledge. We not only see, but are enabled to discover by what means we see. So too we are under the necessity, in given cir- cumstances, of mistaking a square for a round object: but ere the mistake can have any practical consequences, it is not only removed, but in its removal gives us the symbol of a new fact, that of distance. In a similar train of thought, though more fancifully, I might have elucidated the preceding condition, and have referred our hurrying enlighteners and revolutionary am- putators to the gentleness of Nature, in the oak and the beech, the dry foliage of which she pushes off" only by the propulsion of the new buds, that supply its place. My friends! a cloth- ing even of withered leaves is better than bareness. Having thus determined the nature and conditions of a right notion, it remains to determine the circumstances which tend to render the communication of it impracticable, and oblige us of course, to abstain from the attempt — oblige us not to convey falsehood under the pretext of saying truth. These circumstances, it is plain, must consist either in natural or mo- ral impediments. The former, including the obvious gradations of constitutional insensibility and derangement, preclude all temptation to misconduct, as well as all probability of ill-con- sequences from accidental oversight, on the part of the commu- nicator. Far otherwise is it with the impediments from moral causes. These demand all the attention and forecast of the genuine lovers of truth in the matter, the manner, and the time of their communications, public and private ; and these are the 40 ordinary materials of the vain and the factious, determine them in the choice of their audiences and of their arguments, and to each argument give powers not its own. They are distinguish- able into two sources, the streams from which, however, must often become confluent, viz. hindrances from ignorance (I here use the word in relation to the habits of reasoning as well as to the previous knowledge requisite for the due comprehen- sion of the subject) and hindrances from predominant passions.* From both these the law of conscience commands us to ab- stain, because such being the ignorance and such the passions of the supposed auditors, we ought to deduce the impractica- bility of conveying not only adequate but even right notions of our own convictions : much less does it permit us to avail our- selves of the causes of this impracticability in order to procure nominal proselytes, each of whom will have a diiFerent, and all a false, conception of those notions that were to be conveyed for their truth's sake alone. Whatever is (or but for some de- fect in our moral character would have been ) foreseen as pre- venting the conveyance of our thoughts, makes the attempt an act of self-contradiction : and whether the faulty cause exist in our choice of unfit words or our choice of unfit auditors, the result is the same and so is the guilt. We have voluntarily communicated falsehood. Thus (without reference to consequences, if only one short digression be excepted ) from the sole principle of self-consist- ence or moral integrity, we have evolved the clue of right reason, which we are bound to follow in the communication of truth. Now then we appeal to the judgment and experience of the reader, whether he who most faithfully adheres to the letter of the law of conscience will not likewise act in strictest correspondence to the maxims of prudence and sound policy. I am at least unable to recollect a single instance, either in his- tory or in my personal experience, of a preponderance of in- jurious consequences from the publication of any truth, under the observance of the moral conditions above stated : much less can I even imagine any case, in which truth, as truth, can be pernicious. But if the assertor of the indifferency of truth and falsehood in their own natures, attempt to justify his position * See the Author's Second Lay Sermon, from p. 16 to p. 25. 41 by confining the word truth, in the first instance, to the cor- respondence of given words to given facts, without reference to the total impression left by such words ; what is this more than to assert, that articulated sounds are things of moral in- diff'erency ? and that we may relate a fact accurately and nev- ertheless deceive grossly and wickedly ? Blifil related accu- rately Tom Jones's riotous joy during his benefactor's illness, only omitting that this joy was occasioned by the physician's having pronounced him out of danger. Blifil was not the less a liar for being an accurate matter-of-fact liar. Tell-truths in the service of falsehood we find every where, of various names and various occupations, from the elderly young women that discuss the love-affairs of their friends and acquaintance at the village tea-tables, to the anonymous calumniators of literary merit in reviews, and the more darling malignants, who dole out discontent, innovation and panic, in political journals : and a most pernicious race of liars they are ! - But who ever doubted it ? Why should our moral feelings be shocked, and the holiest words with all their venerable associations be profaned, in or- der to bring forth a Truism ?■ But thus it is for the most part with the venders of startling paradoxes. In the sense in which they are to gain for their author the character of a bold and original thinker, they are false even to absurdity ; and the sense in which they are true and harmless, conveys so mere a Tru- ism, that it even borders on Nonsense. How often have we heard "The Rights of Man — hurra! The Sovereign- ty OF the People — hurra !" roared out by men who, if call- ed upon in another place and before another audience, to ex- plain themselves, would give to the words a meaning, in which the most monarchical of their political opponents would admit them to be true, but which would contain nothing new, or strange, or stimulant, nothing to flatter the pride or kindle the passions of the populace. ESSAY VII. ^t profanum vulgus lectorum quomodo arcendum est ? Ubrisnt nostris jubea- mus, vi coram indignis obnmdescant ? Si Ihrguis, ut dicitiir, emortuis idamur, eheu ! ingenium quoque iiohis emoriuum jacet : sin cditer, Minerva secreta eras- sis ludihium divulgamus, et Dianam nostram impuris hitjus scecidi Adaoiiibus nudam prqferimus. Respondm : — ad incommoditate.s hitjusmodi evitandas, nee Grace nee Latin^ saibere opus est. Sufficiet, nos sicca luce usos Juisse et strictiore argumentandi methodo. Sufficiet, innocenter, idiliter scripsisse : even- tus est apud lectorem. JVuper emptum est a nobis Ciceronianum istud " de offieiis" opus quod semper pane Christiana dignum putabamus. MirumI libel" lus factum fuerat famosisshnus. Credisne ? Vix : at quomodo ? Maligna quodam, nescio quern, plena margine et super tergo, annotatum est et exemplis, calumniis potius, superfcetatum ! Sic et qui inirorsum uritur injlammationes animi vel Catonianis (ne dicam, sacrosaiictis) paginis accipit. Omni aum mons, omnibus scriptis mens, ignita vescitur. RuDOLPHi Langii Epist: ad Amicum quemdam Italicum in qua LingiisB patrise et hodiernse usiim defendit et eruditis commendat. JVec me fallit, id in corporibus hominum sic in animis mvltipliei passione affectis, medieamenta verborum midtis inefficacia visum iri. Sed nee illud quoque me prceterit, id invisibiles animorum morbos, sic invisibilia esse remedia. Falsis opinionibus circumventi veris sententiis liberandi sunt, ut qui audiendo ceci- derant audiendo consurgant. Petrarcha : Prefat. in lib. de remed. utriusque fortunae. (Translation.) But how are we to guard against the herd of promiscuous Readers? Can we bid our books be silent in the presence of the unworthy? If we employ what are called the dead languages, our own genius, alas! becomes flat and dead : and if we embody our thoughts in the words native to them or in which they were conceived, we divulge the secrets of Miner- va to the ridicule of blockheads, and expose our Diana to the Actseons of a sensual age. I reply : that in order to avoid inconveniences of this kind, we need write neither in Greek or in Latin. It will be enough, if we abstain from appealing to the bad passions and low appetites, and confine ourselves to a strictly consequent method of reasoning. To have written innocently, and for wise purposes, is all that can be re- quired of us: the event lies with the Reader. I purchused lately Cicero's 43 work, de ofBciis, which I had always considered as ahnost worthy of a Christian. To my surprize it had become a most flagrant libel. Nay ! but how?-:-Some one, I know not who, out of the fruitfulness of his own malig- nity had filled all the margins and other blank spaces with annotations — a true superfcctation of examples, tliat is, of false and slanderous tales! In like manner, the slave of impure desires will turn the pages of Cato, not to say. Scripture itself, into occasions and excitements of wanton imaginations. There is no wind but feeds a volcano, no work but feeds and fans a conibus- tible mind. I am well aware, that words will appear to many as inefficacious medi- cines when administered to minds agitated with manifold passions, as when they are muttered by way of charm over bodily ailments. But neither does it escape me, on the other hand, that as the diseases of the mind are invisi- ble, invisble must the remedies likewise be. Those who have been entrapped by false opinions are to be liberated by convincing truths: that thus having im- bibed the poison through tlie ear they may receive the antidote by the same channel. That our elder writers, to Jeremy Taylor inclusive, quoted to excess, it would be the very blindness of partiality to deny. More than one might be mentioned, whose works might be char- acterized in the words of Milton, as "a paroxysm of citations, pampered metaphors, and aphorisming pedantry." On the oth- er hand, it seems to me that we now avoid quotations with an anxiety that oifends in the contrary extreme. Yet it is the beau- ty and independent worth of the citations far more than their appropriateness which have made Johnson's Dictionary popular even as a reading book— and the mottos with the translations of them are known to add considerably to the value of the Spectator. With this conviction I have taken more than com- mon pains in the selection of the mottos for the Friend : and of two mottos equally appropriate prefer always that from the book which is least likely to have come into my Reader's hands. For I often please myself with the fancy, now that I may have saved from oblivion the only striking passage in a whole volume, and now that I may have attracted notice to a writer undeserve- dly forgotten. If this should be attributed to a silly ambition in the display of various reading, I can do no more than deny any consciousness of having been so actuated : and for the rest, I must console myself by the reflection, that if it be one of the most foolish, it is at the same time one of the most harmless, of human vanities. 44 The passages prefixed lead at once to the question, which will probably have more than once occurred to the reflecting reader of the preceding Essay. How will these rules apply to the most important mode of communication ? to that, in which one man may utter his thoughts to myriads of men at the same time, and to myriads of myriads at various times and through successions of generations ? How do they apply to authors, whose foreknowledge assuredly does not inform them who, or how many, or of what description their Readers will be ? How do these rules apply to books, which once published, are as likely to fall in the way of the incompetent as of the judi- cious, and will be fortunate indeed if they are not many times looked at through the thick mists of ignorance, or amid the glare of prejudice and passion ? — We answer in the first place, that this is not universally true. The readers are not seldom picked and chosen. Relations of certain pretended miracles performed a few years ago, at Holywell, in consequence of prayers to the Virgin Mary, on female servants, and these relations moralized by the old Roman Catholic arguments without the old protest- ant answers, have to my knowledge been sold by travelling pedlars in villages and farm-houses, not only in a form which placed them within the reach of the narrowest means, but sold at a price less than their prime cost, and doubtless, thrown in occasionally as the make-weight in a bargain of pins and stay- tape. Shall I be told, that the publishers and reverend au- thorizers of these base and vulgar delusions had exerted no choice as to the purchasers and readers ? But waiving this, or rather having first pointed it out, as an important exception, we further reply : that if the Author have clearly and rightly es- tablished in his own mind the class of readers, to which he means to address his communications ; and if both in this choice, and in the particulars of the manner and matter of his work, he conscientiously observes all the conditions which rea- son and conscience have been shewn to dictate, in relation to those for whom the work was designed ; he will, in most in- stances, have effected his design and realized the desired cirj^ curascription. The posthumous work of Spinoza ( £^/iica or- dine geometrico demonstrata) may, indeed, accidentally fall into the hands of an incompetent reader. But (not to mention, that it is written in a dead language ) it will be entirely harm- iess, because it must needs be utterly unintelligible. I ven- 45 ture to assert, that the whole first book, De Deo, might be read in literal English translation to any congregation in the kingdom, and that no individual, who had not been habituated to the strictest and most laborious processes of reasoning, would even suspect its orthodoxy or piety, however heavily the few who listened would complain of its obscurity and want of interest. This, it may be objected, is an extreme case. But it is not so for the present purpose. We are speaking of the probability of injurious consequences from the communication of Truth. This I have denied, if the right means have been adopted, and the necessary conditions adhered to, for its actual communica- tion. Now the truths conveyed in a book are either evident of themselves, or such as require a train of deductions of proof: and the latter will be either such as are authorized and gener- ally received ; or such as are in opposition to received and au- thorized opinions ; or lastly, truths presented for the appropri- ate test of examination, and still under trial (adhuc sub lite.) Of this latter class I affirm, that in neither of the three sort can an instance be brought of a preponderance of ill-consequences, or even of an equilibrium of advantage and injury from a work, in which the understanding alone has been appealed to, by re- sults fairly deduced from just premises, in terms strictly appro- priate. Alas ! legitimate reasoning is impossible without severe thinking, and thinking is neither an easy nor an amusing em- ployment. The reader, who would follow a close reasoner to the summit and absolute principle of any one important subject, has chosen a Chamois-hunter for his guide. Our guide will, indeed, take us the shortest way, will save us many a weari- some and perilous wandering, and warn us of many a mock road that had formerly led himself to the brink of chasms and preci- pices, or at best in an idle circle to the spot from whence he started. But he cannot carry us on his shoulders : we must strain our own sinews, as he has strained his ; and make firm footing on the smooth rock for ourselves, by the blood of toil from our own feet. Examine the journals of our humane and zeaj^us missionaries in Hindostan. Flow often and how feel- ingly do they describe the difficulty of making the simplest chain of reasoning intelligible to the ordinary natives : the ra- pid exhaustion of their whole power of attention, and with what pain and distressful effisrt it is exerted, while it lasts. Yet it is among this class, that the hideous practices of self-torture chief- 46 ly, indeed almost exclusively, prevail. O if folly were no easier than wisdom, it being often so very much more grievous, how certainly might not these miserable men be converted to Chris- tianity ? But alas ! to swing by hooks passed through the back, or to walk on shoes with nails of iron pointed upward on the soles, all this is so much less difficult, demands so very infe rior an exertion of the will than to think, and by thought to gain Knowledge and Tranquility ! It is not true, that ignorant persons have no notion of the advantages of Truth and Knowledge. They confess, they see those advantages in the conduct, the immunities, and the supe- rior powers of the possessors. Were these attainable by Pil- grimages the most toilsome, or Penances the most painful, we should assuredly have as many Pilgrims and as many Self-tor- mentors in the service of true Religion and Virtue, as now ex- ist under the tyranny of Papal or Brahman superstition. This ineificacy of legitimate Reason, from the w'ant of fit objects, this its relative weakness and how narrow at all times its im- mediate sphere of action must be, is proved to us by the impos- tors of all professions. What, I pray, is their fortress, the rock which is both their quarry and their foundation, from which and on which they are built ? The desire of arriving at the end without the effort of thought and will, which are the ap- pointed means. Let us look backwards three or four centuries. Then, as now, the great mass of mankind w^ere governed by the three main wishes, the wish for vigor of body, including the absence of painful feelings : for wealth, or the power of procur- ing the internal conditions of bodily enjoyment: these during life — and security from pain and continuance of happiness after death. Then, as now, men w-ere desirous to attain them by some eaiser means than those of Temperance, Industry, and strict Justice. They gladly therefore applied to the Priest, who could ensure them happiness hereafter without the performance of their duties here ; to the Lawyer who could make money a substitute for a right cause ; to the Physician, w^hose medicines promised to take the sting out of the tail of their sensual indul- gences, and let them fondle and play with vice, as with a charmed serpent ; to the Alchemist, whose gold-tincture would enrich them without toil or economy ; and to the Astrologer, from whom they could purchase foresight without knowledge or reflection. The established professions were, without exception, no other than licensed modes of witchcraft. The Wizards, 47 who would now find their due reward in Bridewell, and their appropriate honors in the pillory, sate then on episcopal thrones, candidates for Saintship, and already canonized in the belief of their deluded contemporaries ; while the one or two real teach- ers and Discoverers of Truth were exposed to the hazard of fire and faggot, a dungeon the best shrine that was vouchsafed to a Roger Bacon and a Galileo ! ESSAY VIII. Pray, why is it, that people say that men are not such fools now-a-days as they were in the days of yore? I would fain know, whether you would have us un'lerstand by this same saying, as indeed you logically may, that formerly men were fools, and in this generation are grown wise ? How many and what dispositions made them fools ? How many and what dispositions were wanting to make 'em wise ? Why were those fools ? How should these be wise? Pray, how came you to know that men were formerly fools ? How did you find, that they are now wise ? Who made them fools ? Who in Heaven's name made us wise ? Who d'ye think are most, those that loved mankind foolish, or those that love it wise ? How long has it been wise? How long otherwise? Whence proceeded the foregoing fol- ly? Whence the following wisdom ? Why did the old folly end now and no later ? Why did the modern wisdom begin now and no sooner ? What were we the worse for the former folly ? What the better for the suc- ceeding wisdom ? How should the ancient folly have come to nothing? How should this same new wisdom be started up and estabhshed ? Now answer me, an't please you ! Fr. Rabelais' Preface to his 5th Book. Monsters and Madmen canonized and Galileo blind in a dungeon ! It is not so in our times. Heaven be praised, that in this respect, at least, we are, if not better, jetbetter o^than our forefathers. But to what, and to whom (under Provi- dence) do we owe the improvement ? To any radical change in the moral affections of mankind in general .-' Perhaps the 48 great majority of men are now fully conscious that they are born with the god-like faculty of Reason, and that it is the bu- siness of life to develope and apply it ? The Jacob's ladder of Truth, let down from heaven, with all its numerous rounds, is now the common highway, on which we are content to toil up- ward to the object of our desires ? We are ashamed of expect- ing the end without the means ? In order to answer these questions in the affirmative, I must have forgotten the Animal Magnetists ; the proselytes of Brothers, and of Joanna South- cot ; and some hundred thousand fanatics less original in their creeds, but not a whit more rational in their expectations ! I must forget the infamous Empirics, whose advertisements pol- lute and disgrace all our Newspapers, and almost paper the walls of our cities ; and the vending of whose poisons and poi- sonous drams (with shame and anguish be it spoken) support a shop in every market-town? I must forget that other oppro- brium of the nation, that Mother-vice, the Lottery ! I must for- get that a numerous class plead Prudence for keeping their fellow-raen ignorant and incapable of intellectual enjoyments, and the Revenue for upholding such temptations as men s^ ig- norant will not withstand — yes! that even senators and officers of state hold forth the Revenue as a sufficient plea for uphold- ing, at every fiftieth door throughout the kingdom, temptations to the most pernicious vices, which fill the land with mourning, and fit the laboring classes for sedition and religious fanaticism! Above all I must forget the first years of the French Revolu- tion, and the millions throughout Europe who confidently ex- pected the best and choicest results of Knowledge and Virtue, namely. Liberty and universal Peace, from the votes of a tu- multuous Assembly — that is, from the mechanical agitation of the air in a large room at Paris — and this too in the most light, unthinking, sensual and profligate of the European nations, a nation, the very phrases of whose language are so composed, that they can scarcely speak without lying ! — No ! Let us not deceive ourselves. Like the man who used to pull off his hat with great demonstration of respect whenever he spoke of himself, we are fond of styling our own the enlightened age : though as Jortin, I think, has wittily remarked, the golden age would be more appropriate. But in spite of our great scien- tific discoveries, for which praise be given to whom the praise is due, and in spite of that general indifference to all the truths 49 and all the principles of truth, that belong to. our permanent being, and therefore do not lie within the sphere of our senses, (that same indifference which makes toleration so easy a virtue with us, and constitutes nine-tenths of our pretended illumina- tion) it still remains the character of the mass of mankind to seek for the attainment of their necessary ends by any means rather than the appointed ones ; and for this cause only, that the latter imply the exertion of the Reason and the Will. But of all things this demands the longest apprenticeship, even an apprenticeship from Infancy ; which is generally neglected, because an excellence, that may and should belong to all men, is expected to come to every man of its own accord. To whom then do we owe our ameliorated condition ? To the successive Few in every age (more indeed in one genera- tion than in another, but relatively to the mass of mankind al- ways few) who by the intensity and permanence of their ac- tion have compensated for the limited sphere, within which it is at any one time intelligible ; and whose good deeds pos- terity reverence in their result, though the mode, in which we repair the inevitable waste of time, and the style of our addi- tions, too generally furnish a sad proof, how little we under- stand the principles. I appeal to the Histories of the Jewish, the Grecian, and the Roman Republics, to the Records of the Christian Church, to the History of Europe from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). What do they contain but accounts of noble structures raised by the wisdom of the few, and gradual- ly undermined by the ignorance and profligacy of the many ? If therefore the deficiency of good, which every- w^here sur- rounds us, orginate in the general unfitness and aversions of men to the process of thought, that is, to continuous reasoning, it must surely be absurd to apprehend a preponderance of evil from works which cannot act at all except as far as they call the reasoning faculties into full co -exertion with them. Still, however, there are truths so self-evident or so imme- diately and palpably deduced from those that are, or are ac- knowledged for such, that they are at once intelligible to all men, who possess the common advantages of the social state ; although by sophistry, by evil habits, by the neglect, false persuasions, and impostures of an anti-christian priesthood join- ed in one conspiracy with the violence of tyrannical governors, the understandings of men may become so darkened and their 7 50 consciences so lethargic, that there may arise a necessity for the republication of these truths, and this too with a voice of loud alarm, and impassioned warning. Such were the doc- trines proclaimed by the first Christians to the Pagan world ; such were the lightnings flashed by Wickliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin, Zuinglius, Latimer, &c. across the Papal darkness ; and such in our own times the agitating truths, with which Thomas Clarkson, and his excellent confederates, the Quakers, fought and conquered the legalized banditti of men-stealers, the numer- ous and powerful perpetrators and advocates of rapine, murder, and (of blacker guilt than either) slavery. Truths of this kind being indispensable to man, considered as a moral being, are above all expedience, all accidental consequences : for as sure as God is holy, and man immortal, there can be no evil so great as the ignorance or disregard of them. It is the very madness of mock prudence to oppose the removal of a poison- ed dish on account of the pleasant sauces or nutritious viands which would be lost with it ! The dish contains destruction to that, for which alone we ought to wish the palate to be grati- fied, or the body to be nourished. The sole condition, therefore, imposed on us by the law of conscience in these cases is, that we employ no unworthy and heterogeneous means to realize the necessary end, that we en- trust the event wholly to the full and adequate promulgation of the truth, and to those generous affections which the constitu- tion of our moral nature has linked to the full perception of it. Yet evil may, nay it will be occasioned. Weak men may take offence, and wicked men avail themselves of it ; though we must not attribute to the promulgation, or to the truth promul- gated, all the evil, of which wicked men (predetermined, like the wolf in the fable, to create some occasion) may choose to make it the pretext. But that there ever was or ever can be a preponderance of evil, I defy either the Historian to instance or the philosopher to prove. " Let* it fly away, all that chaff of light faith that can fly off at any breath of temptation ; the cleaner will the true grain be stored up in the granary of the Lord," we are entitled to say with Tertullian : and to ex- * Avolent quantum volent palese levis fidei quocunque afflatu tentationum ! eo purior massa frumenti in horrea domini reponetur. Tertullian. 51 claim with heroic Luther, " Scandal* and offence ! Talk not to me of scandal and offence. Need breaks through stone- walls, and recks not of scandal. It is my duty to spare weak consciences as far as it may be done without hazard of my soul. Where not, I must take counsel for my soul, though half or the whole world should be scandalized thereby." Luther felt and preached and wrote and acted, as beseemed a Luther to feel and utter and act. The truths, which had been outraged, he re-proclaimed in the spirit of outraged truth, at the behest of his conscience and in the service of the God of truth. He did his duty, come good, come evil : and made no question, on which side the preponderance would be. In the one scale there was gold, and the impress thereon the image and super- scription of the Universal Sovereign. In all the wide and ev- er widening commerce of mind with mind throughout the world, it is treason to refuse it. Can this have a counter-weight ? The other scale indeed might have seemed full up to the very balance-yard ; but of what worth and substance were its con- tents ? Were they capable of being counted or weighed against the former? The conscience indeed is already violated when to moral good or evil we oppose things possessing no moral in- terest. Even if the conscience dared waive this her preven- tive veto, yet before we could consider the twofold results in the relations of loss and gain, it must be known whether their kind is the same or equivalent. They must first be valu- ed, and then they may be weighed or counted, if they are worth it. Rut in the particular case at present before us, the loss is contingent, and alien ; the gain essential and the tree's own natural produce. The gain is permanent, and spreads through all times and places ; the loss but temporary and, owing its very being to vice or ignorance, vanishes at the approach of knowledge and moral improvement. The gain reaches all good men, belongs to all that love light and desire an increase of light : to all and of all times, who thank Heaven for the gra- cious dawn, and expect the noon-day ; who welcome the first gleams of spring, and sow their fields in confident faith of the * Aergerniss hin, Aergerniss her! Noth bricht Eisen, und hat kein Aerger- nisa. Ich soil der schwachen Gewissen schonen so fern es ohne Gefahr memer Seelen geschehn mag. Wo nicht, so soli ich meiuer SeelBU rathen, es argere sicb daran die ganze oder halbe Welt. 52 ripening summer and the rewarding harvest-tide ! But the loss is confined to the unenlightened and the prejudiced — say rather, to the weak and the prejudiced of a single generation. The prejudices of one age are condemned even by the prejudiced of the succeeding ages: for endless are the modes of folly, and the fool joins with the wise in passing sentence on all modes but his own. Who cried out with greater horror against the mur- derers of the Prophets, than those who likewise cried out, cruci- fy him ! crucify him ! The truth-haters of every future genera- tion will call the truth-haters of the preceding ages by their true names: for even these the stream of time carries onward. In fine. Truth considered in it itself and in the effects natural to it, may be conceived as a gentle spring or water-source, warm from the genial earth, and breathing up into the snow drift that is piled over and around its outlet. It turns the ob- stacle into its own form and character, and as it makes its way increases its stream. And should it be arrested in its course by a chilling season, it suffers delay, not loss, and waits only for a change in the wind to awaken and again roll onwards. / semplici pastori Sul Vesolo nevoso Fatti curvi e canuti, /)' alto stupor son muti Miranda alfonte omhroso 11 Po con pochi umori , Poscia udendo gli onori DelV urna angusta e stretta, Chz'l Adda che'l Tesino Soverchia in suo cammino, Che ampio al mar' s affretta Che si spuma, e si suona, Che gli si da corona! * Chiabrera. Lateral Translation. " The simple shepherds grown bent and hoary-head- ed on the snowy Vesolo, are mute with deep astonishment, gazing in the overshadowed fountain on the Po with his scanty waters ; then liearing of the honors of his confined and narrow urn, how he receives as a sovereign the Adda and the Tesino in his course, how ample he hastens on to the sea, how he foams, how mighty his voice, and that to him the crown is assigned." *I give literal translations of my poetic as well as prose quotations: be- cause the propriety of their introduction often depends on the exact sense and order of the words : which it is impossible always to retain in a metrical ver- sion . ES^SAY IX. Great men have liv'd among us, Heads tliat plann'd And Tongues that utter'd Wisdom — better none. ********* Even so doth Heaven protect us ! Wordsworth. In the preceding Number I have expL^-ined the good, that is, the natural consequences of the promulgation to all of truths which all are bound to know and to make known. The evils occasioned by it, with few and rare exceptions, have their ori- gin in the attempts to suppress or pervert it ; in the fury and violence of imposture attacked or undermined in her strong holds, or in the extravagances of ignorance and credulity rous- ed from their lethargy, and angry at the medicinal disturbance — awakening not yet broad awake, and thus blending the mon- sters of uneasy dreams with the real objects, on which the drowsy eye had alternately half-opened and closed, again half- opened and again closed. This re-action of deceit and super- stition, with all the trouble and tumult incident, I would com- pare to a fire which bursts forth from some stifled and ferment- ing mass on the first admission of light and air. It roars and blazes, and converts the already spoilt or damaged stuff with all the straw and straw-like matter near it, first into flame and the next moment into ashes. The fire dies away, the ashes are scattered on all the winds, and what began in worthlessness ends in nothingness. Such are the evil, that is, the casual con- sequences of the same promulgation. It argues a narrow or corrupt nature to lose the general and lasting consequences of rare and virtuous energy, in the brief accidents, which accompanied its first movements — to set light- 64 \y by the emancipation of the human reason from a legion of devils, in our complaints and lamentations over the loss of a herd of swine ! The Cranmers, Hampdens, and Sidneys : the counsellors of our Elizabeth, and the friends of our other great Deliverer, the third William, — is it in vain, that these have been our countrymen ? Are we not the heirs of their good deeds ? And what are noble deeds but noble truths realized ? As Protestants, as Englishmen, as the inheritors of so ample an estate of might and right, an estate so strongly fenced, so rich- ly planted, by the sinewy arms and dauntless hearts of our forefathers, we of all others have good cause to trust in the truth, yea, to follow its pillar of fire through the darkness and the desart, even though its light should but suffice to make us certain of its own presence. If there be elsewhere men jeal- ous of the light, who prophecy an excess of evil over good from its manifestation, we are entitled to ask them, on what ex- perience they ground their bodings ? Our own country bears no traces, our own history contains no records, to justify them. From the great aeras of national illumination we date the com- mencement of our main national advantages. The tangle of delusions, which stifled and distorted the growing tree, have been torn away ; the parasite weeds, that fed on its very roots, have been plucked up with a salutary violence. To us there remain only quiet duties, the constant care, the gradual im- provement, the cautious unhazardous labors of the industrious though contented gardener — to prune, to engraft, and one by one to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots the slug and the caterpillar. But far be it from us to undervalue with light and senseless detraction the conscientious hardihood of our pre- decessors, or even to condemn in them that vehemence, to which the blessings it won for us leave us now neither tempta- tion or pretext. That the very terms, with which the bigot or the hireling would blacken the first publishers of political and religious Truth, are, and deserve to be, hateful to us, we owe to the eff"ects of its publication. We ante-date the feelings in order (o criminate the authors of our tranquility, opulence, and security. But let us be aware. Effects will not, indeed, im- mediately disappear with their causes; but neither can they long continue without them. If by the reception of Truth in the spirit of Truth, we became what we are : only by the re- tention of it in the same spirit, can we remain what we are. 65 The narrow seas that form our boundaries, what were they in times of old ? The convenient highway for Danish and Nor- man pirates. What are they now ? Still but " a Span of Wa- ters." — Yet they roll at the base of the inisled Ararat, on which the Ark of the Hope of Europe and of Civilization rested ! Even so doth God protect us, if we be Virtuous and Wise. Winds blow and Waters roll, Strength to tlie Brave, antl Power and Deity: Yet in tliemselves are nothing ! One Decree Spake Laws to them, and said that by the Soul Only the Nations shall be great and free ! Wordsworth. ESSAY X. I deny not but that it is of greatest coucernnient in the church and com- monwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men. For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a pro- geny of life in them to be as active as that soul was w hose progeny they are. I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth : and being sown up and down may chance to spring up aim- ed men. And yet on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good al- most kill a man as kill a good book. Many a man lives a burthen to the earth ; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master sj)irit, em- balmed and treasured up on })urpose to a life beyond life.— Milton's Speech for the Liberty of unlicensed Pri7iting. Thus far then I have been conducting a cause between an individual and his own mind. Proceeding on the'conviction, that to man is entrusted the nature, not the result of his ac' tions, I have presupposed no calculations. I have presumed no foresight.— Introduce no contradiction into thy own con- sciousness. Acting or abstaining from action, delivering or withholding thy thoughts, whatsoever thou dost, do it in single- ness of heart. In all things therefore let thy means correspond 56 to thy purpose, and let the purpose be one with the purport. — To this principle I have referred the supposed individual, and from this principle solely I have deduced each particular of his conduct. As far, therefore, as the court of Conscience ex- tends, (and in this court alone I have been pleading hitherto) I have won the cause. It has been decided, that there is no just ground for apprehending mischief from Truth communica- ted conscientiously^ (i. e. with a strict observance of all the conditions required by the Conscience) — that what is not so communicated, is falsehood, and that to the Falsehood, not to the Truth, must the ill consequences be attributed. Another and altogether different cause remains now to be pleaded ; a different cause, and in a different court. The par- ties concerned are no longer the well-meaning Individual and his Conscience, but the Citizen and the State — The Citizen, who may be a fanatic as probably as a philosopher, and the State, which concerns itself with the Conscience only as far as it appears in the action, or still more accurately, in the fact; and which must determine the nature of the fact not merely by a rule of Right formed from the modification of particular by general consequences, not merely by a principle of compromise, that reduces the freedom of each citizen to the common mea- sure in which it becomes compatible with the freedom of all ; but likewise by the relation which the facts bear to its (the State's) own instinctive principle of self-preservation. For every depository of the Supreme Power must presume itself rightful : and as the source of law not legally to be endanger- ed. A form of government may indeed, in reality, be most pernicious to the governed, and the highest moral honor may await the patriot who risks his life in order by its subversion to introduce a better and juster constitution ; but it would be absurd to blame the law by which his life is declared forfeit. It were to expect, that by an involved contradiction the law should allow itself not to be law, by allowing the State, of which it is a part, not to be a State. For as Hooker has well observed, the law of men's actions is one, if they be respected only as men ; and another, when they are considered as parts of a body politic. But though every government subsisting inlaw (for pure lawless despotism grounding itself wholly on terror precludes all consideration of duty) — though every government subsist- 57 ing In law must, and ought to, regard itself as the life of the body politic, of which it is the head, and consequently must pun- ish every attempt against itself as an act of assault or murder, i. e. sedition or treason ; yet still it ought so to secure the life as not to prevent the conditions of its growth, and of that adapta- tion to circumstances, without which its very life becomes in- secure. In the application, therefore, of these principles to the public communication of opinions by the most efficient means, the Press — we have to decide, whether consistently with them there should be any liberty of the press ; and if this be answered in the affirmative, what shall be declared abuses of that liberty, and made punishable as such ; and in what way the general law shall be applied to each particular case. First then, should there be any liberty of the press.? we will not here mean, whether it should be permitted to print books at all; (for our Essay has little chance of being read in Turkey, and in any other part of Europe it cannot be supposed questionable) but whether by the appointment of a Censorship the Government should take upon itself the responsibility of each particular publication. In Governments purely monarchical (i. e. oligarchies under one head) the balance of the advan- tage and disadvantage from this monopoly of the press will un- doubtedly be affected by the general state of information ; though after reading Milton's " Speech for the liberty of unli- censed Piinting*" we shall probably be inclined to belive, that the best argument in favor of licensing, &c. under any constitu- tion is that, which supposing the ruler to have a different inter- est from that of his country, and even from himself as a rea- sonable and moral creature, grounds itself on the incompatibili- ty of knoAvledge with folly, oppression, and degradation. What our prophetic Harrington said of religious, applies eqally to li- terary toleration. " U it be said that in France there is liberty of conscience .in part, it is also plain that while the hierarchy is standing, this liberty is falling ; and that if on the contrary, * II y a un voile qui doit toujour couvrlr tout ce que I'on peut dire et tout ce qu' on peut croire du Droit des peuples et de celui cka pnnces, que ne s' accordent jamais si bien ensemble que dans le silence. Mem. du Card. de. Retz. How severe a satire where it can be justly applied I how false and calum- nious if meant as a general maxim! 68 it conies to pull down the Hierarchy, it pulls down that Mon- archy also ; wherefore the Monarchy or Hierarchy will be be- forehand with it, if they see their true interest." On the other hand, there is no slight danger from general ignorance ; and the only choice, which providence has graciously left to a vi- cious Government, is either to fall by the People, if they are suffered to become enlightened, or with them, if they are kept enslaved and ignorant. The nature of our Constitution, since the revolution, the state of our literature, and the wide dilTusion, if not of intellectual yet of literary power, and the almost universal interest in the productions of literature, have set the question at rest relative- ly to the British press. However great the advantages of pre- vious examination might be under other circumstances, in this country it would be both impracticable and inefficient. I need only suggest in broken sentences — the prodigious number of licensers that would be requisite — the variety of their attain- ments, and (inasmuch as the scheme must be made consistent with our religious freedom) the ludicrous variety of their prin- ciples and creeds — their number being so great, and each ap- pointed censor being himself a man of letters, quis custodiet ipsos custodes ? — If these numerous licensers hold their offices for life, and independent of the ministry pro tempore^ a new heterogeneous, and alarming power is introduced, which can never be assimilated to the constitutional powers already ex- isting: — if they are removeable at pleasure, that which is he- retical and seditious in 1809, may become orthordox and loyal in 1810 — and what man, whose attainments and moral respec- tability gave him even an endurable claim to this awful trust, would accept a situation at once so invidious and so precarious } And what institution can retain any useful influence in so free a nation, when its abuses have made it contemptible .'' — Lastly, and which of itself would suffice to justify the rejection of such a plan — unless all proportion between crime and punishment were abandoned, what penalties could the law attach to the assumption of a liberty, which it had denied, more severe than those which it now attaches to the abuse of the liberty, which it grants ? In all those instances at least, which it would be most the inclination — perhaps the duty — of the State to prevent, namely, in seditious and incendiary publications (whether ac- tually such, or only such as the existing Government chose so 69 to denominate, makes no difference in the argument) the pub- lisher, who hazards the punishment now assigned to seditious publications, would assuredly hazard the penalties of unlicens- ed ones, especially as the very practice of licensing would na- turally diminish the attention to the contents of the works pub- lished, the chance of impunity therefore be so much greater, and the artifice of prefixing an unauthorised license so likely to escape detection. It is a fact, that in many of the former German States in which literature flourished, notwithstanding the establishment of censors or licensors, three fourths of the books printed were unlicensed — even those, the contents of which were unobjectionable, and where the sole motive for eva- ding the law, must have been either the pride and delicacy of the author, or the indolence of the bookseller. So difficult was the detection, so various the means of evasion, and worse than all, from the nature of the law and the affront it offers to the pride of human nature, such was the merit attached to the breach of it — a merit commencing perhaps with Luther's Bible, and other prohibited works of similar great minds, published with no dissimilar purpose, and thence by many an intermedi- ate link of association finally connected with books, of the very titles of which a good man would wish to remain ignorant. The interdictory catalogues of the Roman hierarchy always pre- sent to my fancy the muster-rolls of the two hostile armies of Michael and Satan printed promiscuously, or extracted at hap- hazard, save only that the extracts from the former appear somewhat the more numerous. And yet even in Naples, and in Rome itself, whatever difficulty occurs in procuring any ar- ticle catalogued in these formidable folios, must arise either from the scarcity of the work itself, or the absence of all inter- est in it. Assuredly there is no difficulty in procuring from the most respectable booksellers the vilest provocatives to the ba- sest crimes, though intermixed with gross lampoons on the heads of the Church, the religious orders, and on religion it- self. The stranger is invited into an inner room, and the loath- some wares presented to him with most significant looks and gestures, implying the hazard, and the necessity of secrecy. A creditable English bookseller would deem himself insulted, if such works were even inquired after at his shop. It is a well-known fact, that with the mournful exception indeed of political provocatives, and the titillations of vulgar envy provi- eo ded by our anonymous critics ; the loathsome articles are among us vended and offered for sale almost exclusively by Foreign- ers. Such are the purifying effects of a free Press, and the dignified habit of action imbibed from the blessed air of Law and Liberty, even by men who neither understand the princi- ple or feel the sentiment of the dignified purity, to which they yield obeisance from the instinct of character. As there is a national guilt which can be charged but gently on each indi- vidual, so are there national virtues, which can as little be im- puted to the individuals, — no where, however, but in countries where Liberty is the presiding influence, the universal medi- um and menstruum of all other excellence, moral and intellec- tual. Admirably doth the admirable Petrarch* admonish us: Nee sibi vero quisquam false persuadeat, eos qui pro liber- TATE excubant, alienum agere negotium non suum. In hac una reposita sibi omnia norint omnes, securitatem mercator, gloriam miles, utilitatem agricola. Postremo, in eadem libertate Re- ligiosi cserimonias, otium studiosi, requiem senes, rudimenta disciplinarum pueri, nuptias et castitatem puellse, pudicitiam matronse, pietatem et antiqui laris sacra patres familias spem atque gaudium omnes invenient. Huic uni igitur reliquse ce- dant curae ! Si banc omittitis, in quanta libet occupatione nihil agitis : si huic incumbitis, et nihil agere videmini, cumulate ta- men et civium et virorum implevistis ofiicia. Petrarchje Ho7'ta. (Translation.) — Nor let any one falsely persuade himself, that those who keep watch and ward for liberty, are med- * I quote Petrarch often in the hope of drawing the attention of Scholars to his inestimable Lathi Writings. Let me adrl, in the wish hkewise of re- commending a Translation of select passages from his Treatises and Letters to the London Publishers- If I except the German writings and original Letters of the heroic Luther, I do not remember a work from which so de- lightful and instructive a volume might be compiled. To give the true bent to the above extract, it is necessary to bear in niind, that he who keeps watch and ward for Frc(>dom, has to guard against two (Miemies, the Despotism of the Few and the Despotism of the 31auy — but es- [)ecially in the present day against the Sycophants of the Populace. Uc€7ice THEY mean, when they cry Liberty ! For who loves that, must first be wise and good. 61 dling with things that do not concern them, instead of minding their own business. For all men should know, that all bles- sings are stored and protected in this one, as in a common re- pository. Here is the tradesman's security, the soldier's honor, the agriculturist's profit. Lastly, in this one good of Liberty the Religious will find the permission of their rites and forms of worship, the students their learned leisure, the aged their re- pose, boys the rudiments of the several branches of their edu- cation, maidens their chaste nuptials, matrons their womanly honor and the dignity of their modesty, and fathers of families the dues of natural aft'ection and the sacred privileges of their ancient home. To this one solicitude therefore let all other cares yield the priority. If you omit this, be occupied as much and sedulously as you may, you are doing nothing: If you ap- ply your heart and strength to this, though you seem to be do- ing nothing, you will, nevertheless, have been fulfilling the du- ties of citizens and of men, yea, in a measure pressed down and running over. ESSAY XI. Nemo vei-6 fallatur, quasi minora sint animoi-iun coniagia quani corporum. Majora sunt; gravius Iteduut ; ajtius descendunt, serpuutque latentius. Petrarch, de Fit. Solit. L. 1. 5. 3. c. 4. (Translaiion.) — And let no man be deceived as if the contagions of the soul were less than those of the body. They are yet greater ; they convey more direful diseases ; they sink deeper, and creep on more unsuspectedly. We have abundant reason then to infer, that the Law of England has done well and concluded wisely in proceeding on the principle so clearly worded by Milton ; that a book should be as freely admitted into the world as any other birth ; and \i it prove a monster, who denies but that it may justly be burnt or sunk into the sea.^ We have reason then, I repeat, to rest 63 satisfied with our Laws, which no more prevent a book from coming into the world unlicensed, lest it should prove a libel, than a traveller from passing unquestioned through our turn- pike-gates, because it is possible he may be a highwayman. Innocence is presumed in both cases. The publication is a part of the offence, and its necessary condition. Words are moral acts, and words deliberately made public the law consid- ers in the same light as any other cognizable overt-act. Here however a diflSculty presents itself. Theft, Robbery, Murder, and the like, are easily defined : the degrees and circumstances likewise of these and similar actions are defin- ite, and constitute specific offences, described and punishable each under its own name. We have only to prove the fact and identify the offender. The intention too, in the great majority of cases, is so clearly implied in the action, that the Law can safely adopt it as its universal maxim, that the proof of the malice is included in the proof of the fact : especially as the few occasional exceptions have their remedy provided in the prerogative of pardon entrusted to the supreme Magis- trate. But in the case of Libel, the degree makes the kind, the circumstances constitute the criminality ; and both degrees and circumstances, like the ascending shades of color or the shooting hues of a dove's neck, die away into each other, inca- pable of definition or outline. The eye of the understanding, indeed, sees the determinate difference in each individual case, but language is most often inadequate to express what the eye perceives, much less can a general statute anticipate and pre-de- fine it. Again : in other overt-acts a charge disproved leaves the Defendant either guilty of a different fault, or at best simply blameless. A man having killed a fellow-citizen is acquitted of murder — the act was Manslaughter only, or it was justifiable Homicide. But when we reverse the iniquitous sentence passed on Algernon Sidney, during our perusal of his work on Govern- ment ; at the moment we deny it to have been a traitorous Libel, our beating hearts declare it to have been a benefaction to our country, and under the circumstances of those times the perform- ance of an heroic duty. From this cause therefore, as well as from a Libel's being a thing made up of degrees and circumstan- ces (and these too discriminating offence from merit by such dim and ambulant boundaries) the intention of the agent, wherever it can be independently or inclusively ascertained, must be al- 63 lowed a great share in determining the character of the action, unless the Law is not onlj to be divorced from moral Justice,* but to wage open hostility against it. Add too, that Laws in doubtful points are to be interpreted according to the design of the legislator, where this can be certainly inferred. But the Laws of England, which owe their own present supremacy and absoluteness to the good sense and generous dispositions diffused by the Press more, far more, than to any other single cause, must needs be presumed fa- vorable to its general influence. Even in the penalties attached to its abuse, we must suppose the Legislature to have been ac- tuated by the desire of preserving its essential privileges. The Press is indilferently the passive instrument of Evil and of Good ; nay, there is some good even in its evil. "Good and Evil," says Milton, in the Speech from which I have selected the Mot- to of the preceding Essay, "in the field of this world, grow up together almost inseparably : and the knowledge of Good is so in- tervolved and interwoven with the knowledge of Evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed on Psyche as an incessant labor to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. As, therefore, the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowl- edge of Evil ? He that can apprehend and consider Vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true way-faring Christian. ^^,annot praise a fugitive and clois- tered virtue, that never sallies out and sees her adversary : — •; that which is but a youngling in the contemplation of Evil' and knows not the utmost that Vic^ promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank Virtue, not a pure. — Since, therefore, the knowledge and survey of Vice is in this world so necessa- ry to the constituting of human Virtue, and the scanning of Error to the confirmation of Truth, how can we more safely and with less danger scout into the regions of Sin and Falsity, than by reading all manner of Tractates, and hearing all man- ner of reason ?" Again — but, indeed the whole Treatise is one * According to the old adage: you are not hung for stealing a horse, but that horses may not be stolen. To what extent this is true, we shall have occasion to examine hereafler. 64 strain of moral wisdom and political prudence — " Why should we then affect a rigor contrary to the manner of God and of Na- ture, by abridging or scanting those means, which Books, free- ly permitted, are both to the trial of Virtue and the exercise of Truth ? It would be better done to learn, that the Law must needs be frivolous, which goes to restrain things uncertainly, and yet equally working to Good and to Evil. And were I the chooser, a dram of well-doing should be preferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of Evil-doing. For God sure esteems the growth and completion of one virtuous person, more than the restraint of ten vicious." The evidence of History is strong in favor of the same prin- ciples, even in respect of their expediency. The average re- sult of the Press from Henry Vlll. to Charles I. was such a diffusion of religious light as first redeemed and afterwards saved this nation from the spiritual and moral death of Popery i and in the following period it is to the Press that we owe the gradual ascendency of those wise political maxims, which cast- ing philosophic truth in the moulds of national laws, customs, and existing orders of society, subverted the tyranny without suspending the government, and at length completed the mild and salutary revolution by the establishment of the House of Brunswick. To what must we attribute this vast over-balance of Good in the genetal effects of the Press, but to the over- balance of virtuous intention in those who employed the Press .'' The Law, therefore, will not refuse to manifest good intention a certain weight even in cases of apparent error, lest it should discourage and scare away those, to whose eftbrts we owe the comp'arative infrequency and weakness of error on the whole. The Law may however, nay, it must demand, that the external proofs of the author's honest intentions should be supported by the general style and matter of his work, and by the circum- stances, and mode of its publication. A passage, which in a grave and regular disquisition would be blameless, might be- come highly libellous and justly punishable, if it were applied to present measures or persons for immediate purposes, in a cheap and popular tract. I have seldom felt greater indigna- tion than at finding in a large manufactory a sixpenny pamph- let, containing a selection of inflamatory paragraphs from the prose-writings of Milton, without a hint given of the time, oc- casion, state of government, &;c. under which they were written 65 not a hint, that the Freedom, which we now enjoy, exceeds all that Milton dared hope for, or deemed practicable ; and that his political creed sternly excluded the populace, and indeed the majority of the population, from all pretensions to political power. If the manifest bad intention would constitute this publication a seditious Libel, a good intention equally manifest can not justly be denied its share of influence in producing a contrary verdict. Here then is the difficulty. From the very nature^f/^ Ubel,/^/ it is impossible so to define it, but that the most meritorious works will be found included in the description. Not from any defect or undue severity in the particular Statute, but from the very nature of the offence to be guarded agninst, a work recommending reform by the only rational n ode of recommend- ation, that is, by the detection and exposure of corruption, abuse, or incapacity, might, though it should breathe the best and most unadulterated English feelings, be brought within the definition of libel equally with the vilest incendiary Brochure^ that ever aimed at leading and misleading the multitude. Not a paragraph in the Morning Post during the peace of Amiens, (or rather the experimental truce so called) though to the im- mortal honour of the then editor, that newspaper was the chief secondary means of producing the unexampled national una- nimity, with which the war re-commenced and has since been continued — not a paragraph warning the nation, as need was and most imperious duty commanded, of the perilous designs and unsleeping ambition of our neighbor, the mimic and cari- caturist of Charlemagne, but was a punishable libel. The sta- tute of libel is a vast aviary, which incages the awakening cock and the geese whose alarum preserved the capitol, no less than the babbling magpye and ominous screech-owl. And yet will we avoid this seeming injustice, we throw down all fence and bulwark of public decency and public opinion ; political calum- ny will soon join hands with private slander ; and every prin- ciple, every feeling, that binds the citizen to his country and the spirit to its Creator, will be undermined — not by reasoning, for from that there is no danger; but — by the mere habit of hearing them reviled and scoffed at wath impunity. Were we to contemplate the evils of a rank and unweeded press only in its effects on the manners of a people, and on the general tone of thought and conversation, the greater the love, which we 9 66 bore to literature and to all the means and instruments of hu- man improvement, the greater would be the earnestness with which we should solicit the interference of law : the more anxiously should we wish for some Ithureal spear, that might remove from the ear of the public, and expose in their own fiendish shape those reptiles, which inspiring venom and for- ging illusions as they list, thence raise, At least distempered discontented thouf>lns, Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires. Paradise Lost. ESSAY XII. Quomodo autem idfuturum sit, ne quis incredihile arhitretur, ostendam. In pn- mis mvltiplicahitur regnum, et svmma rerum potestas per plurimos dissipata et co7icisa minuetur. Tunc discordice civiles serentui; nee ulla requies hellis exiti- cdihus ei-it, dum exercitibus in immensum coactis,reges disperdent omnia, et eom- minuent : donee adversus eos dux potentissimus a plehe orietur, et assumetur in societatem a cceieris, et princeps omnium constituetur. Hie insuslentabili domi- ncUione vexahit orbem, divina et humana miscebit : infanda dictu et execrabilia molietur : nova consilia in pectore suo volutabit, ut proprium sibi constituat im- perium : leges commutabit, et smow sanciet, contaminabit, diripiet, spcliabit, occi- det, Denique immutatis nominibus, et impeni sede traiislata, confusio ac per- turbatio humani generis consequetur. Turn vere detestahile, et atque ahominan- dvm tempus existet, quo nvlli hominum sit vitajucunda. Lactantius de Vita Beatd, lAb. vii. c. 16. But lest this should be deemed incredible, I shew the manner in which it is to take place. First, there will be a nniltii)lication of independent sove- reignties ; and the supreme magistracy of the Empire, scattered and cut up in- to fragments, will be enfeebled in the exercise of power by law and authority. Then will be sowed the seeds of civil discords, nor will there be any rest or pause to wasteful and ruinous wars, while the soldiery kejit together in im- mense standing armies, the Kings will crash and lay waste at their will ; — un- til at length there will rise up against them a most puissant military chieftain of low birth, who will have acceded to him a fellowship with the other Sove- reigns of the earth, and will finally be constituted the head of all. This man will hanass the civilized world with an insupportable despotism, he will con- 67 found and commix all things spiritual and temporal, lie will form plans and preparations of the most execrable and sacrilegious nature. He wiU be for- ever restlessly turning over new schemes in his imagination, in order that he may fix the imperial power over all in his own name and possessions. He will change the former laws, he will sanction a code of his own, he will contaminate, pillage, lay waste and massacre. At length, when he has suc- ceeded in the change of names and titles, and in the transfer of the seat of Empire, there will follow a confusion and perturbation of the human race ; then will there be for a while an a^ra of horror and abomination, during which no man will enjoy his life in quietness. I interpose this Essay as an historical comment on the words " mimic and caricaturist of Charlemagne," as applied to the despot, whom since the time that the words were first printed, we have, thank heaven ! succeeded in incaging. The Motto contains the most striking instance of an uninspired prophecy fulfilled even in its minutiae, that I recollect ever to have met with : and it is hoped, that as a curiosity it will reconcile my readers to its unusual length. But though my chief motive was that of relieving (by the variety of an historical parallel) the series of argument on this most important of all subjects, the communicability of truth, yet the Essay is far from being a di- gression. Having in the preceding number given utterance to quicquid in rem tarn malcficam indignatio dolorque dictarent, concerning the mischiefs of a lawless Press, I held it an act of justice to give a portrait no less lively of the excess to which the remorseless ambition of a government might accumulate its oppressions in the one instance before the discovery of Print- ing, and in the other during the suppression of its freedom. I have translated the following from a voluminous German work, Michael Ignuz Schmidt's History of the Germans ; in which this Extract forms the conclusion of the second chapter of the third book, from Charles the Great to Conrade the First. The late Tyrant's close imitation of Charlemagne was suffi- ciently evidenced by his assumption of the Iron Crown of Italy ; by his imperial coronation with the presence and authority of the Holy Father ; by his imperial robe embroidered with bees in order to mark him as a successor of Pepin ; and even by his ostentatious revocation of Charlemagne's grants to the Bishop of Rome. But that the differences might be felt likewise, I 68 prefaced the translation here re-printed with the few following observations. Let it be remembered then, that Charlemagne, for the great- er part, created for himself the means of which he availed himself; that his very education was his own work, and that unlike Peter the Great, he could find no assistants out of his own realm; that the unconquerable courage and heroic dispo- sitions of tlie nations he conquered, supplied a proof positive of real superiority, indeed the sole positive proof of intellectual power in a warrior : for how can we measure force but hj the resistance of it ? But all was prepared for Buonaparte ; Europe weakened in the very heart of all human strength, namely, in moral and religious principle, and at the same time accidentally destitute of any one great or commanding mind : the French people, on the other hand, still restless from revolutionary fana- ticism ; their civic enthusiasm already passed into military pas- sion and the ambition of conquest ; and alike by disgust, terror, and characteristic unfitness for freedom, ripe for the reception of a despotism. Add too, that the main obstacles to an unlimi- ted system of conquest, and the pursuit of universal monarchy had been cleared away for him by his pioneers the Jacobins, viz. the influence of the great land-holders, of the privileged and of the commercial classes. Even the naval successes of Great Britain, by destroying the trade, rendering useless the colonies, and almost annihilating the navy of France, were in some respects subservient to his designs by concentrating the powers of the French empire in its armies, and supplying them out of the wrecks of all other employments, save that of agri- culture. France had already approximated to the formidable state so prophetically described by Sir James Stuart, in his Po- litical Economy, in which the population should consist chiefly of soldiers and peasantry : at least the interests of no other classes were regarded. The great merit of Buonaparte has been that of a skillful steersman, who with his boat in the most violent storm still keeps himself on the summit of the waves, which not he, but the winds had raised. I will now proceed to my translation. That Charles was an hero, his exploits bear evidence. The subjugation of the Lombards, protected as they were by the Alps, by fortresses and fortified towns, by numerous armies, and by a great name ; of the Saxons, secured by their savage reso- 69 luteness, by an untameable love of freedom, by their desart plains and enormous forests, and by their own poverty ; the humbling of the Dukes of Bavaria, Aquitania, Bretagne, and Gascony ; proud of their ancestry as well as of their ample domains ; the almost entire extirpation of the Avars, so long the terror of Eu- rope ; are assuredly works which demand a courage and a firmness of mind such as Charles only possessed. How great his reputation was, and this too beyond the limits of Europe, is proved by the embassies sent to him out of Persia, Palestine, Mauritania, and even from the Caliphs of Bagdad. If at the present day an embassy from the Black or Caspian Sea comes to a prince on the Baltic, it is not to be wondered at, since such are now the political relations of the four quarters of the world, that a blow which is given to any one of them is felt more or less by all the others. Whereas in the times of Charlemagne, the inhabitants in one of the known parts of the world scarcely knew what w'as going on in the rest. Nothing but the extraordinary, all-piercing report of Charles's exploits could bring this to pass. His greatness, which set the world in astonishment, was likewise, without doubt, that w^hich begot in the Pope and the Romans the first idea of the re-es- tablishment of their empire. Is it true, that a number of things united to make Charles a great man — favorable circumstances of time, a nation already disciplined to warlike habits, a long life, and the consequent acquisition of experience, such as no one possessed in his whole realm. Still, however, the principal means of his greatness Charles found in himself. His great mind wa5 capable of ex- tending Its attention to the greatest multiplicity of aflairs. In the middle of Saxony he thought on Italy and Spain, and at Rome he made provisions for Saxony, Bavaria, and Pannonia. He gave audience to die Ambassadors of the Greek emperor and other potentates, and himself audited the accounts of his own farms, where every thing was entered even to the number of the eggs. Busy as his mind was, his body was not less in one continued state of motion. Charles would see into every thing himself, and do every thing himself, as far as his powers extended: and even this it was too, which gave to his under- takings such a force and energy. But with all this the government of Charles was the gov- ernment of a conqueror, that is splendid abroad and fearfully 70 oppressive at home. What a grievance must it not have been for the people that Charles for forty years together dragged them now to the Elbe, then to the Ebro, after this to the Po, and from thence back again to the Elbe, and this not to check an invading enemy, but to make conquests which little profited the French nation ! This must prove too much, at length, for a hired soldier : how much more for conscripts, who did not live only to fight, but who were fathers of families, citizens, and proprietors? But above all, is it to be wondered at, that a nation like the French, should suffer themselves to be used as Charles used them. But the people no longer possessed any considerable share of influence. All depended on the great chieftains, who gave their willing suffrage for endless wars, by which they were always sure to win. They found the best opportunity, under such circumstances, to make themselves great and mighty at the expense of the freemen resident with- in the circle of their baronial courts; and when conquests were made, it was far more for their advantage than that of the monarchy. In the conquered provinces there was a necessity, for dukes, vassal kings, and different high offices : all this fell to their share. I would not say this if we did not possess incontrovertible original documents of those times, which prove clearly to us that Charles's government was an unhappy one for the people, and that this great man, by his actions, labored to the direct subversion of his first principles. It was his first pretext to es- tablish a greater equality among the members of his vast com- munity, and to make all free and equalsub jects under a common sovereign. And from the necessity occasioned by continual war, the exact contrary took place. Nothing gives us a better notion of the interior state of the French Monarchy, than the third capitular of the year 811. {compare with this the four or Jive quarto vols, of the present French Consci'ipt Code.) All is full of complaint ; the Bishops and Earls clamouring against the freeholders, and these in their turn against the Bishops and Earls. And in truth the freeholders had no small reason to be discontented and to resist, as far as they dared, even the imperial levies. A dependant must be content to fol- low his lord without furtlier questioning : for he was paid for it. But a free citizen, who lived wholly on his own property, might reasonably object to suffer himself to be dragged about 71 in all quarters of the world, at the fancies of his lord : espe- cially as there was so much injustice intermixed. Those who gave up their properties entirely, or in part, of their own ac- cord, were left undisturbed at home, while those, who refused to do this, were forced so often into service, that at length, be- coming impoverished, they were compelled by want to give up, or dispose of their free tenures to the Bishops or Earls. (It would require no great ingenuity to discover parallels^ or at least ^ equivalent hardships to these, in the treatment of, and regulations concerning the reluctant conscripts.) It almost surpasses belief to what a height, at length, the aversion to war rose in the French nation, from the multitude of the campaigns and the grievances connected with them. The national vanity was now satiated by the frequences of vic- tories ; and the plunder which fell to the lot of individuals, made but a poor compensation for the losses and burthens sus- tained by their families at home. Some, in order to become exempt from military service, sought for menial employments, in the establishments of the Bishops, Abbots, Abbesses, and Earls. Others made over their free property to become te- nants at will of such Lords, as from their age or other circum- stances, they thought would be called to no further military services. Others, even privately took away the life of their mothers, aunts, or other of their relatives, in order that no family residents might remain through whom their names might be known, and themselves traced ; others voluntarily made slaves of themselves, in order thus to render themselves inca- pable of the military rank. When this Extract was first published, namely, September 7, 1809, 1 prefixed the following sentence. "This passage con- tains so much matter/or political anticipation and well-ground- ed hope, that I feel no apprehension of the Reader's being dis- satisfied with its length." I trust, that I may derive the same confidence from his genial exultation, as a Christian ; and from his honest pride as a Briton ; in the retrospect of its comple- tion. In this belief I venture to conclude the Essay with the following Extract from a " Comparison of the French Republic, under Buonaparte, with the Roman Empire under the first Caesars," published by me in the Morning Post, Tuesday, 21 Sept. 1802. If then there is no counterpoise of dissimilar circumstances, 72 the prospect is gloomy indeed. The commencement of the public slavery in Rome was in the most splendid sera of human genius. Any unusually flourishing period of the arts and sci- ences in any country, is, even to this day, called the Augustan age of that country. The Roman poets, the Roman historians, the Roman orators, rivalled those of Greece ; in military tac- tics, in machinery, in all the conveniences of private life, the Romans greatly surpassed the Greeks. With few exceptions, all the emperors, even the worst of them, were, like Buona- parte,* the liberal encouragers of all great public works, and of every species of public merit not connected with the asser- tion of political freedom. ■ O Juvenes, circunispicit et agitat vos, Materiaiiique sibi Ducis influlgoutia quaerit. It is even so, at this present moment, in France. Yet, both in France and in Rome, we have;learned, that the most abject dispositions to slavery rapidly trod on the heels of the most outrageous fanaticism for an almost anarchical liberty. Ruere in servitium patres et populian. Peace and the coadunation of all the civilized provinces of the earth were the grand and plau- sible pretexts of Roman despotism : the degeneracy of the hu- man species itself, in all the nations so blended, was the melan- choly effect. To-morrow, therefore, we shall endeavour to de- * Imitators suc<;eod better in copying the vices than the excellences or their archetypes. Where shall we find in the First Consul of France a counter- part to the generous and dreadless clemency of the first Caesar? Acerbe lo- quentibus satis habuit ])ro concione denunciare, ne persevarent. Aulique Caecinie criminosissimo libro, et Pitholai carminibus maiedicentissimis lacera- tain existimationem suam civili animo tulit. It deserves translation, for oiu- English readiM'S. " If any spoke bittei-ly against him, he held it sufficient to complain of it publicly, to prevent them from persevering in the use of such language. His character had been man- gled in a most libellous work of Aulus Csecina, and he had been grossly lam- pooned in some verses by Pitholaus; but he boie both with the temper of a good citizen." For tliis part of the First Consul's character, if common rc])ort speaks the truth, we must seek a parallel in the dispositions of the third CiBsar, who dreaded the pen of a paragraj)!! writer, hintinjo- aught against his morals and measures, with as great anxiety, and with as vindictive feelings, as if it had been the dagger of an assassin lifted uj) against bis life. From the third Cjesar, too, he adopted the abrogation of all pojuilar elections. 73 tect all those points and circumstances of dissimilarity, which, though they cannot impeach the rectitude of the parallel, for the present, may yet render it probable, that as the same Con- stitution of Government has been built up in France with in- comparably greater rapidity, so it may have an incomparably shorter duration. We are not conscious of any feelings of bit- terness towards the First Consul ; or, if any, only that venial prejudice, which naturally results from the having hoped proud- ly of any individual, and the having been miserably disappoint- ed. But we will not voluntarily cease to think freely and speak openly. We owe grateful hearts, and uplifted hands of thanks- giving to the Divine Providence, that there is yet one Europe- an country (and that country our own) in which the actions of public men may be boldly analyzed, and the result publicly stated. And let the Chief Consul, who professes in all things to follow his FATE, learn to submit to it if he finds that it is still his FATE to struggle with the spirit of English freedom, and the virtues which are the offspring of that spirit ! If he finds, that the Genius of Great Britain, which blew up his Egyptian navy into the air, and blighted his Syrian laurels, still follows him with a calm and dreadful eye ; and in peace, equal- ly as in war, still watches for that liberty, in which alone the Genius of our Isle lives, and moves, and has his being; and which being lost, all our commercial and naval greatness would instantly languish, like a flower, the root of which had been silently eat away by a worm ; and without which, in any coun- try, the public festivals, and pompous merriments of a nation present no other spectacle to the eye of Reason, than a mob of maniacs dancing in their fetters. 10 '^t'^T-fiifl- ESSAY XIII Must there be still some discord niixt among The harmony of men, whose mood accords Best with contention tun'd to notes of wrong ? That when War fails, Peace must make war with w ords, With words unto destruction arm'd more strong Than ever were our foreign Foemans' swords: Making as deep, tho' not yet bleeding wounds ? What War left scarless. Calumny confounds. Truth lies entrapp'd where Cunning finds no bar : Since no proportion can th(>re be betwixt Our actions which in endless motions are, And ordinances A\hich are always fixt. Ten thousand Laws more cannot reach so far, But Malice goes beyond, or lives conunixt So close with Goodness, that it ever will Corrupt, disguise, or counterfeit it still. And therefore Avould our glorious Alfred, who Join'd with the King's the good man's Majesty, Not leave Law's labyrinth without a clue — Gave to deep Skill its just authority, — *********** But the lost Judgment (this his Jury's plan) Left to the natural sense of Work-day Man. Adapted f/vm an elder PoeL We recur to the dilemma stated in our eighth number. How shall we solve this problem ? Its solution is to be found in that spirit which, like the universal menstruum sought for by the old alchemists, can blend and harmonize the most discordant ele- ments — it is found to be in the spirit of a rational Freedom dif- fused and become national, in the consequent influence and control of public opinion, and in its most precious organ, the 75 jury. It is to be found, wherever Juries are sufficiently en- lightened to perceive the difference, and to comprehend tht origin and necessity of the difference, between libels and other criminal overt-acts, and are sufficiently independent to act upon the conviction, that in a charge of libel, the degree, the circum- stances, and intention, constitute (not merely modify^) the of- fence, give it its Being, and determine its legal name. The words '•'•maliciously and advisedly," must here have a force of their own and a proof of their own. They will consequently consider the written law as a blank poiver provided for the pun- ishment of the ojfender, not as a light by which they are to deter- mine and discriminate the offence. The understanding and con- science of the Jury are the Judges, in toto : the statute a blank conge d'^elire. The Statute is the Clay and those the Potter's wheel. Shame fall on that Man, who shall labor to confound what reason and nature have put asunder, and who at once, as far as in him lies, would render the Press ineffectual and the Law odious ; who would lock up the main river, the Thames of our intellectual commerce ; would throw a bar across the stream, that that must render its navigation dangerous or partial, using as his materials the very banks, that were intended to deepen its chan- nel and guard against its inundations ! Shame fall on him, and a a participation of the infamy of those, who misled an English Jury to the murder of Algernon Sidney ! But though the virtuous intention of the writer must be al- io wed a certain influence in facilitating his acquittal, the degree of his moral guilt is not the true index or mete-wand of his condemnation. For Juries do not sit in a Court of Conscience, but of Law ; they are not the representatives of religion, but the guardians of external tranquillity. The leading principle, the Pole Star, of the judgment in its decision concerning the libellous nature of a published writing, is its more or less re- mote connection with after overt-acts, as the cause or occasion of the same. Thus the publication of actual facts may be, and most often will be, criminal and libellous, when directed against private characters: not only because the charge will reach the minds of many who cannot be competent judges of the truth or falsehood of facts to which themselves were not witnesses, against a man whom they do not know, or at best know imper- fectly ; but because such a publication is of itself a very serious overt-act, by which the author without authority and without tri- 7« al, has inflicted punishment on a fellow subject, himself being witness,and jury, judge and executioner. Of such publications there can be no legal justification, though the wrong may be palliated by the circumstance that the injurious charges are not only true but wholly out of the reach of the law. But in libels on the government there are two things to be balanced against each other : first, the incomparably greater mischief of the overt-acts, supposing them actually occasioned by the libel — (as for instance, the subversion of government and property, if the principles taught by Thomas Paine had been realized, or if even an attempt had been made to realize them, by the ma- ny thousands of his readers ;) and second, the very great im- probability that such eifects will be produced by such writings. Government concerns all generally, and no one in particular. The facts are commonly as well known to the readers, as to the writer : and falsehood therefore easily detected. It is proved, likewise, by experience, that the frequency of open political discussion, with all its blameable indiscretion, indisposes a na- tion to overt-acts of practical sedition or conspiracy. They talk ill, said Charles the Fifth, of his Belgian Provinces, but they suffer so much the better for it. His successor thought differently: he determined to be master of their words and opinions, as well as of their actions, and in consequence lost one half of those provinces, and retained the other half at an expense of strength and treasure greater than the original worth of the whole. An enlightened Jury, therefore, will require proofs of some more than ordinary malignity of intention, as furnished by the style, price, mode of circulation, and so forth; or of punishable indiscretion arising out of the state of the times, as of dearth, for instance, or of whatever other calamity is likely to render the lower classes turbulent and apt to be al- ienated from the government of their country. For the absence of a right disposition of mind must be considered both in law and in morals, as nearly equivalent to the presence of a wrong disposition. Under such circumstances the legal paradox, that a libel may be the more a libel for being true, becomes strictly just, and as such ought to be acted upon. Concerning the right of punishing by law the authors of he- retical or deistical writings, I reserve my remarks for a future Essay, in which I hope to state the grounds and limits of tole- ration more accurately than they seem to me to have been hith- crto traced. There is one maxim, however, which I am tempted to seize as it passes across me. If I may trust my own memory, it is indeed a very old truth : and yet if the fash- ion of acting in apparent ignorance thereof be any presumption of its novelty, it ought to be new, or at least have become so by courtesy of oblivion. It is this : that as far as human prac- tice can realize the sharp limits and exclusive proprieties of Science, Law and Religion should be kept distinct. There IS, strictly speaking, no proper opposition but between the TWO POLAR forces OF ONE AND THE SAME POWER.* If I Say then, that Law and Religion are natural opposites, and that the latter is the requisite counterpoise of the former, let it not be interpreted, as if I had declared them to be contraries. The Law has rightfully invested the Creditor with the power of arresting and imprisoning an insolvent Debtor, the Farmer with the Power of transporting, mediately at least, the Pillagers of his Hedges and Copses ; but the Law does not compel him to exercise that power, while it will often happen, that Religion commands him to forego it. Nay, so well was this understood by our Grandfathers, that a man who squares his conscience by the Law was a common paraphrase or synonyme of a wretch without any conscience at all. We have all of us learnt from History, that there was a long and dark period, during which the Powers and the Aims of Law were usurped * Evert Power in Nature and in Spirit must evolve an opposite, as the sole inea7}3 and condition of its manifestation: and all opposition is a tendenc? TO Re-union. This is the universal Law of Polarity or essential Dualism, first proiiiiilgateflbyHeraclitus, 2000 years afterwards re-])iib]ished,an(l made the foundation both of Logic, of Physics, and of Metaphysics by Giordano Bruno. The Principle may be tlius expressed. The Identity of Thesis and Antithesis is the substance of all Being; their Opposition tlie condition of all Existence, or Being manifested; and every Thing or Phaenouienon is the Ex- ponent of a Synthesis as long as the opposite energies are retained in that Synthesis. Thus Water is neither O.V3'gcn nor Hydrogen, nor yet is it a commixture of both ; but the Synthesis or Indifference of the two: and as long as the copula endures, by which it becomes Water, or rather which alone is Water, it is not less a simple Body than either of the imaginary Ele- ments, improperly called its Ingredients or Components. It is the olyect of the mechanical atomistic Psilosojihy to confound Synthesis with synartesis, or rather with mere juxta-position of Coi-pnscles separated by invisible In- terspaces. I find it difficult to determine, whether this tlieory contradicts tlie Reason or the Senses most: for it is alike inconceivable and unimaginable. 76 in the name of Religion by the Clergy and the Courts Spiritu- al : and we all know the result. Law and Religion thus in- terpenetrating neutralized each other ; and the baleful product, or tertium Aliquid, of this union retarded the civilization of Europe for Centuries. Law splintered into the minutiae of Re- ligion, whose awful function and prerogative it is to take ac- count of every '■'■idle loon/," became a busy and inquisitorial tyranny : and Religion substituting legal terrors for the eno- bling influences of Conscience remained Religion in name only. The present age appears to me approaching fast to a similar usurpation of the functions of Religion by Law : and if it were required, I should not want strong presumptive proofs in favor of this opinion, whether I sought for them in the Charges from the Bench concerning Wrongs, to which Re- ligion denounces the fearful penalties of Guilt, but for which the Law of the Land assigns Damages only : or in sundry sta- tutes, and (all praise to the late Mr. Wyndham, Romanorum ultimo) in a still greater number of attempts towards new sta- tutes, the authors of which displayed the most pitiable igno- rance, not merely of the distinction between perfected and im- perfected Obligations but even of that still more sacred dis- tinction between Things and Persons. What the Son of Si- rach advises concerning the Soul, every Senator should apply to his legislative capacity — Reverence it in meekness, know- ing how feeble and how mighty a Thing it is ! From this hint concerning Toleration, we may pass by an easy transitition to the, perhaps, still more interesting subject of Tolerance. And here I fully coincide with Frederic H. Jacobi, that the only true spirit of Tolerance consists in our conscientious toleration of each other's intolerance. Whatever pretends to be more than this, is either the unthinking cant of fashion, or the soul-palsying narcotic of moral and religious in- difference. All of us without exception, in the same mode though not in the same degree, are necessarily subjected to the risk of mistaking positive opinions for certainty and clear in- sight. From this yoke we cannot free ourselves, but by ceas- ing to be men ; and this too not in order to transcend but to sink below our human nature. For if in one point of view it be the mulct of our fall, and of the corruption of our will ; it is equally true, that contemplated from another point, it is the price and consequence of our progressiveness. To him who is compelled to pace to and fro within the high walls and in the narrow courtyard of a prison, all objects may appear clear and distinct. It is the traveller journeying onward, full of heart and hope, with an ever-varying horrizon, on the boundless plain, that is liable to mistake clouds for mountains, and the mirage of drouth for an expanse of refreshing waters. But notwithstanding this deep conviction of our general fal- libility, and the most vivid recollection of my own, I dare avow with the German philosopher, that as far as opinions, and not motives ; principles, and not men, are concerned ; I neither am tolerant^ nor wish to be regarded as such. Accor- ding to my judgment, it is mere ostentation, or a poor trick that hypocrisy plays with the cards of nonsense, when a man makes protestation of being perfectly tolerant in respect of all principles, opinions and persuasions, those alone excepted which render the holders intolerant. For he either means to say by this, that he is utterly indifferent towards all truth, and finds nothing so insufferable as the persuasion of their being any such mighty value or importance attached to the profession of the Truth as should give a marked preference to any one convic- tion above any other ; or else he means nothing, and amuses himself with articulating the pulses of the air instead of inha- ling it in the more healthful and profitable exercise of yawning. That which doth not withstand^ hath itself no standing place. To fill a station is to exclude or repel others, — and this is not less the definition of moral, than of material, solidity. We live by continued acts of defence, that involve a sort of offensive warfare. But a man's principles, on which he grounds his Hope and his Faith, are the life of his life. We live by Faith, says the philosophic Apostle ; and faith without principles is but a flattering phrase for wilful positiveness, or fanatical bodily sensation. Well, and of good right therefore, do we maintain with more zeal, than we should defend body or estate, a deep and inward conviction, which is as the moon to us ; and like the moon with all its massy shadows and deceptive gleams, it yet lights us on our way, poor travellers as we are, and benight- ed pilgrims. With all its spots and changes and temporary eclipses, with all its vain halos and bedimming vapors, it yet reflects the light that is to rise on us, which even now is rising^ though intercepted from our immediate view by the mountains that enclose and frown over the vale of our mortal life. This again is the mystery and the dignity of our human nature, that we cannot give up our reason, without giving up at the same time our individual personality. For that must appear to each man to be his reason which produces in him the highest sense of certainty ; and yet it is not reason, except as far as it is of universal validity and obligatory on all mankind. There is a one heart for the whole mighty mass of Humanity, and eve- ry pulse in each particular vessel strives to beat in concert with it. He who asserts that truth is of no importance except in the sense of sincerity, confounds sense with madness, and the word of God with a dream. If the power of reasoning be the Gift of the Supreme Reason, that we be sedulous, yea, and militant in the endeavor to reason aright, is his implied Com- mand. But what is of permanent and essential interest to one man must needs be so to all, in proportion to the means and op- portunities of each. Woe to him by whom these are neglected, and double woe to him by whom they are withheld ; for he robs at once himself and his neighbor. That man's Soul is not dear to himself, to whom the Souls of his Brethren are not dear. As far as they can be influenced by Jaim, they are parts and properties of his own soul, their faith his faith, their errors his burthen, their righteousness and bliss his righteousness and his reward — and of their Guilt and Misery his own will be the echo. As much as I love my fellow-men, so much and no more will I be intolerant of their Heresies and Unbelief — and I will honor and hold forth the right hand of fellowship to every individual who is equally intolerant of that which he conceives such in me. We will both exclaim — I know not, what antidotes among the complex views, impulses and circumstances, that form your moral Being, God's gracious Providence may have vouchsafed to you against the serpent fang of this Error — but it is a viper, and its poison deadly, although through higher influences some men may take the reptile to their bosom, and remain unstung. In one of these viperous Journals, which deal out Profane- ness. Hate, Fury, and Sedition throughout the Land, I read the following Paragraph. " The Brahman believes that every man will be saved in his own persuasion, and that all religions are equally pleasing to the God of all. The Christian confines salvation to the Believer in his own Vedahs and Shasters. Which is the more humane and philosophic creed of the two ?" Let question answer question. Self-icomplacent Scoifer ! 81 Whom meanest thou by God ? The God of Truth ? and cari He be pleased with falsehood and the debasement or utter sus- pension of the Reason which he gave to man that he might re- ceive from him the sacrifice of Truth ? Or the God of love and mercy ? And can He be pleased with the blood of thousands poured out under the wheels of Juggernaut, or with the shrieks of children offered up as fire offerings to Baal or to Moloch ? Or dost thou mean the God of holiness and infinite purity ? and can He be pleased with abominations unutterable and more than brutal defilements ? and equally pleased too as with that religion, which commands us that we have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness but to reprove them ? With that religion, which strikes the fear of the Most High so deeply, and the sense of the exceeding sinfulness of sin so inwardly' that the Believer anxiously enquires : " Shall I give my first- born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?"— and which makes answer to him.—" He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good ; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to walk justly, and to love mercy, and to walk hum- bly with thy God." But I check myself. It is at once folly and profanation of Truth, to reason with the man who can place before his eyes a minister of the Gospel directing the eye of the widow from the corse of her husband upward to his and her Redeemer, (the God of the living and not of the dead) and then the remorseless Brahmin goading on the disconsolate victim to the flames of her husband's funeral pile, abandoned by, and abandoning, the helpless pledges of their love-and yet dare ask, which is the more humane and philosophic creed of the two ? No ! No ! when such opinions are in question I neither am, or will be, or wish to be regarded as, tolerant. 11 ESSAY XIV. Knowing the heart of Man is set to be The centre of this world, about the which These revolutions of disturbances Still roll ; where all th' aspects of misery Predomhiate ; whose strong effects are such, As he must bear, being powerless to redress : And that unless above himself he can Erect liimself, how poor a thing is Man ! Dan I EI,. I have thus endeavoured, with an anxiety which may per- haps have misled me into prolixity, to detail and ground the conditions under which the communication of truth is com- manded or forbidden to us as individuals, by our conscience; and those too, under which it is permissible by the law which controls our conduct as members of the state. But is the subject of sufficient importance to deserve so minute an ex- amination ? that my readers would look round the world, as it now is, and make to themselves a faithful catalogue of its many miseries! From what do these proceed, and on what do they depend for their continuance ? Assuredly for the great- er part on the actions of men, and those again on the want of a vital principle of action. We live by faith. The essence of virtue consists in the principle. And the reality of this, as well as its importance, is belived by all men in fact, few as there may be who bring the truth forward into the light of dis- tinct consciousness. Yet all men feel, and at times acknow- ledge to themselves, the true cause of their misery. There is no man so base, but that at some time or other, and in some way or other, he admits that he is not what he ought to be, though 83 by a curious art of self-delusion, by an effort to keep at peace with himself as long and as much as possible, he will throw off the blame from the amenable part of his nature, his moral prin- ciple, to that which is independent of his will, namely, the degree of his intellectual faculties. Hence, for once that a man exclaims, how dishonest I am, on what base and unwor- thy motives I act, we may hear a hundred times, what a fool I am ! curse on my folly?* and the like. Yet even this implies an obscure sentiment, that with clearer conceptions in the understanding, the principle of action would become purer in the will. Thanks to the image of our Maker not wholly obliterated from any human soul, we dare not pur- chase an exemption from guilt by an excuse, which would place our amelioration out of our own power. Thus the very man, who will abuse himself for a fool but not for a villian, would rather, spite of the usual professions to the contrary, be con- demned as a rogue by other men, than be acquitted as a block- head. But be this as it may, out of himself, however, he sees plainly the true cause of our common complaints. Doubtless, there seem many physical causes of distress, of disease, of po- verty and of desolation — tempests, earthquakes, volcanoes, wild or venomous animals, barren soils, uncertain or tyrannous cli- mates, pestilential swamps, and death in the very air we breathe. Yet when do we hear the general wretchedness of mankind attributed to these? In Iceland, the earth opened and sent forth three or more vast rivers of fire. The smoke and va- pour from them dimmed the light of Heaven through all Eu- rope, for months • even at Cadiz, the sun and moon, for sever- al weeks, seemed turned to blood. What was the amount of the injur}^ to the human race ? sixty men were destroyed, and of these the greater part in consequence of their own impru- dence. Natural calamities that do indeed spread devastation wide, (for instance, the Marsh Fever,) are almost without ex- ception, voices of Nature in her all-intelligible language — do this ! or cease to do that ! By the mere absence of one su- * We do not consider as exceptions the thousands that abuse themselves by rote with lip-penitence, or the wild ravings of fanaticism: for these per- sons at the veiy time they speak so vehemently of the wickedness and rot- teness of their hearts, are then commonly the warmest in their own good opinion, covered round and comfortable in the wrap-rascal of self-hypocrisy. 84 perstition, and of the sloth engendered by it, the Plague would cease to exist throughout Asia and Africa. Pronounce medita- tively the name of Jenner, and ask what might we not hope, what need we deem unattainable, if all the time, the effort, the skill, which we waste in making ourselves miserable through vice, and vicious through misery, were embodied and mar- shalled to a systematic war against the existing evils of na- ture ? No, "/i is a wicked ivorld /" This is so generally the solution, that this very wickedness is assigned by selfish men, as their excuse for doing nothing to render it better, and for op- posing those who would make the attempt. What fhave not Clarkson, Granville Sharp, Wilberforce, and the Society|of the Friends, effected for the honor, and if we believe in a retribu- tive providence, for the continuance of the prosperity of the English nation, imperfectly as the intellectual and moral facul- ties of the people at large are developed at present ? What may not be effected, if the recent discovery of the means of educating nations (freed, however, from the vile sophistications and mutilations of ignorant mountebanks,) shall have been ap- plied to its full extent ? Would I frame to myself the most in- spiriting representation of future bliss, which my mind is ca- pable of comprehending, it would be embodied to me in the idea of Bell, receiving, at some distant period, the appropri- ate reward of his earthly labours, when thousands and ten thousands of glorified spirits, whose reason and conscience had, through his efforts, been unfolded, shall sing the song of their own redemption, and pouring forth praises to God and to their Saviour, shall repeat his " New name" in Heaven, give thanks for his earthly virtues, as the chosen instruments of divine mer- cy to themselves, and not seldom perhaps, turn their eyes to- ward Aim, as from the sun to its image in the fountain, with se- condary gratitude and the permitted utterance of a human love ! Were but a hundred men to combine a deep conviction that virtuous habits may be formed by the very means by which knowledge is communicated, that men may be made better, not only in consequence, but hy the mode and in the process, of instruction : were but an hundred men to combine that clear conviction of this, which I myself at this moment feel, even as I feel the certainty of my being, with the perseverance of a Clarkson or a Bell, the promises of ancient prophecy would disclose themselves to our faith, even as when a noble castle 85 hidden from us by an intervening mist, discovers itself by its reflection in the tranquil lake, on the opposite shore of which we stand gazing. What an awful duty, what a nurse of all other, the fairest virtues, does not hope become ! We are bad ourselves, because we despair of the goodness of others. If then it be a truth, attested alike by common feeling and common sense, that the greater part of human misery depends directly on human vices and the remainder indirectly, by what means can we act on men so as to remove or preclude these vices and purify their principle of moral election ? The ques- tion is not by what means each man is to alter his own charac- ter — in order to this, all the means prescribed and all the aid- ances given by religion, may be necessary for him. Vain, of themselves, may be, the sayings of the wise In ancient and in modern books inrolled ******** Unless he feel within Some source of consolation from above — Secret refreshings, that repair his strength And fainting spirits uphold. Samson Agonistes. This is not the question. Virtue would not be virtue, could it be given by one fellow-creature to another. To make use oi all the means and appliances in our power to the actual attain- ment of Rectitude, is the abstract of the Duty which we owe to ourselves ; to supply those means as far as we can, comprizes our Duty to others. The question then is, what are these means? Can they be any other than the communication of knowledge, and the removal of those evils and impediments which prevent its reception ? It may not be in our power to combine both, but it is in the power of every man to contribute to the former, who is sufficiently informed to feel that it is his duty. If it be said, that we should endeavour not so much to remove ignorance, as to make the ignorant religious : Religion herself, through her sacred oracles, answers for me, that all effective faith pre-supposes knowledge and individual convic- tion. If the mere acquiescence in truth, uncomprehended and unfathomed, were sufficient, few indeed would be the vicious and the miserable, in this country at least where speculative infidelity is. Heaven be praised, confined to a small number. 86 Like bodily deformity, there is one instance here and another there; but three in one place are already an undue proportion. It is highly worthy of observation, that the inspired writings received by Christians are distinguishable from all other books pretending to inspiration, from the scriptures of the Bramins, and even from the Koran, in their strong and frequent recom- mendations of truth. I do not here mean veracity, which can- not but be enforced in every code which appeals to the reli- gious principle of man; but knowledge. This is not only ex- tolled as the crown and honor of a man, but to seek after it is again and again commanded us as one of our most sacred du- ties. Yea, the very perfection and final bliss of the glorified spirit is represented by the Apostle as a plain aspect, or intui- tive beholding of truth in its eternal and immutable source. Not that knowledge can of itself do all ! The light of religion is not that of the moon, light without heat ; but neither is its warmth that of the stove, warmth without light. Religion is the sun, whose warmth indeed swells, and stirs, and actuates the life of nature, but who at the same time beholds all the growth of life with a master eye, makes all objects glorious on which he looks, and by that glory visible to all others. But though knowledge be not the only, yet that it is an in- dispensable and most effectual agent in the direction of our ac- tions, one consideration will convince us. It is an undoubted fact of human nature, that the sense of impossibility quenches all will. Sense of utter inaptitude does the same. The man shuns the beautiful flame, which is eagerly grasped at by the infant. The sense of a disproportion of certain after-harm to present gratification — produces effects almost equally uniform : though almost perishing with thirst, we should dash to the earth a goblet of wine in which we had seen a^poison infused, though the poison, were without taste or odour, or even added to the pleasures of both. Are not all our vices equally inapt to the universal end of human actions, the satisfaction of the agent .'' Are not their pleasures equally disproportionate to the after-harm? Yet many a maiden, who will not grasp at the fire, will yet purchase a wreath of diamonds at the price of her health, her honor, nay ( and she herself knows it at the mo- ment of her choice) at the sacrifice of her peace and happiness. The sot would reject the poisoned cup, yet the trembling hand with which he raises his daily or hourly draught to his lips, 87 has not left him ignorant that this too is altogether a poison. 1 know it will be objected, that the consequences foreseen are less immediate ; that they are diffused over a larger space of time ; and that the slave of vice hopes where no hope is. This, however, only removes the question one step further : for why should the distance or diffusion of known consequences produce so great a difference ? Why are men the dupes of the present moment ? Evidently because the conceptions are in- distinct in the one case, and vivid in the other ; because all confused conceptions render us restless ; and because restless- ness can drive us to vices that promise no enjoyment, no not even the cessation of that restlessness. This is indeed the dread punishment attached by nature to habitual vice, that its impulses wax as its motives wane. No object, not even the light of a solitary taper in the far distance, tempts the benight- ed mind from before ; but its own restlessness dogs it from be- hind, as with the iron goad of Destiny. What then is or can be the preventive, the remedy, the counteraction, but the ha- bituation of the intellect to clear, distinct, and adequate con- ceptions concerning all things that are the possible objects of clear conception, and thus to reserve the deep feelings which belong, as by natural right to those obscure ideas* that are neces- sary to the moral perfection of the human being, notwithstand- ing, yea, even in consequence, of their obscurity — to reserve these feelings, I repeat, for objects, which their very sublimity renders indefinite, no less than their indefiniteness renders them sublime : namely, to the Ideas of Being, Form, Life, the Rea- son, the Law of Conscience, Freedom, Lnmortality, God ? To connect with the objects of our senses the obscure notions and consequent vivid feelings, which are due only to immaterial and permanent things, is profanation relatively to the heart, * I have not expressed myself as clearly as I could wish. But the truth of the assertion, that deep feeling has a tendency to combine with obscure ideas, in preference to distinct and clear notions, may be proved by the history of Fanatics and Fanaticism in all ages and coimtries. The odium theologicum is even proverbial: and it is the common conij)laint of Philosophers and phi- losophic Historians, that the passions of the disputants are commonly violent in proportion to the subtlety and obscurity of the questions in dispute. Nor is this fact confined to professional theologians : for whole nations have dis- played the same agitations, and have sacrificed national policy to tlie more powerful interest of a controverted obscuritj^ 88 and superstition in the understanding. It is in this sense, that the philosophic Apostle calls Covetousness Idolatry. Could we emancipate ourselves from the bedimming influences of custom, and the transforming witchcraft of early associations, we should see as numerous tribes of Fetish- Worshippers in the streets of London and Paris, as we hear of on the coasts of Africa. ESSAY XV. A palace when 'tis that which it should be Leaves growing, and stands such, or else decays With him who dwells there, 'tis not so : for he Should still urge upward, and his fortune raise. Our bodies had their morning, have their noon, And shall not better — the next change is night ; But their fair larger guest, t'whom sun and moon Are sparks and short-lived, claims another right. The noble soul by age grows lustier. Her appetite and her digestion mend ; We must not stai-ve nor hope to pamper her With woman's milk and pap unto the end. Provide you manlier diet ! Donne. I am fully aware, that what I am writing and have written (in these latter Essays at least) will expose me to the censure of some, as bewildering myself and readers with Metaphysics ; to the ridicule of others as a school-boy declaimer on old and worn-out truisms or exploded fancies ; and to the objection of most as obscure. The last real or supposed defect has already re- ceived an answer both in the preceding Numbers, and in page 34 of the Appendix to the Author's First Lay- Sermon, entitled 89 the Statesman's Manual. Of the two former, I shall take the present opportunity of declaring my sentiments : especially as I have already received a hint that my " idol, Milton, has represented Metaphysics as the subjects which the bad spirits in hell delight in discussing." And truly, if I had exerted my subtlety and invention in persuading myself and others that we are but living machines, and that (as one of the late followers of Hobbes and Hartley has expressed the system ) the assassin and his dagger are equally fit objects of moral esteem and ab- horrence ; or if with a writer of wider influence and higher authority, I had reduced all virtue to a selfish prudence eked out by superstition, (for assuredly, a creed which takes its cen- tral point in conscious selfishness, whatever be the forms or names that act on the selfish passion, a ghost or a constable, can have but a distant relationship to that religion, which places its essence in our loving our neighbor as ourselves, and God above all) I know not, by what arguments I could repel the sarcasm. But what are my metaphysics? merely the referring of the mind to its own consciousness for truths indispensable to its own happiness ! To what purposes do I, or am I about to employ them ? To perplex our clearest notions and living moral in- stincts ? To deaden the feelings of will and free power, to extinguish the light of love and conscience, to make myself and others worthless, soul-less, God-less ? No ! to expose the folly and the legerdemain of those who have thus abused the blessed machine of language ; to support all old and vener- able truths ; and by them to support, to kindle, to project the spirit ; to make the reason spread light over our feelings, to make our feelings, with their vital warmth, actualize our reason : — these are my objects, these are my subjects, and are these the metaphysics which the bad spirits in hell delight in .'* But how shall I avert the scorn of those critics who laugh at the oldness of my topics, Evil and Good, Necessity and Arbi- trament, Immortality and the Ultimate Aim ? By what shall I regain their favor ? My themes must be new, a French con- stitution ; a balloon ; a change of ministry ; a fresh batch of kings on the Continent, or of peers in our happier island ; or who had the best of it of two parliamentary gladiators, and whose speech, on the subject of Europe bleeding at a thousand wounds, or our own country struggling for herself and all hu- man nature, w^as cheered by the greatest number of laughs, loud n 90 laughs^ and very loud laughs : (which, carefully marked by italics, form most conspicuous and strange parentheses in the newspaper reports.) Or if I must be philosophical, the last chemical discoveries, provided I do not trouble my reader with the principle which gives them their highest interest, and the character of intellectual grandeur to the discoverer ; or the last shower of stones, and that they were supposed, by certain phi- losophers, to have been projected from some volcano in the moon, taking care, however, not to add any of the cramp rea- sons for this opinion ! Something new, however, it must be, quite new and quite out of themselves ! for whatever is within them, whatever is deep within them, must be as old as the first dawn of human reason. But to find no contradiction in the union of old and new, to contemplate the ancient of days with feelings as fresh, as if they then sprung forth at his own fiat, this characterizes the minds that feel the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it! To carry on th« feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar, With Sun and Moon and Stars throughout the year, And Man and Woman this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talents. And so to pre- sent familiar objects as to awaken the minds of others to a like freshness of sensation concerning them (that constant accom- paniment of mental, no less than of bodily, convalescence ) — to the same modest questioning of a self-discovered and intelli- gent ignorance, which, like the deep and massy foundations of a Roman bridge, forms half of the whole structure {prudens in- terrogatio dimidium scientice, says Lord Bacon) — this is the prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of mani- festation. Who has not, a thousand times, seen it snow upon water ? who has not seen it with a new feeling, since he has read Burns' comparison of sensual pleasure, To snow that falls upon a river, A moment white — then gone for ever! In philosophy equally, as in poetry, genius produces the stror^gest impressions of novelty, while it rescues the stalest 91 and most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission. Extremes meet — a proverb, by the bye, to collect and explain all the in- stances and exemplifications of which, would constitute and ex- haust all philosophy. Truths, of all others the most awful and mysterious, yet being at the same time of universal interest, are too often considered as so true that they lose all the powers of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side Avith the most despised and exploded errors. But as the class of critics, whose contempt I have anticipa- ted, commonly consider themselves as men of the world, in- stead of hazarding additional sneers by appealing to the au- thorities of recluse philosophers, (for such in spite of all histo- ry, the men who have distinguished themselves by profound thought, are generally deemed, from Plato and Aristotle to Tully, and from Bacon to Berkeley) I will refer them to the Darling of the polished Court of Augustus, to the man, whose works have been in all ages deemed the models of good sense, and are still the pocket-companion of those who pride them- selves on uniting the scholar with the gentleman. This ac- complished man of the world has given us an account of the subjects of conversation between himself and the illustrious statesman who governed, and the brightest luminaiies who then adorned the empire of the civilized world : Sermo oritur non de villis domihusve alienis jVcc, male, nee ne lepus saltet. Sed quod magis ad nos Peiiinet, et nescire malum est, agitamu^: utnimne Divitiis homines, an sint virtute beati ? Et quo sit natura boni ? summumque quid eius ? HoRAT. Serm. L. II. Sat. 6. v. 78.* Berkeley indeed asserts, and is supported in his assertion by the great statesmen, Lord Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh, that without an habitual interest in these subjects, a man may be a dexterous intriguer, but never can be a statesman. Would to Heaven that the verdict to be passed on my labors depended * (Literal Translation.) Conversation arises not concerning the country seats or families of strangers, nor whether the dancing liare performed well or ill. But we discuss what more nearly concerns us, and which it is an evil not to know : whether men are made ha])py by riches or by ^ irtue ? And in what consists the nature of good? and what is the ultimate or Buiremo? (i. e. the &immuin Bomvm.) on those who least needed them ! The water lilly in the midst of waters lifts up its broad leaves, and expands its petals at the first pattering of the shower, and rejoices in the rain with a quicker sympathy, than the parched shrub in the sandy desart. God created man in his own image. To be the image of his own eternity created he man ! Of eternity and self-existence what other likeness is possible in a finite being, but immortali- ty and moral self-determination ! In addition to sensation, per- ception, and practical judgment (instinctive or acquirable) concerning the notices furnished by the organs of perception, all which in kind at least, the dog possesses in common with his master ; in addition to these, God gave us reason, and with reason he gave us reflective self-consciousness ; gave us PRINCIPLES, distinguished from the maxims and generaliza- tions of outward experience by their absolute and essential universality and necessity ; and above all, by superadding to reason the mysterious faculty of free-will and consequent per- sonal amenability, he gave us conscience — that law of con- science, which in the power, and as the indwelling word, of an holy and omnipotent legislator commands us — from among the numerous ideas mathematical and philosophical, which the reason by the necessity of its own excellence creates for itself, unconditionally commands us to attribute reality^ and actual ex- istence^ to those ideas and to those only, without which the con- science itself would be baseless and contradictory, to the ideas of Soul, of Free-will, of Immortality, and of God ! To God, as the reality of the conscience and the source of all obligation ; to Free-will, as the power of the human being to maintain the obedience, which God through the conscience has commanded, against all the might of nature ; and to the Immortality of the Soul, as a state in which the weal and woe of man shall be proportioned to his moral worth. With this faith all nature, Of eye and ear - • all the mighty world presents itself to us, now as the aggregated material of duty, and now as a vision of the Most High revealing to us the mode, and time, and particular instance of applying and realizing that universal rule, pre-established in the heart of our reason ! " The displeasure of some Readers may, perhaps, be incur- 93 red by my having surprized theai into certain reflections and inquiries, for which they have no curiosity. But perhaps some others may be pleased to find themselves carried into ancient times, even though they should consider the hoary maxims, de- fended in these Essays, barely as Hints to awaken and exer- cise the inquisitive Reader, on points not beneath the atten- tion of the ablest men. Those great men, Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, men the most consummate in politics, who found- ed states, or instructed princes, or wrote most accurately on public government, were at the same time the most acute at all abstracted and sublime speculations : the clearest light being ever necessary to guide the most important actions. And what- ever the world may opine, he who hath not much meditated up- on God, the Human Mind, and the Smmnum Bonum, may pos- sibly make a thriving Earth-worm, hut will most indubitably make a blundering Patriot and a sorry statesman.''^ SiRis, § 350. ESSAY XVI. Blind is tliat soul which from this truth can swerve, No state stands sure, but on the grounds of right, Of virtue, knowledge ; judgment to presei-ve, And all the jjowers of learning requisite ! Though other shifts a present turn may serve, Yet in the trial they will weigh too light. Daniel. I earnestly entreat the reader not to be dissatisfied eithei with himself or with the author, if he should not at once under- stand every part of the preceding Number ; but rather to con- sider it as a mere annunciation of a magnificent theme, the dif- ferent parts of which are to be demonstrated and developed, explained, illustrated, and exemplified in the progress of the 94 work. I likewise entreat him to peruse with attention and witli candor, the weighty extract from the judicious Hooker, prefix- ed as the motto to a following Number of the Friend. In works of reasoning, as distinguished from narration of events or state- ments of facts ; but more particularly in works, the object of which is to make us better acquainted with our own nature, a writer, whose meaning is every where comprehended as quick- ly as his sentences can be read, may indeed have produced an amusing composition, nay, by awakening and re-enlivening our recollections, a useful one ; but most assuredly he will not have added either to the stock of our knowledge, or to the vigor of our intellect. For how can we gather strength, but by exercise ? How can a truth, new to us, be made our own without examin- ation and self-questioning — any new truth, I mean, that relates to the properties of the mind, and its various faculties and af- fections ! But whatever demands effort, requires time. Igno- rance seldom vaults into knowledge, but passes into it through an intermediate state of obscurity, even as night into day through twilight. All speculative Truths begin with a Postu- late, even the Truths of Geometry. They all suppose an act of the Will; for in the moral being lies the source of the intel- lectual. The first step to knowledge, or rather the previous condition of all insight into truth, is to dare commune with our very and permanent self. It is Warburton's remark, not the Friend's, that " of all literary exercitations, whether designed for the use or entertainment of the world, there are none of so much importance, or so immediately our concern, as those which let us into the knowledge of our own nature. Others may ex- ercise the understanding or amuse the imagination ; but these only can improve the heart and form the human mind to wis- dom." The recluse Hermit oft'times more doth know Of the woild's inmost wheels, than worldlings can. As Man is of the World, the Heart of Man Is an Epitome of God's great Book Of Creatures, and Men need no further look. Donne. The higher a man's station, the more arduous and full of peril his duties, the more comprehensive should his Foresight be, the more rooted his tranquillity concerning Life and Death- But these are gifts which no experience can bestow, but the ex- 95 perience from within : and there is a nobleness of the whole personal being, to which the contemplation of all events and phsenomena in the Light of the three Master Ideas, announced in the foregoing pages, can alone elevate the spirit. Anima sapiens, (says Giordano Bruno, and let the sublime piety of the passage excuse some intermixture of error, or rather let the words, as they well may, be interpreted in a safe sense) Anima sapiens non timet mortem, immo interdum illam ultro appetit, illi ultro occurrit. Manet quippe substantiam omnem pro Du- rations Eternitas, pro Loco Immensitas, pro Actu Omniformi- tas. Non levem igitur ac futilem, atqui gravissimam perfecto- que Homine dignissimam Contenfiplationis Partem persequiniur ubi divinitatis, naturceque splendorem, fusionem, et communi- cationem, non in Cibo, Potu, et ignobiliore quadam materia cum attonitorum seculo perquirHmus ; sed in augustd Omnipo- tentis Regia, immenso cetheris spacio, in infmita natures gemi- nce omnia fientis et omnia facientis potentia, unde tot astrorum, mundorum inquam et numinum, uni altissimo concinenfium at' que saltantium absque numero atque fine juxta propositos ubique fines atque oi'dines, contemplamur. Sic ex visibilium ceternOj immenso et innumerabili effectu, sempiterna immensa ilia Ma- jestas atque bonitas intellecta conspicitur, proque sua dignitate innumer ah ilium Deorum (mundorum dico) adsistentia, conci- nentia, et gloria, ipsius enarratione, immo ad occulos expressa condone glorificatur. Cui Immenso mensum non quadrabit Domicilium atque Templum — ad cujus mojestatis plenitudinem agnoscendam atque percolendam, nwmerabiliuin ministorum nullus esset.ordo. Eia igitur ad omniformis Dei omniformem Imaginem conjectemus oculos, vivum et magnum illius admire- mar simulacrum ! — Hinc miraculum magnum a Trismegisto appellabatur Homo, qui in Deum transeat quasi ipse sit Deus qui conatur omnia fieri sicut Deus est omnia ; ad objectum sine fine, ubique tamem finiendo, contendit, sicut infiniius est Deus immensus, ubique totus.* * Translation. — A wise spirit does not fear death, nay, sometimes, {as m ca- ses of voluntary viaHyrdom) seeks and goes forth to meet it, of its own aceord. For there awaits all actual beings, for duration and eternity, for place immen- sity, for action omniformity. We pursue, therefore a species of contem[)lation not light or futile, but the weightiest and most worthy of an accomplished man, wliile we examine and seek for the spknidor, the interfusion, and com- munication of the Divinity and of Namre, not in meats or drink, or in any yet 96 If this be regarded as the fancies of an enthusiast, by such as deem themselves most^free, When they within this gross and visable sphere Chain down the winged soul, scoffing ascent, Proud in tlitir meanness, by such as pronounce every man out of his senses who has not lost his reason ; even such men may find some weight in the historical fact tliat from persons, who had previously strength- ened their intellects and feelings by the contemplation of Prin- ciples — Principles, the actions correspondent to which involve one half of their consequences, by their ennobling influence on the agent's own soul, and have omnipotence, as the pledge for the remainder — we have derived the surest and most general maxims of prudence. Of high value are they all. Yet there is one among them worth all the rest, which in the fullest and primary sense of the word, is indeed, the Maxim, (i. e. the Maximum) of human Prudence ; and of which History itself in all that makes it most worth studying, is one continued comment and exemplification. It is this : that there is a Wisdom higher ignobler matter, with the race of the thunder-stricken ; but in the august palace of the Omnipotent, in the illimitable etherial space, in the infinite power, that creates all things, and is tlie abiding heing of all things. There we may contemj)late the Host of Stars, of Worlds and tlieir guardi- an Deities, numbers without number, each in its appointed sphere, singing together, and dancing in adoration of the One Most High. Thus from the perpetual, immense, and innumerable goings on of the visible world, tliat sem- piternal and absolutely infinite Majesty is intellectually beheld, and is glorifi- ed according to his glory, by the attendance and choral symphonies of innu- merable gods, who utter forth the glory of their ineffable Creator in the ex- pressive language of Vision ! To him illimitable, a limited tem])le will not corresjiond — to the acknowledgement and due worship of the Plentitude of his Majesty there would be no ])roportion in any numerable army of minis- trant spirits. Let us then cast our eyes upon the omniform image of the At- tributes of the all-creating Siijireme, nor admit any representation of his Ex- cellency but the living Universe, which he has created! — Thence was man entidcd by Trismegistus, " the great Miracle, " inasmuch as he has been made capable of entering into union with God, as if he were himself a divine na- ture ; tries to become all things, even as in God al! things are; and in limitless progression of limited States of Being, urges onward to the ultimate aim, even as God is simultaneously infinite, and every where All! In the last voknne'of the work, announced and its nature and objects ex- plained, at the close of tlie present, 1 ])urpose, to give an account of the life of Giordano Bnmo, the friend of Sir Philip Sidney, who was burnt under pre- 97 than Prudence, to which Prudence stands in the same relation as the Mason and Carpenter to the genial and scientific Archi- tect : and from the habits of thinking and feeling, that in this Wisdom had their first formation, our Nelsons and Wellingtons inherit that glorious hardihood, which completes the under- taking, ere the contemptuous calculator (who has left nothing omitted in his scheme of probabilities, except the might of the human mind) has finished his pretended proof of its impossi- bility. You look to Facts and profess to take Experience for your guide. Well! I too appeal to Experience : and let Facts be the ordeal of my position ! Therefore, although I have in this and the preceding Numbers quoted more frequently and copiously than I shall permit myself to do in future, I owe it to the cause I am pleading, not to deny myself the gratification of supporting this connection of practical heroism with previous habits of philosophic thought, by a singularly appropriate pas- sage from an author whose works can be called rare only from their being, I fear, rarely read, however commonly talked of. It is the instance of Xenophon as stated by Lord Bacon, who would himself furnish an equal instance, if there could be found an equal commentator. " It is of Xenophon the Philosopher, who went from Socra- tes's School into Asia, in the expedition of Cyrus the younger, against King Artaxerxes. This Xenophon, at that time, was very young, and never had seen the wars before ; neither had any command in the army, but only followed the war as a vol- unteer, for the love and conversation of Proxenus, his friend. He was present when Falinus came in message from the king tence of Atheism, at Rome, in the year 1600 ; and of his works, which are perhaps the scai'cest books ever printed. They are singularly interesting as ])ortraits of a vigorous mind struggling after truth, amid many prejudices, which fi-om the state of tlie Roman Church, in which he was born, have a claim to much indulgence. One of them (entitled Ember Week) is curious for its livelyaccounts of the rude state of London, at that time, both as to the streets and the manners of the citizens. The most industrious Historians of speculative Philosophy, have not been able to procure more than a few of his works. Accidentally I have been more fortunate in this respect, than those who have written hitherto on the unhappy Philosopher of JVola : as out of eleven works, the titles of \vhich are preserved to us, I have had an op- portunity of perusing six. I was told, when in Germany, that there is a com- plete collection of them in the Royal Lilirary at Copenhagen. If so, it is unique. 13 98 to the Grecians, after that Cyrus was slain in the Field, and they, a handful of men, left to themselves in the midst of the King's territories, cut oflf from their country by many navigable rivers, and many hundred miles. The message imported, that they should deliver up their arms and submit themselves to the King's mercy. To which message, before answer was made, di- vers of the army conferred familiarly with Falinus, and amongst the rest Xenophon happened to say : Why, Falinus ! we have now but two things left, our arms and our virtue ; and if we yield up our arms, how shall we make use of our virtue ? Where- to Falinus, smiling on him, said, 'If I be not deceived. Young Gentleman, you are an Athenian, and I believe, you study Philosophy, and it is pretty that you say ; but you are much abused, if you think your virtue can withstand the King's pow- er.' Here was the scorn : the wonder followed — which was, that this young Scholar or Philosopher, after all the Captains were murdered in parly, by treason, conducted those ten thou- sand foot through the heart of all the King's high countries from Babylon to Grecia, in safety, in despight of all the King's forces, to the astonishment of the world, and the encouragement of the Grecians, in times succeeding, to make invasion upon the kings of Persia ; as was after purposed by Jason the Thessalian, at- tempted by Agesilaus the Spartan, and achieved by Alexander the Macedonian, all upon the ground of the act of that young Schola7\^^ Often have I reflected with awe on the great and dispropor- tionate power, which an individual of no extraordinary talents or attainments may exert, by merely throwing otf all restraint of conscience. What then must not be the power, where an individual, of consummate wickedness, can organize into the unity and rapidity of an individual will all the natural and arti- ficial forces of a populous and wicked nation ? And could we bring within the field of imagination, the devastation eff'ected in the moral world, by the violent removal of old customs, fa- miliar sympathies, willing reverences, and habits of subordina- tion almost naturalized into instinct ; of the mild influences of reputation, and the other ordinary props and aidances of our infirm virtue, or at least, if virtue be too high a name, of our well-doing; and above all, if we could give form and body to all the effects produced on the principles and dispositions of nations by the infectious feelings of insecurity, and the soul- sickening sense of unsteadiness in the whole edifice of civil 99 society ; the honors of battle, though the miseries of a whole war were brought together before our eyes in one disastrous field, would present but a tame tragedy in comparison. Nay, it would even present a sight of comfoit and of elevation, if this field of carnage were the sign and result of a national resolve, of a general will, so to die, that neither deluge nor fire should take away the name of Country from their graves, rather than to tread the same clods of earth, no longer a country, and them- selves alive in nature, but dead in infamy. What is Greece at this present moment ? It is the country of the Heroes from Codrus to Philopaemen ; and so it would be, though all the sands of Africa should cover its corn fields and olive gardens, and not a flower were left on Hymettus for a bee to murmur in. If then the power with which wickedness can invest the hu- man being be thus tremendous, greatly does it behove us to enquire into its source and causes. So doing we shall quickly discover that it is not vice, as vice, which is thus mighty ; but systematic vice! Vice self-consistent and entire; crime corres- ponding to crime ; villainy entrenched and barricadoed by vil- lainy ; this is the condition and main constituent of its power. The abandonment of all principle of right enables the soul to choose and act upon a principle of wrong, and to subordinate to this one principle all the various vices of human nature. For it is a mournful truth, that as devastation is incomparably an easier work than production, so may all its means and instru- ments be more easily arranged into a scheme and system. Even as in a seige every building and garden, which the faithful go- vernor must destroy, as impeding the defensive means of the garrison, or furnishing means of offence to the besieger, occa- sions a wound in feelings which virtue herself has fostered : and virtue, because it is virtue, loses perforce part of her ener- gy in the reluctance with which she proceeds to a business so repugnant to her wishes, as a choice of evils. But He, who has once said with his whole heart, Evil, be thou my Good ! has removed a world of obstacles by the very decision, that he will have no obstacles but those of force and brute matter. The road of Justice " Curves round the corn-field and the hill of vines "Honoring the holy hounds of property! But the path of the lightning is straight : and straight the fear- ful path 100 " Of the camion-ball. Direct it flies and rapid " Shatt'ring that it may reach, and shatt'ring what it reaches."* Happily for mankind, however, the obstacles which a consist- ently evil mind no longer finds in itself", it finds in its own un- suitableness to human nature. A limit is fixed to its power: but within that limit, both as to the extent and duration of its influence, there is little hope of checking its career, if giant and united vices are opposed only by mixed and scattered vir- tues : and those too, probably, from the want of some combining Principle, which assigns to each its due place and rank, at civil war with themselves, or at best perplexing and counteract- ing each other. In our late agony of glory and of peril, did we not too often hear even good men declaiming on the horrors and crimes of war, and softening or staggering the minds of their brethren by details of individual wretchedness ? Thus under pretence of avoiding blood, they were withdrawing the will from the defence of the very source of those blessings without which the blood would flow idly in our veins ! thus lest a few should fall on the bulwarks in glory, they were preparing us to give up the whole state to baseness, and the children of free ancestors to become slaves, and the fathers of slaves ! Machiavelli has well observed, " Sono di tre generazione Cer- velli : Vuno intende per se ; Valtro intende quanta da altri gli e mostro ; il terzo non intende ne j)er se stesso neper demostra- zione d^altri.''^ " There are brains of three races. The one understands of itself; the second understands as much as is shewn it by others ; the third neither understands of itself nor what is shewn it by others." I should have no hesitation in placing that man in the third Class of Brains, for whom the History of the last twenty years has not supplied a copious comment on the preceding Text. The widest maxims of pru- dence are like arms without hearts, disjoined from those feelings which flow forth from principle as from a fountain. So little * Wallenstein, from Schiller, by S. T. Coleridge. I return my thanks to the unknown Author of Waverly, Guy IMannering, &c., for having quoted this free Translation from Schiller's best ^and therefore most neglected) Drama with applause : and am not ashamed to avow, that I have deiived a peculiar gratification, that the first men of our age have united in giving no ordinary praise to a work, which our anonymous critics were equally unanimous in abusing as below all criticism : though they charitably added, that the fault was, doubtless, chiefly if not wholly, in the Translator's dullness and inca- pacity. 101 are even the genuine maxims of expedience likely to be per- ceived or acted upon by those who have been habituated to ad- mit nothing higher than expedience, that I dare hazard the as- sertion, that in the whole Chapter-of- Contents of European Ruin, every article might be unanswerably deduced from the neglect of some maxim that had been repeatedly laid down, demonstrated, and enforced with a host of illustrations, in some one or other of the works of Machiavelli, Bacon, or Harring- ton.* Indeed I can remember no one event of importance which was not distinctly foretold, and this not by a lucky prize drawn among a thousand blanks out of the lottery wheel of con- jecture, but legitimately deduced as certain consequences from established premises. It would be a melancholy, but a very profitable employment, for some vigorous mind, intimately ac- quainted with the recent history of Europe, to collect the weightiest Aphorisms of Machiavelli alone, and illustrating by appropriate facts the breach or observation of each, to render less mysterious the present triumph of lawless violence. The apt motto to such a work would be, — " The Children of Dark- ness are wiser in their Generation than the Children of Light." So grievously, indeed, have men been deceived by the showy mock theories of unlearned mock thinkers, that there seems a tendency in the public mind to shun all thought, and to expect help from any quarter rather than from seriousness and reflec- tion : as if some invisible power would think for us, when we gave up the pretence of thinking for ourselves. But in the first place, did those, who opposed the theories of invocators, conduct their untheoretic opposition with more wisdom or to a happier result ? And secondly, are societies now constructed on principles so few and so simple, that we could, even if we wished it, act as it were by instinct, like our distant Forefa- thers in the infancy of States ? Doubtless, to act is nobler than to think : but as the old man doth not become a child by means of his second childishness, as little can a nation exempt itself from the necessity of thinking, which has once learnt to think. Miserable was the delusion of the late mad Kealizer of mad Dreams, in his belief that he should ultimately succeed in trans- forming the nations of Europe into the unreasoning hordes of a Babylonian or Tartar Empire, or even in reducing the age to the simplicity, (so desirable for tyrants) of those times, when ^ See The Statesman's Manual : a Lay Sermon by the Author. 102 the sword and the plough were the sole implements of human skill. Those are epochs in the history of a people which hav- ing been can never more recur. Extirpate all civilization and all its arts by the sword, trample down all ancient Institutions, Rights, Distinctions, and Privileges, drag us backward to our old Barbarism, as beasts to the den of Cacus — deemed you that thus you could re-create the unexamining and boisterous youth of the world when the sole questions were — " What is to be conquered ? and who is the most famous leader !" In an age in which artificial knowledge is received almost at the birth, intellect, and thought alone can be our upholder and judge. Let the importance of this Truth procure pardon for its repetition. Only by means of seriousness and medita- tion and the free infliction of censure in the spirit of love, can the true philanthropist of the present time, curb-in himself and his contemporaries ; only by these can he aid in preventing the evils which threaten us, not from the terrors of an enemy so much as from our fears of our own thoughts, and our aversion to all the toils of reflection ? For all must now be taught in sport — Science, Morality, yea. Religion itself. And yet few now sport from the actual impulse of a believing fancy and in a happy delusion. Of the most influensive class, at least, of our literary guides, (the anonymous authors of our periodical publications) the most part assume this character from cowar- dice or malice, till having begun with studied ignorance and a premeditated levity, they at length realize the lie, and end in- deed in a pitiable destitution of all intellectual power. To many I shall appear to speak insolently, because the PUBLIC, (for that is the phrase which has succeeded to " The Town," of the wits of the reign of Charles the Second) — the public is at present accustomed to find itself appealed to as the infallible Judge, and each reader complimented with excellen- cies, which if he really possessed, to what purpose is he a reader, unless, perhaps, to remind himself of his own superiori- ty ! I confess that 1 think widely different. I have not a deep- er conviction on earth, than that the principles both of Taste, Morals, and Religion, which are taught in the commonest books of recent composition, are false, injurious, and debasing. If these sentiments should be just, the consequences must be so important, that every well-educated man, who professes them in sincerity, deserves a patient hearing. He may fairly appeal 103 * even to those whose persuasions are most opposed to his own, fn the words of the Philosopher of Nola : " Ad ist hoec queeso vos, qualiacunque primo videantur aspectu, adtendite, ut qui vohis forsan insanire videar, saltern quibus insaniam rationibus cognoscatisy What I feel deeply, freely will I utter. Truth is not detraction ; and assuredly we do not hate him, to whom we tell the Truth. But with whomsoever we play the deceiv- er and flatterer, him at the bottom we despise. We are, in deed, under a necessity to conceive a vileness in him, in or- der to diminish the sense of the wrong we have committed, by the worthlessness of the object. Through no excess of confidence in the strength of my tal- ents, but with the deepest assurance of the justice of my cause, I bid defiance to all the flatterers of the folly and foolish self- opinion of the half-instructed Many ; to all who fill the air with festal explosions and false fires sent up against the lightnings of Heaven, in order that the people may neither distinguish the warning Flash nor hear the threatening thunder ! How re- cently did we stand alone in the word ? And though the one storm has blown over, another may even now be gathering : or haply the hollow murmur of the Earthquake within the Bowels of our own Commonweal may strike a direr terror than ever did the Tempest of foreign Warfare. Therefore, though the first quatrain is no longer applicable, yet the moral truth and the sublime exhortation of the following Sonnet can never be superannuated. With it I conclude this Number, thanking Heaven ! that I have communed with, honored, and loved its wise and high-minded author. To know that such men are among us, is of itself an antidote against despondence. Another year ! — another deadly blow ! Another mighty Empire overtiirown! And we are left, or shall be left, alone ; The last that dares to struggle with the Foe. 'Tis well ! from this day forward we shall know That in ourselves our safety must be souglit; That by our own right hands it must be wrought; That we must stand unproj)! or be laid low. O Dastard! whom such foretaste doth not cheer! We shall exult, if They, who rule the land, Be Men who hold its many blessings dear, Wise, upright, valiant ; not a venal Band, Who are to judge of danger which they fear, And honour, which they do not understand. Wordsworth. THE Li AN DING-PL. ACE: OR ESSAYS INTERPOSED FOR AMUSEMENT, RETROSPECT, AND PREPARATION. MISCELLANY THE FIRST. Etiam a musts si quaiido aniiniim paulisper abducanius, apiul Miisas iiihil- ominus feriamur : at reclines quidcin, at otiosas, at de hie et illis inter se li- bere colloquentes. 14 ESSAY I. O blessed Letters ! that combine in one All ages past, and make one live with all : By you we do confer with who are gone And the Dead-living unto Council call! By you the Unborn shall have communion Of what we feel and what doth us befall. Since Writings are the Veins, the Arteries, And undecaying Life-strings of those Hearts, That still shall pant and still shall exercise Their mightiest powers when Nature none imparts: And the strong constitution of their Praise Wear out the infection of disteniper'd days. Daniel's Musophilus. The Intelligence, which produces or controls human actions and occurrences, is often represented by the Mystics under the name and notion of the supreme Harmonist. I do not myself approve of these metaphors : they seem to imply a restlessness to understand that which is not among the appointed objects of our comprehension or discursive faculty. But certainly there is one excellence in good music, to which, without mysticism, we may find or make an analogy in the records of History. I ailude to that sense of recognition, which accompanies our sense of novelty in the most original passages of a great com- poser. If we listen to a Symphony of Cimarosa, the present strain still seems not only to recal, but almost to renew, some past movement, another and yet the same ! Each present movement bringing back, as it were, and embodying the spirit of some melody that had gone before, anticipates and seems trying to overtake something that is to come : and the musician has reached the summit of his art, when having thus modified the 108 Present by the Past, he at the same time weds the Past in the Present to some prepared and corresponsive Future. The audi- tor's thoughts and feelings move under the same influence : re- trospection blends with anticipation, and Hope and Memory (a female Janus) become one power with a double aspect. A simi- lar effect the reader may produce for himself in the pages of His- tory, if he will be content to substitute an intellectual compla- cency for pleasurable sensation. The events and characters of one age, like the strains in music, recal those of another, and the variety by which each is individualized, not only gives a charm and poignancy to the resemblance, but likewise renders the whole more intelligible. Meantime ample room is afforded for the exercise both of the judgment and the fancy, in distin- guishing cases of real resemblance from those of intentional imitation, the analogies of nature, revolving upon herself, from the masquerade figures of cunning and vanity. It is not from identity of opinions, or from similarity of events and outward actions, that a real resemblance in the radical char- acter can be deduced. On the contrary, men of great and stir- ring powers, who are destined to mould the age in which they are born, must first mould themselves upon it. Mahomet born twelve centuries later, and in the heart of Europe, would not have been a false Prophet ; nor would a false Prophet of the present generation have been a Mahomet in the sixth century. I have myself, therefore, derived the deepest interest from the comparison of men, whose characters at the first view appear widely dissimilar, who yet have produced similar effects on their different ages, and this by the exertion of powers which on examination will be found far more alike, than the altered drapery and costume would have led us to suspect. Of the heirs of fame few are more respected by me, though for very different qualities, than Erasmus and Luther : scarcely any one has a larger share of my aversion than Voltaire ; and even of the better-hearted Eousseau I Avas never more than a very lukewarm admirer. I should perhaps too rudely affront the general opinion, if I avowed my whole creed concerning the proportions of real talent between the two purifiers of revealed Religion, now neglected as obsolete, and the two modern con- spirators against its authority, who are still the Alpha and Ome- ga of Continental Genius. Yet when I abstract the questions of evil and good, and measure only the effects produced and the 109 mode of producing them, I have repeatedly found the idea of Voltaire, Rosseau, and Robespierre, recal in a similar cluster and connection that of Erasmus, Luther, and Munster. Those who are familiar with the works of Erasmus, and who know the influence of his wit, as the pioneer of the reformation ; and who likewise know, that by his wit, added to the vast va- riety of knowledge communicated in his works, he had won over by anticipation so large a part of the polite and lettered world to the Protestant party ; will be at no loss in discovering the intended counterpart in the life and writings of the veteran Frenchman. They will see, indeed, that the knowledge of the one was solid through its whole extent, and that of the other extensive at a cheap rate, by its superficiality ; that the wit of the one is always bottomed on sound sense, peoples and enriches the mind of the reader with an endless variety of distinct images and living interests : and that his broadest laughter is every where translatable into grave and weighty truth ; while the wit of the Frenchman, without imagery, with- out character, and without that pathos which gives the magic charm to genuine humor, consists, when it is most perfect, in happy turns of phrase, but far too often in fantastic incidents, outrages of the pure imagination, and the poor low trick of combining the ridiculous with the venerable, where he, who does not laugh, abhors. Neither will they have forgotten, that the object of the one was to drive the thieves and mummers out of the temple, while the other was propelling a worse banditti, first to profane and pillage, and ultimately to raze it. Yet not the less will they perceive, that the effects remain par- allel, the circumstances analagous, and the instruments the same. In each case the effects extended over Europe, were at- tested and augmented by the praise and patronage of thrones and dignities, and are not to be explained but by extraordinary industry and a life of literature ; in both instances the circum- stances were supplied by an age of hopes and promises — the age of Erasmus restless from the first vernal influences of real knowledge, that of Voltaire fiom the hectic of imagined supe- riority. In the voluminous works of both, the instr'uments em- ployed are chiefly those of wit and amusive erudition, and alike in both the errors and evils (real or imputed) in Religion and Politics are the objects of the battery. And here we must stop. The two Men were essentially different. Exchange no mutually their dates and spheres of action, yet Voltaire, had he been ten-fold a Voltaire, could not have made up an Erasmus ; and Erasmus must have emptied himself of half his greatness and all his goodness, to have become a Voltaire. Shall we succeed better or worse with the next pair, in this our new dance of death, or rather of the shadows which we have brought forth — two by two — from the historic ark ? In our first couple we have at least secured an honorable retreat, and though we failed as to the agents^ we have maintained a fair analogy in the actions and the objects. But the heroic Luther, a Giant awaking in his strength ! and the crazy Rousseau, the Dreamer of love-sick Tales, and the spinner of speculative Cobwebs; shy of light as the Mole, but as quick- eared too for every whisper of the public opinion ; the Teacher of stoic Pride in his principles, yet the victim of morbid Vani- ty in his feelings and conduct. From what point of likeness can we commence the comparison between a Luther and a Rousseau? And truly had 1 been seeking for characters that, taken as they really existed, closely resemble each other, and this too to our first apprehensions, and according to the com- mon rules of biographical comparison, I could scarcely have made a more unlucky choice : unless I had desired that my parallel of the German " Son of Thunder" and the Visionary of Geneva, should sit on the same bench with honest Fluellin's of Alexander the Great and Harry of Monmouth. Still, how- ever, the same analogy would hold as in my former instance : the eflfects produced on their several ages by Luther and Rous- seau, were commensurate with each other, and were produced in both cases by (what their contemporaries felt as) serious and vehement eloquence, and an elevated lone of moral feel- ing .' and Luther, not less than Rousseau, was actuated by an almost superstitious hatred of superstition, and a turbulent pre- judice against prejudices. In the relation too which their wri- tings severally bore to those of Erasmus and Voltaire, and the way in which the latter co-operated with them to the same general end, each finding its own class of admirers and Prose- lytes, the parallel is complete. I cannot, however, rest here ! Spite of the apparent incon- gruities, I am disposed to plead for a resemblance in the Men themselves, for that similarity in their radical natures, which 1 abandoned all pretence and desire of shewing in the instances Ill of Voltaire and Erasmus. But then my readers must think of Luther not as he really was, but as he might have been, if he had been born in the age and under the circumstances of the Swiss Philosopher. For this purpose I must strip him of many advantages which he derived from his own times, and must contemplate him in his natural weaknesses as well as in his original strength. Each referred all things to his own ideal. The ideal was indeed widely different in the one and in the other : and this was not the least of Luther's many advantages, or (to use a favorite phrase of his own) not one of his least favors of preventing grace. Happily for him he had derived his standard from a common measure already received by the good and wise : I mean the inspired writings, the study of which Erasmus had previously restored among the learned. To know that we are in sympathy with others, moderates our feelings, as well as strengthens our convictions : and for the mind, which opposes itself to the faith of the multitude, it is more especially desirable, that there should exist an object out of itself, on which it may fix its attention, and thus balance its own energies. Rousseau, on the contrary in the inauspicious spirit of his age and birth-place,* had slipped the cable of his faith, and steer- ed by the compass of unaided reason, ignorant of the hidden currents that were bearing him out of his course, and too proud to consult the faithful charts prized and held sacred by his forefathers. But the strange influences of his bodily tempera- ment on his understanding; his constitutional melancholy pam- pered into a morbid excess by solitude ; his wild dreams of suspicion; his hypochondriacal fancies of hosts of conspirators all leagued against him and his cause, and headed by some arch-enemy, to whose machinations he attributed every trifling mishap, (all as much the creatures of his imagination, as if in- stead of Men he had conceived them to be infernal Spirits and Beings preternatural) — these, or at least the predisposition to them, existed in the ground-work of his nature : they were * Infidelity was so common in Geneva about that time, that Voltaire in one of his Letters exults, that in this, Calvin's own City, some half dozen on- ly of the most ignorant believed in Christianity under any form. This was, no doubt, one of Voltaire's usual lies of exaggeration : it is not however to be denied, that here, and throughout Switzerland, he and the dark Master in whose service he employed himself, had ample grounds of triumph. 112 parts of Rousseau himself. And what corresponding in kind to these, not to speak of degree, can we detect in the character of his supposed parallel ? This difficulty will suggest itself at the first thought, to those who derive all their knowledge ol Luther from the meagre biography met with in " The Lives of eminent Reformers," or even from the ecclesiastical Histories of Mosheim or Milner : for a life of Luther, in extent and style of execution proportioned to the grandeur and interest of the subject, a Life of the Man Luther, as well as of Luther the Theologian, is still a desideratum in English Literature, though perhaps there is no subject for which so many unused materi- als are extant, both printed and in manuscript.* *The affectionate respect in which I hold the name of Dr. Jortin (one of the many illustrious Nurslings of the College to which I deem it no small honor to have belonged — Jesus, Cambridge) renders it painful to me to assert, that the above remark holds almost equally true of a Life of Erasmus. But every Scholar well read in the writings of Erasmus and his illustrious Con- temporaries, must have discovered, that Jortin had neither collected sufficient, nor the best, materials for his work: and (perhaps from that veiy cause) he grew weaiy of his task, before he had made a full use of the scanty materi- als which he had collected. ESSAY II. Is it, I ask, most important to the best interests of Mankind, temporal as well as spiritual, that certain Works, the names and number of which are fixed and unalterable, should be distinguished from all other Works, not in a degree only but even in kind'i And that these, collectively should form THE Book, to which in all the concerns of Faith and Morality the last re- course is to be made, and from the decisions of which no man dare appeal? If the mere existence of a Book so called and charactered be, as the Koran itself suffices to evince, a mighty Bond of Union, among nations whom all other causes tend to separate ; if moreover the Book revered by us and our forefathers has been the Foster-nurse of Learning in the darkest, and of Civilization in the rudest, times ; and lastly, if this so vast and wide a Bless- ing is not to be founded in a Delusion, and doomed therefore to the Ira- permanence and Sconi in which sooner or later all delusions must end; how, I pray you, is it conceivable that this should be brought about and se- cured, otherwise than by a special vouchsafement to this one Book, exclu- sively, of that Divine JMean, that uniform and perfect middle way, which in all points is at safe and equal distance from all errors whether of excess or de- fect? But again if this be true, (and what Protestant christian worthy of his baptismal dedication will deny its truth) surely we ought not to be hard and over-stern in our censures of the mistakes and infirmities of those, who pre- tending to no warrant of extraordinary Inspiration have yet been raised up- by God's providence to be of highest power and eminence in the reformation of his Church. Far rather does it behove us to consider, in how many in- stances the peccant humor native to the man had been wrought upon by the faithful study of that only faultless Model, and corrected into an unsinning, or at least a venial, Predominance in the Writer or Preacher. Yea, that not seldom the Infirmity of a zealous Soldier in the Warfare of Christ has been made the very mould and ground-work of that man's peculiar gifis and vir- tues. Grateful too we should be, that the very Faults of famous Men have been fitted to the age, on which they were to act: and that thus the folly of man has proved the wisdom of God, and been made the instrument of his mercy to mankind. Anon. Whoever has sojourned in Eisenach,* will assuredly have * Durchflage durch Deutchland, die Niederlande und Frankreich : zweit. — Theil. p. 126. 15 114 visited the Warteburg, interesting by so many historical asso- ciations, which stands on a high rock, about two miles to the south from the City Gate. To this Castle Luther was taken on his return from the imperial diet, where Charles the Fifth had pronounced the ban upon him, and limited his safe convoy to one and twenty days. On the last but one of these days, as he was on his way to Waltershausen (a town in the dutchy of Saxe Gotha, a few leagues to the south-east of Eisenach) he was stopped in a hollow behind the Castle Altenstein, and carried to the Warteburg. The Elector of Saxony, who could not have refused to deliver up Luther, as one put in the ban by the Emperor and the Diet, had ordered John of Berleptsch the governor of the Warteburg and Burckhardt von Hundt, the governor of Altenstein, to take Luther to one or the other of these Castles, without acquainting him which ; in order that he might be able, with safe conscience, to declare, that he did not know where Luther was. Accordingly they took him to the Warteburg, under the name of the Chevalier (Ritter) George. To this friendly imprisonment the reformation owes many of Luther's most important labours. In this place he wrote his works against auricular confession, against Jacob Latronum, the tract on the abuse of Masses, that against clerical and monastic vows, composed his Exposition of the 22, 27, and G8 Psalms, finished his Declaration of the Magnificat, began to write his Church Homilies, and translated the New Testament. Here too, and during this time, he is said to have hurled his ink-stand at the Devil, the black spot from which yet remains on the stone wail of the room he studied in ; which surely, no one will have visited the Warteburg without having had pointed out to him by the good Catholic who is, or at least some few years ago was, the Warden of the Castle. He must have been either a very supercilious or a very incurious traveller if he did not, for the gratification of his guide at least, inform himself by means of his pen-knife, that the said marvellous blot bids defiance to all the toils of the scrubbing brush, and is to remain a sign for ever ; and with this advantage over most of its kindred, that being capable of a double interpretation, it is equally flattering to the Protestant and the Papist, and is regarded by the won- der-loving zealots of both parties, with equal faith. Whether the great man ever did throw his ink-stand at his Satanic Majesty, whether he ever boasted of the exploit, and 115 himself declared the dark blotch on. his Study-Wall in the Warteburg, to be the result and relict of this author-like hand- grenado, (happily for mankind he used his ink-stand at other times to better purpose, and with more effective hostility against the arch-fiend) I leave to my reader's own judgment ; on con- dition, however, tliat he has previously perused Luther's table- talk, and other writings of the same stamp, of some of his most illustrious contemporaries, which contain facts still more strange and whimsical, related by themselves and of themselves, and accompanied with solemn protestations of the Truth of their statements. Luther's table-talk, which to a truly philosophic mind, will not be less interesting than Rousseau's confessions, I have not myself the means of consulting at present, and can- not therefore say, whether this ink-pot adventure is, or is not, told or referred to in it ; but many considerations incline me to give credit to the story. Luther's unremitting literary labor and his sedentary mode of life, during his confinement in the Warteburg, where he was treated with the greatest kindness, and enjoyed every liberty consistent with his own safety, had begun to undermine his for- mer unusually strong health. He suffered many and most dis- tressing effects of indigestion and a deranged state of the di- gestive organs. Melancthon, whom he had desired to consult the Physicians at Erfurth, sent him some de-obstruent medi- cines, and the advice to take regular and severe exercise. At first he followed the advice, sate and laboured less, and spent whole days in the chase ; but like the younger Pliny, he strove in vain to form a taste for this favorite amusement of the " Gods of the earth," as appears from a passage in a letter to George Spalatin, which I translate for an additional reason : to prove to the admirers of Rousseau, (who perhaps will not be less af- fronted by this biographical parallel, than the zealous Luther- ans will be offended) that if my comparison should turn out groundless on the v.-hole, the failure will not have arisen either from the want of sensibility in our great reformer, or of angry aversion to those in high places, whom he regarded as the op- pressors of their rightful equals. " I have been," he writes, " employed for two days in the sports of the field, and was wil- ling myself to taste this bitter-sweet amusement of the great heroes : we have caught two hares, and one brace of poor lit- tle partridges. An employment this which does not ill suit quiet leisurely folks : for even in the midst of the ferrets and 116 dogs, I have had theological faiicies. But as much pleasure as the general appearance of the scene and the mere looking on occasioned me, even so much it pitied me to think of the mys- tery and emblem which lies beneath it. For what does this symbol signify, but that the Devil, through his godless hunts- man and dogs, the Bishops and Theologians to wit, doth privily chase and catch the innocent poor little beasts ? Ah ! the simple and credulous souls came thereby far too plain before my eyes. Thereto comes a yet more frightful mystery : as at my earnest entreaty we had saved alive one poor little hare, and I had con- cealed it in the sleeve of my great coat, and had strolled off a short distance from it, the dogs in the mean time found the poor hare. Such, too, is the fury of the Pope with Satan, that he destroys even the souls that had been saved, and troubles him- self little about my pains and entreaties. Of such hunting then I have had enough." In another passage he tells his corres- pondent, " you know it is hard to be a Prince, and not in some degree a Robber, and the greater a Prince the more a Robber." Of our Henry the Eighth, he says, " I must answer the grim Lion that passes himself off for King of England. The igno- rance in the Book is such as one naturally expects from a King ; but the bitterness and impudent falsehood is quite leonine." And in his circular letter to the Princes, on occasion of the Peasant's War, he uses a language so inflammatory, and holds forth a doctrine which borders so near on the holy right of in- surrection, that it may as well remain untranslated. Had Luther been himself a Prince, he could not have de- sired better treatment than he received during his eight months stay in the Warteburg ; and in consequence of a more luxuri- ous diet than he had been accustomed to, he was plagued with temptations both from the "Flesh and the Devil." It is evi- dent from his letters* that he suffered under great irritability of his nervous system, the common effect of deranged digestion in men of sedentary habits, who are at the same time intense thinkers : and this irritability added to, and revivifying, the * I can scarcely conceive a more delightful Volume than might be made from Luther's Letters, especially from those that were written from the War- tebm-g, if they were translated in the simple, sinewy, idiomatic, Aea/-/^ mother- tongue of the original. A difficult task I admit — and scarcely possible for any man, however great his talents in other respects, whose favorite reading has not lain among the English writers from Edward the Sixth to Charles the First. 117 impressions made upon him in early lite, and fostered by tlie theological systems of his manhood, is abundantly sufficient to explain all his apparitions and all his nightly combats with evil spirits, I see nothing improbable in the supposition, that in one of those unconscious half sleeps, or rather those rapid alternations of the sleeping with the half-waking state, which is the true witching time, -" the season Wherein the spirits hold their wont to walk," the fruitful matrix of Ghosts — I see nothing improbable, that in some one of those momentary slumbers, into which the sus- pension of all Thought in the perplexity of intense thinking so often passes ; Luther should have had a full view of the Room in which he was sitting, of his writting Table and all the Im- plements of Study, as they really existed, and at the same time a brain-image of the Devil, vivid enough to have acquired apparent Outness, and a distance regulated by the proportion of its distinctness to that of the objects really impressed on the outward senses. If this Christian Hercules, this heroic Cleanser of the Au- gean Stable of Apostacy, had been born and educated in the present or the preceding generation, he would, doubtless, have held himself for a man of genius and original power. But with this faith alone he would scarcely have removed the mountains which he did remove. The darkness and super- stition of the age, which required such a Reformer, had mould- ed his mind for the reception of ideas concerning himself, bet- ter suited to inspire the strength and enthusiasm necessary for the task of reformation, ideas more in sympathy with the spir- its whom he was to influence. He deemed himself gifted with supernatural influxes, an especial servant of Heaven, a chosen Warrior, fighting as the General of a small but faithful troop, against an Army of evil Beings headed by the Prince of the Air. These were no metaphorical beings in his apprehension. He was a Poet indeed, as great a Poet as ever lived in any age or country ; but his poetic images were so vivid, that they mastered the Poet's own mind! He was possessed with them, as with substances distinct from himself: Luther did not write, he acted Poems. The Bible was a spiritual indeed but not a figurative armoury in his belief; it was the magazine 118 of his warlike stores, and from thence he was to arm himself, and supply both shield and sword, and javelin, to the elect. Methinks I see him sitting, the heroic Student, in his Cham- ber in the Warterburg, with his midnight Lamp before him, seen by the late Traveller in the distant Plain of Bischofsroda^ as a Star on the Mountain ! Below it lies the Hebrew Bible open, on which he gazes his brow pressing on his palm, brood- ing over some obscure Text, which he desires to make plain to the simple Boor and to the humble Artizan, and to transfer its whole force into their own natural and living Tongue. And he himself does not understand it ! Thick darkness lies on the original Text , he counts the letters, he calls up the roots of each separate word, and questions them as the familiar Spirits of an Oracle. In vain ! thick darkness continues to cover it! not a ray of meaning dawns through it. With sullen and an- gry hope he reaches for the Vulgate, his old and sworn ene- my, the treacherous confederate of the Roman Antichrist, which he so gladly, when he can, re-rebukes for idolatrous falsehoods, that had dared place " Within the sanctuary itself their shrines, Alxnninations ! " Now — thought of humiliation — he must entreat its aid. See ! there has the sly spirit of apostacy worked-in a phrase which favors the doctrine of purgatory, the intercession of Saints, or the efficacy of Prayers for the Dead. And what is worst of all, the interpretation is plausible. The original Hebrew might be forced into this meaning : and no other meaning seems to lie in it, none to hover above it in the heights of Allegory, none to lurk beneath it even in the depths of Caba- la ! This is the work of the Tempter ! it is a cloud of dark- ness conjured up between the truth of the sacred letters and the eyes of his understanding, by the malice of the evil one, and for a trial of his faith ! Must he then at length con- fess, must he subscribe the name of Luther to an Exposition which consecrates a weapon for the hand of the idolatrous Hie- rarchy ? Never ! never ! There still remains one auxiliary in reserve, the translation of the seventy. The Alexandrine Greeks, anterior to the Church itself, could extend no support to its corruptions — the Septuagint will have profaned the Altar of Truth with no in- cense for the Nostrils of tiie universal Bishop to snuff up. 119 And here again his hopes are baflled ! Exactly at this per- plexed passage had the Greek Translator given his understand- ing a holiday, and made his pen supply its place. O honored Luther ! as easily mightest thou convert the whole City of Rome, with the Pope and the conclave of Cardinals inclusive as strike a spark of light from the words, and nothing hut words, of the Alexandrine Version. Disappointed, despondent, en- raged, ceasing to think, yet continuing his brain on the stretch in solicitation of a thought ; and gradually giving himself up to angry fancies, to recollections of past persecutions, to uneasy fears and inward defiances and floating Images of the evil Be-"^ ing, their supposed personal author ; he sinks, without perceiv- ing it, into a trance of slumber: during which his brain retains its waking energies, excepting that what would have been mere thoughts before now (the action and counterweight of his senses and of their impressions being vt^ithdrawn) shape and condense themselves into things, into realities ! Repeatedly half-wakening, and his eye-lids as often re-closing, the objects which really surrounded him form the place and scenery of his dream. All at once he sees the Arch-fiend coming forth on the wall of the room, from the very spot perhaps, on which his eyes had been fixed vacantly during the perplexed moments of his former meditation : the Ink-stand, which he had at the same time been using, becomes associated with it: and in that strug- gle of rage, which in these distempered dreams almost constant- ly precedes the helpless terror by the pain of which we are finally awakened, he imagines that he hurls it at the intruder, or not improbably in the first instant of awakening, while yet both his imagination and his eyes are possessed by the dream, he actually hurls it. Some weeks after, perhaps, during which interval he had often mused on the incident, undetermined whether to deem it a visitation of Satan to him in the body or out of the body, he discovers for the first time the dark spot on his wall, and receives it as a sign and pledge vouchsafed to him of the event having actually taken place. Such was Luther under the influences of the age and coun- try in and for which he was born. Conceive him a citizen of Geneva, and a contemporary of Voltaire : suppose the French language his mother tongue, and the political and moral philos- ophy of English Free-thinkers re-modelled by Parisian Fort Esprits, to hiive been the objects of his study ; — conceive this 120 change of circumstances, and Luther will no longer dream of Fiends or of Antichrist— but will we have no dreams in their place ? His melancholy will have changed its drapery ; but will it find no new costume wherewith to clothe itself? His impetuous temperament, his deepworking mind, his busy and vivid imaginations — would they not have been a trouble to him in a world, where nothing was to be altered, where nothing was to obey his power, to cease to be that which had been, in order to realize his pre-conceptions of what it ought to be ? His sensibility, which found objects for itself, and shadows of human suft'ering in the harmless Brute, and even the Flowers which he trod upon — might it not naturally, in an unspiritual- ized age, have wept, and trembled, and dissolved, over scenes of earthly passion, and the struggles of love with duty? His pity, that so easily passed into rage, would it not have found in the inequalities of mankind, in the oppressions of govern- ments and the miseries of the governed, an entire instead of a divided object ? And might not a perfect constitution, a gov- ernment of pure reason, a renovation of the social contract, have easily supplied the place of the reign of Christ in the new Jerusalem, of the restoration of the visible Church, and the union of all men by one faith in one charity ? Hencefor- ward then, we will conceive his reason employed in building up anew the edifice of earthly society, and his imagination as pledging itself for the possible realization of the structure. We will lose the great reformer, who was born in an age which needed him, in the Philosopher of Geneva, who was doomed to misapply his energies to materials the properties of which he misunderstood, and happy only that he did not live to witness the direful effects of his system. ESSAY III. Pectora cui credam ? quis me lenii-e docebit Mordaces curas, quis longas fallere noctes Ex quo summa dies tulerit Damona sub umbras ? Omnia paulatim consumit longior setas, Vivendoque simul morimur, rapimurque manendo. Ite tamen, lacrymte ! purum colis sethera, Damon ! Nee mihi conveniunt lacrymfe. Non onmia ten-je Obruta! vivit amor, vivit dolor ! ora negatur Dulcia conspicere : flere et meminisse relictum est. The two following Essays I devote to elucidation, the first of the theory of Luther's Apparitions stated perhaps too briefly in the preceding Number : the second for the purjDose of re- moving the only difficulty, which I can discover in the next section of the Friend to the Reader's ready comprehension of the principles, on which the arguments are grounded. First, I will endeavor to make ray Ghost-Theory more clear to those of my readers, who are fortunate enough to find it obscure in conse- quence of their own good health and unshattered nerves. The window of my library at Keswick is opposite to the fire-place, and looks out on the very large garden that occupies the whole slope of the hill on which the house stands. Consequently, the rays of the light transmitted through the glass, (i. e. the rays from the garden, the opposite mountains, and the bridge, river, lake, and vale interjacent) and the rays reflcctedyi-om it, (of the fire-place, &c.) enter the eye at the same moment. At the coming on of evening, it was my frequent amusement to watch the image or reflection of the fire, that seemed burn- ing in the bushes or between the trees in different parts of the garden or the fields beyond it, according as there was more or less light ; and which still arranged itself among the real objects 16 122 of vision, with a distance and magnitude proportioned to its greater or lesser faintness. For still as the darkness encreased, the image of the fire lessened and grew nearer and more dis- tinct ; till the twilight had depened into perfect night, when all outward objects being excluded, the window became a per- fect looking-glass : save only that my books on the side shelves of the room were lettered, as it were, on their backs with stars, more or fewer as the sky was more or less clouded, (the rays of the stars being at that time the only ones transmitted.) Now substitute the Phantom from Luther's brain for the ima- ges of re^ec^erf light (the fire for instance) and the forms of his room and his furniture for the transmitted rays, and you have a fair resemblance of an apparition, and a just conception of the manner in which it is seen together with real objects. I have long wished to devote an entire work to the subject of Dreams, Visions, Ghosts, Witchcraft, &c. in which I might first give, and then endeavor to explain the most interesting and best attested fact of each, which has come within my knowledge, either from books or from personal testimony. I might then explain in a more satisfactory way the mode in which our thoughts, in states of morbid slumber, become at times perfectly dramatic (for in certain sorts of dreams the dullest Wight becomes a Shakespeare) and by what law the Form of the vision appears to talk to us its own thoughts in a voice as audible as the shape is visible ; and this too often- times in connected trains, and not seldom even with a concen- tration of power which may easily impose on the soundest judgements, uninstructed in the Optics and Acoustics of the inner sense, for Revelations and gifts of Prescience. In aid of the present case, I will only remark, that it would appear in- credible to persons not accustomed to these subtle notices of self observation, what small and remote resemblances, what mere hints of likeness from some real external object, especi- ally if the shape be aided by colour, will suffice to make a vivid thought consubstantiate with the real object, and derive from it an outward perceptibility. Even when we are broad awake, if we are in anxious expectation, how often will not the most confused sounds of nature be heard by us as articu- late sounds? For instance, the babbling of a brook will appear for a moment the voice of a Friend, for whom we are waiting, calling out our own names, &c. A short meditation, there- 123 fore, on the great law of the imagination, that a likeness in part tends to become a likeness of the whole, will make it not on- ly conceivable but probable, that the ink-stand itself, and the dark-coloured stone on the wall, which Luther perhaps had never till then noticed, might have a considerable influence in the production of the Fiend, and of the hostile act by which his obtrusive visit was repelled. A lady once asked me if I believed in ghosts and apparitions. 1 answered with truth and simplicity : No, madam ! I have seen far too many myself. I have indeed a whole memorandum book filled with records of these Phsenomena, many of them interesting as facts and data for Psychology, and affording some valuable materials for a theory of preception and its dependence on the memory and imagination. " In omnem actum Percep- tionis imaginatio influet efficienter." — Wolfe. But He is no more, who would have realized this idea : who had already established the foundations and the law of the theory ; and for whom I had so often found a pleasure and a comfort, even during the wretched and restless nights of sickness, in watch' ing and instantly recording these experiences of the world within us, of the " gemina natura, quae fit et facit, et creat et creatur !" He is gone, my friend ! my munificent co-patron, and not less the benefactor of my intellect ! — He who, beyond all other men known to me, added a fine and ever-wakeful sense of beauty to the most patient accuracy in experimental Philoso- phy and the profounder researches of metaphysical science ; he who united all the play and spring of fancy with the subtlest discrimination and an inexorable judgement ; and who control- led an almost painful exquisiteness of taste by a warmth of heart, which in the practical relations of life made allowances for faults as quick as the moral taste detected them; a warmth of heart, which was indeed noble and pre-eminent, for alas ! the genial feelings of health contributed no spark toward it ! Of these qualities I may speak, for they belonged to all man- kind. — The higher virtues, that were blessings to his friends, and the still higher that resided in and for his own soul, are themes for the energies of solitude, for the awfulness of pray- er ! — virtues exercised in the barrenness and desolation of his animal being ; while he thirsted with the full stream at his lips, and yet with unwearied goodness poured out to all around him, like the master of a feast among his kindred in the day of his 124 own gladness ! Were it but for the remembrance of him alone and of his lot here below, the disbelief of a future state would sadden the earth around me, and blight the very grass in the field. ESSAY IV. JLuXeTTo" I', bf dui/io' I'le, [ii/^ TtuQudeiy/ituav /qw' /lievop ixurofg erdsixrv(r- xf'ai TtTW » iiei'C,o'vMV. y.iidvrev'ei yu^ i/'fiu)v exugog oiof "opuf), eidoj^g ^^anuvTU, nuPi' cTv rcaXiv oj'' crneQ^vnuQ u^yvoEiP. Plato, Polit. p. 47. Ed. Bip. Translatiojy. — It is difficult, excellent friend! to make, any comprehensive truth completely intelligible, unless we avail ourselves of an example. Otherwise we may as in a dream, seem to know all, and then as it were, awaking find that we know nothing. Plato. Among my earliest impressions I still distinctly remember that of my first entrance into the mansion of a neighboring Baronet, awfully known to me by the name of The Grkat House, its exterior having been long connected in my childish imagination with the feelings and fancies stirred up in me by the perusal of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.* Beyond * As I had read one volume of these tales over and over again before my fifth birth-day, it may be readily conjectured of what sort these fancies and feelings must have been. The book, I well remember, used to lie in a cor- ner of the parlour window at my dear Father's Vicarage-house : and lean never forget with what a strange mixuue of obscure dread and intense de- sire I used to look at the volume and watch it, till the morning sunshine had reached and nearly covered it, when, and not before, I felt the courage given me to seize the precious treasure and hurry off with it to some sunny corner in oiu- play-ground. 125 all other objects, I was most struck with the magnificent stair- case, relieved at well proportioned intervals by spacious land- ing-places, this adorned with grand or shewy plants, the next looking out on an extensive prospect through the stately window with its side panes of rich blues and saturated amber or orange tints : while from the last and highest the eye com- manded the whole spiral ascent with the marbled pavement of the great hall from which it seemed to spring up as if it merely used the ground on which it rested. My readers will find no difficulty in translating these forms of the outward senses into their intellectual analogies, so as to understand the purport of the Friend's landing-places, and the objects, he proposed to himself, in the small groups of Essays interposed under this ti- tle between the main divisions of the work. My best powers would have sunk within me, had I not sooth- ed my solitary toils with the anticipation of many readers — (whether during the Writer's life, or when his grave shall have shamed his detractors into a sympathy with its own silence, formed no part in this self-flattery) who would submit to any reasonable trouble rather than read " as in a dream seeming to know all, to find on awaking that they know nothing." Hav- ing, therefore in the three preceding numbers selected from my conservatory a few plants, of somewhat gayer petals and a live- lier green, though like the Geranium tribe of a sober character in the whole physiognomy and odor, I shall first devote a few sentences to a catalogue raisonne of my introductory lucubra- tions, and the remainder of the Essay to the prospect, as far as it can be seen distinctly from our present site. Within a short distance, several ways meet : and at that point only does it ap- pear to me that the reader will be in danger of mistaking the road. Dropping the metaphor, I would say that there is one term, the meaning of which has become unsettled. To differ- ent persons it conveys a different idea, and not seldom to the same person at different times ; while the force, and to a cer- tain extent, the intelligibility of the following sections depend on its being interpreted in one sense exclusively. Essays from I. to IV. inclusive convey the design and con- tents ol the work ; the Friend's judgement respecting the style, and his defence of himself from the charges of Arrogance and Presumption. Say rather, that such are the personal threads of the discourse : for it will not have escaped the Reader's ob- 126 servation, that even in these prefatory pages principles and truths of general interest form the true contents, and that amid all the usual compliments and courtesies of the The Friend's first presentation of himself to his Reader's acquaintance the substantial object is still to assert the practicability, without disguising the difficulties, of improving the morals of mankind by a direct appeal to their Understandings ; to shew the dis- tinction between Attention and Thought, and the necessity of the former as a habit or discipline without which the very word, Thinking, must remain a thoughtless substitute for dream- ing with, our eyes open ; and lastly, the tendency of a certain fashionable style with all its accommodations to paralyse the very faculties of manly intellect by a series of petty stimulants. After this preparation The Friend proceeds at once to lay the foundations common to the whole work by an inquiry into the duty of communicating Truth, and the conditions under which it may be communicated with safety, from the Fifth to the Sixteenth Essay inclusive. Each Essay will, he believes, be found complete in itself, yet an organic part of the whole con- sidered as one disquisition. First, the inexpediency of pious Frauds is proved from History, the shameless assertion of the indifference of Truth and Falsehood exposed to its deserved infamy, and an answer given to the objection derived from the impossibility of conveying an adequate notion of the truths, we may attempt to communicate. The conditions are then de- tailed, under which, right though inadequate notions may be taught without danger, and proofs given, both from facts and from reason, that he, who fulfils the conditions, required by Conscience, takes the surest way of answering the purposes of Prudence. This is, indeed, the main characteristic of the mor- al system taught by the Friend throughout, that the distinct foresight of Consequences belongs exclusively to that infinite Wisdom which is one with that Almighty Will, on which all consequences depend ; but that /or Man — to obey the simple unconditional commandment of eschewing every act that im- plies a self-contradiction, or in other words, to produce and maintain the greatest possible Harmony in the component im- pulses and faculties of his nature, involves the effects of Pru- dence. It is, as it were, Prudence in short-hand or cypher. A pure Conscience, that inward something, that ^suc. olxjio.c, which being absolutely unique no man can describe^ because 127 every man is bound to knoiv^ and even in the eye of the Law is held to be a. person no longer than he may be supposed to know it — the Conscience, I say, bears the same relation to God, as an accurate Time-piece bears to the Sun. The Time- piece merely indicates the relative path of the Sun, yet we can regulate our plans and proceedings by it with the same con- fidence as if it was itself the efficient cause of light, heat, and the revolving seasons; on the self-evident axiom, that in what- ever sense two things (for instance, A. and c D JG^) are both equal to a third thing (B.) they are in the same sense equal to each other. Cunning is circuitous folly. In plain English, to act the knave is but a round about way of playing the fool ; and the man, who will not permit himself to call an action by its proper name without a previous calculation of all its probable consequences, may be indeed only a coxcomb, who is looking at his fingers through an opera glass ; but he runs no small risk of becoming a knave. The chances are against him. Though he should begin by calculating the consequences with regard to others, yet by the mere habit of never contemplating an action in its own proportions and immediate relations to his moral be- ing it is scarcely possible but that he must end in selfishness : for the YOU, and the they will stand on different occasions for a thousand different persons, while the 1 is one only, and recurs in every calculation. Or grant that the principle of expedien- cy should prompt to the same outward deeds as are commanded by the law" of reason ; yet the doer himself is debased. B ut if it be replied, that the re-action on the agent's own mind is to form a part of the calculation, then it is a rule that destroys it- self in the very propounding, as will be more fully demonstra- ted in the second or ethical division of the Friend, when we shall have detected and exposed the equivoque between an ac- tion and the series of motions by which the determinations of the Will are to be realized in the world of the senses. What modification of the latter corresponds to the former, and is en- titled to be called by the same name, will often depend on time, place, persons, and circumstances, the consideration of which requires an exertion of the judgement ; but the action itself re- mains the same, and like all other ideas pre-exists in the rea- son,* or (in the more expressive and perhaps more precise and * See the Statesman's Manual, p. 23. 128 philosophical language of St. Paul) in the spirit, unalterable because unconditional, or with no other than that most awful condition, as sure as God liveth, it is so ! These remarks are inserted in this place, because the prin- ciple admits of easiest illustration in the instance of veracity and the actions connected with the same, and may then be in- telligibly applied to other departments of morality, all of which WoUaston indeed considers as only so many different forms of truth and falsehood. So far the Friend has treated of oral communication of the truth. The applicability of the same principle is then tried and affirmed in publications by the Press, first as between the individual and his own conscience and then between the publisher and the state : and under this head the Friend has considered at large the questions of a free Press and the law of libel, the anomalies and peculiar difficulties of the latter, and the only possible solution com- patible with the continuance of the former : a solution rising out of and justified by the necessarily anomalous and unique nature of the law itself. He confesses, that he looks back on this discussion concerning the Press and its limits with a satis- faction unusual to him in the review of his own labours : and if the date of their first publication (September, 1809) be re- membered, it will not perhaps be denied on an impartial com- parison, that he has treated this most important subject (so es- pecially interesting in the present times) more fully and more systematically than it had hitherto been. Interim tum recti conscientia, tum illo me consolor, quod octimis quibusque certe non improbamur, fortassis omnibus placituri, simul atque livor ab obitu conquieverit. Lastly, the subject is concluded even as it commenced, and as beseemed a disquisition placed as the steps and vestibule of the whole work, with an enforcement of the absolute necessi- ty of principles grounded in reason as the basis or rather as the living root of all genuine expedience. Where these are de- spised or at best regarded as aliens from the actual business of life, and consigned to the ideal world of speculative philosophy and Utopian politics, instead of state-wisdom we shall have state-craft, and for the talent of the governor the cleverness of an embarrassed spendthrift — which consists in tricks to shift off difficulties and dangers when they are close upon us, and to keep them at arm's length, not in solid and grounded courses 129 to preclude or subdue them. We must content ourselves with expedient-makers — with fire-engines /against fires, Life-boats against inundations : but no houses built fire-proof, no dams that rise above the water-mark. The reader will have observ- ed that already has the term, reason, been frequently contra- distinguished from the understanding, and the judgement. If the Friend could succeed in fully explaining the sense in which the word Reason, is employed by him, and in satisfying the reader's mind concerning the grounds and importance of the distinction, he would feel little or no apprehension concerning the intelligibility of these Essays from first to last. The fol- lowing section is in part founded on this distinction : the which remaining obscure, all else will be so as a system, however clear the component paragraphs may be, taken separately. In the appendix to his first Lay Sermon, the Author has indeed treated the question at considerable length, but chiefly in rela- tion to the heights of Theology and Metaphysics. In the next number he attempts to explain himself more popularly, and trusts that with no great expenditure of attention the reader will satisfy his mind, that our remote ancestors spoke as men acquainted with the constituent parts of their own moral and intellectual being, when they described one man as being out his senses, another as out of his luits, or deranged in his un- derstanding, and a third as having lost his reason. Observe, the understanding may be deranged, weakened, or perverted ; but the reason is either lost or not lost, that is, wholly present or wholly absent. 17 ESSAY V. Man may rather be defined a religions than a rational character, in regard that in other creatures tliere may bo something of Reason, but there is nothing of Rehgion, Harrington. If the Reader will substKute the word " Understanding" for " Reason," and the word " Reason" for " Religion," Harring- ton has here completely expressed the Truth for which the Friend is contending. But that this was Harrington's meaning is evident. Otherwise instead of comparing two faculties with each other, he would contrast a faculty with one of its own ob- jects, which would involve the same absurdity as if he had said, that man might rather be defined an astronomical than a seeing animal, because other animals possessed the sense of Sight, but were incapable of beholding the satellites of Saturn, or the nebulae of fixed stars. If further confirmation be necessary, it may be supplied by the following reflections, the leading thought of which I remember to have read in the works of a continen- tal Philosopher. It should seem easy to give the definite dis- tinction of the Reason from the Understanding, because we constantly imply it when we speak of the difference between ourselves and the brute creation. No one, except as a figure of speech, ever speaks of an animal reason;* but that many * I have this moment looked over a Translation of Blumenbach's Physiolo- gy by Dr. Elliotson, which forms a glaring exception, p. 45. I do not know Dr. Elliotson, but I do know Professor Blumenbach, and was an assiduous attendant on the Lectures, of which this classical work was the text-book: and I know that that good and great man would start back with surprize and indignation at the gross materialism morticed on to his work : the moru so because during the whole period, in which the identification of Man with the 131 animals possess a share of Understanding, perfectly distinguisha- ble from mere Instinct, we all allow. Few persons have a fa- vorite dog without making instances of its intelligence an oc- casional topic of conversation. They call for our admiration of the individual animal, and not with exclusive reference to the Wisdom in Nature, as in the case of the storge or maternal in- stinct of beasts ; or of the hexangular cells of the bees, and the wonderful coincidence of this form with the geometrical demon- stration of the largest possible number of rooms in a given space. Likewise, we distinguish various degrees of Understanding there, and even discover from inductions supplied by the Zoo- logists, that the Understanding appears (as a general rule) in an inverse proportion to the Instinct. We hear little or noth- ing of the instincts of "the half-reasoning elephant," and as little of the Understanding of Caterpillars and Butterflies. (N. B. Though REASONING does not in our language, in the lax use of words natural in conversation or popular writings, imply scientific conclusion, yet the phrase "half-reasoning" is evidently used by Pope as a poetic hyperbole.) But Reason is wholly denied, equally to the highest as to the lowest of the brutes ; otherwise it must be wholly attributed to them, and with it therefore Self-consciousness, and personality^ or Moral Being. I should have no objection to define Reason with Jacobi, and with his friend Hemsterhuis, as an organ bearing the same re- lation to spiritual objects, the Universal, the Eternal, and the Necessary, as the eye bears to material and contingent phseno- mena. But then it must be added, that it is an organ identical with its appropriate objects. Thus, God, the Soul, eternal Truth, &c. are the objects of Reason ; but they are themselves reason. We name God the Supreme Reason ; and Milton says, *' Whence the Soul /Reason receives, and Reason is her Being." Brute in kind was the /as/; ion of Naturalists, Bkmienbach remained arrfe?i< and instant in controverting tiie opinion, and exposing its fallacy and falsehood, both as a man of sense and as a Naturalist. I may truly say, that it was up- permost in his heart and foremost in his s])eech. Therefore, and from no hos- tile feeling to Dr. Elliotson (whom I hear spoken of with great regard and respect, and to whom I myself give credit for his manly openness in the avowed of his opinions) I have felt the present animadversion a duty of justice as well as gratitude. S. T. C. 8 April, 1817. 133 Whatever fs conscious Self-knowledge ts Reason ; and in this sense it may be safely defined the organ of the Supersensuous ; even as the Understanding wherever it does not possess or use the Reason, as another and inward eye, may be defined the conception of the Sensuous, or the faculty by which we gener- alize and arrange the phienomena of perception : that faculty, the functions of which contain the rules and constitute the pos- sibility of outward Experience. In short, the Understanding supposes something that is understood. This may be merely its own acts or forms, that is, formal Logic ; but real objects, the materials of suhsiantial knowledge, must be furnished, we might safely say revealed^ to it by Organs of Sense. The un- derstanding of the higher Brutes has only organs of outward sense, and consequently material objects only ; but man's un- derstanding has likewise an organ of inward sense, and there- fore the power of acquainting itself with invisible realities or spiritual objects. This organ is his Reason, Again, the Un- derstanding and Experience may exist* without Reason. But Reason cannot exist without Understanding ; nor does it or can it manifest itself but in and through the understanding, which in our elder writers is often called discourse^ or the discursive faculty, as by Hooker, Lord Bacon, and Hobbes : and an un- derstanding enlightened by reason Shakspeare gives as the con- tra-distinguishing character of man, under the name discourse of reason. In short, the human understanding possesses two distinct organs, the outward sense, and " the mind's eye" which is reason: wherever we use that phrase (the mind's eye) in its proper sense, and not as a mere synonyme of the memory or the fancy. In this way we reconcile the promise of Revelation, that the blessed will see God, with the decla- ration of St. John, God hath no one seen at any time. We will add one other illustration to prevent any misconcep- * Of this no one would feel inclined to doubt, who had seen the poodle dog whom the celebrated Blumenbach, a name so dear to science, as a physiolo- gist and Comparative Anatomist, and not less dear as a man, to all English- men who have ever resided at Gottingen in the course of their education, trained up, not only to ha.ch the eggs of the hen with all the mother's care and patience, but to attend the chicken afterwards, and find the food for them. I have myself known a Newfoundland dog, who watched and guarded a family of young children with all the intelligence of a nurse, during their walks. 133 tion, as If we were dividing the human soul into different es- sences, or ideal persons. In this piece of steel I acknowledge the properties of hardness, brittleness, high polish, and the capability of forming a mirror. I find all these likewise in the plate glass of a friend's carriage ; but in addition to all these, I find the quality of transparency, or the power of transmitting as well as of reflecting the rays of light. The application is obvious. If the reader therefore will take the trouble of bearing in mind these and the following explanations, he will have re- moved before hand every possible difficulty from the Friend's political section. For there is another use of the word. Rea- son, arising out of the former indeed, but less definite, and more exposed to misconception. In this latter use it means the understanding considered as using the Reason, so far as by the organ of Reason only we possess the ideas of the Necessa- ry and the Universal ; and this is the more common use of the word, when it is applied with any attempt at clear and distinct conceptions. In this narrower and derivative sense the best de- finition of Reason, which, I can give, will be found in i:he third member of the following sentence, in which the under- standing is described in its three-fold operation, and from each receives an appropriate name. The sense, (vis sensitiva vel intuitiva) jaerceives : Vis regulatrix (the undeisianding, in its own peculiar operation) conceives: Vis rationalis (.the Reason or rationalized understanding) comprehends. The first is im- pressed through the organs of sense, the second combines these multifarious impressions into individual Notions, and by reducing these notions to Rules, according to the analogy of all its former notices, constitutes Experience : the third subordi- nates both these notions and the rules of Experience to abso- lute Principles or necessary Laws : and thus concerning ob- jects, which our experience has proved to have real existence, it demonstrates moreover, in what way they are possible, and in doing this constitutes Science. Reason therefore, in this secondary sense, and used, not as a spiritual Organ but as a Faculty (namely, the Understanding or Soul enlightened by that organ) — Reason, I say, or the scientific Faculty, is the In- tellection of the possibility or essential properties of things by means of the Laws that constitute them. Thus the rational 134 idea of a Circle is that of a figure constituted by the circum- volution of a straight line with its one end fixed. Every man must feel, that though he may not be exerting different faculties, he is exerting his faculties in a different way, when in one instance he begins with some one self-evi- dent truth, (that the radii of a circle, for instance, are all equal,) and in consequence of this being true sees at once, without any actual experience, that some other thing must be true like- wise, and that, this being true, some third thing must be equal- ly true, and so on till he comes, we will say, to the properties of the lever, considered as the spoke of a circle ; which is capa- ble of having all its marvellous powers demonstrated even to a savage who had never seen a lever, and without supposing any other previous knowledge in his mind, but this one, that there is a conceivable figure, all possible lines from the middle to the circumference of which are of the same length : or when, in the second instance, he brings together the facts of experience, each of which has its own separate value, neither encreased nor diminished by the truth of any other fact which may have preceded it ; and making these several facts bear upon some particular project, and finding some in favor of it, and some against the project, according as one or the other class of facts preponderate: as, for instance, whether it would be better to plant a particular spot of ground with larch, or with Scotch fir, or with oak in preference to either. Surely every man will acknowledge, that his mind was very differently em- ployed in the first case from what it was in the second, and all men have agreed to call the results of the first class the truths of science^ such as not only are true, but which it is impossible to conceive otherwise : while the results of the second class are called facts, or things of experience : and as to these latter we must often content ourselves with the greater probability, that they are so, or so, rather than otherwise — nay, even when we have no doubt that they are so in the particular case, we never presume to assert that they must continue so always, and under all circumstances. On the contrary, our conclusions de- pend altogether on contingent circumstances. Now when the mind is employed, as in the case first-mentioned, I call it Rea- soning, or the use of the pure Reason ; but, in the second case, the Understanding or Prudence. This reason applied to the motives of our conduct, and com- 135 bined with the sense of our moral responsibility, is the condi- tional cause of Conscience, which is a spiritual sense or testi- fying state of the coincidence or discordance of the free will with the Rkason. But as the Reasoning consists wholly in a man's power of seeing, whether any two ideas, which happen to be in his mind, are, or are not in contradiction with each other, it follows of necessity, not only that all men have reason, but that every man has it in the same degree. For Reasoning (or Reason, in this its secondary sense) does not consist in the Ideas, or in their clearness, but simply, when they are in the mind, in seeing whether they contradict each other or no. And again, as in the determinations of Conscience the only knowledge required is that of my own intention — whether in doing such a thing, instead of leaving it undone, I did what I should think right if any other person had done it ; it follows that in the mere question of guilt or innocence, all men have not only Reason equally, but likewise all the materials on which the reason, considered as Conscience, is to work. But when we pass out of ourselves, and speak, not exclusively of the agent as meaning well or ill, but of the action in its con- sequences, then of course experience is required, judgement in making use of it, and all those other qualities of the mind which are so differently dispensed to different persons, both by nature and education. And though the reason itself is the same in all men, yet the means of exercising it, and the materials (i. e. the facts and ideas) on which it is exercised, being pos- sessed in very different degrees by different persons, the practical Result is, of course, equally different — and the whole ground work of Rousseau's Philosophy ends in a mere No- thingism. — Even in that branch of knowledge, on which the ideas, on the congruity of which with each other, the Reason is to decide, are all possessed alike by all men, namely, in Ge- ometry, (for all men in their senses possess all the component images, viz. simple curves and straight lines) yet the power of attention required for the perception of linked Truths, even o( such Truths, is so very different in A and in B, that Sir Isaac Newton professed that it was in this power only that he was superior to ordinary men. In short, the sophism is as gross as if I should say — The Souls of all men have the faculty of sight in an equal degree — forgetting to add, that this faculty cannot be exercised without eyes, and that some men are blind 136 and others short-sighted, &c. — and should then take advantage of this my omission to conclude against the use or necessity of spectacles, microscopes, &c. — or of choosing the sharpest sight- ed men for our guides. Having exposed this gross sophism, I must warn against an opposite error — namely, that if Reason, distinguished from Prudence, consists merely in knowing that Black cannot be White — or when a man has a clear conception of an inclosed figure, and another equally clear conception of a straight line, his Reason teaches him that these two conceptions are incom- patible in the same object, i. e. that two straight lines cannot include a space the said Reason must be a very insignifi- cant faculty. But a moment's steady self-reflection will shew us, that in the simple determination " Black is not White" — or " that two straight lines cannot include a space" — all the pow- ers are implied, that distinguish Man from Animals — first, the Ytowev oi reflection — 2d. oi comparison — 3d. and therefore of suspension of the mind — 4th. therefore of a controlling will, and the power of acting from notions, instead of mere images exciting appetites ; from motives, and not from mere dark in- stincts. Was it an insignificant thing to weigh the Planets, to determine all their courses, and prophecy every possible rela- tion of the Heavens a thousand yeais hence? Yet- all this mighty chain of science is nothing but a linking together of truths of the same kind, as, the whole is greater than its part : — or, if A and B = C, then A = B — or 3 -i- 4 z=: 7, therefore 7 H- 5 rr 12, and so forth. X is to be found either in A or B, or C or D : It is not found in A, B, or C, therefore it is to be found in D. — What can be simpler ? Apply this to an animal — a Dog misses his master where four roads meet — he has come up one, smells to two of the others, and then with his head aloft darts forward to the third road without any examination. If this was done by a conclusion, the Dog would have Reason — ^how comes it then, that he never shews it in his ordinary habits ? Why does this story excite either wonder or increduli- ty ? — If the story be a fact, and not a fiction, I should say — the Breeze brought his Master's scent down the fourth Road to the Dog's nose, and that therefore he did not put it down to the Road, as in the two former instances. So aweful and almost miraculous does the simple act of concluding, that take S from 4, there remains one, appear to us when attributed to the most sagacious of all animals. THE FRIEND. SECTION THE FIRST. ON T HI PRINCIPLES O F POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE. 18 Hoc potissimum pacto felicem ac magnum regem se fore judicans : non si quam plurimis sed si quam optimis imperet. Proinde parum esse putat justis prsesidiis regnum suum muniisse, nisi idem viris eruditione juxta ac vitseinteg- ritate prajcellentibus ditet atque honestet. Nimirum intelligit , haec demum esse vera regni decora, has veras opes. Erasmus: epist. ad Episc. Paris. %% ESSAY I. Dum PonTici sapiuscule hominibus magis insidiantur quam consulunt, potius callidi quam sapientes ; Theoretici e contrario se rem divinam facere et sapi- entim cvlmen attingere credunt, quando humanam naturam, qua mdlihi est, nmltis modis laudare, et earn, qua re vera est, didis lacessere norunt. Unde factum est, ut nunquam Politicam conceperint qtue possil ad usum revocari ; sed qiue in Utopia vel in illo poetarum aureo scecido, ubi scilicet minime necesse erat, institui potuisset. At mihi plane persuadeo, Expei-ientiam oinnia civita- tum genera, qiuz concipi possunt id homines concorditer vivant, et simid me- dia, quibus multitudo dirigi, seu quibus intra certos limitcs contineri debeat, osteiidisse : ita id non credam, nos posse aliquid, quod ab expenentia sive, prcLvi non abhorreat, cogitatione de hac re assequi, quod nondum expeiium com- pertumque sit. Cum igitur animum ad Politicam applicuerim, nihil quod novum vel inauditum est ; sed taiiium ea qua cum praxi optime conveniunt, certa et indubitata ra- tione deinonstrare aut ex ipsa humancR naturm conditione deducere, intendi. Et ut ea quae ad hanc scientiam spectant, eadem animi libertate, qua res mathema- ticas sol€7nus, inquirerem, sedulo ciiravi humanas actiones non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari ; sed intelligere. JVec ad imperii securitatem refert quo animo homines inducantur ad res recte administrandum, modo res recte ad- ministrentur. Animi enim libertas, seu fortitudo, privata virtus est; at impe- rii virtus securitas. Spinoza, op. Post. p. 267. Translation. — While the mere practical Statesman too often rather plots against mankind, than consults their interest, crafty not wise ; the mere The- orists, on the other hand, imagine that they are employed in a glorious work, and believe themselves at the very summit of earthly Wisdom, when they are able, in set and varied language, to extol that Human Nature, which exists no where (except indeed in their own fancy) and to accuse and vilify our nature as it really is. Hence it has happened, tliat these men have never conceived a practicaL'le scheme of civil policy, but, at best, such forms of Government only, as might liave been instituted in Utopia, or during the gol- den age of the poets: that is to say, forms of government excellently adapted for those Avho need no government at all. But I am fully persuaded, that ex- perience has already brought to light all conceivable sorts of political Institu- tions under which human society can be maintained in concord, and like- wise the chief means of directing the multitude, or retaining them within given boundaries: so that I can hardly believe, that on this subject the deep- est research would arrive at any result, not abhorrent from experience and practice, which has not been already tried and proved. 140 When, therefore, I applied my thoughts to the study of Political Econo- my, I proposed to myself nothing original or strange as the fruits of my re- flections; but simply to demonstrate from plain and undoubted principles, or to deduce from the very condition and necessities of human nature, those plans and maxims which square the best with practice. And that in all things which relate to this province, I might conduct my investigatiorjs with the same freedom of intellect with which we proceed in questions of pure science, I sedulously discipUned my mind neither to laugh at, or bewail, or detest, the actions of men ; but to understand them. For to the safety of the state it is not of necessary importance, what motives induce men to adminis- ter public affairs rightly, provided only that public affairs be rightly adminis- tered. For moral strength, or fi-eedom from the selfish passions, is the virtue of individuals ; but security is the virtue of a state. ON THE PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. All the different philosophical systems of political justice, all the Theories on the rightful Origin of Government, are re- ducible in the end to three classes, correspondent to the three different points of view, in which the Human Being itself may be contemplated. The first denies all truth and distinct mean- ing to the words. Right and Duty, and affirming that the hu- man mind consists of nothing, but manifold modifications of passive sensation, considers men as the highest sort of ani- mals indeed, but at the same time the most wretched ; inas- much as their defenceless nature forces them into society, while such is the multiplicity of wants engendered by the social state, that the wishes of one are sure to be in contra- diction with those of some other. The assertors of this sys- tem consequently ascribe the origin and continuance of Gov- ernment to fear, or the power of the stronger, aided by the force of custom. This is the system of Hobbes. Its state- ment is its confutation. It is, indeed, in the literal sense of the word preposterous : for fear pre-supposes conquest, and conquest a previous union and agreement between the con- querors. A vast Empire may perhaps be governed by fear ; at least the idea is not absolutely inconceivable, under circum- stances which prevent the consciousness of a common strength. A million of men united by mutual confidence and free inter- course of thoughts form one power, and this is as much a real thing as a steam engine ; but a million of insulated individuals is only an abstraction of the mind, and but one told so many 141 times over without addition, as an ideot would tell the clock at noon — one, one, one, &c. But when, in the tiist instances, the descendants of one family joined together to attack those of another family, it is impossible that their chief or leader should have appeared to them stronger than all the rest together : they must therefore have chosen him, and this as for particular purposes, so doubtless under particular conditions, expressed or understood. Such we know to be the case with the North American tribes at present ; such we are informed by History, was the case with our own remote ancestors. Therefore, even on the system of those who, in comtempt of the oldest and most authentic records, consider the savages as the first and natural state of man, government must have originated in choice and an agreement. The apparent exceptions in Africa and Asia are, if possible, still more subversive of this system : for they will be found to have originated in religious imposture, and the first chiefs to have secured a willing and enthusiastic obedience to themselves, as Delegates of the Deity. But the whole Theory is baseless. We are told by Histoiy, we learn from our experience, we know from our own hearts, that fear, of itself, is utterly incapable of producing any regu- lar, continuous and calculable effect, even on an individual ; and that the fear, which does act systematically upon the mind always presupposes a sense of duty, as its cause. The most cowardly of the European nations, the Neapolitans and Sicili- ans, those among whom the fear of death exercises the most tyrannous influence relatively to their own persons, are the ve- ry men who least fear to take away the life of a fellow citizen by poison or assassination ; while in Great Britain, a tyrant who has abused the power, which a vast pro])erty has given him, to oppress a whole neighborhood, can walk in safety un- armed, and unattended, amid a hundred men, each of whom feels his heart burn with rage and indignation at the sight of him. " It was this Man who broke my Father's heart"— or " it is through Him that my Children are clad in rags, and cry for the Food which I am no longer able to provide for them." And yet they dare not touch a hair of his head ! Whence does this arise? Is it from a cowardice of sensibility that makes the injured man shudder at the thought of shedding blood ? Or from a cowardice of selfishness which makes him afraid oi hazarding his own life ! Neither the one or the 142 other ! The Field of Waterloo, as the most recent of an hun- dred equal proofs, has borne witness. That " bring a Briton fra his hill, » * * * * Say, such is Royal George's will, And there's the foe, He has nae thought but how to kill Twa at a blow. Nae cauld, faint-hearted doubtings tease him ; Death conies, wi' fearless eye he sees him , Wi' bloody hand, a welcome gies him ; And when he fa's His latest draught o' breathin leaves him In faint huzzas." Whence then arises the difference of feeling in the former case ? To what does the oppressor owe his safety ? To the spirit-quelling thought the laws of God and of my country have made his life sacred ! I dare not touch a hair of his head ! — " Tis Conscience that makes Cowards of us all," — but ! oh ! it is Conscience too which makes Heroes of us all. ESSAY II. ie plus fort iCest jamais assezfort pour itre toujours le nwitre, s'U ne transforme sa force en droit et Vobeissance en devoir. Rousseau. Ymhus parantur provincicE, jure retinentur. Jgitur hreve id gatidium, quippe Germani victi inagis, quam domiti. Flor. iv 12. Translation. — The strongest is never strong enough to be always the mas- ter, unless he transform his Power into Right and Obedience into Duty. Rousseau. Provinces are taken by force, but they are kept by right. This exultation therefore was of brief continuance, inasmuch as the Germans had been overcome, but not subdued. Florus. A TRULY great man, (the best and greatest public character that I had ever the opportunity of making myself acquainted with) on assuming the command of a man of war, found a mu- tinous crew, more than one half of them uneducated Irishmen, and of the remainder no small portion had become sailors by compromise of punishment. What terror could effect by se- verity and frequency of acts of discipline, had been already effected. And what twa* this effect ? Something like that of a polar winter on a flask of brandy. The furious spirit concen- tered itself with tenfold strength at the heart ; open violence was changed into secret plots and conspiracies ; and the con- sequent orderliness of the crew, as far as they were orderly, was but the brooding of a tempest. The new commander in- stantly commenced a system of discipline as near as possible to that of ordinary law — as much as possible, he avoided, in his own person, the appearance of any will or arbitrary power to vary, or to remit, punishment. The rules to be observed were affixed to a conspicuous part of the ship, with the particu- lar penalties for the breach of each particular rule ; and care was taken that every individual of the ship should know and 144 understand this code. With a single exception in the case of mutinous behavior, a space of twenty-four hours was appointed between the first charge and the second hearing of the cause, at which time the accused person was permitted and required to bring forward whatever he thought conducive to his defence or palliation. If, as was commonly the case (for the officers well knew that the commander would seriously resent in them all caprice of will, and by no means permit to others what he denied to himself) if no answer could be returned to the three questions — Did you not commit the act ^ Did you not know that it was in contempt of such a rule, and in defi- ance of such a punishment ? And was it not wholly in your own power to have obeyed the one and avoided the other ? — the sentence was then passed with the greatest solemnity, and another, but shorter, space of time was again interposed be- tween it and its actual execution. During this space the feel- ings of the commander, as a man, were so well blended with his inflexibility, as the organ of the law ; and how much he suffered previous to and during the execution of the sentence was so well known to the crew, that it became a common say- ing with them, when a sailor was about to be punished, " The captain takes it more to heart than the fellow himself." But whenever the commander perceived any trait of pride in the offender, or the germs of any noble feeling, he lost no oppor- tunity of saying, " It is not the pain that you are about to suf- fer which grieves me ! You are none of you, I trust, such cowards as to turn faint-hearted at the thought of that ! hut that, being a man and one who is to fight for his king and coun- try, you should have made it necessary to treat you as a vi- cious beast, it is this that grieves me." I have been assured, both by a gentleman who was a lieu- tenant on board that ship at the time when the heroism of its captain, aided by his characteristic calmness and foresight, greatly influenced the decision of the most glorious battle re- corded in the annals of our naval glory ; and very recently by a grey-headed sailor, who did not even know my name, or could have suspected that I was previously acquainted with the circumstances — I have been assured, I say, that the success of this plan was such as astonished the oldest officers, and convin-? ced the most incredulous. Ruffians, who like the old Buccan- eers, had been used to inflict torture on themselves for sport, or 145 in order to harden themselves beforehand, were tamed and overpowered, how or why they themselves knew not. From the fiercest spirits were heard the most earnest entreaties for the forgiveness of their commander: not before the punish- ment, for it was too well known that then they would have been to no purpose, but days after it, when the bodily pain was remembered but as a dream. An invisible power it was, that quelled them, a power, which was therefore irresistible, be- cause it took away the very will of resisting. It was the awe- ful power of Law, acting on natures pre-configured to its influ- ences. A faculty was appealed to in the Offender's own being ; a Faculty and a Presence, of which he had not been previously made aware — but it answered to the appeal ! its real existence therefore could not be doubted, or its reply rendered inaudible! and the very struggle of the wilder passions, to keep upper- most counteracted its own purpose, by wasting in internal con- test that energy, which before had acted in its entirenes on external resistance or provocation. Strength may be met with strength ; the power of inflicting pain may be baffled by the pride of endurance ; the eye of rage may be answered by the stare of defiance, or the downcast look of dark and revengeful resolve ; and with all this there is an outward and determined object to which the mind can attach its passions and purposes, and bury its own disquietudes in the full occupation of the senses. But who dares struggle with an invisible combatant ? with an enemy which exists and makes us know its existence but ivhere it is, we ask in vain. — No space contains it — time promises no control over it — it has no ear for my threats — it has no substance, that my hands can grasp, or my weapons find vulnerable — it commands and cannot be commanded — it acts and is insusceptible of my reaction — the more I strive to sub- due it, the more am I compelled to think of it — and the more I think of it, the more do I find it to possess a reality out of myself, and not to be a phantom of my own imagination ; that all, but the most abandoned men, acknowledge its authority, and that the whole strength and majesty of my country are pledged to support it ; and yet that for me its power is the same with that of my own permanent Self, and that all the choice, which is permitted to me, consists in having it for my Guardian Angel or my avenging Fiend ! This is the Spirit of Law ! the Lute of Amphion, the Harp of Orpheus ! This is the true necessity, which compels man into the social state, 19 146 noTT and always, by a still-beginning, never-ceasing force of moral cohesion. Thus is man to be governed, and thus only can he be gov- erned. For from his creation the objects of his senses were to become his subjects, and the task allotted to him was to sub- due the visible world within the sphere of action circumscribed by those senses, as far as they could act in concert. What the eye beholds the hand stiives to reach ; what it reaches, it conquers and makes the instrument of further conquest. We can be subdued by that alone which is analogous in kind to that by which we subdue : therefore by the invisible powers of our nature, whose immediate presence is disclosed to our inner sense, and only as the symbols and language of which all shapes and modifications of matter become formidable to us. - A machine continues to move by the force which first set it in motion. If only the smallest number in any state, pro- perly so called, hold together through the influence of any fear that does not itself presuppose the sense of duty, it is evident that the state itself could not have commenced through animal fear. We hear, indeed, of conquests ; but how does History represent these ? Almost without exception as the substitu- tion of one set of governors for another : and so far is the con- queror from relying on fear alone to secure the obedience of the conquered, that his first step is to demand an oath of feal- ty from them, by which he would impose upon them the be- lief, that they become subjects : for who would think of ad- ministering an oath to a gang of slaves? But what can make the difference between slave and subject, if not the existence of an implied contract in the one case, and not in the other? And to what purpose would a contract serve if, however it might be entered into through fear, it were deemed binding only in consequence of fear ? To repeat my former illustra- tion — where fear alone is relied on, as in a slave ship, the chains that bind the poor victims must be material chains : for these only can act upon feelings which have their source Avholly in the material organization. Hobbes has said that Laws with- out the sword are but bits of parchment. How far this is true, every honest man's heart will best tell him, if he will content himself with asking his own heart, and not falsify the answer by 1ms notions concerning the hearts of other men. But were it true, still the fair answer would be — Well ! but without the Laws the sword is but a piece of iron. The wretched tyrant. 147 who disgraces the present age and human nature itself, had exhausted the whole magazine of animal terror, in order to consolidate his truly satanic Government. But look at the new French catechism, and in it read the misgivings of the mon- ster's mind, as to the insufficiency of terror alone ! The sys- tem, which I have been confuting, is indeed so inconsistent with the facts revealed to us by our own mind, and so utterly unsupported by any facts of History, that I should be censura- ble in wasting my own time and my Reader's patience by the exposure of its falsehood, but that the arguments adduced have a value of themselves independent of their present application. Else it would have been an ample and satisfactory reply to an assertor of this bestial Theory — Government is a thing which relates to men, and what you say applies only to beasts. Before I proceed to the second of the thiee Systems, let me remove a possible misunderstanding that may have arisen from the use of the word Contract : as if I had asserted, that the whole duty of obedience to Governors is derived from, and dependent on, the fact of an original Contract. I freely ad- mit, that to make this the cause and origin of political obliga- tion, is not only a dangerous but an absurd Theory ; for what could give moral force to the Contract ? The same sense of Duty which binds us to keep it, must have pre-existed as im- pelling us to make it. For what man in his senses would re- gard the faithful observation of a contract enteired into to plun- der a neighbor's house but as a treble crime ? First the actj which is a crime of itself; — secondly, the entering into a Con- tract which it is a crime to observe, and yet a weakening of one of the main pillars of human confidence not to observe, aild thus voluntarily placing ourselves under the necessity of choosing between two evils ; — and thirdly, the crime of clausing the greater of the two evils, by the unlawful observance of an un- lawful promise. But in my sense, the word Contract is mere- ly synonimous with the sense of duty acting in a specific direc- tion, i. e. determining our moral relations, as members of a body politic. If I have referred to a supposed origin of Gov- ernment, it has been in courtesy to a common notion : for I myself regard the supposition as no more than a means of sim- plifying to our apprehension the ever-continuing causes of social union, even as the conservation of the world may be represented as an act of continued Creation. For, what ii an original Contract had really been entered into, and formally recorded ^ 148 ■ Still it could do no more than bind the contracting parties to act for the general good in the best manner, that the existing relations among themselves, (state of property, religion, &c.) on the one hand, and the external circumstances on the other (ambitious or barbarous neighbors, &c.) required or permit- ted. In after times it could be appealed to only for the gen- eral principle, and no more than the ideal Contract, could it affect a question of ways and means. As each particular age brings with it its own exigencies, so must it rely on its own prudence for the specific measures by which they are to be encountered. Nevertheless, it assuredly cannot be denied, that an original (in reality, rather an ever-originating) Contract is a very natu- ral and significant mode of expressing the reciprocal duties of subject and sovereign. We need only consider the utility of a real and formal State Contract, the Bill of Rights for in- stance, as a sort of est demons ti'atum in politics ; and the con- tempt lavished on this notion, though sufficiently compatible with the tenets of a Hume, will seem strange to us in the wri- tings of a Protestant clergyman, who surely owed some respect to a mode of thinking which God himself had authorized by his own example, in the establishment of the Jewish constitu- tion. In this instance there was no necessity for deducing the will of God from the tendency of the Laws to the general hap- piness : his will was expressly declared. Nevertheless, it seemed good to the divine wisdom, that there should be a co- venant, an original contract, between himself as sovereign, and the Hebrew nation as subjects. This, I admit, was a written and formal Contract ; but the relations of mankind, as mem- bers of a body spiritual, or religious commonwealth, to the Saviour, as its head or regent — is not this too styled a covenant, though it would be absurd to ask for the material instrument that contained it, or the time when it was signed or voted by the members of the church collectively.* * It is ])erhaps to be regretted, that the words, Old and New Testament, they ha\'ing lost the sense inten