Thoughts on Man, His Nature, etc
by William Godwin
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

Oh, the blood more stirs
To rouse a lion, than to start a hare!

SHAKESPEARE

LONDON:
EFFINGHAM WILSON, ROYAL EXCHANGE.
1831.

PREFACE

In the ensuing volume I have attempted to give a defined and
permanent form to a variety of thoughts, which have occurred to
my mind in the course of thirty-four years, it being so long
since I published a volume, entitled, the Enquirer,--thoughts,
which, if they have presented themselves to other men, have, at
least so far as I am aware, never been given to the public
through the medium of the press. During a part of this period I
had remained to a considerable degree unoccupied in my character
of an author, and had delivered little to the press that bore my
name.--And I beg the reader to believe, that, since I entered in
1791 upon that which may be considered as my vocation in life, I
have scarcely in any instance contributed a page to any
periodical miscellany.

My mind has been constitutionally meditative, and I should not
have felt satisfied, if I had not set in order for publication
these special fruits of my meditations. I had entered upon a
certain career; and I held it for my duty not to abandon it.

One thing further I feel prompted to say. I have always regarded
it as my office to address myself to plain men, and in clear and
unambiguous terms. It has been my lot to have occasional
intercourse with some of those who consider themselves as
profound, who deliver their oracles in obscure phraseology, and
who make it their boast that few men can understand them, and
those few only through a process of abstract reflection, and by
means of unwearied application.

To this class of the oracular I certainly did not belong. I felt
that I had nothing to say, that it should be very difficult to
understand. I resolved, if I could help it, not to "darken
counsel by words without knowledge."  This was my principle in
the Enquiry concerning Political Justice. And I had my reward.
I had a numerous audience of all classes, of every age, and of
either sex. The young and the fair did not feel deterred from
consulting my pages.

It may be that that book was published in a propitious season. I
am told that nothing coming from the press will now be welcomed,
unless it presents itself in the express form of amusement. He
who shall propose to himself for his principal end, to draw aside
in one particular or another the veil from the majesty of
intellectual or moral truth, must lay his account in being
received with little attention.

I have not been willing to believe this: and I publish my
speculations accordingly. I have aimed at a popular, and (if I
could reach it) an interesting style; and, if I am thrust aside
and disregarded, I shall console myself with believing that I
have not neglected what it was in my power to achieve.

One characteristic of the present publication will not fail to
offer itself to the most superficial reader. I know many men who
are misanthropes, and profess to look down with disdain on their
species. My creed is of an opposite character. All that we
observe that is best and most excellent in the intellectual
world, is man: and it is easy to perceive in many cases, that
the believer in mysteries does little more, than dress up his
deity in the choicest of human attributes and qualifications. I
have lived among, and I feel an ardent interest in and love for,
my brethren of mankind. This sentiment, which I regard with
complacency in my own breast, I would gladly cherish in others.
In such a cause I am well pleased to enrol myself a missionary.

     February 15, 1831.

The particulars respecting the author, referred to in the
title-page, will be found principally in Essays VII, IX, XIV, and
XVIII.

CONTENTS

Essay.
I. Of Body and Mind. The Prologue
II. Of the Distribution of Talents  
III. Of Intellectual Abortion
IV. Of the Durability of Human Achievements and Productions
V. Of the Rebelliousness of Man
VI. Of Human Innocence  
VII. Of the Duration of Human Life
VIII. Of Human Vegetation
IX. Of Leisure  
X. Of Imitation and Invention
XI. Of Self-Love and Benevolence  
XII. Of the Liberty of Human Actions
XIII. Of Belief
XIV. Of Youth and Age
XV. Of Love and Friendship  
XVI. Of Frankness and Reserve
XVII. Of Ballot
XVIII. Of Diffidence  
XIX. Of Self Complacence  
XX. Of Phrenology
XXI. Of Astronomy
XXII. Of the Material Universe
XXIII. Of Human Virtue. The Epilogue

THOUGHTS, &c.

ESSAY I.
OF BODY AND MIND.

THE PROLOGUE.

There is no subject that more frequently occupies the attention
of the contemplative than man: yet there are many circumstances
concerning him that we shall hardly admit to have been
sufficiently considered.

Familiarity breeds contempt. That which we see every day and
every hour, it is difficult for us to regard with admiration. To
almost every one of our stronger emotions novelty is a necessary
ingredient. The simple appetites of our nature may perhaps form
an exception. The appetite for food is perpetually renewed in a
healthy subject with scarcely any diminution and love, even the
most refined, being combined with one of our original impulses,
will sometimes for that reason withstand a thousand trials, and
perpetuate itself for years. In all other cases it is required,
that a fresh impulse should be given, that attention should anew
be excited, or we cannot admire. Things often seen pass feebly
before our senses, and scarcely awake the languid soul.

"Man is the most excellent and noble creature of the world, the
principal and mighty work of God, the wonder of nature, the
marvel of marvels[1]."

[1] Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 1.

Let us have regard to his corporeal structure. There is a
simplicity in it, that at first perhaps we slightly consider.
But how exactly is it fashioned for strength and agility! It is
in no way incumbered. It is like the marble when it comes out of
the hand of the consummate sculptor; every thing unnecessary is
carefully chiseled away; and the joints, the muscles, the
articulations, and the veins come out, clean and finished. It
has long ago been observed, that beauty, as well as virtue, is
the middle between all extremes: that nose which is neither
specially long, nor short, nor thick, nor thin, is the perfect
nose; and so of the rest. In like manner, when I speak of man
generally, I do not regard any aberrations of form, obesity, a
thick calf, a thin calf; I take the middle between all extremes;
and this is emphatically man.

Man cannot keep pace with a starting horse: but he can
persevere, and beats him in the end.

What an infinite variety of works is man by his corporeal form
enabled to accomplish! In this respect he casts the whole
creation behind him.

What a machine is the human hand! When we analyse its parts and
its uses, it appears to be the most consummate of our members.
And yet there are other parts, that may maintain no mean
rivalship against it.

What a sublimity is to be attributed to his upright form! He is
not fashioned, veluti pecora, quae natura prona atque ventri
obedientia finxit. He is made coeli convexa tueri. The looks
that are given him in his original structure, are "looks
commercing with the skies."

How surpassingly beautiful are the features of his countenance;
the eyes, the nose, the mouth! How noble do they appear in a
state of repose! With what never-ending variety and emphasis do
they express the emotions of his mind! In the visage of man,
uncorrupted and undebased, we read the frankness and
ingenuousness of his soul, the clearness of his reflections, the
penetration of his spirit. What a volume of understanding is
unrolled in his broad, expanded, lofty brow! In his countenance
we see expressed at one time sedate confidence and awful
intrepidity, and at another godlike condescension and the most
melting tenderness. Who can behold the human eye, suddenly
suffused with moisture, or gushing with tears unbid, and the
quivering lip, without unspeakable emotion? Shakespear talks of
an eye, "whose bend could awe the world."

What a miraculous thing is the human complexion! We are sent
into the world naked, that  all the variations of the blood might
be made visible. However trite, I cannot avoid quoting here the
lines of the most deep-thinking and philosophical of our poets:

                         We understood
      Her by her sight: her pure and eloquent blood
      Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
      That one might almost say her body thought.

What a curious phenomenon is that of blushing! It is impossible
to witness this phenomenon without interest and sympathy. It
comes at once, unanticipated by the person in whom we behold it.
It comes from the soul, and expresses with equal certainty shame,
modesty, and vivid, uncontrollable affection. It spreads, as it
were in so many stages, over the cheeks, the brow, and the neck,
of him or her in whom the sentiment that gives birth to it is
working.

Thus far I have not mentioned speech, not perhaps the most
inestimable of human gifts, but, if it is not that, it is at
least the endowment, which makes man social, by which principally
we impart our sentiments to each other, and which changes us from
solitary individuals, and bestows on us a duplicate and
multipliable existence. Beside which it incalculably increases
the perfection of one. The man who does not speak, is an
unfledged thinker; and the man that does not write, is but half
an investigator.

Not to enter into all the mysteries of articulate speech and the
irresistible power of eloquence, whether addressed to a single
hearer, or instilled into the ears of many,--a topic that belongs
perhaps less to the chapter of body than mind,--let us for a
moment fix our thoughts steadily upon that little implement, the
human voice. Of what unnumbered modulations is it susceptible!
What terror may it inspire! How may it electrify the soul, and
suspend all its functions! How infinite is its melody! How
instantly it subdues the hearer to pity or to love! How does the
listener hang upon every note praying that it may last for ever,

               ----that even silence
      Was took ere she was ware, and wished she might
      Deny her nature, and be never more,      
      Still to be so displaced.

It is here especially that we are presented with the triumphs of
civilisation. How immeasurable is the distance between the voice
of the clown, who never thought of the power that dwells in this
faculty, who delivers himself in a rude, discordant and
unmodulated accent, and is accustomed to confer with his fellow
at the distance of two fields, and the man who understands his
instrument as Handel understood the organ, and who, whether he
thinks of it or no, sways those that hear him as implicitly as
Orpheus is said to have subdued the brute creation!

From the countenance of man let us proceed to his figure. Every
limb is capable of speaking, and telling its own tale. What can
equal the magnificence of the neck, the column upon which the
head reposes! The ample chest may denote an almost infinite
strength and power. Let us call to mind the Apollo Belvidere,
and the Venus de Medicis, whose very "bends are adornings."  What
loftiness and awe have I seen expressed in the step of an
actress, not yet deceased, when first she advanced, and came down
towards the audience! I was ravished, and with difficulty kept
my seat! Pass we to the mazes of the dance, the inimitable
charms and picturesque beauty that may be given to the figure
while still unmoved, and the ravishing grace that dwells in it
during its endless changes and evolutions.

The upright figure of man produces, incidentally as it were, and
by the bye, another memorable effect. Hence we derive the power
of meeting in halls, and congregations, and crowded assemblies.
We are found "at large, though without number," at solemn
commemorations and on festive occasions. We touch each other, as
the members of a gay party are accustomed to do, when they wait
the stroke of an electrical machine, and the spark spreads along
from man to man. It is thus that we have our feelings in common
at a theatrical representation and at a public dinner, that
indignation is communicated, and patriotism become irrepressible.

One man can convey his sentiments in articulate speech to a
thousand; and this is the nursing mother of oratory, of public
morality, of public religion, and the drama. The privilege we
thus possess, we are indeed too apt to abuse; but man is scarcely
ever so magnificent and so awful, as when hundreds of human heads
are assembled together, hundreds of faces lifted up to
contemplate one object, and hundreds of voices uttered in the
expression of one common sentiment.

But, notwithstanding the infinite beauty, the magazine of
excellencies and perfections, that appertains to the human body,
the mind claims, and justly claims, an undoubted superiority. I
am not going into an enumeration of the various faculties and
endowments of the mind of man, as I have done of his body. The
latter was necessary for my purpose. Before I proceeded to
consider the ascendancy of mind, the dominion and loftiness it is
accustomed to assert, it appeared but just to recollect what was
the nature and value of its subject and its slave.

By the mind we understand that within us which feels and thinks,
the seat of sensation and reason. Where it resides we cannot
tell, nor can authoritatively pronounce, as the apostle says,
relatively to a particular phenomenon, "whether it is in the
body, or out of the body."  Be it however where or what it may,
it is this which constitutes the great essence of, and gives
value to, our existence; and all the wonders of our microcosm
would without it be a form only, destined immediately to perish,
and of no greater account than as a clod of the valley.

It was an important remark, suggested to me many years ago by an
eminent physiologer and anatomist, that, when I find my attention
called to any particular part or member of my body, I may be
morally sure that there is something amiss in the processes of
that part or member. As long as the whole economy of the frame
goes on well and without interruption, our attention is not
called to it. The intellectual man is like a disembodied spirit.

He is almost in the state of the dervise in the Arabian Nights,
who had the power of darting his soul into the unanimated body of
another, human or brute, while he left his own body in the
condition of an insensible carcase, till it should be revivified
by the same or some other spirit. When I am, as it is vulgarly
understood, in a state of motion, I use my limbs as the
implements of my will. When, in a quiescent state of the body, I
continue to think, to reflect and to reason, I use, it may be,
the substance of the brain as the implement of my thinking,
reflecting and reasoning; though of this in fact we know nothing.

We have every reason to believe that the mind cannot subsist
without the body; at least we must be very different creatures
from what we are at present, when that shall take place. For a
man to think, agreeably and with serenity, he must be in some
degree of health. The corpus sanum is no less indispensible than
the mens sana. We must eat, and drink, and sleep. We must have
a reasonably good appetite and digestion, and a fitting
temperature, neither too hot nor cold. It is desirable that we
should have air and exercise. But this is instrumental merely.
All these things are negatives, conditions without which we
cannot think to the best purpose, but which lend no active
assistance to our thinking.

Man is a godlike being. We launch ourselves in conceit into
illimitable space, and take up our rest beyond the fixed stars.
We proceed without impediment from country to country, and from
century to century, through all the ages of the past, and through
the vast creation of the imaginable future. We spurn at the
bounds of time and space; nor would the thought be less futile
that imagines to imprison the mind within the limits of the body,
than the attempt of the booby clown who is said within a thick
hedge to have plotted to shut in the flight of an eagle.

We never find our attention called to any particular part or
member of the body, except when there is somewhat amiss in that
part or member. And, in like manner as we do not think of any
one part or member in particular, so neither do we consider our
entire microcosm and frame. The body is apprehended as no more
important and of intimate connection to a man engaged in a train
of reflections, than the house or apartment in which he dwells.
The mind may aptly be described under the denomination of the
"stranger at home."  On set occasions and at appropriate times we
examine our stores, and ascertain the various commodities we
have, laid up in our presses and our coffers. Like the governor
of a fort in time of peace, which was erected to keep out a
foreign assailant, we occasionally visit our armoury, and take
account of the muskets, the swords, and other implements of war
it contains, but for the most part are engaged in the occupations
of peace, and do not call the means of warfare in any sort to our
recollection.

The mind may aptly be described under the denomination of the
"stranger at home."  With their bodies most men are little
acquainted. We are "like unto a man beholding his natural face
in a glass, who beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and
straightway forgetteth what manner of man he is."  In the
ruminations of the inner man, and the dissecting our thoughts and
desires, we employ our intellectual arithmetic, we add, and
subtract, and multiply, and divide, without asking the aid,
without adverting to the existence, of our joints and members.
Even as to the more corporeal part of our avocations, we behold
the external world, and proceed straight to the object of our
desires, without almost ever thinking of this medium, our own
material frame, unaided by which none of these things could be
accomplished. In this sense we may properly be said to be
spiritual existences, however imperfect may be the idea we are
enabled to affix to the term spirit.

Hence arises the notion, which has been entertained ever since
the birth of reflection and logical discourse in the world, and
which in some faint and confused degree exists probably even
among savages, that the body is the prison of the mind. It is in
this sense that Waller, after completing fourscore years of age,
expresses himself in these affecting and interesting couplets.

      When we for age could neither read nor write,
      The subject made us able to indite.
      The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
      Lets in new light by chinks that time hath made:
      Stronger by weakness, wiser, men become,
      As they draw near to their eternal home.

Thus it is common with persons of elevated soul to talk of
neglecting, overlooking, and taking small account of the body.
It is in this spirit that the story is recorded of Anaxarchus,
who, we are told, was ordered by Nicocreon, tyrant of Salamis, to
be pounded in a mortar, and who, in contempt of his mortal
sufferings, exclaimed, "Beat on, tyrant! thou dost but strike
upon the case of Anaxarchus; thou canst not touch the man
himself."  And it is in something of the same light that we must
regard what is related of the North American savages. Beings,
who scoff at their tortures, must have an idea of something that
lies beyond the reach of their assailants.

It is just however to observe, that some of the particulars here
related, belong not less to the brute creation than to man. If
men are imperfectly acquainted with their external figure and
appearance, this may well be conceived to be still more
predicable of the inferior animals. It is true that all of them
seem to be aware of the part in their structure, where lie their
main strength and means of hostility. Thus the bull attacks with
his horns, and the horse with his heels, the beast of prey with
his claws, the bird with his beak, and insects and other venomous
creatures with their sting. We know not by what impulse they are
prompted to the use of the various means which are so intimately
connected with their preservation and welfare; and we call it
instinct. We may be certain it does not arise from a careful
survey of their parts and members, and a methodised selection of
the means which shall be found most effectual for the
accomplishment of their ends. There is no premeditation; and,
without anatomical knowledge, or any distinct acquaintance with
their image and likeness, they proceed straight to their purpose.

Hence, even as men, they are more familiar with the figures and
appearance of their fellows, their allies, or their enemies, than
with their own.

Man is a creature of mingled substance. I am many times a day
compelled to acknowledge what a low, mean and contemptible being
I am. Philip of Macedon had no need to give it in charge to a
page, to repair to him every morning, and repeat, "Remember, sir,
you are a man."  A variety of circumstances occur to us, while we
eat, and drink, and submit to the humiliating necessities of
nature, that may well inculcate into us this salutary lesson.
The wonder rather is, that man, who has so many things to put him
in mind to be humble and despise himself, should ever have been
susceptible of pride and disdain. Nebuchadnezzar must indeed
have been the most besotted of mortals, if it were necessary that
he should be driven from among men, and made to eat grass like an
ox, to convince him that he was not the equal of the power that
made him.

But fortunately, as I have said, man is a "stranger at home."
Were it not for this, how incomprehensible would be

      The ceremony that to great ones 'longs,
      The monarch's crown, and the deputed sword,
      The marshal's truncheon, and the judge's robe!

How ludicrous would be the long procession and the caparisoned
horse, the gilded chariot and the flowing train, the colours
flying, the drums beating, and the sound of trumpets rending the
air, which after all only introduce to us an ordinary man, no
otherwise perhaps distinguished from the vilest of the ragged
spectators, than by the accident of his birth!

But what is of more importance in the temporary oblivion we are
enabled to throw over the refuse of the body, it is thus we
arrive at the majesty of man. That sublimity of conception which
renders the poet, and the man of great literary and original
endowments "in apprehension like a God," we could not have, if we
were not privileged occasionally to cast away the slough and
exuviae of the body from incumbering and dishonouring us, even as
Ulysses passed over his threshold, stripped of the rags that had
obscured him, while Minerva enlarged his frame, and gave
loftiness to his stature, added a youthful beauty and grace to
his motions, and caused his eyes to flash with more than mortal
fire. With what disdain, when I have been rapt in the loftiest
moods of mind, do I look down upon my limbs, the house of clay
that contains me, the gross flesh and blood of which my frame is
composed, and wonder at a lodging, poorly fitted to entertain so
divine a guest!

A still more important chapter in the history of the human mind
has its origin in these considerations. Hence it is that
unenlightened man, in almost all ages and countries, has been
induced, independently of divine revelation, to regard death, the
most awful event to which we are subject, as not being the
termination of his existence. We see the body of our friend
become insensible, and remain without motion, or any external
indication of what we call life. We can shut it up in an
apartment, and visit it from day to day. If we had perseverance
enough, and could so far conquer the repugnance and humiliating
feeling with which the experiment would be attended, we might
follow step by step the process of decomposition and
putrefaction, and observe by what degrees the "dust returned unto
earth as it was."  But, in spite of this demonstration of the
senses, man still believes that there is something in him that
lives after death. The mind is so infinitely superior in
character to this case of flesh that incloses it, that he cannot
persuade himself that it and the body perish together.

There are two considerations, the force of which made man a
religious animal. The first is, his proneness to ascribe
hostility or benevolent intention to every thing of a memorable
sort that occurs to him in the order of nature. The second is
that of which I have just treated, the superior dignity of mind
over body. This, we persuade ourselves, shall subsist uninjured
by the mutations of our corporeal frame, and undestroyed by the
wreck of the material universe.

ESSAY II.
OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF TALENTS.

{Greek - omitted} Thucydides, Lib.I, cap. 84.

SECTION I.

PRESUMED DEARTH OF INTELLECTUAL POWER.--SCHOOLS FOR THE EDUCATION
OF YOUTH CONSIDERED.--THE BOY AND THE MAN COMPARED.

One of the earliest judgments that is usually made by those whose
attention is turned to the characters of men in the social state,
is of the great inequality with which the gifts of the
understanding are distributed among us.

Go into a miscellaneous society; sit down at table with ten or
twelve men; repair to a club where as many are assembled in an
evening to relax from the toils of the day--it is almost
proverbial, that one or two of these persons will perhaps be
brilliant, and the rest "weary, stale, flat and unprofitable."

Go into a numerous school--the case will be still more striking.
I have been present where two men of superior endowments
endeavoured to enter into a calculation on the subject; and they
agreed that there was not above one boy in a hundred, who would
be found to possess a penetrating understanding, and to be able
to strike into a path of intellect that was truly his own. How
common is it to hear the master of such a school say, "Aye, I am
proud of that lad; I have been a schoolmaster these thirty years,
and have never had such another!"

The society above referred to, the dinner-party, or the club, was
to a considerable degree select, brought together by a certain
supposed congeniality between the individuals thus assembled.
Were they taken indiscriminately, as boys are when consigned to
the care of a schoolmaster, the proportion of the brilliant would
not be a whit greater than in the latter case.

A main criterion of the superiority of the schoolboy will be
found in his mode of answering a casual question proposed by the
master. The majority will be wholly at fault, will shew that
they do not understand the question, and will return an answer
altogether from the purpose. One in a hundred perhaps, perhaps
in a still less proportion, will reply in a laudable manner, and
convey his ideas in perspicuous and spirited language.

It does not certainly go altogether so ill, with men grown up to
years of maturity. They do not for the most part answer a plain
question in a manner to make you wonder at their fatuity.

A main cause of the disadvantageous appearance exhibited by the
ordinary schoolboy, lies in what we denominate sheepishness. He
is at a loss, and in the first place stares at you, instead of
giving an answer. He does not make by many degrees so poor a
figure among his equals, as when he is addressed by his seniors.

One of the reasons of the latter phenomenon consists in the
torpedo effect of what we may call, under the circumstances, the
difference of ranks. The schoolmaster is a despot to his
scholar; for every man is a despot, who delivers his judgment
from the single impulse of his own will. The boy answers his
questioner, as Dolon answers Ulysses in the Iliad, at the point
of the sword. It is to a certain degree the same thing, when the
boy is questioned merely by his senior. He fears he knows not
what,--a reprimand, a look of lofty contempt, a gesture of
summary disdain. He does not think it worth his while under
these circumstances, to "gird up the loins of his mind."  He
cannot return a free and intrepid answer but to the person whom
he regards as his equal. There is nothing that has so
disqualifying an effect upon him who is to answer, as the
consideration that he who questions is universally acknowledged
to be a being of a higher sphere, or, as between the boy and the
man, that he is the superior in conventional and corporal
strength.

Nor is it simple terror that restrains the boy from answering his
senior with the same freedom and spirit, as he would answer his
equal. He does not think it worth his while to enter the lists.
He despairs of doing the thing in the way that shall gain
approbation, and therefore will not try. He is like a boxer,
who, though skilful, will not fight with one hand tied behind
him. He would return you the answer, if it occurred without his
giving himself trouble; but he will not rouse his soul, and task
his strength to give it. He is careless; and prefers trusting to
whatever construction you may put upon him, and whatever
treatment you may think proper to bestow upon him. It is the
most difficult thing in the world, for the schoolmaster to
inspire into his pupil the desire to do his best.

Among full-grown men the case is different. The schoolboy,
whether under his domestic roof, or in the gymnasium, is in a
situation similar to that of the Christian slaves in Algiers, as
described by Cervantes in his History of the Captive. "They were
shut up together in a species of bagnio, from whence they were
brought out from time to time to perform certain tasks in common:

they might also engage in pranks, and get into scrapes, as they
pleased; but the master would hang up one, impale another, and
cut off the ears of a third, for little occasion, or even wholly
without it."  Such indeed is the condition of the child almost
from the hour of birth. The severities practised upon him are
not so great as those resorted to by the proprietor of slaves in
Algiers; but they are equally arbitrary and without appeal. He
is free to a certain extent, even as the captives described by
Cervantes; but his freedom is upon sufferance, and is brought to
an end at any time at the pleasure of his seniors. The child
therefore feels his way, and ascertains by repeated experiments
how far he may proceed with impunity. He is like the slaves of
the Romans on the days of the Saturnalia. He may do what he
pleases, and command tasks to his masters, but with this
difference--the Roman slave knew when the days of his licence
would be over, and comported himself accordingly; but the child
cannot foresee at any moment when the bell will be struck, and
the scene reversed. It is commonly enough incident to this
situation, that the being who is at the mercy of another, will
practise, what Tacitus calls, a "vernacular urbanity," make his
bold jests, and give utterance to his saucy innuendoes, with as
much freedom as the best; but he will do it with a wary eye, not
knowing how soon he may feel his chain plucked! and himself
compulsorily reduced into the established order. His more usual
refuge therefore is, to do nothing, and to wrap himself up in
that neutrality towards his seniors, that may best protect him
from their reprimand and their despotism.

The condition of the full-grown man is different from that of the
child, and he conducts himself accordingly. He is always to a
certain degree under the control of the political society of
which he is a member. He is also exposed to the chance of
personal insult and injury from those who are stronger than he,
or who may render their strength more considerable by combination
and numbers. The political institutions which control him in
certain respects, protect him also to a given degree from the
robber and assassin, or from the man who, were it not for
penalties and statutes, would perpetrate against him all the
mischiefs which malignity might suggest. Civil policy however
subjects him to a variety of evils, which wealth or corruption
are accustomed to inflict under the forms of justice; at the same
time that it can never wholly defend him from those violences to
which he would be every moment exposed in what is called the
state of nature.

The full-grown man in the mean time is well pleased when he
escapes from the ergastulum where he had previously dwelt, and in
which he had experienced corporal infliction and corporal
restraint. At first, in the newness of his freedom, he breaks
out into idle sallies and escapes, and is like the full-fed steed
that manifests his wantonness in a thousand antics and ruades.
But this is a temporary extravagance. He presently becomes as
wise and calculating, as the schoolboy was before him.

The human being then, that has attained a certain stature,
watches and poises his situation, and considers what he may do
with impunity. He ventures at first with no small diffidence,
and pretends to be twice as assured as he really is. He
accumulates experiment after experiment, till they amount to a
considerable volume. It is not till he has passed successive
lustres, that he attains that firm step, and temperate and
settled accent, which characterise the man complete. He then no
longer doubts, but is ranged on the full level of the ripened
members of the community.

There is therefore little room for wonder, if we find the same
individual, whom we once knew a sheepish and irresolute
schoolboy, that hung his head, that replied with inarticulated
monotony, and stammered out his meaning, metamorphosed into a
thoroughly manly character, who may take his place on the bench
with senators, and deliver a grave and matured opinion as well as
the best. It appears then that the trial and review of
full-grown men is not altogether so disadvantageous to the
reckoning of our common nature, as that of boys at school.

It is not however, that the full-grown man is not liable to be
checked, reprimanded and rebuked, even as the schoolboy is. He
has his wife to read him lectures, and rap his knuckles; he has
his master, his landlord, or the mayor of his village, to tell
him of his duty in an imperious style, and in measured sentences;
if he is a member of a legislature, even there he receives his
lessons, and is told, either in phrases of well-conceived irony,
or by the exhibition of facts and reasonings which take him by
surprise, that he is not altogether the person he deemed himself
to be. But he does not mind it. Like Iago in the play, he
"knows his price, and, by the faith of man, that he is worth no
worse a place" than that which he occupies. He finds out the
value of the check he receives, and lets it "pass by him like the
idle wind"--a mastery, which the schoolboy, however he may affect
it, never thoroughly attains to.

But it unfortunately happens, that, before he has arrived at that
degree of independence, the fate of the individual is too often
decided for ever. How are the majority of men trampled in the
mire, made "hewers of wood, and drawers of water," long, very
long, before there was an opportunity of ascertaining what it was
of which they were capable! Thus almost every one is put in the
place which by nature he was least fit for: and, while perhaps a
sufficient quantity of talent is extant in each successive
generation, yet, for want of each man's being duly estimated, and
assigned his appropriate duty, the very reverse may appear to be
the case. By the time that they have attained to that sober
self-confidence that might enable them to assert themselves, they
are already chained to a fate, or thrust down to a condition,
from which no internal energies they possess can ever empower
them to escape.

SECTION II.

EQUALITY OF MAN WITH MAN.--TALENTS EXTENSIVELY DISTRIBUTED.--WAY
IN WHICH THIS DISTRIBUTION IS COUNTERACTED.--THE APTITUDE OF
CHILDREN FOR DIFFERENT PURSUITS SHOULD BE EARLY SOUGHT OUT.--
HINTS FOR A BETTER SYSTEM OF EDUCATION.--AMBITION AN UNIVERSAL
PRINCIPLE.

The reflections thus put down, may assist us in answering the
question as to the way in which talents are distributed among men
by the hand of nature.

All things upon the earth and under the earth, and especially all
organised bodies of the animal or vegetable kingdom, fall into
classes. It is by this means, that the child no sooner learns
the terms, man, horse, tree, flower, than, if an object of any of
these kinds which he has never seen before, is exhibited to him,
he pronounces without hesitation, This is a man, a horse, a tree,
a flower.

All organised bodies of the animal or vegetable kingdom are cast
in a mould of given dimension and feature belonging to a certain
number of individuals, though distinguished by inexhaustible
varieties. It is by means of those features that the class of
each individual is determined.

To confine ourselves to man.

All men, the monster and the lusus naturae excepted, have a
certain form, a certain complement of limbs, a certain internal
structure, and organs of sense--may we not add further, certain
powers of intellect?

Hence it seems to follow, that man is more like and more equal to
man, deformities of body and abortions of intellect excepted,
than the disdainful and fastidious censors of our common nature
are willing to admit.

I am inclined to believe, that, putting idiots and extraordinary
cases out of the question, every human creature is endowed with
talents, which, if rightly directed, would shew him to be apt,
adroit, intelligent and acute, in the walk for which his
organisation especially fitted him.

But the practices and modes of civilised life prompt us to take
the inexhaustible varieties of man, as he is given into our
guardianship by the bountiful hand of nature, and train him in
one uniform exercise, as the raw recruit is treated when he is
brought under the direction of his drill-serjeant.

The son of the nobleman, of the country-gentleman, and of those
parents who from vanity or whatever other motive are desirous
that their offspring should be devoted to some liberal
profession, is in nearly all instances sent to the
grammar-school. It is in this scene principally, that the
judgment is formed that not above one boy in a hundred possesses
an acute understanding, or will be able to strike into a path of
intellect that shall be truly his own.

I do not object to this destination, if temperately pursued. It
is fit that as many children as possible should have their chance
of figuring in future life in what are called the higher
departments of intellect. A certain familiar acquaintance with
language and the shades of language as a lesson, will be
beneficial to all. The youth who has expended only six months in
acquiring the rudiments of the Latin tongue, will probably be
more or less the better for it in all his future life.

But seven years are usually spent at the grammar-school by those
who are sent to it. I do not in many cases object to this. The
learned languages are assuredly of slow acquisition. In the
education of those who are destined to what are called the higher
departments of intellect, a long period may advantageously be
spent in the study of words, while the progress they make in
theory and dogmatical knowledge is too generally a store of
learning laid up, to be unlearned again when they reach the
period of real investigation and independent judgment. There is
small danger of this in the acquisition of words.

But this method, indiscriminately pursued as it is now, is
productive of the worst consequences. Very soon a judgment may
be formed by the impartial observer, whether the pupil is at home
in the study of the learned languages, and is likely to make an
adequate progress. But parents are not impartial. There are
also two reasons why the schoolmaster is not the proper person to
pronounce: first, because, if he pronounces in the negative, he
will have reason to fear that the parent will be offended; and
secondly, because he does not like to lose his scholar. But the
very moment that it can be ascertained, that the pupil is not at
home in the study of the learned languages, and is unlikely to
make an adequate progress, at that moment he should be taken from
it.

The most palpable deficiency that is to be found in relation to
the education of children, is a sound judgment to be formed as to
the vocation or employment in which each is most fitted to excel.

As, according to the institutions of Lycurgus, as soon as a boy
was born, he was visited by the elders of the ward, who were to
decide whether he was to be reared, and would be made an
efficient member of the commonwealth, so it were to be desired
that, as early as a clear discrimination on the subject might be
practicable, a competent decision should be given as to the
future occupation and destiny of a child.

But this is a question attended with no common degree of
difficulty. To the resolving such a question with sufficient
evidence, a very considerable series of observations would become
necessary. The child should be introduced into a variety of
scenes, and a magazine, so to speak, of those things about which
human industry and skill may be employed, should be successively
set before him. The censor who is to decide on the result of the
whole, should be a person of great sagacity, and capable of
pronouncing upon a given amount of the most imperfect and
incidental indications. He should be clear-sighted, and vigilant
to observe the involuntary turns of an eye, expressions of a lip,
and demonstrations of a limb.

The declarations of the child himself are often of very small use
in the case. He may be directed by an impulse, which occurs in
the morning, and vanishes in the evening. His preferences change
as rapidly as the shapes we sometimes observe in the evening
clouds, and are governed by whim or fantasy, and not by any of
those indications which are parcel of his individual
constitution. He desires in many instances to be devoted to a
particular occupation, because his playfellow has been assigned
to it before him.

The parent is not qualified to judge in this fundamental
question, because he is under the dominion of partiality, and
wishes that his child may become a lord chancellor, an
archbishop, or any thing else, the possessor of which condition
shall be enabled to make a splendid figure in the world. He is
not qualified, because he is an interested party, and, either
from an exaggerated estimate of his child's merits, or from a
selfish shrinking from the cost it might require to mature them,
is anxious to arrive at a conclusion not founded upon the
intrinsic claims of the case to be considered.

Even supposing it to be sufficiently ascertained in what calling
it is that the child will be most beneficially engaged, a
thousand extrinsical circumstances will often prevent that from
being the calling chosen. Nature distributes her gifts without
any reference to the distinctions of artificial society. The
genius that demanded the most careful and assiduous cultivation,
that it might hereafter form the boast and ornament of the world,
will be reared amidst the chill blasts of poverty; while he who
was best adapted to make an exemplary carpenter or artisan, by
being the son of a nobleman is thrown a thousand fathoms wide of
his true destination.

Human creatures are born into the world with various
dispositions. According to the memorable saying of Themistocles,
One man can play upon a psaltery or harp, and another can by
political skill and ingenuity convert a town of small account,
weak and insignificant, into a city noble, magnificent and great.

It is comparatively a very little way that we can penetrate into
the mysteries of nature.

Music seems to be one of the faculties most clearly defined in
early youth. The child who has received that destination from
the hands of nature, will even in infancy manifest a singular
delight in musical sounds, and will in no long time imitate
snatches of a tune. The present professor of music in the
university of Oxford contrived for himself, I believe at three
years old, a way for playing on an instrument, the piano forte,
unprompted by any of the persons about him. This is called
having an ear.

Instances nearly as precocious are related of persons, who
afterwards distinguished themselves in the art of painting.

These two kinds of original destination appear to be placed
beyond the reach of controversy.

Horace says, The poet is born a poet, and cannot be made so by
the ingenuity of art: and this seems to be true. He sees the
objects about him with an eye peculiarly his own; the sounds that
reach his ear, produce an effect upon him, and leave a memory
behind, different from that which is experienced by his fellows.
His perceptions have a singular vividness.

      The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
      Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;   

      And his imagination bodies forth      
      The forms of things unknown,

It is not probable that any trainings of art can give these
endowments to him who has not received them from the gift of
nature.

The subtle network of the brain, or whatever else it is, that
makes a man more fit for, and more qualified to succeed in, one
occupation than another, can scarcely be followed up and detected
either in the living subject or the dead one. But, as in the
infinite variety of human beings no two faces are so alike that
they cannot be distinguished, nor even two leaves plucked from
the same tree[2], so it may reasonably be presumed, that there
are varieties in the senses, the organs, and the internal
structure of the human species, however delicate, and to the
touch of the bystander evanescent, which may give to each
individual a predisposition to rise to a supreme degree of
excellence in some certain art or attainment, over a million of
competitors.

[2] Papers between Clarke and Leibnitz, p. 95.

It has been said that all these distinctions and anticipations
are idle, because man is born without innate ideas. Whatever is
the incomprehensible and inexplicable power, which we call
nature, to which he is indebted for his formation, it is
groundless to suppose, that that power is cognisant of, and
guides itself in its operations by, the infinite divisibleness of
human pursuits in civilised society. A child is not designed by
his original formation to be a manufacturer of shoes, for he may
be born among a people by whom shoes are not worn, and still less
is he destined by his structure to be a metaphysician, an
astronomer, or a lawyer, a rope-dancer, a fortune-teller, or a
juggler.

It is true that we cannot suppose nature to be guided in her
operations by the infinite divisibleness of human pursuits in
civilised society. But it is not the less true that one man is
by his structure best fitted to excel in some one in particular
of these multifarious pursuits, however fortuitously his
individual structure and that pursuit may be brought into
contact. Thus a certain calmness and steadiness of purpose, much
flexibility, and a very accurate proportion of the various limbs
of the body, are of great advantage in rope-dancing; while
lightness of the fingers, and a readiness to direct our thoughts
to the rapid execution of a purpose, joined with a steadiness of
countenance adapted to what is figuratively called throwing dust
in the eyes of the bystander, are of the utmost importance to the
juggler: and so of the rest.

It is as much the temper of the individual, as any particular
subtlety of organ or capacity, that prepares him to excel in one
pursuit rather than a thousand others. And he must have been a
very inattentive observer of the indications of temper in an
infant in the first months of his existence, who does not confess
that there are various peculiarities in that respect which the
child brings into the world with him.

There is excellent sense in the fable of Achilles in the island
of Scyros. He was placed there by his mother in female attire
among the daughters of Lycomedes, that he might not be seduced to
engage in the Trojan war. Ulysses was commissioned to discover
him, and, while he exhibited jewels and various woman's ornaments
to the princesses, contrived to mix with his stores a suit of
armour, the sight of which immediately awakened the spirit of the
hero.

Every one has probably within him a string more susceptible than
the rest, that demands only a kindred impression to be made, to
call forth its latent character. Like the war-horse described in
the Book of Job: "He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his
strength; he goeth on to meet the armed men; he smelleth the
battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting."

Nothing can be more unlike than the same man to himself, when he
is touched, and not touched, upon

           the master-string
                That makes most harmony or discord to him.

It is like the case of Manlius Torquatus in Livy, who by his
father was banished among his hinds for his clownish demeanour
and untractableness to every species of instruction that was
offered him, but who, understanding that his parent was
criminally arraigned for barbarous treatment of him, first
resolutely resorted to the accuser, compelling him upon pain of
death to withdraw his accusation, and subsequently, having
surmounted this first step towards an energetic carriage and
demeanour, proved one of the most illustrious characters that the
Roman republic had to boast.

Those children whose parents have no intention of training them
to the highest departments of intellect, and have therefore no
thought of bestowing on them a classical education, nevertheless
for the most part send them to a school where they are to be
taught arithmetic, and the principles of English grammar. I
should say in this case, as I said before on the subject of
classical education, that a certain initiation in these
departments of knowledge, even if they are pursued a very little
way, will probably be beneficial to all.

But it will often be found, in these schools for more ordinary
education, as in the school for classical instruction, that the
majority of the pupils will be seen to be unpromising, and, what
is usually called, dull. The mistake is, that the persons by
whom this is perceived, are disposed to set aside these pupils as
blockheads, and unsusceptible of any species of ingenuity.

It is unreasonable that we should draw such a conclusion.

In the first place, as has been already observed, it is the most
difficult thing in the world for the schoolmaster to inspire into
his pupil the desire to do his best. An overwhelming majority of
lads at school are in their secret hearts rebels to the
discipline under which they are placed. The instructor draws,
one way, and the pupil another. The object of the latter is to
find out how he may escape censure and punishment with the
smallest expence of scholastic application. He looks at the task
that is set him, without the most distant desire of improvement,
but with alienated and averted eye. And, where this is the case,
the wonder is not that he does not make a brilliant figure. It
is rather an evidence of the slavish and subservient spirit
incident to the majority of human beings, that he learns any
thing. Certainly the schoolmaster, who judges of the powers of
his pupil's mind by the progress he makes in what he would most
gladly be excused from learning, must be expected perpetually to
fall into the most egregious mistakes.

The true test of the capacity of the individual, is where the
desire to succeed, and accomplish something effective, is already
awakened in the youthful mind. Whoever has found out what it is
in which he is qualified to excel, from that moment becomes a new
creature. The general torpor and sleep of the soul, which is
incident to the vast multitude of the human species, is departed
from him. We begin, from the hour in which our limbs are enabled
to exert themselves freely, with a puerile love of sport.
Amusement is the order of the day. But no one was ever so fond
of play, that he had not also his serious moments. Every human
creature perhaps is sensible to the stimulus of ambition. He is
delighted with the thought that he also shall be somebody, and
not a mere undistinguished pawn, destined to fill up a square in
the chess-board of human society. He wishes to be thought
something of, and to be gazed upon. Nor is it merely the wish to
be admired that excites him: he acts, that he may be satisfied
with himself. Self-respect is a sentiment dear to every heart.
The emotion can with difficulty be done justice to, that a man
feels, who is conscious that he is breathing his true element,
that every stroke that he strikes will have the effect he
designs, that he has an object before him, and every moment
approaches nearer to that object. Before, he was wrapped in an
opake cloud, saw nothing distinctly, and struck this way and that
at hazard like a blind man. But now the sun of understanding has
risen upon him; and every step that he takes, he advances with an
assured and undoubting confidence.

It is an admirable remark, that the book which we read at the
very time that we feel a desire to read it, affords us ten times
the improvement, that we should have derived from it when it was
taken up by us as a task. It is just so with the man who chooses
his occupation, and feels assured that that about which he is
occupied is his true and native field. Compare this person with
the boy that studies the classics, or arithmetic, or any thing
else, with a secret disinclination, and, as Shakespear expresses
it, "creeps like snail, unwillingly, to school." They do not seem
as if they belonged to the same species.

The result of these observations certainly strongly tends to
support the proposition laid down early in the present Essay,
that, putting idiots and extraordinary cases out of the question,
every human creature is endowed with talents, which, if rightly
directed, would shew him to be apt, adroit, intelligent and
acute, in the walk for which his organisation especially fitted
him.

SECTION III.

ENCOURAGING VIEW OF OUR COMMON NATURE.--POWER OF SOUND EXPOSITION
AFFORDED TO ALL.--DOCTRINE OF THIS ESSAY AND THE HYPOTHESIS OF
HELVETIUS COMPARED.--THE WILLING AND UNWILLING PUPIL
CONTRASTED.--MISCHIEVOUS TENDENCY OF THE USUAL MODES OF
EDUCATION.

What a beautiful and encouraging view is thus afforded us of our
common nature! It is not true, as certain disdainful and
fastidious censurers of their fellow-men would persuade us to
believe, that a thousand seeds are sown in the wide field of
humanity, for no other purpose than that half-a-dozen may grow up
into something magnificent and splendid, and that the rest,
though not absolutely extinguished in the outset, are merely
suffered to live that they may furnish manure and nourishment to
their betters. On the contrary, each man, according to this
hypothesis, has a sphere in which he may shine, and may
contemplate the exercise of his own powers with a well-grounded
satisfaction. He produces something as perfect in its kind, as
that which is effected under another form by the more brilliant
and illustrious of his species. He stands forward with a serene
confidence in the ranks of his fellow-creatures, and says, "I
also have my place in society, that I fill in a manner with which
I have a right to be satisfied."  He vests a certain portion of
ingenuity in the work he turns out. He incorporates his mind
with the labour of his hands; and a competent observer will find
character and individuality in it.

He has therefore nothing of the sheepishness of the ordinary
schoolboy, the tasks imposed upon whom by his instructor are
foreign to the true bent of his mind, and who stands cowed before
his seniors, shrinking under the judgment they may pass upon him,
and the oppression they may exercise towards him. He is probably
competent to talk in a manner that may afford instruction to men
in other respects wise and accomplished, and is no less clear and
well-digested in his discourse respecting the subjects to which
his study and labour have been applied, than they are on the
questions that have exercised the powers of analysis with which
they are endowed. Like Elihu in the Book of Job, he says, "I am
young, and you are old; I said therefore, Days shall speak, and
multitude of years shall teach wisdom. But there is a spirit in
man; and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him
understanding. Great men are not always wise; neither do the
aged understand judgment. Hearken therefore to me; and I also
will shew my opinion."

What however in the last instance is affirmed, is not always
realised in the experiment. The humblest mechanic, who works con
amore, and feels that he discharges his office creditably, has a
sober satisfaction in the retrospect, and is able to express
himself perspicuously and well on the subject that has occupied
his industry. He has a just confidence in himself. If the
occasion arises, on which he should speak on the subject of what
he does, and the methods he adopts for effecting it, he will
undoubtedly acquit himself to the satisfaction of those who hear
him. He knows that the explanations he can afford will be sound
and masculine, and will stand the test of a rigid examination.

But, in proportion as he feels the ground on which he stands, and
his own power to make it good, he will not fail to retire from an
audience that is not willing to be informed by him. He will
often appear in the presence of those, whom the established
arrangements of society call his superiors, who are more
copiously endowed with the treasures of language, and who,
confident perhaps in the advantage of opulence, and what is
called, however they may have received it, a liberal education,
regard with disdain his artless and unornamented explanations.
He did not, it may be, expect this. And, having experienced
several times such unmerited treatment, he is not willing again
to encounter it. He knew the worth of what he had to offer.
And, finding others indisposed to listen to his suggestions, he
contentedly confines them within the circle of his own thoughts.

To this it must be added that, though he is able to explain
himself perspicuously, yet he is not master of the graces of
speech, nor even perhaps of the niceties of grammar. His voice
is not tuned to those winning inflections by which men,
accustomed to the higher ranks of society, are enabled so to
express themselves,

      That aged ears play truant at their tales,
      And younger hearings are quite ravished,
      So sweet and voluble is their discourse.

On the contrary there is a ruggedness in his manner that jars
upon the sense. It is easy for the light and supercilious to
turn him into ridicule. And those who will not be satisfied with
the soundness of his matter, expounded, as he is able to expound
it, in clear and appropriate terms, will yield him small credit,
and listen to him with little delight.

These considerations therefore bring us back again to the reasons
of the prevalent opinion, that the majority of mankind are dull,
and of apprehension narrow and confused. The mass of boys in the
process of their education appear so, because little of what is
addressed to them by their instructors, awakens their curiosity,
and inspires them with the desire to excel. The concealed spark
of ambition is not yet cleared from the crust that enveloped it
as it first came from the hand of nature. And in like manner the
elder persons, who have not experienced the advantages of a
liberal education, or by whom small profit was made by those
advantages, being defective in exterior graces, are generally
listened to with impatience, and therefore want the confidence
and the inclination to tell what they know.

But these latter, if they are not attended to upon the subjects
to which their attention and ingenuity have been applied, do not
the less possess a knowledge and skill which are intrinsically
worthy of applause. They therefore contentedly shut up the sum
of their acquisitions in their own bosoms, and are satisfied with
the consciousness that they have not been deficient in performing
an adequate part in the generation of men among whom they live.

Those persons who favour the opinion of the incessant
improveableness of the human species, have felt strongly prompted
to embrace the creed of Helvetius, who affirms that the minds of
men, as they are born into the world, are in a state of equality,
alike prepared for any kind of discipline and instruction that
may be afforded them, and that it depends upon education only, in
the largest sense of that word, including every impression that
may be made upon the mind, intentional or accidental, from the
hour of our birth, whether we shall be poets or philosophers,
dancers or singers, chemists or mathematicians, astronomers or
dissectors of the faculties of our common nature.

But this is not true. It has already appeared in the course of
this Essay, that the talent, or, more accurately speaking, the
original suitableness of the individual for the cultivation, of
music or painting, depends upon certain peculiarities that we
bring into the world with us. The same thing may be affirmed of
the poet. As, in the infinite variety of human beings, there are
no two faces so alike that they cannot be distinguished, nor even
two leaves plucked from the same tree, so there are varieties in
the senses, the organs, and the internal structure of the human
species, however delicate, and to the touch of the bystander
evanescent, which give to each individual a predisposition to
rise to excellence in one particular art or attainment, rather
than in any other.

And this view of things, if well considered, is as favourable,
nay, more so, to the hypothesis of the successive improveableness
of the human species, as the creed of Helvetius. According to
that philosopher, every human creature that is born into the
world, is capable of becoming, or being made, the equal of Homer,
Bacon or Newton, and as easily and surely of the one as the
other. This creed, if sincerely embraced, no doubt affords a
strong stimulus to both preceptor and pupil, since, if true, it
teaches us that any thing can be made of any thing, and that,
wherever there is mind, it is within the compass of possibility,
not only that that mind can be raised to a high pitch of
excellence, but even to a high pitch of that excellence, whatever
it is, that we shall prefer to all others, and most earnestly
desire.

Still this creed will, after all, leave both preceptor and pupil
in a state of feeling considerably unsatisfactory. What it sets
before us, is too vast and indefinite. We shall be left long
perhaps in a state of balance as to what species of excellence we
shall choose; and, in the immense field of accessible improvement
it offers to us, without land-mark or compass for the direction
of our course, it is scarcely possible that we should feel that
assured confidence and anticipation of success, which are perhaps
indispensibly required to the completion of a truly arduous
undertaking.

But, upon the principles laid down in this Essay, the case is
widely different. We are here presented in every individual
human creature with a subject better fitted for one sort of
cultivation than another. We are excited to an earnest study of
the individual, that we may the more unerringly discover what
pursuit it is for which his nature and qualifications especially
prepare him. We may be long in choosing. We may be even on the
brink of committing a considerable mistake. Our subsequent
observations may enable us to correct the inference we were
disposed to make from those which went before. Our sagacity is
flattered by the result of the laborious scrutiny which this view
of our common nature imposes upon us.

In addition to this we reap two important advantages.

In the first place, we feel assured that every child that is born
has his suitable sphere, to which if he is devoted, he will not
fail to make an honourable figure, or, in other words, will be
seen to be endowed with faculties, apt, adroit, intelligent and
acute. This consideration may reasonably stimulate us to call up
all our penetration for the purpose of ascertaining the proper
destination of the child for whom we are interested.

And, secondly, having arrived at this point, we shall find
ourselves placed in a very different predicament from the
guardian or instructor, who, having selected at random the
pursuit which his fancy dictates, and in the choice of which he
is encouraged by the presumptuous assertions of a wild
metaphysical philosophy, must often, in spite of himself, feel a
secret misgiving as to the final event. He may succeed, and
present to a wondering world a consummate musician, painter,
poet, or philosopher; for even blind chance may sometimes hit the
mark, as truly as the most perfect skill. But he will probably
fail. Sudet multum, frustraque laboret. And, if he is
disappointed, he will not only feel that disappointment in the
ultimate result, but also in every step of his progress. When he
has done his best, exerted his utmost industry, and consecrated
every power of his soul to the energies he puts forth, he may
close every day, sometimes with a faint shadow of success, and
sometimes with entire and blank miscarriage. And the latter will
happen ten thousand times, for once that the undertaking shall be
blessed with a prosperous event.

But, when the destination that is given to a child has been
founded upon a careful investigation of the faculties, tokens,
and accidental aspirations which characterise his early years, it
is then that every step that is made with him, becomes a new and
surer source of satisfaction. The moment the pursuit for which
his powers are adapted is seriously proposed to him, his eyes
sparkle, and a second existence, in addition to that which he
received at his birth, descends upon him. He feels that he has
now obtained something worth living for. He feels that he is at
home, and in a sphere that is appropriately his own. Every
effort that he makes is successful. At every resting-place in
his race of improvement he pauses, and looks back on what he has
done with complacency. The master cannot teach him so fast, as
he is prompted to acquire.

What a contrast does this species of instruction exhibit, to the
ordinary course of scholastic education! There, every lesson that
is prescribed, is a source of indirect warfare between the
instructor and the pupil, the one professing to aim at the
advancement of him that is taught, in the career of knowledge,
and the other contemplating the effect that is intended to be
produced upon him with aversion, and longing to be engaged in any
thing else, rather than in that which is pressed upon his
foremost attention. In this sense a numerous school is, to a
degree that can scarcely be adequately described, the
slaughter-house of mind. It is like the undertaking, related by
Livy, of Accius Navius, the augur, to cut a whetstone with a
razor--with this difference, that our modern schoolmasters are
not endowed with the gift of working miracles, and, when the
experiment falls into their hands, the result of their efforts is
a pitiful miscarriage. Knowledge is scarcely in any degree
imparted. But, as they are inured to a dogged assiduity, and
persist in their unavailing attempts, though the shell of
science, so to speak, is scarcely in the smallest measure
penetrated, yet that inestimable gift of the author of our being,
the sharpness of human faculties, is so blunted and destroyed,
that it can scarcely ever be usefully employed even for those
purposes which it was originally best qualified to effect.

A numerous school is that mint from which the worst and most
flagrant libels on our nature are incessantly issued. Hence it
is that we are taught, by a judgment everlastingly repeated, that
the majority of our kind are predestinated blockheads.

Not that it is by any means to be recommended, that a little
writing and arithmetic, and even the first rudiments of classical
knowledge, so far as they can be practicably imparted, should be
withheld from any. The mischief is, that we persist, month after
month, and year after year, in sowing our seed, when it has
already been fully ascertained, that no suitable and wholsome
crop will ever be produced.

But what is perhaps worse is, that we are accustomed to
pronounce, that that soil, which will not produce the crop of
which we have attempted to make it fertile, is fit for nothing.
The majority of boys, at the very period when the buds of
intellect begin to unfold themselves, are so accustomed to be
told that they are dull and fit for nothing, that the most
pernicious effects are necessarily produced. They become half
convinced by the ill-boding song of the raven, perpetually
croaking in their ears; and, for the other half, though by no
means assured that the sentence of impotence awarded against them
is just, yet, folding up their powers in inactivity, they are
contented partly to waste their energies in pure idleness and
sport, and partly to wait, with minds scarcely half awake, for
the moment when their true destination shall be opened before
them.

Not that it is by any means to be desired. that the child in his
earlier years should meet with no ruggednesses in his way, and
that he should perpetually tread "the primrose path of
dalliance." Clouds and tempests occasionally clear the atmosphere
of intellect, not less than that of the visible world. The road
to the hill of science, and to the promontory of heroic virtue,
is harsh and steep, and from time to time puts to the proof the
energies of him who would ascend their topmost round.

There are many things which every human creature should learn, so
far as, agreeably to the constitution of civilised society, they
can be brought within his reach. He should be induced to learn
them, willingly if possible, but, if that cannot be thoroughly
effected, yet with half a will. Such are reading, writing,
arithmetic, and the first principles of grammar; to which shall
be added, as far as may be, the rudiments of all the sciences
that are in ordinary use. The latter however should not be
brought forward too soon; and, if wisely delayed, the tyro
himself will to a certain degree enter into the views of his
instructor, and be disposed to essay Quid valeant humeri, quid
ferre recusent. But, above all, the beginnings of those studies
should be encouraged, which unfold the imagination, familiarise
us with the feelings, the joys and sufferings of our
fellow-beings, and teach us to put ourselves in their place and
eagerly fly to their assistance.

SECTION IV.

HOW FAR OUR GENUINE PROPENSITIES AND VOCATION SHOULD BE
FAVOURED.--SELF-REVERENCE RECOMMENDED.--CONCLUSION.

I knew a man of eminent intellectual faculties[3], one of whose
favourite topics of moral prudence was, that it is the greatest
mistake in the world to suppose, that, when we have discovered
the special aspiration of the youthful mind, we are bound to do
every thing in our power to assist its progress. He maintained
on the contrary, that it is our true wisdom to place obstacles in
its way, and to thwart it: as we may be well assured that,
unless it is a mere caprice, it will shew its strength in
conquering difficulties, and that all the obstacles that we can
conjure up will but inspire it with the greater earnestness to
attain final success.

[3] Henry Fuseli.

The maxim here stated, taken to an unlimited extent, is doubtless
a very dangerous one. There are obstacles that scarcely any
strength of man would be sufficient to conquer. "Chill penury"
will sometimes "repress the noblest rage," that almost ever
animated a human spirit: and our wisest course will probably be,
secretly to favour, even when we seem most to oppose, the genuine
bent of the youthful aspirer.

But the thing of greatest importance is, that we should not teach
him to estimate his powers at too low a rate. One of the wisest
of all the precepts comprised in what are called the Golden
Verses of Pythagoras, is that, in which he enjoins his pupil to
"reverence himself."  Ambition is the noblest root that can be
planted in the garden of the human soul: not the ambition to be
applauded and admired, to be famous and looked up to, to be the
darling theme of "stupid starers and of loud huzzas;" but the
ambition to fill a respectable place in the theatre of society,
to be useful and to be esteemed, to feel that we have not lived
in vain, and that we are entitled to the most honourable of all
dismissions, an enlightened self-approbation. And nothing can
more powerfully tend to place this beyond our acquisition, even
our contemplation, than the perpetual and hourly rebuffs which
ingenuous youth is so often doomed to sustain from the
supercilious pedant, and the rigid decision of his unfeeling
elders.

Self-respect to be nourished in the mind of the pupil, is one of
the most valuable results of a well conducted education. To
accomplish this, it is most necessary that it should never be
inculcated into him, that he is dull. Upon the principles of
this Essay, any unfavourable appearances that may present
themselves, do not arise from the dulness of the pupil, but from
the error of those upon whose superintendence he is cast, who
require of him the things for which he is not adapted, and
neglect those in which he is qualified to excel.

It is further necessary, if self-respect is one of the most
desirable results of a well-conducted education, that, as we
should not humble the pupil in his own eyes by disgraceful and
humiliating language, so we should abstain, as much as possible,
from personal ill-treatment, and the employing towards him the
measures of an owner towards his purchased or indentured slave.
Indignity is of all things the most hostile to the best purposes
of a liberal education. It may be necessary occasionally to
employ, towards a human creature in his years of nonage, the
stimulants of exhortation and remonstrance even in the pursuits
to which he is best adapted, for the purpose of overcoming the
instability and fits of idleness to which all men, and most of
all in their early years, are subject: though in such pursuits a
necessity of this sort can scarcely be supposed. The bow must
not always be bent; and it is good for us that we should
occasionally relax and play the fool. It may more readily be
imagined, that some incitement may be called for in those things
which, as has been mentioned above, it may be fit he should learn
though with but half a will. All freaks must not be indulged;
admonition is salutary, and that the pupil should be awakened by
his instructor to sober reflection and to masculine exertion.
Every Telemachus should have his Mentor.--But through the whole
it is necessary that the spirit of the pupil should not be
broken, and that he should not be treated with contumely.
Stripes should in all instances be regarded as the last resort,
and as a sort of problem set up for the wisdom of the wise to
solve, whether the urgent case can arise in which it shall be
requisite to have recourse to them.

The principles here laid down have the strongest tendency to
prove to us how little progress has yet been made in the art of
turning human creatures to the best account. Every man has his
place, in which if he can be fixed, the most fastidious judge
cannot look upon him with disdain. But, to effect this
arrangement, an exact attention is required to ascertain the
pursuit in which he will best succeed. In India the whole mass
of the members of the community is divided into castes; and,
instead of a scrupulous attention being paid to the early
intimations of individual character, it is already decided upon
each, before he comes into the world, which child shall be a
priest, and which a soldier, a physician, a lawyer, a merchant,
and an artisan. In Europe we do not carry this so far, and are
not so elaborately wrong. But the rudiments of the same folly
flourish among us; and the accident of birth for the most part
decides the method of life to which each individual with whatever
violence shall be dedicated. A very few only, by means of
energies that no tyranny can subdue, escape from the operation of
this murderous decree.

Nature never made a dunce. Imbecility of mind is as rare, as
deformity of the animal frame. If this position be true, we have
only to bear it in mind, feelingly to convince ourselves, how
wholesale the error is into which society has hitherto fallen in
the destination of its members, and how much yet remains to be
done, before our common nature can be vindicated from the basest
of all libels, the most murderous of all proscriptions.

There is a passage in Voltaire, in which he expresses himself to
this effect: "It is after all but a slight line of separation
that divides the man of genius from the man of ordinary mould."
I remember the place where, and the time when, I read this
passage. But I have been unable to find the expression. It is
however but reasonable that I should refer to it on this
occasion, that I may hereby shew so eminent a modern concurring
with the venerable ancient in an early era of letters, whose
dictum I have prefixed to this Essay, to vouch to a certain
extent for the truth of the doctrine I have delivered.

ESSAY III.
OF INTELLECTUAL ABORTION.

In the preceding Essay I have endeavoured to establish the
proposition, that every human creature, idiots and extraordinary
cases excepted, is endowed with talents, which, if rightly
directed, would shew him to be apt, adroit, intelligent and
acute, in the walk for which his organisation especially fitted
him.

There is however a sort of phenomenon, by no means of rare
occurrence, which tends to place the human species under a less
favourable point of view. Many men, as has already appeared, are
forced into situations and pursuits ill assorted to their
talents, and by that means are exhibited to their contemporaries
in a light both despicable and ludicrous.

But this is not all. Men are not only placed, by the absurd
choice of their parents, or an imperious concurrence of
circumstances, in destinations and employments in which they can
never appear to advantage: they frequently, without any external
compulsion, select for themselves objects of their industry,
glaringly unadapted to their powers, and in which all their
efforts must necessarily terminate in miscarriage.

I remember a young man, who had been bred a hair-dresser, but who
experienced, as he believed, the secret visitations of the Muse,
and became inspired. "With sad civility, and aching head," I
perused no fewer than six comedies from the pen of this aspiring
genius, in no page of which I could discern any glimmering of
poetry or wit, or in reality could form a guess what it was that
the writer intended in his elaborate effusions. Such are the
persons enumerated by Pope in the Prologue to his Satires,

          a parson, much bemused in beer,
      A maudlin poetess, a rhyming peer,
      A clerk, foredoomed his father's sou to cross,
      Who pens a stanza, when he should engross.

Every manager of a theatre, and every publishing bookseller of
eminence, can produce you in each revolving season whole reams,
almost cartloads, of blurred paper, testifying the frequent
recurrence of this phenomenon.

The cause however of this painful mistake does not lie in the
circumstance, that each man has not from the hand of nature an
appropriate destination, a sphere assigned him, in which, if life
should be prolonged to him, he might be secure of the respect of
his neighbours, and might write upon his tomb, "I have filled an
honourable career; I have finished my course."

One of the most glaring infirmities of our nature is discontent.
One of the most unquestionable characteristics of the human mind
is the love of novelty. Omne ignotum pro magnifico est. We are
satiated with those objects which make a part of our business in
every day, and are desirous of trying something that is a
stranger to us. Whatever we see through a mist, or in the
twilight, is apt to be apprehended by us as something admirable,
for the single reason that it is seen imperfectly. What we are
sure that we can easily and adequately effect, we despise. He
that goes into battle with an adversary of more powerful muscle
or of greater practice than himself, feels a tingling sensation,
not unallied to delight, very different from that which would
occur to him, when his victory was easy and secure.

Each man is conscious what it is that he can certainly effect.
This does not therefore present itself to him as an object of
ambition. We have many of us internally something of the spirit
expressed by the apostle: "Forgetting the things that are
behind, we press forward to those that remain."  And, so long as
this precept is soberly applied, no conduct can be more worthy of
praise. Improvement is the appropriate race of man. We cannot
stand still. If we do not go forward, we shall inevitably
recede. Shakespear, when he wrote his Hamlet, did not know that
he could produce Macbeth and Othello.

But the progress of a man of reflection will be, to a
considerable degree, in the path he has already entered. If he
strikes into a new career, it will not be without deep
premeditation. He will attempt nothing wantonly. He will
carefully examine his powers, and see for what they are adapted.
Sudet multum. He will be like the man, who first in a frail bark
committed himself to the treachery of the waves. He will keep
near to the shore; he will tremble for the audaciousness of his
enterprise; he will feel that it calls for all his alertness and
vigilance. The man of reflection will not begin, till he feels
his mind swelling with his purposed theme, till his blood flows
fitfully and with full pulses through his veins, till his eyes
sparkle with the intenseness of his conceptions, and his "bosom
labours with the God."

But the fool dashes in at once. He does not calculate the
dangers of his enterprise. He does not study the map of the
country he has to traverse. He does not measure the bias of the
ground, the rising knolls and the descending slopes that are
before him. He obeys a blind and unreflecting impulse.

His case bears a striking resemblance to what is related of
Oliver Goldsmith. Goldsmith was a man of the most felicitous
endowments. His prose flows with such ease, copiousness and
grace, that it resembles the song of the sirens. His verses are
among the most spirited, natural and unaffected in the English
language. Yet he was not contented. If he saw a consummate
dancer, he knew no reason why he should not do as well, and
immediately felt disposed to essay his powers. If he heard an
accomplished musician, he undertook to enter the lists with him.
His conduct was of a piece with that of the countryman, who,
cheapening spectacles, and making experiment of them for ever in
vain upon the book before him, was at length asked, "Could you
ever read without spectacles?" to which he was obliged to answer,
"I do not know; I never tried."  The vanity of Goldsmith was
infinite; and his failure in such attempts must necessarily have
been ludicrous.

The splendour of the thing presented to our observation, awakens
the spirit within us. The applause and admiration excited by
certain achievements and accomplishments infects us with desire.
We are like the youthful Themistocles, who complained that the
trophies of Miltiades would not let him sleep. We are like the
novice Guido, who, while looking on the paintings of Michael
Angelo, exclaimed, "I also am a painter."  Themistocles and Guido
were right, for they were of kindred spirit to the great men they
admired. But the applause bestowed on others will often generate
uneasiness and a sigh, in men least of all qualified by nature to
acquire similar applause. We are not contented to proceed in the
path of obscure usefulness and worth. We are eager to be
admired, and thus often engage in pursuits for which perhaps we
are of all men least adapted Each one would be the man above him.

And this is the cause why we see so many individuals, who might
have passed their lives with honour, devote themselves to
incredible efforts, only that they may be made supremely
ridiculous.

To this let it be added, that the wisest man that ever existed,
never yet knew himself, especially in the morning of life. The
person, who ultimately stamped his history with the most heroic
achievements, was far perhaps even from suspecting, in the dawn
of his existence, that he should realise the miracles that mark
its maturity. He might be ready to exclaim, with Hazael in the
Scriptures, "Is thy servant more than man, that he should do this
great thing?"  The sublimest poet that ever sung, was
peradventure, while a stripling, unconscious of the treasures
which formed a part of the fabric of his mind, and unsuspicious
of the high destiny that in the sequel awaited him. What wonder
then, that, awaking from the insensibility and torpor which
precede the activity of the soul, some men should believe in a
fortune that shall never be theirs, and anticipate a glory they
are fated never to sustain! And for the same reason, when
unanticipated failure becomes their lot, they are unwilling at
first to be discouraged, and find a certain gallantry in
persevering, and "against hope believing in hope."

This is the explanation of a countless multitude of failures that
occur in the career of literature. Nor is this phenomenon
confined to literature. In all the various paths of human
existence, that appear to have something in them splendid and
alluring, there are perpetual instances of daring adventures,
unattended with the smallest rational hope of success. Optat
ephippia bos piger.

          All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies.

But, beside these instances of perfect and glaring miscarriage,
there are examples worthy of a deeper regret, where the juvenile
candidate sets out in the morning of life with the highest
promise, with colours flying, and the spirit-stirring note of
gallant preparation, when yet his voyage of life is destined to
terminate in total discomfiture. I have seen such an one, whose
early instructors regarded him with the most sanguine
expectation, and his elders admired him, while his youthful
competitors unreluctantly confessed his superiority, and gave way
on either side to his triumphant career; and all this has
terminated in nothing.

In reality the splendid march of genius is beset with a thousand
difficulties. "The race is not always to the swift, nor the
battle to the strong."  A multitude of unthought-of
qualifications are required; and it depends at least as much upon
the nicely maintained balance of these, as upon the copiousness
and brilliancy of each, whether the result shall be auspicious.
The progress of genius is like the flight of an arrow; a breath
may turn it out of its course, and cause that course to terminate
many a degree wide of its purposed mark. It is therefore
scarcely possible that any sharpness of foresight can pronounce
of the noblest beginnings whether they shall reach to an adequate
conclusion.

I have seen such a man, with the most fervent imagination, with
the most diligent study, with the happiest powers of memory, and
with an understanding that apparently took in every thing, and
arranged every thing, at the same time that by its acuteness it
seemed able to add to the accumulated stores of foregone wisdom
and learning new treasures of its own; and yet this man shall
pass through the successive stages of human life, in appearance
for ever active, for ever at work, and leave nothing behind that
shall embalm his name to posterity, certainly nothing in any
degree adequately representing those excellencies, which a chosen
few, admitted to his retired and his serenest hours, knew to
reside in him.

There are conceptions of the mind, that come forth like the
coruscations of lightning. If you could fix that flash, it would
seem as if it would give new brightness to the sons of men, and
almost extinguish the luminary of day. But, ere you can say it
is here, it is gone. It appears to reveal to us the secrets of
the world unknown; but the clouds congregate again, and shut in
upon us, before we had time to apprehend its full radiance and
splendour.

To give solidity and permanence to the inspirations of genius two
things are especially necessary. First, that the idea to be
communicated should be powerfully apprehended by the speaker or
writer; and next, that he should employ words and phrases which
might convey it in all its truth to the mind of another. The man
who entertains such conceptions, will not unfrequently want the
steadiness of nerve which is required for their adequate
transmission. Suitable words will not always wait upon his
thoughts. Language is in reality a vast labyrinth, a scene like
the Hercinian Forest of old, which, we are told, could not be
traversed in less than sixty days. If we do not possess the
clue, we shall infallibly perish in the attempt, and our thoughts
and our memory will expire with us.

The sentences of this man, when he speaks, or when he writes,
will be full of perplexity and confusion. They will be endless,
and never arrive at their proper termination. They will include
parenthesis on parenthesis. We perceive the person who delivers
them, to be perpetually labouring after a meaning, but never
reaching it. He is like one flung over into the sea, unprovided
with the skill that should enable him to contend with the
tumultuous element. He flounders about in pitiable helplessness,
without the chance of extricating himself by all his efforts. He
is lost in unintelligible embarrassment. It is a delightful and
a ravishing sight, to observe another man come after him, and
tell, without complexity, and in the simplicity of
self-possession, unconscious that there was any difficulty, all
that his predecessor had fruitlessly exerted himself to unfold.

There are a multitude of causes that will produce a miscarriage
of this sort, where the richest soil, impregnated with the
choicest seeds of learning and observation, shall entirely fail
to present us with such a crop as might rationally have been
anticipated. Many such men waste their lives in indolence and
irresolution. They attempt many things, sketch out plans, which,
if properly filled up, might illustrate the literature of a
nation, and extend the empire of the human mind, but which yet
they desert as soon as begun, affording us the promise of a
beautiful day, that, ere it is noon, is enveloped in darkest
tempests and the clouds of midnight. They skim away from one
flower in the parterre of literature to another, like the bee,
without, like the bee, gathering sweetness from each, to increase
the public stock, and enrich the magazine of thought. The cause
of this phenomenon is an unsteadiness, ever seduced by the
newness of appearances, and never settling with firmness and
determination upon what had been chosen.

Others there are that are turned aside from the career they might
have accomplished, by a visionary and impracticable
fastidiousness. They can find nothing that possesses all the
requisites that should fix their choice, nothing so good that
should authorise them to present it to public observation, and
enable them to offer it to their contemporaries as something that
we should "not willingly let die."  They begin often; but nothing
they produce appears to them such as that they should say of it,
"Let this stand."  Or they never begin, none of their thoughts
being judged by them to be altogether such as to merit the being
preserved. They have a microscopic eye, and discern faults
unworthy to be tolerated, in that in which the critic himself
might perceive nothing but beauty.

These phenomena have introduced a maxim which is current with
many, that the men who write nothing, and bequeath no record of
themselves to posterity, are not unfrequently of larger calibre,
and more gigantic standard of soul, than such as have inscribed
their names upon the columns of the temple of Fame. And certain
it is, that there are extraordinary instances which appear in
some degree to countenance this assertion. Many men are
remembered as authors, who seem to have owed the permanence of
their reputation rather to fortune than merit. They were daring,
and stepped into a niche that was left in the gallery of art or
of science, where others of higher qualifications, but of
unconquerable modesty, held back. At the same time persons,
whose destiny caused them to live among the elite of an age, have
seen reason to confess that they have heard such talk, such
glorious and unpremeditated discourse, from men whose thoughts
melted away with the breath that uttered them, as the wisest of
their vaunted contemporary authors would in vain have sought to
rival.

The maxim however, notwithstanding these appearances, may safely
be pronounced to be a fallacious one. It has been received in
various quarters with the greater indulgence, inasmuch as the
human mind is prone in many cases to give a more welcome
reception to seeming truths, that present us at the first blush
the appearance of falshood.

It must however be recollected that the human mind consists in
the first instance merely of faculties prepared to be applied to
certain purposes, and susceptible of improvement. It cannot
therefore happen, that the man, who has chosen a subject towards
which to direct the energy of his faculties, who has sought on
all sides for the materials that should enable him to do that
subject justice, who has employed upon it his contemplations by
day, and his meditations during the watches of the night, should
not by such exercise greatly invigorate his powers. In this
sense there was much truth in the observation of the author who
said, "I did not write upon the subject you mention because I
understood it; but I understood it afterward, because I had
written upon it."

The man who merely wanders through the fields of knowledge in
search of its gayest flowers and of whatever will afford him the
most enviable amusement, will necessarily return home at night
with a very slender collection. He that shall apply himself with
self-denial and an unshrinking resolution to the improvement of
his mind, will unquestionably be found more fortunate in the end.

He is not deterred by the gulphs that yawn beneath his feet, or
the mountains that may oppose themselves to his progress. He
knows that the adventurer of timid mind, and that is infirm of
purpose, will never make himself master of those points which it
would be most honourable to him to subdue. But he who undertakes
to commit to writing the result of his researches, and to
communicate his discoveries to mankind, is the genuine hero.
Till he enters on this task, every thing is laid up in his memory
in a certain confusion. He thinks he possesses a thing whole;
but, when he brings it to the test, he is surprised to find how
much he was deceived. He that would digest his thoughts and his
principles into a regular system, is compelled in the first place
to regard them in all their clearness and perspicuity, and in the
next place to select the fittest words by which they may be
communicated to others. It is through the instrumentality of
words that we are taught to think accurately and severely for
ourselves; they are part and parcel of all our propositions and
theories. It is therefore in this way that a preceptor, by
undertaking to enlighten the mind of his pupil, enlightens his
own. He becomes twice the man in the sequel, that he was when he
entered on his task. We admire the amateur student in his public
essays, as we admire a jackdaw or a parrot: he does considerably
more than could have been expected from him.

In attending to the subject of this Essay we have been led to
observe the different ways, in which the mind of man may be
brought into a position tending to exhibit its powers in a less
creditable and prepossessing point of view, than that in which
all men, idiots and extraordinary cases excepted, are by nature
qualified to appear. Many, not contented with those occupations,
modest and humble in certain cases, to which their endowments and
original bent had designed them, shew themselves immoderately set
upon more alluring and splendid pursuits in which they are least
qualified to excel. Other instances there are, still more
entitled to our regret, where the individual is seen to be gifted
with no ordinary qualities, where his morning of life has proved
auspicious, and the highest expectations were formed of a
triumphant career, while yet in the final experiment he has been
found wanting, and the "voyage of his life" has passed "in
shallows and in miseries."

But our survey of the subject of which I treat will not be
complete, unless we add to what has been said, another striking
truth respecting the imperfection of man collectively taken. The
examples of which the history of our species consists, not only
abound in cases, where, from mistakes in the choice of life, or
radical and irremediable imperfection in the adventurer, the most
glaring miscarriages are found to result,--but it is also true,
that all men, even the most illustrious, have some fatal
weakness, obliging both them and their rational admirers to
confess, that they partake of human frailty, and belong to a race
of beings which has small occasion to be proud. Each man has his
assailable part. He is vulnerable, though it be only like the
fabled Achilles in his heel. We are like the image that
Nebuchadnezzar saw in his dream, of which though the head was of
fine gold, and the breast and the arms were silver, yet the feet
were partly only of iron, and partly of clay. No man is whole
and entire, armed at all points, and qualified for every
undertaking, or even for any one undertaking, so as to carry it
through, and to make the achievement he would perform, or the
work he would produce, in all its parts equal and complete.

It is a gross misapprehension in such men as, smitten with
admiration of a certain cluster of excellencies, or series of
heroic acts, are willing to predicate of the individual to whom
they belong, "This man is consummate, and without alloy."  Take
the person in his retirement, in his hours of relaxation, when he
has no longer a part to play, and one or more spectators before
whom he is desirous to appear to advantage, and you shall find
him a very ordinary man. He has "passions, dimensions, senses,
affections, like the rest of his fellow-creatures, is fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, warmed and cooled by
the same summer and winter."  He will therefore, when narrowly
observed, be unquestionably found betraying human weaknesses, and
falling into fits of ill humour, spleen, peevishness and folly.
No man is always a sage; no bosom at all times beats with
sentiments lofty, self-denying and heroic. It is enough if he
does so, "when the matter fits his mighty mind."

The literary genius, who undertakes to produce some consummate
work, will find himself pitiably in error, if he expects to turn
it out of his hands, entire in all its parts, and without a flaw.

There are some of the essentials of which it is constituted, that
he has mastered, and is sufficiently familiar with them; but
there are others, especially if his work is miscellaneous and
comprehensive, to which he is glaringly incompetent. He must
deny his nature, and become another man, if he would execute
these parts, in a manner equal to that which their intrinsic
value demands, or to the perfection he is able to give to his
work in those places which are best suited to his powers. There
are points in which the wisest man that ever existed is no
stronger than a child. In this sense the sublimest genius will
be found infelix operas summa, nam ponere totum nescit. And, if
he properly knows himself, and is aware where lies his strength,
and where his weakness, he will look for nothing more in the
particulars which fall under the last of these heads, than to
escape as he can, and to pass speedily to things in which he
finds himself at home and at his ease.

Shakespear we are accustomed to call the most universal genius
that ever existed. He has a truly wonderful variety. It is
almost impossible to pronounce in which he has done best, his
Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, or Othello. He is equally excellent in
his comic vein as his tragic. Falstaff is in his degree to the
full as admirable and astonishing, as what he achieved that is
noblest under the auspices of the graver muse. His poetry and
the fruits of his imagination are unrivalled. His language, in
all that comes from him when his genius is most alive, has a
richness, an unction, and all those signs of a character which
admits not of mortality and decay, for ever fresh as when it was
first uttered, which we recognise, while we can hardly persuade
ourselves that we are not in a delusion. As Anthony Wood
says[4], "By the writings of Shakespear and others of his time,
the English tongue was exceedingly enriched, and made quite
another thing than what it was before."  His versification on
these occasions has a melody, a ripeness and variety that no
other pen has reached.

[4] Athenae Oxonienses, vol. i. p. 592.

Yet there were things that Shakespear could not do. He could not
make a hero. Familiar as he was with the evanescent touches of
mind en dishabille, and in its innermost feelings, he could not
sustain the tone of a character, penetrated with a divine
enthusiasm, or fervently devoted to a generous cause, though this
is truly within the compass of our nature, and is more than any
other worthy to be delineated. He could conceive such
sentiments, for there are such in his personage of Brutus; but he
could not fill out and perfect what he has thus sketched. He
seems even to have had a propensity to bring the mountain and the
hill to a level with the plain. Caesar is spiritless, and Cicero
is ridiculous, in his hands. He appears to have written his
Troilus and Cressida partly with a view to degrade, and hold up
to contempt, the heroes of Homer; and he has even disfigured the
pure, heroic affection which the Greek poet has painted as
existing between Achilles and Patroclus with the most odious
imputations.

And, as he could not sustain an heroic character throughout, so
neither could he construct a perfect plot, in which the interest
should be perpetually increasing, and the curiosity of the
spectator kept alive and in suspense to the last moment. Several
of his plays have an unity of subject to which nothing is
wanting; but he has not left us any production that should rival
that boast of Ancient Greece in the conduct of a plot, the
OEdipus Tyrannus, a piece in which each act rises upon the act
before, like a tower that lifts its head story above story to the
skies. He has scarcely ever given to any of his plays a fifth
act, worthy of those that preceded; the interest generally
decreases after the third.

Shakespear is also liable to the charge of obscurity. The most
sagacious critics dispute to this very hour, whether Hamlet is or
is not mad, and whether Falstaff is a brave man or a coward.
This defect is perhaps partly to be imputed to the nature of
dramatic writing. It is next to impossible to make words, put
into the mouth of a character, develop all those things passing
in his mind, which it may be desirable should be known.

I spoke, a short time back, of the language of Shakespear in his
finest passages, as of unrivalled excellence and beauty; I might
almost have called it miraculous. O, si sic omnia! It is to be
lamented that this felicity often deserts him. He is not seldom
cramp, rigid and pedantic. What is best in him is eternal, of
all ages and times; but what is worst, is crusted with an
integument, almost more cumbrous than that of any other writer,
his contemporary, the merits of whose works continue to invite us
to their perusal.

After Shakespear, it is scarcely worth while to bring forward any
other example, of a writer who, notwithstanding his undoubted
claims to excellencies of the highest order, yet in his
productions fully displays the inequality and non-universality of
his genius. One of the most remarkable instances may be alleged
in Richardson, the author of Clarissa. In his delineation of
female delicacy, of high-souled and generous sentiments, of the
subtlest feelings and even mental aberrations of virtuous
distress strained beyond the power of human endurance, nothing
ever equalled this author. But he could not shape out the image
of a perfect gentleman, or of that winning gaiety of soul, which
may indeed be exemplified, but can never be defined, and never be
resisted. His profligate is a man without taste; and his
coquettes are insolent and profoundly revolting. He has no
resemblance of the art, so conspicuous in Fletcher and Farquhar,
of presenting to the reader or spectator an hilarity, bubbling
and spreading forth from a perennial spring, which we love as
surely as we feel, which communicates its own tone to the
bystander, and makes our very hearts dance within us with a
responsive sportiveness. We are astonished however that the
formal pedant has acquitted himself of his uncongenial task with
so great a display of intellectual wealth; and, though he has not
presented to us the genuine picture of an intellectual
profligate, or of that lovely gaiety of the female spirit which
we have all of us seen, but which it is scarcely possible to fix
and to copy, we almost admire the more the astonishing talent,
that, having undertaken a task for which it was so eminently
unfit, yet has been able to substitute for the substance so
amazing a mockery, and has treated with so much copiousness and
power what it was unfit ever to have attempted.

ESSAY IV.
OF THE DURABILITY OF HUMAN ACHIEVEMENTS AND PRODUCTIONS.

There is a view of the character of man, calculated more perhaps
than any other to impress us with reverence and awe.

Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his
natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him.

All other animals have but one object in view in their more
considerable actions, the supply of the humbler accommodations of
their nature. Man has a power sufficient for the accomplishment
of this object, and a residue of power beyond, which he is able,
and which he not unfrequently feels himself prompted, to employ
in consecutive efforts, and thus, first by the application and
arrangement of material substances, and afterward by the faculty
he is found to possess of giving a permanent record to his
thoughts, to realise the archetypes and conceptions which
previously existed only in his mind.

One method, calculated to place this fact strongly before us, is,
to suppose ourselves elevated, in a balloon or otherwise, so as
to enable us to take an extensive prospect of the earth on which
we dwell. We shall then see the plains and the everlasting
hills, the forests and the rivers, and all the exuberance of
production which nature brings forth for the supply of her living
progeny. We shall see multitudes of animals, herds of cattle and
of beasts of prey, and all the varieties of the winged tenants of
the air. But we shall also behold, in a manner almost equally
calculated to arrest our attention, the traces and the monuments
of human industry. We shall see castles and churches, and
hamlets and mighty cities. We shall see this strange creature,
man, subjecting all nature to his will. He builds bridges, and
he constructs aqueducts. He "goes down to the sea in ships," and
variegates the ocean with his squadrons and his fleets. To the
person thus mounted in the air to take a wide and magnificent
prospect, there seems to be a sort of contest between the face of
the earth, as it may be supposed to have been at first, and the
ingenuity of man, which shall occupy and possess itself of the
greatest number of acres. We cover immense regions of the globe
with the tokens of human cultivation.

Thus the matter stands as to the exertions of the power of man in
the application and arrangement of material substances.

But there is something to a profound and contemplative mind much
more extraordinary, in the effects produced by the faculty we
possess of giving a permanent record to our thoughts.

From the development of this faculty all human science and
literature take their commencement. Here it is that we most
distinctly, and with the greatest astonishment, perceive that man
is a miracle. Declaimers are perpetually expatiating to us upon
the shortness of human life. And yet all this is performed by
us, when the wants of our nature have already by our industry
been supplied. We manufacture these sublimities and everlasting
monuments out of the bare remnants and shreds of our time.

The labour of the intellect of man is endless. How copious is
the volume, and how extraordinary the variety, of our sciences
and our arts! The number of men is exceedingly great in every
civilised state of society, that make these the sole object of
their occupation. And this has been more or less the condition
of our species in all ages, ever since we left the savage and the
pastoral modes of existence.

From this view of the history of man we are led by an easy
transition to the consideration of the nature and influence of
the love of fame in modifying the actions of the human mind. We
have already stated it to be one of the characteristic
distinctions of our species to erect monuments which outlast the
existence of the persons that produced them. This at first was
accidental, and did not enter the design of the operator. The
man who built himself a shed to protect him from the inclemency
of the seasons, and afterwards exchanged that shed for a somewhat
more commodious dwelling, did not at first advert to the
circumstance that the accommodation might last, when he was no
longer capable to partake of it.

In this way perhaps the wish to extend the memory of ourselves
beyond the term of our mortal existence, and the idea of its
being practicable to gratify that wish, descended upon us
together. In contemplating the brief duration and the
uncertainty of human life, the idea must necessarily have
occurred, that we might survive those we loved, or that they
might survive us. In the first case we inevitably wish more or
less to cherish the memory of the being who once was an object of
affection to us, but of whose society death has deprived us. In
the second case it can scarcely happen but that we desire
ourselves to be kindly recollected by those we leave behind us.
So simple is the first germ of that longing after posthumous
honour, which presents us with so memorable effects in the page
of history.

But, previously to the further consideration of posthumous fame,
let us turn our attention for a moment to the fame, or, as in
that sense it is more usually styled, popularity, which is the
lot of a few favoured individuals while they live. The attending
to the subject in this point of view, will be found to throw
light upon the more extensive prospect of the question to which
we will immediately afterwards proceed.

Popularity is an acquisition more level to the most ordinary
capacities, and therefore is a subject of more general ambition,
than posthumous fame. It addresses itself to the senses.
Applause is a species of good fortune to which perhaps no mortal
ear is indifferent. The persons who constitute the circle in
which we are applauded, receive us with smiles of approbation and
sympathy. They pay their court to us, seem to be made happy by
our bare presence among them, and welcome us to their houses with
congratulation and joy. The vulgar portion of mankind scarcely
understand the question of posthumous fame, they cannot
comprehend how panegyric and honour can "soothe the dull, cold
ear of death:"  but they can all conceive the gratification to be
derived from applauding multitudes and loud huzzas.

One of the most obvious features however that attends upon
popularity, is its fugitive nature. No man has once been
popular, and has lived long, without experiencing neglect at
least, if he were not also at some time subjected to the very
intelligible disapprobation and censure of his fellows. The good
will and kindness of the multitude has a devouring appetite, and
is like a wild beast that you should stable under your roof,
which, if you do not feed with a continual supply, will turn
about and attack its protector.     

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,--
That all, with one consent, praise new-born gauds,
And give to dust, that is a little gilt,
More laud than they will give to gold o'erdusted.

Cromwel well understood the nature of this topic, when he said,
as we are told, to one of his military companions, who called his
attention to the rapturous approbation with which they were
received by the crowd on their return from a successful
expedition, "Ah, my friend, they would accompany us with equal
demonstrations of delight, if, upon no distant occasion, they
were to see us going to be hanged!"

The same thing which happens to the popularity attendant on the
real or imaginary hero of the multitude, happens also in the race
after posthumous fame.

As has already been said, the number of men is exceedingly great
in every civilised state of society, who make the sciences and
arts engendered by the human mind, the sole or the principal
objects of their occupation.

This will perhaps be most strikingly illustrated by a retrospect
of the state of European society in the middle, or, as they are
frequently styled, the dark ages.

It has been a vulgar error to imagine, that the mind of man, so
far as relates to its active and inventive powers, was sunk into
a profound sleep, from which it gradually recovered itself at the
period when Constantinople was taken by the Turks, and the books
and the teachers of the ancient Greek language were dispersed
through Europe. The epoch from which modern invention took its
rise, commenced much earlier. The feudal system, one of the most
interesting contrivances of man in society, was introduced in the
ninth century; and chivalry, the offspring of that system, an
institution to which we are mainly indebted for refinement of
sentiment, and humane and generous demeanour, in the eleventh.
Out of these grew the originality and the poetry of romance.

These were no mean advancements. But perhaps the greatest debt
which after ages have contracted to this remote period, arose out
of the system of monasteries and ecclesiastical celibacy. Owing
to these a numerous race of men succeeded to each other
perpetually, who were separated from the world, cut off from the
endearments of conjugal and parental affection, and who had a
plenitude of leisure for solitary application. To these men we
are indebted for the preservation of the literature of Rome, and
the multiplied copies of the works of the ancients. Nor were
they contented only with the praise of never-ending industry.
They forged many works, that afterwards passed for classical, and
which have demanded all the perspicacity of comparative criticism
to refute. And in these pursuits the indefatigable men who were
dedicated to them, were not even goaded by the love of fame.
They were satisfied with the consciousness of their own
perseverance and ingenuity.

But the most memorable body of men that adorned these ages, were
the Schoolmen. They may be considered as the discoverers of the
art of logic. The ancients possessed in an eminent degree the
gift of genius; but they have little to boast on the score of
arrangement, and discover little skill in the strictness of an
accurate deduction. They rather arrive at truth by means of a
felicity of impulse, than in consequence of having regularly gone
through the process which leads to it. The schools of the middle
ages gave birth to the Irrefragable and the Seraphic doctors, the
subtlety of whose distinctions, and the perseverance of whose
investigations, are among the most wonderful monuments of the
intellectual power of man. The thirteenth century produced
Thomas Aquinas, and Johannes Duns Scotus, and William Occam, and
Roger Bacon. In the century before, Thomas a Becket drew around
him a circle of literary men, whose correspondence has been
handed down to us, and who deemed it their proudest distinction
that they called each other philosophers. The Schoolmen often
bewildered themselves in their subtleties, and often delivered
dogmas and systems that may astonish the common sense of
unsophisticated understandings. But such is man. So great is
his persevering labour, his invincible industry, and the
resolution with which he sets himself, year after year, and
lustre after lustre, to accomplish the task which his judgment
and his zeal have commanded him to pursue.

But I return to the question of literary fame. All these men,
and men of a hundred other classes, who laboured most commendably
and gallantly in their day, may be considered as swept away into
the gulph of oblivion. As Swift humorously says in his
Dedication to Prince Posterity, "I had prepared a copious list of
Titles to present to your highness, as an undisputed argument of
the prolificness of human genius in my own time: the originals
were posted upon all gates and corner's of streets: but,
returning in a very few hours to take a review, they were all
torn down, and fresh ones put in their places. I enquired after
them among readers and booksellers, but in vain: the memorial of
them was lost among men; their place was no more to be found."

It is a just remark that had been made by Hume[5]: "Theories of
abstract philosophy, systems of profound theology, have prevailed
during one age. In a successive period these have been
universally exploded; their absurdity has been detected; other
theories and systems have supplied their place, which again gave
way to their successors; and nothing has been experienced more
liable to the revolutions of chance and fashion than these
pretended decisions of science. The case is not the same with
the beauties of eloquence and poetry. Just expressions of
passion and nature are sure, after a little time, to gain public
applause, which they maintain for ever. Aristotle and Plato and
Epicurus and Descartes may successively yield to each other: but
Terence and Virgil maintain an universal, undisputed empire over
the minds of men. The abstract philosophy of Cicero has lost its
credit: the vehemence of his oratory is still the object of our
admiration."

[5] Essays, Part 1, Essay xxiii.

A few examples of the instability of fame will place this
question in the clearest light.

Nicholas Peiresk was born in the year 1580. His progress in
knowledge was so various and unprecedented, that, from the time
that he was twenty-one years of age, he was universally
considered as holding the helm of learning in his hand, and
guiding the commonwealth of letters. He died at the age of
fifty-seven. The academy of the Humoristi at Rome paid the most
extraordinary honours to his memory; many of the cardinals
assisted at his funeral oration; and a collection of verses in
his praise was published in more than forty languages.

Salmasius was regarded as a prodigy of learning; and various
princes and powers entered into a competition who should be so
fortunate as to secure his residence in their states. Christina,
queen of Sweden, having obtained the preference, received him
with singular reverence and attention; and, Salmasius being taken
ill at Stockholm, and confined to his bed, the queen persisted
with her own hand to prepare his caudles, and mend his fire.
Yet, but for the accident of his having had Milton for his
adversary, his name would now be as little remembered, even by
the generality of the learned, as that of Peiresk.

Du Bartas, in the reign of Henry the Fourth of France, was one of
the most successful poets that ever existed. His poem on the
Creation of the World went through upwards of thirty editions in
the course of five or six years, was translated into most
European languages, and its commentators promised to equal in
copiousness and number the commentators on Homer.

One of the most admired of our English poets about the close of
the sixteenth century, was Donne. Unlike many of those trivial
writers of verse who succeeded him after an interval of forty or
fifty years, and who won for themselves a brilliant reputation by
the smoothness of their numbers, the elegance of their
conceptions, and the politeness of their style, Donne was full of
originality, energy and vigour. No man can read him without
feeling himself called upon for earnest exercise of his thinking
powers, and, even with the most fixed attention and application,
the student is often obliged to confess his inability to take in
the whole of the meaning with which the poet's mind was
perceptibly fraught. Every sentence that Donne writes, whether
in verse or prose, is exclusively his own. In addition to this,
his thoughts are often in the noblest sense of the word poetical;
and passages may be quoted from him that no English poet may
attempt to rival, unless it be Milton and Shakespear. Ben Jonson
observed of him with great truth and a prophetic spirit: "Donne
for not being understood will perish."  But this is not all. If
Waller and Suckling and Carew sacrificed every thing to the
Graces, Donne went into the other extreme. With a few splendid
and admirable exceptions, his phraseology and versification are
crabbed and repulsive. And, as poetry is read in the first place
for pleasure, Donne is left undisturbed on the shelf, or rather
in the sepulchre; and not one in an hundred even among persons of
cultivation, can give any account of him, if in reality they ever
heard of his productions.

The name of Shakespear is that before which every knee must bow.
But it was not always so. When the first novelty of his pieces
was gone, they were seldom called into requisition. Only three
or four of his plays were upon the acting list of the principal
company of players during the reign of Charles the Second; and
the productions of Beaumont and Fletcher, and of Shirley, were
acted three times for once of his. At length Betterton revived,
and by his admirable representation gave popularity to, Macbeth,
Hamlet and Lear, a popularity they have ever since retained. But
Macbeth was not revived (with music, and alterations by sir
William Davenant) till 1674; and Lear a few years later, with
love scenes and a happy catastrophe by Nahum Tate.

In the latter part of the reign of Charles the Second, Dryden and
Otway and Lee held the undisputed supremacy in the serious drama.

Such was the insensibility of the English public to nature, and
her high priest, Shakespear. The only one of their productions
that has survived upon the theatre, is Venice Preserved: and why
it has done so it is difficult to say; or rather it would be
impossible to assign a just and honourable reason for it. All
the personages in this piece are of an abandoned and profligate
character. Pierre is a man resolved to destroy and root up the
republic by which he was employed, because his mistress, a
courtesan, is mercenary, and endures the amorous visits of an
impotent old lecher. Jaffier, without even the profession of any
public principle, joins in the conspiracy, because he has been
accustomed to luxury and prodigal expence and is poor. He has
however no sooner entered into the plot, than he betrays it, and
turns informer to the government against his associates.
Belvidera instigates him to this treachery, because she cannot
bear the thought of having her father murdered, and is absurd
enough to imagine that she and her husband shall be tender and
happy lovers ever after. Their love in the latter acts of the
play is a continued tirade of bombast and sounding nonsense,
without one real sentiment, one just reflection, or one strong
emotion working from the heart, and analysing the nature of man.
The folly of this love can only be exceeded, by the abject and
despicable crouching and fawning of Jaffier to the man he had so
basely betrayed, and their subsequent reconciliation. There is
not a production in the whole realms of fiction, that has less
pretension to manly, or even endurable feeling, or to common
propriety. The total defect of a moral sense in this piece is
strongly characteristic of the reign in which it was written. It
has in the mean while a richness of melody, and a picturesqueness
of action, that enables it to delude, and that even draws tears
from the eyes of, persons who can be won over by the eye and the
ear, with almost no participation of the understanding. And this
unmeaning rant and senseless declamation sufficed for the time to
throw into shade those exquisite delineations of character, those
transcendent bursts of passion, and that perfect anatomy of the
human heart, which render the master-pieces of Shakespear a
property for all nations and all times.

While Shakespear was partly forgotten, it continued to be totally
unknown that he had contemporaries as inexpressibly superior to
the dramatic writers that have appeared since, as these
contemporaries were themselves below the almighty master of
scenic composition. It was the fashion to say, that Shakespear
existed alone in a barbarous age, and that all his imputed
crudities, and intermixture of what was noblest with unparalleled
absurdity and buffoonery, were to be allowed for to him on that
consideration.

Cowley stands forward as a memorable instance of the inconstancy
of fame. He was a most amiable man; and the loveliness of his
mind shines out in his productions. He had a truly poetic frame
of soul; and he pours out the beautiful feelings that possessed
him unreservedly and at large. He was a great sufferer in the
Stuart cause, he had been a principal member of the court of the
exiled queen; and, when the king was restored, it was a deep
sentiment among his followers and friends to admire the verses of
Cowley. He was "the Poet."  The royalist rhymers were set
lightly by in comparison with him. Milton, the republican, who,
by his collection published during the civil war, had shewn that
he was entitled to the highest eminence, was unanimously
consigned to oblivion. Cowley died in 1667; and the duke of
Buckingham, the author of the Rehearsal, eight years after, set
up his tomb in the cemetery of the nation, with an inscription,
declaring him to be at once "the Pindar, the Horace and Virgil of
his country, the delight and the glory of his age, which by his
death was left a perpetual mourner."--Yet--so capricious is fame
--a century has nearly elapsed, since Pope said,

Who now reads Cowley? If he pleases yet,
His moral pleases, not his pointed wit;
Forgot his epic, nay, Pindaric art,
But still I love the language of his heart.

As Cowley was the great royalist poet after the Restoration,
Cleveland stood in the same rank during the civil war. In the
publication of his works one edition succeeded to another, yearly
or oftener, for more than twenty years. His satire is eminently
poignant; he is of a strength and energy of thinking uncommonly
masculine; and he compresses his meaning so as to give it every
advantage. His imagination is full of coruscation and
brilliancy. His petition to Cromwel, lord protector of England,
when the poet was under confinement for his loyal principles, is
a singular example of manly firmness, great independence of mind,
and a happy choice of topics to awaken feelings of forbearance
and clemency. It is unnecessary to say that Cleveland is now
unknown, except to such as feel themselves impelled to search
into things forgotten.

It would be endless to adduce all the examples that might be
found of the caprices of fame. It has been one of the arts of
the envious to set up a contemptible rival to eclipse the
splendour of sterling merit. Thus Crowne and Settle for a time
disturbed the serenity of Dryden. Voltaire says, the Phaedra of
Pradon has not less passion than that of Racine, but expressed in
rugged verse and barbarous language. Pradon is now forgotten:
and the whole French poetry of the Augustan age of Louis the
Fourteenth is threatened with the same fate. Hayley for a few
years was applauded as the genuine successor of Pope; and the
poem of Sympathy by Pratt went through twelve editions. For a
brief period almost each successive age appears fraught with
resplendent genius; but they go out one after another; they set,
"like stars that fall, to rise no more."  Few indeed are endowed
with that strength of construction, that should enable them to
ride triumphant on the tide of ages.

It is the same with conquerors. What tremendous battles have
been fought, what oceans of blood have been spilled, by men who
were resolved that their achievements should be remembered for
ever! And now even their names are scarcely preserved; and the
very effects of the disasters they inflicted on mankind seem to
be swept away, as of no more validity than things that never
existed. Warriors and poets, the authors of systems and the
lights of philosophy, men that astonished the earth, and were
looked up to as Gods, even like an actor on the stage, have
strutted their hour, and then been heard of no more.

Books have the advantage of all other productions of the human
head or hand. Copies of them may be multiplied for ever, the
last as good as the first, except so far as some slight
inadvertent errors may have insinuated themselves. The Iliad
flourishes as green now, as on the day that Pisistratus is said
first to have stamped upon it its present order. The songs of
the Rhapsodists, the Scalds, and the Minstrels, which once seemed
as fugitive as the breath of him who chaunted them, repose in
libraries, and are embalmed in collections. The sportive sallies
of eminent wits, and the Table Talk of Luther and Selden, may
live as long as there shall be men to read, and judges to
appreciate them.

But other human productions have their date. Pictures, however
admirable, will only last as long as the colours of which they
are composed, and the substance on which they are painted. Three
or four hundred years ordinarily limit the existence of the most
favoured. We have scarcely any paintings of the ancients, and
but a small portion of their statues, while of these a great part
are mutilated, and various members supplied by later and inferior
artists. The library of Bufo is by Pope described,

          where busts of poets dead,
      And a true Pindar stood without a head.

Monumental records, alike the slightest and the most solid, are
subjected to the destructive operation of time, or to the being
removed at the caprice or convenience of successive generations.
The pyramids of Egypt remain, but the names of him who founded
them, and of him whose memory they seemed destined to perpetuate,
have perished together. Buildings for the use or habitation of
man do not last for ever. Mighty cities, as well as detached
edifices, are destined to disappear. Thebes, and Troy, and
Persepolis, and Palmyra have vanished from the face of the earth.

"Thorns and brambles have grown up in their palaces: they are
habitations for serpents, and a court for the owl."

There are productions of man however that seem more durable than
any of the edifices he has raised. Such are, in the first place,
modes of government. The constitution of Sparta lasted for seven
hundred years. That of Rome for about the same period.
Institutions, once deeply rooted in the habits of a people, will
operate in their effects through successive revolutions. Modes
of faith will sometimes be still more permanent. Not to mention
the systems of Moses and Christ, which we consider as delivered
to us by divine inspiration, that of Mahomet has continued for
twelve hundred years, and may last, for aught that appears,
twelve hundred more. The practices of the empire of China are
celebrated all over the earth for their immutability.

This brings us naturally to reflect upon the durability of the
sciences. According to Bailly, the observation of the heavens,
and a calculation of the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, in
other words, astronomy, subsisted in maturity in China and the
East, for at least three thousand years before the birth of
Christ: and, such as it was then, it bids fair to last as long
as civilisation shall continue. The additions it has acquired of
late years may fall away and perish, but the substance shall
remain. The circulation of the blood in man and other animals,
is a discovery that shall never be antiquated. And the same may
be averred of the fundamental elements of geometry and of some
other sciences. Knowledge, in its most considerable branches
shall endure, as long as books shall exist to hand it down to
successive generations.

It is just therefore, that we should regard with admiration and
awe the nature of man, by whom these mighty things have been
accomplished, at the same time that the perishable quality of its
individual monuments, and the temporary character and inconstancy
of that fame which in many instances has filled the whole earth
with its renown, may reasonably quell the fumes of an inordinate
vanity, and keep alive in us the sentiment of a wholsome
diffidence and humility.

ESSAY V.
OF THE REBELLIOUSNESS OF MAN.

There is a particular characteristic in the nature of the human
mind, which is somewhat difficult to be explained.

Man is a being of a rational and an irrational nature.

It has often been said that we have two souls. Araspes, in the
Cyropedia, adopts this language to explain his inconsistency, and
desertion of principle and honour. The two souls of man,
according to this hypothesis, are, first, animal, and, secondly,
intellectual.

But I am not going into any thing of this slight and every-day
character.

Man is a rational being. It is by this particular that he is
eminently distinguished from the brute creation. He collects
premises and deduces conclusions. He enters into systems of
thinking, and combines systems of action, which he pursues from
day to day, and from year to year. It is by this feature in his
constitution that he becomes emphatically the subject of history,
of poetry and fiction. It is by this that he is raised above the
other inhabitants of the globe of earth, and that the individuals
of our race are made the partners of "gods, and men like gods."

But our nature, beside this, has another section. We start
occasionally ten thousand miles awry. We resign the sceptre of
reason, and the high dignity that belongs to us as beings of a
superior species; and, without authority derived to us from any
system of thinking, even without the scheme of gratifying any
vehement and uncontrolable passion, we are impelled to do, or at
least feel ourselves excited to do, something disordinate and
strange. It seems as if we had a spring within us, that found
the perpetual restraint of being wise and sober insupportable.
We long to be something, or to do something, sudden and
unexpected, to throw the furniture of our apartment out at
window, or, when we are leaving a place of worship, in which
perhaps the most solemn feelings of our nature have been excited,
to push the grave person that is just before us, from the top of
the stairs to the bottom. A thousand absurdities, wild and
extravagant vagaries, come into our heads, and we are only
restrained from perpetrating them by the fear, that we may be
subjected to the treatment appropriated to the insane, or may
perhaps be made amenable to the criminal laws of our country.

A story occurs to me, which I learned from the late Dr. Parr at
Hatton, that may not unhappily illustrate the point I am
endeavouring to explain.

Dr. Samuel Clarke, rector of St. James's, Westminster, the
especial friend of Sir Isaac Newton, the distinguished editor of
the poems of Homer, and author of the Demonstration of the Being
and Attributes of God, was one day summoned from his study, to
receive two visitors in the parlour. When he came downstairs,
and entered the room, he saw a foreigner, who by his air seemed
to be a person of distinction, a professor perhaps of some
university on the continent; and an alderman of London, a
relation of the doctor, who had come to introduce the foreigner.
The alderman, a man of uncultivated mind and manners, and whom
the doctor had been accustomed to see in sordid attire,
surrounded with the incumbrances of his trade, was decked out for
the occasion in a full-dress suit, with a wig of majestic and
voluminous structure. Clarke was, as it appears, so much struck
with the whimsical nature of this unexpected metamorphosis, and
the extraordinary solemnity of his kinsman's demeanour, as to
have felt impelled, almost immediately upon entering the room, to
snatch the wig from the alderman's head, and throw it against the
ceiling: after which this eminent person immediately escaped,
and retired to his own apartment. I was informed from the same
authority, that Clarke, after exhausting his intellectual
faculties by long and intense study, would not unfrequently quit
his seat, leap upon the table, and place himself cross-legged
like a tailor, being prompted, by these antagonist sallies, to
relieve himself from the effect of the too severe strain he had
previously put upon his intellectual powers.

But the deviousness and aberration of our human faculties
frequently amount to something considerably more serious than
this.

I will put a case.

I will suppose myself and another human being together, in some
spot secure from the intrusion of spectators. A musket is
conveniently at hand. It is already loaded. I say to my
companion, "I will place myself before you; I will stand
motionless: take up that musket, and shoot me through the
heart."  I want to know what passes in the mind of the man to
whom these words are addressed.

I say, that one of the thoughts that will occur to many of the
persons who should be so invited, will be, "Shall I take him at
his word?"

There are two things that restrain us from acts of violence and
crime. The first is, the laws of morality. The second is, the
construction that will be put upon our actions by our
fellow-creatures, and the treatment we shall receive from
them.--I put out of the question here any particular value I may
entertain for my challenger, or any degree of friendship and
attachment I may feel for him.

The laws of morality (setting aside the consideration of any
documents of religion or otherwise I may have imbibed from my
parents and instructors) are matured within us by experience. In
proportion as I am rendered familiar with my fellow-creatures, or
with society at large, I come to feel the ties which bind men to
each other, and the wisdom and necessity of governing my conduct
by inexorable rules. We are thus further and further removed
from unexpected sallies of the mind, and the danger of suddenly
starting away into acts not previously reflected on and
considered.

With respect to the censure and retaliation of other men on my
proceeding, these, by the terms of my supposition, are left out
of the question.

It may be taken for granted, that no man but a madman, would in
the case I have stated take the challenger at his word. But what
I want to ascertain is, why the bare thought of doing so takes a
momentary hold of the mind of the person addressed?

There are three principles in the nature of man which contribute
to account for this.

First, the love of novelty.

Secondly, the love of enterprise and adventure. I become
insupportably wearied with the repetition of rotatory acts and
every-day occurrences. I want to be alive, to be something more
than I commonly am, to change the scene, to cut the cable that
binds my bark to the shore, to launch into the wide sea of
possibilities, and to nourish my thoughts with observing a train
of unforeseen consequences as they arise.

A third principle, which discovers itself in early childhood, and
which never entirely quits us, is the love of power. We wish to
be assured that we are something, and that we can produce notable
effects upon other beings out of ourselves. It is this
principle, which instigates a child to destroy his playthings,
and to torment and kill the animals around him.

But, even independently of the laws of morality, and the fear of
censure and retaliation from our fellow-creatures, there are
other things which would obviously restrain us from taking the
challenger in the above supposition at his word.

If man were an omnipotent being, and at the same time retained
all his present mental infirmities, it would be difficult to say
of what extravagances he would be guilty. It is proverbially
affirmed that power has a tendency to corrupt the best
dispositions. Then what would not omnipotence effect?

If, when I put an end to the life of a fellow-creature, all
vestiges of what I had done were to disappear, this would take
off a great part of the control upon my actions which at present
subsists. But, as it is, there are many consequences that "give
us pause."  I do not like to see his blood streaming on the
ground. I do not like to witness the spasms and convulsions of a
dying man. Though wounded to the heart, he may speak. Then what
may he chance to say? What looks of reproach may he cast upon
me? The musket may miss fire. If I wound him, the wound may be
less mortal than I contemplated. Then what may I not have to
fear? His dead body will be an incumbrance to me. It must be
moved from the place where it lies. It must be buried. How is
all this to be done by me? By one precipitate act, I have
involved myself in a long train of loathsome and heart-sickening
consequences.

If it should be said, that no one but a person of an abandoned
character would fail, when the scene was actually before him, to
feel an instant repugnance to the proposition, yet it will
perhaps be admitted, that almost every reader, when he regards it
as a supposition merely, says to himself for a moment, "Would I?
Could I?"

But, to bring the irrationality of man more completely to the
test, let us change the supposition. Let us imagine him to be
gifted with the powers of the fabled basilisk, "to monarchise, be
feared, and kill with looks."  His present impulses, his
passions, his modes of reasoning and choosing shall continue; but
his "will is neighboured to his act;" whatever he has formed a
conception of with preference, is immediately realised; his
thought is succeeded by the effect; and no traces are left
behind, by means of which a shadow of censure or suspicion can be
reflected on him.

Man is in truth a miracle. The human mind is a creature of
celestial origin, shut up and confined in a wall of flesh. We
feel a kind of proud impatience of the degradation to which we
are condemned. We beat ourselves to pieces against the wires of
our cage, and long to escape, to shoot through the elements, and
be as free to change at any instant the place where we dwell, as
to change the subject to which our thoughts are applied.

This, or something like this, seems to be the source of our most
portentous follies and absurdities. This is the original sin
upon which St. Austin and Calvin descanted. Certain Arabic
writers seem to have had this in their minds, when they tell us,
that there is a black drop of blood in the heart of every man, in
which is contained the fomes peccati, and add that, when Mahomet
was in the fourth year of his age, the angel Gabriel caught him
up from among his playfellows, and taking his heart from his
bosom, squeezed out of it this first principle of frailty, in
consequence of which he for ever after remained inaccessible to
the weaknesses of other men[6].

[6] Life of Mahomet, by Prideaux.

It is the observation of sir Thomas Browne: "Man is a noble
animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave."  One of the
most remarkable examples of this is to he found in the pyramids
of Egypt. They are generally considered as having been erected
to be the tombs of the kings of that country. They have no
opening by which for the light of heaven to enter, and afford no
means for the accommodation of living man. An hundred thousand
men are said to have been constantly employed in the building;
ten years to have been consumed in hewing and conveying the
stones, and twenty more in completing the edifice. Of the
largest the base is a square, and the sides are triangles,
gradually diminishing as they mount in the air. The sides of the
base are two hundred and twenty feet in length, and the
perpendicular height is above one hundred and fifty-five feet.
The figure of the pyramid is precisely that which is most
calculated for duration: it cannot perish by accident; and it
would require almost as much labour to demolish it, as it did to
raise it at first.

What a light does this fact convey into the inmost recesses of
the human heart! Man reflects deeply, and with feelings of a
mortified nature, upon the perishableness of his frame, and the
approaching close, so far as depends upon the evidence of our
senses, of his existence. He has indeed an irrepressible
"longing after immortality;" and this is one of the various and
striking modes in which he has sought to give effect to his
desire.

Various obvious causes might be selected, which should be
calculated to give birth to the feeling of discontent.

One is, the not being at home.

I will here put together some of the particulars which make up
the idea of home in the most emphatical sense of the word.

Home is the place where a man is principally at his ease. It is
the place where he most breathes his native air: his lungs play
without impediment; and every respiration brings a pure element,
and a cheerful and gay frame of mind. Home is the place where he
most easily accomplishes all his designs; he has his furniture
and materials and the elements of his occupations entirely within
his reach. Home is the place where he can be uninterrupted. He
is in a castle which is his in full propriety. No unwelcome
guests can intrude; no harsh sounds can disturb his
contemplations; he is the master, and can command a silence equal
to that of the tomb, whenever he pleases.

In this sense every man feels, while cribbed in a cabin of flesh,
and shut up by the capricious and arbitrary injunctions of human
communities, that he is not at home.

Another cause of our discontent is to be traced to the disparity
of the two parts of which we are composed, the thinking
principle, and the body in which it acts. The machine which
constitutes the visible man, bears no proportion to our thoughts,
our wishes and desires. Hence we are never satisfied; we always
feel the want of something we have not; and this uneasiness is
continually pushing us on to precipitate and abortive resolves.

I find in a book, entitled, Illustrations of Phrenology, by Sir
George Mackenzie, Baronet, the following remark. 'If this
portrait be correctly drawn, the right side does not quite agree
with the left in the region of ideality. This dissimilarity may
have produced something contradictory in the feelings of the
person it represents, which he may have felt extremely
annoying[7]."  An observation of this sort may be urged with
striking propriety as to the dissimilar attributes of the body
and the thinking principle in man.

[7] The remark thus delivered is applied to the portrait of the
author of the present volume.

It is perhaps thus that we are to account for a phenomenon, in
itself sufficiently obvious, that our nature has within it a
principle of boundless ambition, a desire to be something that we
are not, a feeling that we are out of our place, and ought to be
where we are not. This feeling produces in us quick and earnest
sallies and goings forth of the mind, a restlessness of soul, and
an aspiration after some object that we do not find ourselves
able to chalk out and define.

Hence comes the practice of castle-building, and of engaging the
soul in endless reveries and imaginations of something mysterious
and unlike to what we behold in the scenes of sublunary life.
Many writers, having remarked this, have endeavoured to explain
it from the doctrine of a preexistent state, and have said that,
though we have no clear and distinct recollection of what
happened to us previously to our being launched in our present
condition, yet we have certain broken and imperfect conceptions,
as if, when the tablet of the memory was cleared for the most
part of the traces of what we had passed through in some other
mode of being, there were a few characters that had escaped the
diligence of the hand by which the rest had been obliterated.

It is this that, in less enlightened ages of the world, led men
to engage so much of their thoughts upon supposed existences,
which, though they might never become subject to our organs of
vision, were yet conceived to be perpetually near us, fairies,
ghosts, witches, demons and angels. Our ancestors often derived
suggestions from these, were informed of things beyond the ken of
ordinary faculties, were tempted to the commission of forbidden
acts, or encouraged to proceed in the paths of virtue.

The most remarkable of these phenomena was that of necromancy,
sorcery and magic. There were men who devoted themselves to
"curious arts," and had books fraught with hidden knowledge.
They could "bedim

The noon-tide sun, call forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread, rattling thunder
They could give fire, and rift even Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt--graves at their command
Have waked their sleepers, oped and let them forth.

And of these things the actors in them were so certain, that many
witches were led to the stake, their guilt being principally
established on their own confessions. But the most memorable
matters in the history of the black art, were the contracts which
those who practised it not unfrequently entered into with the
devil, that he should assist them by his supernatural power for
ten or twenty years, and, in consideration of this aid, they
consented to resign their souls into his possession, when the
period of the contract was expired.

In the animal creation there are some species that may be tamed,
and others whose wildness is irreclaimable. Horace says, that
all men are mad: and no doubt mankind in general has one of the
features of madness. In the ordinary current of our existence we
are to a considerable degree rational and tractable. But we are
not altogether safe. I may converse with a maniac for hours; he
shall talk as soberly, and conduct himself with as much
propriety, as any other of the species who has never been
afflicted with his disease; but touch upon a particular string,
and, before you are aware of it, he shall fly out into the
wildest and most terrifying extravagances. Such, though in a
greatly inferior degree, are the majority of human beings.

The original impulse of man is uncontrolableness. When the
spirit of life first descends upon us, we desire and attempt to
be as free as air. We are impatient of restraint. This is the
period of the empire of will. There is a power within us that
wars against the restraint of another. We are eager to follow
our own impulses and caprices, and are with difficulty subjected
to those who believe they best know how to control inexperienced
youth in a way that shall tend to his ultimate advantage.

The most moderate and auspicious method in which the old may
endeavour to guide and control the pursuits of the young,
undoubtedly is by the conviction of the understanding. But this
is not always easy. It is not at all times practicable fully to
explain to the apprehension of a very young person the advantage,
which at a period a little more advanced he would be able clearly
to recognise.

There is a further evil appertaining to this view of the subject.

A young man even, in the early season of life, is not always
disposed to obey the convictions of his understanding. He has
prescribed to himself a task which returns with the returning
day; but he is often not disposed to apply. The very sense that
it is what he conceives to be an incumbent duty, inspires him
with reluctance.

An obvious source of this reluctance is, that the convictions of
our understanding are not always equally present to us. I have
entered into a deduction of premises, and arrived at a
conclusion; but some of the steps of the chain are scarcely
obvious to me, at the time that I am called upon to act upon the
conclusion I have drawn. Beside which, there was a freshness in
the first conception of the reasons on which my conduct was to be
framed, which, by successive rehearsals, and by process of time,
is no longer in any degree spirit-stirring and pregnant.

This restiveness and impracticability are principally incident to
us in the period of youth. By degrees the novelties of life wear
out, and we become sober. We are like soldiers at drill, and in
a review. At first we perform our exercise from necessity, and
with an ill grace. We had rather be doing almost any thing else.

By degrees we are reconciled to our occupation. We are like
horses in a manege, or oxen or dogs taught to draw the plough, or
be harnessed to a carriage. Our stubbornness is subdued; we no
longer exhaust our strength in vain efforts to free ourselves
from the yoke.

Conviction at first is strong. Having arrived at years of
discretion, I revolve with a sobered mind the different
occupations to which my efforts and my time may be devoted, and
determine at length upon that which under all the circumstances
displays the most cogent recommendations. Having done so, I
rouse my faculties and direct my energies to the performance of
my task. By degrees however my resolution grows less vigorous,
and my exertions relax. I accept any pretence to be let off, and
fly into a thousand episodes and eccentricities.

But, as the newness of life subsides, the power of temptation
becomes less. That conviction, which was at first strong, and
gradually became fainter and less impressive, is made by
incessant repetitions a part of my nature. I no more think of
doubting its truth, than of my own existence. Practice has
rendered the pursuits that engage me more easy, till at length I
grow disturbed and uncomfortable if I am withheld from them.
They are like my daily bread. If they are not afforded me, I
grow sick and attenuated, and my life verges to a close. The sun
is not surer to rise, than I am to feel the want of my stated
employment.

It is the business of education to tame the wild ass, the restive
and rebellious principle, in our nature. The judicious parent or
instructor essays a thousand methods to accomplish his end. The
considerate elder tempts the child with inticements and caresses,
that he may win his attention to the first rudiments of learning.

He sets before him, as he grows older, all the considerations and
reasons he can devise, to make him apprehend the advantage of
improvement and literature. He does his utmost to make his
progress easy, and to remove all impediments. He smooths the
path by which he is to proceed, and endeavours to root out all
its thorns. He exerts his eloquence to inspire his pupil with a
love for the studies in which he is engaged. He opens to him the
beauties and genius of the authors he reads, and endeavours to
proceed with him hand in hand, and step by step. He persuades,
he exhorts, and occasionally he reproves. He awakens in him the
love of excellence, the fear of disgrace, and an ambition to
accomplish that which "the excellent of the earth" accomplished
before him.

At a certain period the young man is delivered into his own
hands, and becomes an instructor to himself. And, if he is
blessed with an ingenuous disposition, he will enter on his task
with an earnest desire and a devoted spirit. No person of a
sober and enlarged mind can for a moment delude himself into the
opinion that, when he is delivered into his own hands, his
education is ended. In a sense to which no one is a stranger,
the education of man and his life terminate together. We should
at no period of our existence be backward to receive information,
and should at all times preserve our minds open to conviction.
We should through every day of our lives seek to add to the
stores of our knowledge and refinement. But, independently of
this more extended sense of the word, a great portion of the
education of the young man is left to the direction of the man
himself. The epoch of entire liberty is a dangerous period, and
calls upon him for all his discretion, that he may not make an
ill use of that, which is in itself perhaps the first of
sublunary blessings. The season of puberty also, and all the
excitements from this source, "that flesh is heir to," demand the
utmost vigilance and the strictest restraint. In a word, if we
would counteract the innate rebelliousness of man, that
indocility of mind which is at all times at hand to plunge us
into folly, we must never slumber at our post, but govern
ourselves with steady severity, and by the dictates of an
enlightened understanding. We must be like a skilful pilot in a
perilous sea, and be thoroughly aware of all the rocks and
quicksands, and the multiplied and hourly dangers that beset our
navigation.

In this Essay I have treated of nothing more than the inherent
restiveness and indocility of man, which accompany him at least
through all the earlier sections and divisions of his life. I
have not treated of those temptations calculated to lead him into
a thousand excesses and miseries, which originate in our lower
nature, and are connected with what we call the passion of love.
Nor have I entered upon the still more copious chapter, of the
incentives and provocations which are administered to us by those
wants which at all times beset us as living creatures, and by the
unequal distribution of property generally in civil society. I
have not considered those attributes of man which may serve
indifferently for good or for ill, as he may happen to be or not
to be the subject of those fiercer excitements, that will oft
times corrupt the most ingenuous nature, and have a tendency to
inspire into us subtle schemes and a deep contrivance. I have
confined myself to the consideration of man, as yet untamed to
the modes of civilised community, and unbroken to the steps which
are not only prescribed by the interests of our social existence,
but which are even in some degree indispensible to the
improvement and welfare of the individual. I have considered
him, not as he is often acted upon by causes and motives which
seem almost to compel him to vice, but merely as he is restless,
and impatient, and disdainful both of the control of others, and
the shackles of system.

For the same reason I have not taken notice of another species of
irrationality, and which seems to answer more exactly to the
Arabic notion of the fomes peccati, the black drop of blood at
the bottom of the heart. We act from motives apprehended by the
judgment; but we do not stop at them. Once set in motion, it
will not seldom happen that we proceed beyond our original mark.
We are like Othello in the play:

Our blood begins our safer guides to rule;  
And passion, having our best judgment quelled,  
Assays to lead the way.

This is the explanation of the greatest enormities that have been
perpetrated by man, and the inhuman deeds of Nero and Caligula.
We proceed from bad to worse. The reins of our discretion drop
from our hands. It fortunately happens however, that we do not
in the majority of cases, like Phaeton in the fable, set the
world on fire; but that, with ordinary men, the fiercest excesses
of passion extend to no greater distance than can be reached by
the sound of their voice.

ESSAY VI.
OF HUMAN INNOCENCE.

One of the most obvious views which are presented to us by man in
society is the inoffensiveness and innocence that ordinarily
characterise him.

Society for the greater part carries on its own organization.
Each man pursues his proper occupation, and there are few
individuals that feel the propensity to interrupt the pursuits of
their neighbours by personal violence. When we observe the quiet
manner in which the inhabitants of a great city, and, in the
country, the frequenters of the fields, the high roads, and the
heaths, pass along, each engrossed by his private contemplations,
feeling no disposition to molest the strangers he encounters, but
on the contrary prepared to afford them every courteous
assistance, we cannot in equity do less than admire the innocence
of our species, and fancy that, like the patriarchs of old, we
have fallen in with "angels unawares."

There are a few men in every community, that are sons of riot and
plunder, and for the sake of these the satirical and censorious
throw a general slur and aspersion upon the whole species.

When we look at human society with kind and complacent survey, we
are more than half tempted to imagine that men might subsist very
well in clusters and congregated bodies without the coercion of
law; and in truth criminal laws were only made to prevent the
ill-disposed few from interrupting the regular and inoffensive
proceedings of the vast majority.

From what disposition in human nature is it that all this
accommodation and concurrence proceed?

It is not primarily love. We feel in a very slight degree
excited to good will towards the stranger whom we accidentally
light upon in our path.

Neither is it fear.

It is principally forecast and prudence. We have a
sensitiveness, that forbids us for a slight cause to expose
ourselves to we know not what. We are unwilling to bc disturbed.

We have a mental vis inertiae, analogous to that quality in
material substances, by means of which, being at rest, they
resist being put into a state of motion. We love our security;
we love our respectability; and both of these may be put to
hazard by our rashly and unadvisedly thrusting ourselves upon the
course of another. We like to act for ourselves. We like to act
with others, when we think we can foresee the way in which the
proposed transaction will proceed, and that it will proceed to
our wish.

Let us put the case, that I am passing along the highway,
destitute and pennyless, and without foresight of any means by
which I am to procure the next meal that my nature requires.

The vagrant, who revolves in his mind the thought of extorting
from another the supply of which he is urgently in need, surveys
the person upon whom he meditates this violence with a
scrutinising eye. He considers, Will this man submit to my
summons without resistance, or in what manner will he repel my
trespass? He watches his eye, he measures his limbs, his
strength, and his agility. Though they have met in the deserts
of Africa, where there is no law to punish the violator, he knows
that he exposes himself to a fearful hazard; and he enters upon
his purpose with desperate resolve. All this and more must occur
to the man of violence, within the pale of a civilised community.

Begging is the mildest form in which a man can obtain from the
stranger he meets, the means of supplying his urgent necessities.

But, even here, the beggar knows that he exposes himself not only
to refusal, but to the harsh and opprobrious terms in which that
refusal may be conveyed. In this city there are laws against
begging; and the man that asks alms of me, is an offender against
the state. In country-towns it is usual to remark a notice upon
entering, to say, Whoever shall be found begging in this place,
shall be set in the stocks.

There are modes however in which I may accost a stranger, with
small apprehension that I shall be made to repent of it. I may
enquire of him my way to the place towards which my business or
my pleasure invites me. Ennius of old has observed, that lumen
de lumine, to light my candle at my neighbour's lamp, is one of
the privileges that the practices of civil society concede.

But it is not merely from forecast and prudence that we refrain
from interrupting the stranger in his way. We have all of us a
certain degree of kindness for a being of our own species. A
multitude of men feel this kindness for every thing that has
animal life. We would not willingly molest the stranger who has
done us no injury. On the contrary we would all of us to a
certain extent assist him, under any unforeseen casualty and
tribulation. A part therefore of the innocence that
characterises our species is to be attributed to philanthropy.

Childhood is diffident. Children for the most part are averse to
the addressing themselves to strangers, unless in cases where,
from the mere want of anticipation and reflection, they proceed
as if they were wholly without the faculty of making calculations
and deducing conclusions. The child neither knows himself nor
the stranger he meets in his path. He has not measured either
the one or the other. He does not know what the stranger may be
able, or may likely be prompted to do to him, nor what are his
own means of defence or escape. He takes refuge therefore in a
wary, sometimes an obstinate silence. It is for this reason that
a boy at school often appears duller and more inept, than would
be the amount of a fair proportion to what he is found to be when
grown up to a man.

As we improve in judgment and strength, we know better ourselves
and others, and in a majority of instances take our due place in
the ranks of society. We acquire a modest and cautious firmness,
yield what belongs to another, and assert what is due to
ourselves. To the last however, we for the most part retain the
inoffensiveness described in the beginning of this Essay.

How comes it then that our nature labours under so bitter an
aspersion? We have been described as cunning, malicious and
treacherous. Other animals herd together for mutual convenience;
and their intercourse with their species is for the most part a
reciprocation of social feeling and kindness. But community
among men, we are told, is that condition of human existence,
which brings out all our evil qualities to the face of day. We
lie in wait for, and circumvent each other by multiplied
artifices. We cannot depend upon each other for the truth of
what is stated to us; and promises and the most solemn
engagements often seem as if they were made only to mislead. We
are violent and deadly in our animosities, easily worked up to
ferocity, and satisfied with scarcely any thing short of
mutilation and blood. We are revengeful: we lay up an injury,
real or imaginary, in the store-house of an undecaying memory,
waiting only till we can repay the evil we have sustained
tenfold, at a time when our adversary shall be lulled in
unsuspecting security. We are rapacious, with no symptom that
the appetite for gain within us will ever be appeased; and we
practise a thousand deceits, that it may be the sooner, and to
the greater degree glutted. The ambition of man is unbounded;
and he hesitates at no means in the course it prompts him to
pursue. In short, man is to man ever the most fearful and
dangerous foe: and it is in this view of his nature that the
king of Brobdingnag says to Gulliver, "I cannot but conclude the
bulk of your race to be the most pernicious generation of little,
odious vermin, that were ever suffered to crawl upon the surface
of the earth."  The comprehensive faculties of man therefore, and
the refinements and subtlety of his intellect, serve only to
render him the more formidable companion, and to hold us up as a
species to merited condemnation.

It is obvious however that the picture thus drawn is greatly
overcharged, that it describes a very small part of our race, and
that even as to them it sets before us a few features only, and a
partial representation

History--the successive scenes of the drama in which individuals
play their part--is a labyrinth, of which no man has as yet
exactly seized the clue.

It has long since been observed, that the history of the four
great monarchies, of tyrannies and free states, of chivalry and
clanship, of Mahometanism and the Christian church, of the
balance of Europe and the revolution of empires, is little else
than a tissue of crimes, exhibiting nations as if they were so
many herds of ferocious animals, whose genuine occupation was to
tear each other to pieces, and to deform their mother-earth with
mangled carcases and seas of blood.

But it is not just that we should establish our opinion of human
nature purely from the records of history. Man is alternately
devoted to tranquillity and to violence. But the latter only
affords the proper materials of narration. When he is wrought
upon by some powerful impulse, our curiosity is most roused to
observe him. We remark his emotions, his energies, his tempest.
It is then that he becomes the person of a drama. And, where
this disquietude is not the affair of a single individual, but of
several persons together, of nations, it is there that history
finds her harvest. She goes into the field with all the
implements of her industry, and fills her storehouses and
magazines with the abundance of her crop. But times of
tranquillity and peace furnish her with no materials. They are
dismissed in a few slight sentences, and leave no memory  behind.

Let us divide this spacious earth into equal compartments, and
see in which violence, and in which tranquillity prevails. Let
us look through the various ranks and occupations of human
society, and endeavour to arrive at a conclusion of a similar
sort. The soldier by occupation, and the officer who commands
him, would seem, when they are employed in their express
functions, to be men of strife. Kings and ministers of state
have in a multitude of instances fallen under this description.
Conquerors, the firebrands of the earth, have sufficiently
displayed their noxious propensities.

But these are but a small part of the tenantry of the
many-peopled globe. Man lives by the sweat of his brow. The
teeming earth is given him, that by his labour he may raise from
it the means of his subsistence. Agriculture is, at least among
civilised nations, the first, and certainly the most
indispensible of professions. The profession itself is the
emblem of peace. All its occupations, from seed-time to harvest,
are tranquil; and there is nothing which belongs to it, that can
obviously be applied to rouse the angry passions, and place men
in a frame of hostility to each other. Next to the cultivator,
come the manufacturer, the artificer, the carpenter, the mason,
the joiner, the cabinet-maker, all those numerous classes of
persons, who are employed in forming garments for us to wear,
houses to live in, and moveables and instruments for the
accommodation of the species. All these persons are, of
necessity, of a peaceable demeanour. So are those who are not
employed in producing the conveniencies of life, but in
conducting the affairs of barter and exchange. Add to these,
such as are engaged in literature, either in the study of what
has already been produced, or in adding to the stock, in science
or the liberal arts, in the instructing mankind in religion and
their duties, or in the education of youth. "Civility," "civil,"
are indeed terms which express a state of peaceable occupation,
in opposition to what is military, and imply a tranquil frame of
mind, and the absence of contention, uproar and violence. It is
therefore clear, that the majority of mankind are civil, devoted
to the arts of peace, and so far as relates to acts of violence
innocent, and that the sons of rapine constitute the exception to
the general character.

We come into the world under a hard and unpalatable law, "In the
sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread."  It is a bitter decree
that is promulgated against us, "He that will not work, neither
shall he eat."  We all of us love to do our own will, and to be
free from the manacles of restraint. What our hearts "find us to
do," that we are disposed to execute "with all our might."  Some
men are lovers of strenuous occupation. They build and they
plant; they raise splendid edifices, and lay out pleasure-grounds
of mighty extent. Or they devote their minds to the acquisition
of knowledge; they

          ----outwatch the bear,
With thrice great Hermes, or unsphere
The spirit of Plato, to unfold
What worlds, or what vast regions hold
The immortal mind.

Others again would waste perhaps their whole lives in reverie and
idleness. They are constituted of materials so kindly and
serene, that their spirits never flag from want of occupation and
external excitement. They could lie for ever on a sunny bank, in
a condition divided between thinking and no thinking, refreshed
by the fanning breeze, viewing the undulations of the soil, and
the rippling of the brook, admiring the azure heavens, and the
vast, the bold, and the sublime figure of the clouds, yielding
themselves occasionally to "thick-coming fancies," and
day-dreams, and the endless romances of an undisciplined mind;

     And find no end, in wandering mazes lost.

But all men, alike the busy of constitution and the idle, would
desire to follow the impulses of their own minds, unbroken in
upon by harsh necessity, or the imperious commands of their
fellows.

We cannot however, by the resistless law of our existence, live,
except the few who by the accident of their birth are privileged
to draw their supplies from the labour of others, without
exerting ourselves to procure by our efforts or ingenuity the
necessaries of food, lodging and attire. He that would obtain
them for himself in an uninhabited island, would find that this
amounted to a severe tax upon that freedom of motion and thought
which would otherwise be his inheritance. And he who has his lot
cast in a populous community, exists in a condition somewhat
analogous to that of a negro slave, except that he may to a
limited extent select the occupation to which he shall addict
himself, or may at least starve, in part or in whole,
uncontroled, and at his choice. Such is, as it were, the
universal lot.

     'Tis destiny unshunnable like death:
      Even then this dire necessity falls on us,
      When we do quicken.

I go forth in the streets, and observe the occupations of other
men. I remark the shops that on every side beset my path. It is
curious and striking, how vast are the ingenuity and contrivance
of human beings, to wring from their fellow-creatures, "from the
hard hands of peasants" and artisans, a part of their earnings,
that they also may live. We soon become feelingly convinced,
that we also must enter into the vast procession of industry,
upon pain that otherwise,

     Like to an entered tide, they all rush by,
     And leave you hindmost: there you lie,
     For pavement to the abject rear, o'errun
     And trampled on.

It is through the effect of this necessity, that civilised
communities become what they are. We all fall into our ranks.
Each one is member of a certain company or squadron. We know our
respective places, and are marshaled and disciplined with an
exactness scarcely less than that of the individuals of a mighty
army. We are therefore little disposed to interrupt the
occupations of each other. We are intent upon the peculiar
employment to which we have become devoted. We "rise up early,
and lie down late," and have no leisure to trouble ourselves with
the pursuits of others. Hence of necessity it happens in a
civilised community, that a vast majority of the species are
innocent, and have no inclination to molest or interrupt each
other's avocations.

But, as this condition of human society preserves us in
comparative innocence, and renders the social arrangement in the
midst of which we exist, to a certain degree a soothing and
agreeable spectacle, so on the other hand it is not less true
that its immediate tendency is, to clip the wings of the thinking
principle within us, and plunge the members of the community in
which we live into a barren and ungratifying mediocrity. Hence
it should be the aim of those persons, who from their situation
have more or less the means of looking through the vast
assemblage of their countrymen, of penetrating "into the seeds"
of character, and determining "which grain will grow, and which
will not," to apply themselves to the redeeming such as are
worthy of their care from the oblivious gulph into which the mass
of the species is of necessity plunged. It is therefore an ill
saying, when applied in the most rigorous extent, "Let every man
maintain himself, and be his own provider: why should we help
him?"

The help however that we should afford to our fellow-men requires
of us great discernment in its administration. The deceitfulness
of appearances is endless. And nothing can well be at the same
time more lamentable and more ludicrous, than the spectacle of
those persons, the weaver, the thresher, and the mechanic, who by
injudicious patronage are drawn from their proper sphere, only to
exhibit upon a larger stage their imbecility and inanity, to shew
those moderate powers, which in their proper application would
have carried their possessors through life with respect,
distorted into absurdity, and used in the attempt to make us look
upon a dwarf, as if he were one of the Titans who in the
commencement of recorded time astonished the earth.

It is also true to a great degree, that those efforts of the
human mind are most healthful and vigorous, in which the
possessor of talents "administers to himself," and contends with
the different obstacles that arise,

               --------throwing them aside,
              And stemming them with hearts of controversy.

Many illustrious examples however may be found in the annals of
literature, of patronage judiciously and generously applied,
where men have been raised by the kindness of others from the
obscurest situations, and placed on high, like beacons, to
illuminate the world. And, independently of all examples, a
sound application of the common sense of the human mind would
teach us, that the worthies of the earth, though miracles, are
not omnipotent, and that a certain aid, from those who by counsel
or opulence are enabled to afford it, have oft times produced the
noblest effects, have carried on the generous impulse that works
within us, and prompted us manfully to proceed, when the weakness
of our nature was ready to give in from despair.

But the thing that in this place it was most appropriate to say,
is, that we ought not quietly to affirm, of the man whose mind
nature or education has enriched with extraordinary powers, "Let
him maintain himself, and be his own provider: why should we
help him?"  It is a thing deeply to be regretted, that such a man
will frequently be compelled to devote himself to pursuits
comparatively vulgar and inglorious, because he must live. Much
of this is certainly inevitable. But what glorious things might
a man with extraordinary powers effect, were he not hurried
unnumbered miles awry by the unconquerable power of
circumstances? The life of such a man is divided between the
things which his internal monitor strongly prompts him to do, and
those which the external power of nature and circumstances
compels him to submit to. The struggle on the part of his better
self is noble and admirable. The less he gives way, provided he
can accomplish the purpose to which he has vowed himself, the
more he is worthy of the admiration of the world. If, in
consequence of listening too much to the loftier aspirations of
his nature, he fails, it is deeply to be regretted--it is a man
to a certain degree lost--but surely, if his miscarriage be not
caused by undue presumption, or the clouds and unhealthful
atmosphere of self-conceit, he is entitled to the affectionate
sympathy and sorrow of every generous mind.

ESSAY VII.
OF THE DURATION OF HUMAN LIFE.

The active and industrious portion of the human species in
civilised countries, is composed of those who are occupied in the
labour of the hand, and in the labour of the head.

The following remarks expressly apply only to the latter of these
classes, principally to such as are occupied in productive
literature. They may however have their use to all persons a
considerable portion of whose time is employed in study and
contemplation, as, if well founded, they will form no unimportant
chapter in the science of the human mind.

In relation to all the members of the second class then, I should
say, that human life is made up of term and vacation, in other
words, of hours that may be intellectually employed, and of hours
that cannot be so employed.

Human life consists of years, months and days: each day contains
twenty-four hours. Of these hours how many belong to the
province of intellect?

"There is," as Solomon says, "a time for all things."  There must
be a time for sleep, a time for recreation, a time for exercise,
a time for supplying the machine with nourishment, and a time for
digestion. When all these demands have been supplied, how many
hours will be left for intellectual occupation?

These remarks, as I have said, are intended principally to apply
to the subject of productive literature. Now, of the hours that
remain when all the necessary demands of human life have been
supplied, it is but a portion, perhaps a small portion, that can
be beneficially, judiciously, employed in productive literature,
or literary composition.

It is true, that there are many men who will occupy eight, ten,
or twelve hours in a day, in the labour of composition. But it
may be doubted whether they are wisely so occupied.

It is the duty of an author, inasmuch as he is an author, to
consider, that he is to employ his pen in putting down that which
shall be fit for other men to read. He is not writing a letter
of business, a letter of amusement, or a letter of sentiment, to
his private friend. He is writing that which shall be perused by
as many men as can be prevailed on to become his readers. If he
is an author of spirit and ambition, he wishes his productions to
be read, not only by the idle, but by the busy, by those who
cannot spare time to peruse them but at the expence of some
occupations which ought not to be suspended without an adequate
occasion. He wishes to be read not only by the frivolous and the
lounger, but by the wise, the elegant, and the fair, by those who
are qualified to appreciate the merit of a work, who are endowed
with a quick sensibility and a discriminating taste, and are able
to pass a sound judgment on its beauties and defects. He
advances his claim to permanent honours, and desires that his
lucubrations should be considered by generations yet unborn.

A person, so occupied, and with such aims, must not attempt to
pass his crudities upon the public. If I may parody a celebrated
aphorism of Quintilian, I would say, "Magna debetur hominibus
reverentia[8]:" in other words, we should carefully examine what
it is that we propose to deliver in a permanent form to the taste
and understanding of our species. An author ought only to commit
to the press the first fruits of his field, his best and choicest
thoughts. He ought not to take up the pen, till he has brought
his mind into a fitting tone, and ought to lay it down, the
instant his intellect becomes in any degree clouded, and his
vital spirits abate of their elasticity.

[8] Mankind is to be considered with reverence.

There are extraordinary cases. A man may have so thoroughly
prepared himself by long meditation and study, he may have his
mind so charged with an abundance of thought, that it may employ
him for ten or twelve hours consecutively, merely to put down or
to unravel the conceptions already matured in his soul. It was
in some such way, that Dryden, we are told, occupied a whole
night, and to a late hour in the next morning, in penning his
Alexander's Feast. But these are the exceptions. In most
instances two or three hours are as much as an author can spend
at a time in delivering the first fruits of his field, his
choicest thoughts, before his intellect becomes in some degree
clouded, and his vital spirits abate of their elasticity.

Nor is this all. He might go on perhaps for some time longer
with a reasonable degree of clearness. But the fertility which
ought to be his boast, is exhausted. He no longer sports in the
meadows of thought, or revels in the exuberance of imagination,
but becomes barren and unsatisfactory. Repose is necessary, and
that the soil should be refreshed with the dews of another
evening, the sleep of a night, and the freshness and revivifying
influence of another morning.

These observations lead, by a natural transition, to the question
of the true estimate and value of human life, considered as the
means of the operations of intellect.

A primary enquiry under this head is as to the duration of life:
Is it long, or short?

The instant this question is proposed, I hear myself replied to
from all quarters: What is there so well known as the brevity of
human life? "Life is but a span."  It is "as a tale that is
told."  "Man cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he
fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not."  We are "as a
sleep; or as grass: in the morning it flourisheth, and groweth
up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth."

The foundation of this sentiment is obvious. Men do not live for
ever. The longest duration of human existence has an end: and
whatever it is of which that may be affirmed, may in some sense
be pronounced to be short. The estimation of our existence
depends upon the point of view from which we behold it. Hope is
one of our greatest enjoyments. Possession is something. But
the past is as nothing. Remorse may give it a certain solidity;
the recollection of a life spent in acts of virtue may be
refreshing. But fruition, and honours, and fame, and even pain,
and privations, and torment, when they ere departed, are but like
a feather; we regard them as of no account. Taken in this sense,
Dryden's celebrated verses are but a maniac's rant:

     To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have lived to-day:
         Be fair, or foul, or rain, or shine,
     The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate are mine.
        Not heaven itself upon the past has power,
     But what has been has been, and I have had my hour.

But this way of removing the picture of human life to a certain
distance from us, and considering those things which were once in
a high degree interesting as frivolous and unworthy of regard, is
not the way by which we shall arrive at a true and just
estimation of life. Whatever is now past, and is of little
value, was once present: and he who would form a sound judgment,
must look upon every part of our lives as present in its turn,
and not suffer his opinion to be warped by the consideration of
the nearness or remoteness of the object he contemplates.

One sentence, which has grown into a maxim for ever repeated, is
remarkable for the grossest fallacy: Ars longa, vita brevis[9].
I would fain know, what art, compared with the natural duration
of human life from puberty to old age, is long.

[9] Art is long; life is short.

If it is intended to say, that no one man can be expected to
master all possible arts, or all arts that have at one time or
another been the subject of human industry, this indeed is true.
But the cause of this does not lie in the limited duration of
human life, but in the nature of the faculties of the mind.
Human understanding and human industry cannot embrace every
thing. When we take hold of one thing, we must let go another.
Science and art, if we would pursue them to the furthest extent
of which we are capable, must be pursued without interruption.
It would therefore be more to the purpose to say, Man cannot be
for ever young. In the stream of human existence, different
things have their appropriate period. The knowledge of languages
can perhaps be most effectually acquired in the season of nonage.

At riper years one man devotes himself to one science or art, and
another man to another. This man is a mathematician; a second
studies music; a third painting. This man is a logician; and
that man an orator. The same person cannot be expected to excel
in the abstruseness of metaphysical science, and in the ravishing
effusions of poetical genius. When a man, who has arrived at
great excellence in one department of art or science, would
engage himself in another, he will be apt to find the freshness
of his mind gone, and his faculties no longer distinguished by
the same degree of tenacity and vigour that they formerly
displayed. It is with the organs of the brain, as it is with the
organs of speech, in the latter of which we find the tender
fibres of the child easily accommodating themselves to the
minuter inflections and variations of sound, which the more rigid
muscles of the adult will for the most part attempt in vain.

If again, by the maxim, Ars longa, vita brevis, it is intended to
signify, that we cannot in any art arrive at perfection; that in
reality all the progress we can make is insignificant; and that,
as St. Paul says, we must "not count ourselves to have already
attained; but that, forgetting the things that are behind, it
becomes us to press forward to the prize of our calling,"--this
also is true. But this is only ascribable to the limitation of
our faculties, and that even the shadow of perfection which man
is capable to reach, can only be attained by the labour of
successive generations. The cause does not lie in the shortness
of human life, unless we would include in its protracted duration
the privilege of being for ever young; to which we ought perhaps
to add, that our activity should never be exhausted, the
freshness of our minds never abate, and our faculties for ever
retain the same degree of tenacity and vigour, as they had in the
morning of life, when every thing was new, when all that allured
or delighted us was seen accompanied with charms inexpressible,
and, as Dryden expresses it[10], "the first sprightly running" of
the wine of life afforded a zest never after to be hoped for.

[10] Aurengzebe.

I return then to the consideration of the alleged shortness of
life. I mentioned in the beginning of this Essay, that "human
life consists of years, months and days; each day containing
twenty-four hours."  But, when I said this, I by no means carried
on the division so far as it might be carried. It has been
calculated that the human mind is capable of being impressed with
three hundred and twenty sensations in a second of time.[11]

[11] See Watson on Time, Chapter II.

"How infinitely rapid is the succession of thought! While I am
speaking, perhaps no two ideas are in my mind at the same time,
and yet with what facility do I slide from one to another! If my
discourse be argumentative, how often do I pass in review the
topics of which it consists, before I utter them; and, even while
I am speaking, continue the review at intervals, without
producing any pause in my discourse! How many other sensations
are experienced by me during this period, without so much as
interrupting, that is, without materially diverting, the train of
my ideas! My eye successively remarks a thousand objects that
present themselves. My mind wanders to the different parts of my
body, and receives a sensation from the chair on which I sit, or
the table on which I lean. It reverts to a variety of things
that occurred in the course of the morning, in the course of
yesterday, the most remote from, the most unconnected with, the
subject that might seem wholly to engross me. I see the window,
the opening of a door, the snuffing of a candle. When these most
perceptibly occur, my mind passes from one to the other, without
feeling the minutest obstacle, or being in any degree distracted
by their multiplicity[12]."

[12] Political Justice, Book IV, Chapter ix.

If this statement should appear to some persons too subtle, it
may however prepare us to form a due estimate of the following
remarks.

"Art is long."  No, certainly, no art is long, compared with the
natural duration of human life from puberty to old age. There is
perhaps no art that may not with reasonable diligence be acquired
in three years, that is, as to its essential members and its
skilful exercise. We may improve afterwards, but it will be only
in minute particulars, and only by fits. Our subsequent
advancement less depends upon the continuance of our application,
than upon the improvement of the mind generally, the refining of
our taste, the strengthening our judgment, and the accumulation
of our experience.

The idea which prevails among the vulgar of mankind is, that we
must make haste to be wise. The erroneousness of this notion
however has from time to time been detected by moralists and
philosophers; and it has been felt that he who proceeds in a
hurry towards the goal, exposes himself to the imminent risk of
never reaching it.

The consciousness of this danger has led to the adoption of the
modified maxim, Festina lente, Hasten, but with steps deliberate
and cautious.

It would however be a more correct advice to the aspirant, to
say, Be earnest in your application, but let your march be
vigilant and slow.

There is a doggrel couplet which I have met with in a book on
elocution:

     Learn to speak slow: all other graces
     Will follow in their proper places.

I could wish to recommend a similar process to the student in the
course of his reading.

Toplady, a celebrated methodist preacher of the last age,
somewhere relates a story of a coxcomb, who told him that he had
read over Euclid's Elements of Geometry one afternoon at his tea,
only leaving out the A's and B's and crooked lines, which seemed
to be intruded merely to retard his progress.

Nothing is more easy than to gabble through a work replete with
the profoundest elements of thinking, and to carry away almost
nothing, when we have finished.

The book does not deserve even to be read, which does not impose
on us the duty of frequent pauses, much reflecting and inward
debate, or require that we should often go back, compare one
observation and statement with another, and does not call upon us
to combine and knit together the disjecta membra.

It is an observation which has often been repeated, that, when we
come to read an excellent author a second and a third time, we
find in him a multitude of things, that we did not in the
slightest degree perceive in a first reading. A careful first
reading would have a tendency in a considerable degree to
anticipate this following crop.

Nothing is more certain than that a schoolboy gathers much of his
most valuable instruction when his lesson is not absolutely
before him. In the same sense the more mature student will
receive most important benefit, when he shuts his book, and goes
forth in the field, and ruminates on what he has read. It is
with the intellectual, as with the corporeal eye: we must retire
to a certain distance from the object we would examine, before we
can truly take in the whole. We must view it in every direction,
"survey it," as Sterne says, "transversely, then foreright, then
this way, and then that, in all its possible directions and
foreshortenings[13];" and thus only can it be expected that we
should adequately comprehend it.

[13] Tristram Shandy, Vol. IV, Chap. ii.

But the thing it was principally in my purpose to say is, that it
is one of the great desiderata of human life, not to accomplish
our purposes in the briefest time, to consider "life as short,
and art as long," and therefore to master our ends in the
smallest number of days or of years, but rather to consider it as
an ample field that is spread before us, and to examine how it is
to be filled with pleasure, with advantage, and with usefulness.
Life is like a lordly garden, which it calls forth all the skill
of the artist to adorn with exhaustless variety and beauty; or
like a spacious park or pleasure-ground, all of whose
inequalities are to be embellished, and whose various capacities
of fertilisation, sublimity or grace, are to be turned to
account, so that we may wander in it for ever, and never be
wearied.

We shall perhaps understand this best, if we take up the subject
on a limited scale, and, before we consider life in its assigned
period of seventy years, first confine our attention to the space
of a single day. And we will consider that day, not as it
relates to the man who earns his subsistence by the labour of his
hands, or to him who is immersed in the endless details of
commerce. But we will take the case of the man, the whole of
whose day is to be disposed of at his own discretion.

The attention of the curious observer has often been called to
the tediousness of existence, how our time hangs upon our hands,
and in how high estimation the art is held, of giving wings to
our hours, and making them pass rapidly and cheerfully away. And
moralists of a cynical disposition have poured forth many a
sorrowful ditty upon the inconsistency of man, who complains of
the shortness of life, at the same time that he is put to the
greatest straits how to give an agreeable and pleasant occupation
to its separate portions. "Let us hear no more," say these
moralists, "of the transitoriness of human existence, from men to
whom life is a burthen, and who are willing to assign a reward to
him that shall suggest to them an occupation or an amusement
untried before."

But this inconsistency, if it merits the name, is not an affair
of artificial and supersubtle refinement, but is based in the
fundamental principles of our nature. It is unavoidable that,
when we have reached the close of any great epoch of our
existence, and still more when we have arrived at its final term,
we should regret its transitory nature, and lament that we have
made no more effectual use of it. And yet the periods and
portions of the stream of time, as they pass by us, will often be
felt by us as insufferably slow in their progress, and we would
give no inconsiderable sum to procure that the present section of
our lives might come to an end, and that we might turn over a new
leaf in the volume of existence.

I have heard various men profess that they never knew the minutes
that hung upon their hands, and were totally unacquainted with
what, borrowing a term from the French language, we call ennui.
I own I have listened to these persons with a certain degree of
incredulity, always excepting such as earn their subsistence by
constant labour, or as, being placed in a situation of active
engagement, have not the leisure to feel apathy and disgust.

But we are talking here of that numerous class of human beings,
who are their own masters, and spend every hour of the day at the
choice of their discretion. To these we may add the persons who
are partially so, and who, having occupied three or four hours of
every day in discharge of some function necessarily imposed on
them, at the striking of a given hour go out of school, and
employ themselves in a certain industry or sport purely of their
own election.

To go back then to the consideration of the single day of a man,
all of whose hours are at his disposal to spend them well or ill,
at the bidding of his own judgment, or the impulse of his own
caprice.

We will suppose that, when he rises from his bed, he has sixteen
hours before him, to be employed in whatever mode his will shall
decide. I bar the case of travelling, or any of those schemes
for passing the day, which by their very nature take the election
out of his hands, and fill up his time with a perpetual motion,
the nature of which is ascertained from the beginning.

With such a man then it is in the first place indispensibly
necessary, that he should have various successive occupations.
There is no one study or intellectual enquiry to which a man can
apply sixteen hours consecutively, unless in some extraordinary
instances which can occur but seldom in the course of a life.
And even then the attention will from time to time relax, and the
freshness of mental zeal and activity give way, though perhaps,
after the lapse of a few minutes they may be revived and brought
into action again.

In the ordinary series of human existence it is desirable that,
in the course of the same day, a man should have various
successive occupations. I myself for the most part read in one
language at one part of the day, and in another at another. I am
then in the best health and tone of spirits, when I employ two or
three hours, and no more, in the act of writing and composition.
There must also in the sixteen hours be a time for meals. There
should be a time for fresh air and bodily exercise. It is in the
nature of man, that we should spend a part of every day in the
society of our fellows, either at public spectacles and places of
concourse, or in the familiar interchange of conversation with
one, two, or more persons with whom we can give ourselves up to
unrestrained communication. All human life, as I have said,
every day of our existence, consists of term and vacation; and
the perfection of practical wisdom is to interpose these one with
another, so as to produce a perpetual change, a well-chosen
relief, and a freshness and elastic tone which may bid defiance
to weariness.

Taken then in this point of view, what an empire does the man of
leisure possess in each single day of his life! He disposes of
his hours much in the same manner, as the commander of a company
of men whom it is his business to train in the discipline of war.

This officer directs one party of his men to climb a mountain,
and another to ford or swim a stream which rushes along the
valley. He orders this set to rush forward with headlong course,
and the other to wheel, and approach by circuitous progress
perhaps to the very same point. He marches them to the right and
the left. He then dismisses them from the scene of exercise, to
furbish their arms, to attend to their accoutrements, or to
partake of necessary refection. Not inferior to this is the
authority of the man of leisure in disposing of the hours of one
single day of his existence. And human life consists of many
such days, there being three hundred and sixty-five in each year
that we live.

How infinitely various may be the occupations of the life of man
from puberty to old age! We may acquire languages; we may devote
ourselves to arts; we may give ourselves up to the profoundness
of science. Nor is any one of these objects incompatible with
the others, nor is there any reason why the same man should not
embrace many. We may devote one portion of the year to
travelling, and another to all the abstractions of study. I
remember when I was a boy, looking forward with terror to the
ample field of human life, and saying, When I have read through
all the books that have been written, what shall I do afterwards?
And there is infinitely more sense in this, than in the ludicrous
exclamations of men who complain of the want of time, and say
that life affords them no space in which to act their imaginings.

On the contrary, when a man has got to the end of one art or
course of study, he is compelled to consider what he shall do
next. And, when we have gone through a cycle of as many
acquisitions, as, from the limitation of human faculties, are not
destructive of each other, we shall find ourselves frequently
reduced to the beginning some of them over again. Nor is this
the least agreeable occupation of human leisure. The book that I
read when I was a boy, presents quite a new face to me as I
advance in the vale of years. The same words and phrases suggest
to me a new train of ideas. And it is no mean pleasure that I
derive from the singular sensation of finding the same author and
the same book, old and yet not old, presenting to me cherished
and inestimable recollections, and at the same time communicating
mines of wealth, the shaft of which was till now unexplored.

The result then of these various observations is to persuade the
candid and ingenuous man, to consider life as an important and
ample possession, to resolve that it shall he administered with
as much judgment and deliberation as a person of true
philanthropy and wisdom would administer a splendid income, and
upon no occasion so much to think upon the point of in how short
a time an interesting pursuit is to be accomplished, as by what
means it shall be accomplished in a consummate and masterly
style. Let us hear no more, from those who have to a
considerable degree the command of their hours, the querulous and
pitiful complaint that they have no time to do what they ought to
do and would wish to do; but let them feel that they have a
gigantic store of minutes and hours and days and months,
abundantly sufficient to enable them to effect what it is
especially worthy of a noble mind to perform!

ESSAY VIII.
OF HUMAN VEGETATION.

There is another point of view from which we may look at the
subject of time as it is concerned with the business of human
life, that will lead us to conclusions of a very different sort
from those which are set down in the preceding Essay.

Man has two states of existence in a striking degree
distinguished from each other: the state in which he is found
during his waking hours; and the state in which he is during
sleep.

The question has been agitated by Locke and other philosophers,
"whether the soul always thinks," in other words, whether the
mind, during those hours in which our limbs lie for the most part
in a state of inactivity, is or is not engaged by a perpetual
succession of images and impressions. This is a point that can
perhaps never be settled. When the empire of sleep ceases, or
when we are roused from sleep, we are often conscious that we
have been to that moment busily employed with that sort of
conceptions and scenes which we call dreams. And at times when,
on waking, we have no such consciousness, we can never perhaps be
sure that the shock that waked us, had not the effect of driving
away these fugitive and unsubstantial images. There are men who
are accustomed to say, they never dream. If in reality the mind
of man, from the hour of his birth, must by the law of its nature
be constantly occupied with sensations or images (and of the
contrary we can never be sure), then these men are all their
lives in the state of persons, upon whom the shock that wakes
them, has the effect of driving away such fugitive and
unsubstantial images.--Add to which, there may be sensations in
the human subject, of a species confused and unpronounced, which
never arrive at that degree of distinctness as to take the shape
of what we call dreaming.

So much for man in the state of sleep.

But during our waking hours, our minds are very differently
occupied at different periods of the day. I would particularly
distinguish the two dissimilar states of the waking man, when the
mind is indolent, and when it is on the alert.

While I am writing this Essay, my mind may be said to be on the
alert. It is on the alert, so long as I am attentively reading a
book of philosophy, of argumentation, of eloquence, or of poetry.

It is on the alert, so long as I am addressing a smaller or a
greater audience, and endeavouring either to amuse or instruct
them. It is on the alert, while in silence and solitude I
endeavour to follow a train of reasoning, to marshal and arrange
a connected set of ideas, or in any other way to improve my mind,
to purify my conceptions, and to advance myself in any of the
thousand kinds of intellectual process. It is on the alert, when
I am engaged in animated conversation, whether my cue be to take
a part in the reciprocation of alternate facts and remarks in
society, or merely to sit an attentive listener to the facts and
remarks of others.

This state of the human mind may emphatically be called the state
of activity and attention.

So long as I am engaged in any of the ways here enumerated, or in
any other equally stirring mental occupations which are not here
set down, my mind is in a frame of activity.

But there is another state in which men pass their minutes and
hours, that is strongly contrasted with this. It depends in some
men upon constitution, and in others upon accident, how their
time shall be divided, how much shall be given to the state of
activity, and how much to the state of indolence.

In an Essay I published many years ago there is this passage.

"The chief point of difference between the man of talent and the
man without, consists in the different ways in which their minds
are employed during the same interval. They are obliged, let us
suppose, to walk from Temple-Bar to Hyde-Park-Corner. The dull
man goes straight forward; he has so many furlongs to traverse.
He observes if he meets any of his acquaintance; he enquires
respecting their health and their family. He glances perhaps the
shops as he passes; he admires the fashion of a buckle, and the
metal of a tea-urn. If he experiences any flights of fancy, they
are of a short extent; of the same nature as the flights of a
forest-bird, clipped of his wings, and condemned to pass the rest
of his life in a farm-yard. On the other hand the man of talent
gives full scope to his imagination. He laughs and cries.
Unindebted to the suggestions of surrounding objects, his whole
soul is employed. He enters into nice calculations; he digests
sagacious reasonings. In imagination he declaims or describes,
impressed with the deepest sympathy, or elevated to the loftiest
rapture. He makes a thousand new and admirable combinations. He
passes through a thousand imaginary scenes, tries his courage,
tasks his ingenuity, and thus becomes gradually prepared to meet
almost any of the many-coloured events of human life. He
consults by the aid of memory the books he has read, and projects
others for the future instruction and delight of mankind. If he
observe the passengers, he reads their countenances, conjectures
their past history, and forms a superficial notion of their
wisdom or folly, their virtue or vice, their satisfaction or
misery. If he observe the scenes that occur, it is with the eye
of a connoisseur or an artist. Every object is capable of
suggesting to him a volume of reflections. The time of these two
persons in one respect resembles; it has brought them both to
Hyde-Park-Corner. In almost every other respect it is
dissimilar;[14]."

[14] Enquirer, Part 1, Essay V.

This passage undoubtedly contains a true description of what may
happen, and has happened.

But there lurks in this statement a considerable error.

It has appeared in the second Essay of this volume, that there is
not that broad and strong line of distinction between the wise
man and the dull that has often been supposed. We are all of us
by turns both the one and the other. Or, at least, the wisest
man that ever existed spends a portion of his time in vacancy and
dulness; and the man, whose faculties are seemingly the most
obtuse, might, under proper management from the hour of his
birth, barring those rare exceptions from the ordinary standard
of mind which do not deserve to be taken into the account, have
proved apt, adroit, intelligent and acute, in the walk for which
his organisation especially fitted him[15].

[15] See above, Essay 3.

Many men without question, in a walk of the same duration as that
above described between Temple-Bar and Hyde-Park-Corner, have
passed their time in as much activity, and amidst as strong and
various excitements, as those enumerated in the passage above
quoted.

But the lives of all men, the wise, and those whom by way of
contrast we are accustomed to call the dull, are divided between
animation and comparative vacancy; and many a man, who by the
bursts of his genius has astonished the world, and commanded the
veneration of successive ages, has spent a period of time equal
to that occupied by a walk from Temple-Bar to Hyde-Park-Corner,
in a state of mind as idle, and as little affording materials for
recollection, as the dullest man that ever breathed the vital
air.

The two states of man which are here attempted to be
distinguished, are, first, that in which reason is said to fill
her throne, in which will prevails, and directs the powers of
mind or of bodily action in one channel or another; and,
secondly, that in which these faculties, tired of for ever
exercising their prerogatives, or, being awakened as it were from
sleep, and having not yet assumed them, abandon the helm, even as
a mariner might be supposed to do, in a wide sea, and in a time
when no disaster could be apprehended, and leave the vessel of
the mind to drift, exactly as chance might direct.

To describe this last state of mind I know not a better term that
can be chosen, than that of reverie. It is of the nature of what
I have seen denominated BROWN STUDY[16] a species of dozing and
drowsiness, in which all men spend a portion of the waking part
of every day of their lives. Every man must be conscious of
passing minutes, perhaps hours of the day, particularly when
engaged in exercise in the open air, in this species of
neutrality and eviration. It is often not unpleasant at the
time, and leaves no sinking of the spirits behind. It is
probably of a salutary nature, and may be among the means, in a
certain degree beneficial like sleep, by which the machine is
restored, and the man comes forth from its discipline
reinvigorated, and afresh capable of his active duties.

[16] Norris, and Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language.

This condition of our nature has considerably less vitality in
it, than we experience in a complete and perfect dream. In
dreaming we are often conscious of lively impressions, of a busy
scene, and of objects and feelings succeeding each other with
rapidity. We sometimes imagine ourselves earnestly speaking:
and the topics we treat, and the words we employ, are supplied to
us with extraordinary fluency. But the sort of vacancy and
inoccupation of which I here treat, has a greater resemblance to
the state of mind, without distinct and clearly unfolded ideas,
which we experience before we sink into sleep. The mind is in
reality in a condition, more properly accessible to feeling and
capable of thought, than actually in the exercise of either the
one or the other. We are conscious of existence and of little
more. We move our legs, and continue in a peripatetic state; for
the man who has gone out of his house with a purpose to walk,
exercises the power of volition when he sets out, but proceeds in
his motion by a semi-voluntary act, by a sort of vis inertiae,
which will not cease to operate without an express reason for
doing so, and advances a thousand steps without distinctly
willing any but the first. When it is necessary to turn to the
right or the left, or to choose between any two directions on
which he is called upon to decide, his mind is so far brought
into action as the case may expressly require, and no further.

I have here instanced in the case of the peripatetic: but of how
many classes and occupations of human life may not the same thing
be affirmed? It happens to the equestrian, as well as to him
that walks on foot. It occurs to him who cultivates the fruits
of the earth, and to him who is occupied in any of the thousand
manufactures which are the result of human ingenuity. It happens
to the soldier in his march, and to the mariner on board his
vessel. It attends the individuals of the female sex through all
their diversified modes of industry, the laundress, the
housemaid, the sempstress, the netter of purses, the knotter of
fringe, and the worker in tambour, tapestry and embroidery. In
all, the limbs or the fingers are employed mechanically; the
attention of the mind is only required at intervals; and the
thoughts remain for the most part in a state of non-excitation
and repose.

It is a curious question, but extremely difficult of solution,
what portion of the day of every human creature must necessarily
be spent in this sort of intellectual indolence. In the lower
classes of society its empire is certainly very great; its
influence is extensive over a large portion of the opulent and
luxurious; it is least among those who are intrusted in the more
serious affairs of mankind, and among the literary and the
learned, those who waste their lives, and consume the
midnight-oil, in the search after knowledge.

It appeared with sufficient clearness in the immediately
preceding Essay, that the intellect cannot be always on the
stretch, nor the bow of the mind for ever bent. In the act of
composition, unless where the province is of a very inferior
kind, it is likely that not more than two or three hours at a
time can be advantageously occupied. But in literary labour it
will often occur, that, in addition to the hours expressly
engaged in composition, much time may be required for the
collecting materials, the collating of authorities, and the
bringing together a variety of particulars, so as to sift from
the mass those circumstances which may best conduce to the
purpose of the writer. In all these preliminary and inferior
enquiries it is less necessary that the mind should be
perpetually awake and on the alert, than in the direct office of
composition. The situation is considerably similar of the
experimental philosopher, the man who by obstinate and
unconquerable application resolves to wrest from nature her
secrets, and apply them to the improvement of social life, or to
the giving to the human mind a wider range or a more elevated
sphere. A great portion of this employment consists more in the
motion of the hands and the opportune glance of the eye, than in
the labour of the head, and allows to the operator from time to
time an interval of rest from the momentous efforts of invention
and discovery, and the careful deduction of consequences in the
points to be elucidated.

There is a distinction, sufficiently familiar to all persons who
occupy a portion of their time in reading, that is made between
books of instruction, and books of amusement. From the student
of mathematics or any of the higher departments of science, from
the reader of books of investigation and argument, an active
attention is demanded. Even in the perusal of the history of
kingdoms and nations, or of certain memorable periods of public
affairs, we can scarcely proceed with any satisfaction, unless in
so far as we collect our thoughts, compare one part of the
narrative with another, and hold the mind in a state of activity.

We are obliged to reason while we read, and in some degree to
construct a discourse of our own, at the same time that we follow
the statements of the author before us. Unless we do this, the
sense and spirit of what we read will be apt to slip from under
our observation, and we shall by and by discover that we are
putting together words and sounds only, when we purposed to store
our minds with facts and reflections. We apprehended not the
sense of the writer even when his pages were under our eye, and
of consequence have nothing laid up in the memory after the hour
of reading is completed.

In works of amusement it is otherwise, and most especially in
writings of fiction. These are sought after with avidity by the
idle, because for the most part they are found to have the virtue
of communicating impressions to the reader, even while his mind
remains in a state of passiveness. He finds himself agreeably
affected with fits of mirth or of sorrow, and carries away the
facts of the tale, at the same time that he is not called upon
for the act of attention. This is therefore one of the modes of
luxury especially cultivated in a highly civilized state of
society.

The same considerations will also explain to us the principal
part of the pleasure that is experienced by mankind in all states
of society from public shews and exhibitions. The spectator is
not called upon to exert himself; the amusement and pleasure come
to him, while he remains voluptuously at his ease; and it is
certain that the exertion we make when we are compelled to
contribute to, and become in part the cause of our own
entertainment, is more than the human mind is willing to sustain,
except at seasons in which we are specially on the alert and
awake.

This is further one of the causes why men in general feel
prompted to seek the society of their fellows. We are in part no
doubt called upon in select society to bring our own information
along with us, and a certain vein of wit, humour or narrative,
that we may contribute our proportion to the general stock. We
read the newspapers, the newest publications, and repair to
places of fashionable amusement and resort; partly that we may at
least be upon a par with the majority of the persons we are
likely to meet. But many do not thus prepare themselves, nor
does perhaps any one upon all occasions.

There is another state of human existence in which we expressly
dismiss from our hands the reins of the mind, and suffer our
minutes and our hours to glide by us undisciplined and at random.

This is, generally speaking, the case in a period of sickness.
We have no longer the courage to be on the alert, and to
superintend the march of our thoughts. It is the same with us
for the most part when at any time we lie awake in our beds. To
speak from my own experience, I am in a restless and uneasy state
while I am alone in my sitting-room, unless I have some
occupation of my own choice, writing or reading, or any of those
employments the pursuit of which was chosen at first, and which
is more or less under the direction of the will afterwards. But
when awake in my bed, either in health or sickness, I am
reasonably content to let my thoughts flow on agreeably to those
laws of association by which I find them directed, without giving
myself the trouble to direct them into one channel rather than
another, or to marshal and actively to prescribe the various
turns and mutations they may be impelled to pursue.

It is thus that we are sick; and it is thus that we die. The man
that guides the operations of his own mind, is either to a
certain degree in bodily health, or in that health of mind which
shall for a longer or shorter time stand forward as the
substitute of the health of the body. When we die, we give up
the game, and are not disposed to contend any further. It is a
very usual thing to talk of the struggles of a man in articulo
mortis. But this is probably, like so many other things that
occur to us in this sublunary stage, a delusion. The bystander
mistakes for a spontaneous contention and unwillingness to die,
what is in reality nothing more than an involuntary contraction
and convulsion of the nerves, to which the mind is no party, and
is even very probably unconscious.--But enough of this, the final
and most humiliating state through which mortal men may be called
on to pass.

I find then in the history of almost every human creature four
different states or modes of existence. First, there is sleep.
In the strongest degree of contrast to this there is the frame in
which we find ourselves, when we write! or invent and steadily
pursue a consecutive train of thinking unattended with the
implements of writing, or read in some book of science or
otherwise which calls upon us for a fixed attention, or address
ourselves to a smaller or greater audience, or are engaged in
animated conversation. In each of these occupations the mind may
emphatically be said to be on the alert.

But there are further two distinct states or kinds of mental
indolence. The first is that which we frequently experience
during a walk or any other species of bodily exercise, where,
when the whole is at an end, we scarcely recollect any thing in
which the mind has been employed, but have been in what I may
call a healthful torpor, where our limbs have been sufficiently
in action to continue our exercise, we have felt the fresh breeze
playing on our cheeks, and have been in other respects in a frame
of no unpleasing neutrality. This may be supposed greatly to
contribute to our bodily health. It is the holiday of the
faculties: and, as the bow, when it has been for a considerable
time unbent, is said to recover its elasticity, so the mind,
after a holiday of this sort, comes fresh, and with an increased
alacrity, to those occupations which advance man most highly in
the scale of being.

But there is a second state of mental indolence, not so complete
as this, but which is still indolence, inasmuch as in it the mind
is passive, and does not assume the reins of empire. Such is the
state in which we are during our sleepless hours in bed; and in
this state our ideas, and the topics that successively occur,
appear to go forward without remission, while it seems that it is
this busy condition of the mind, and the involuntary activity of
our thoughts, that prevent us from sleeping.

The distinction then between these two sorts of indolence is,
that in the latter our ideas are perfectly distinct, are attended
with consciousness, and can, as we please, be called up to
recollection. This therefore is not what we understand by
reverie. In these waking hours which are spent by us in bed, the
mind is no less busy, than it is in sleep during a dream. The
other and more perfect sort of mental indolence, is that which we
often experience during our exercise in the open air. This is of
the same nature as the condition of thought which seems to be the
necessary precursor of sleep, and is attended with no precise
consciousness.

By the whole of the above statement we are led to a new and a
modified estimate of the duration of human life.

If by life we understand mere susceptibility, a state of
existence in which we are accessible at any moment to the onset
of sensation, for example, of pain--in this sense our life is
commensurate, or nearly commensurate, to the entire period, from
the quickening of the child in the womb, to the minute at which
sense deserts the dying man, and his body becomes an inanimate
mass.

But life, in the emphatical sense, and par excellence, is reduced
to much narrower limits. From this species of life it is
unavoidable that we should strike off the whole of the interval
that is spent in sleep; and thus, as a general rule, the natural
day of twenty-four hours is immediately reduced to sixteen.

Of these sixteen hours again, there is a portion that falls under
the direction of will and attention, and a portion that is passed
by us in a state of mental indolence. By the ordinary and least
cultivated class of mankind, the husbandman, the manufacturer,
the soldier, the sailor, and the main body of the female sex,
much the greater part of every day is resigned to a state of
mental indolence. The will does not actively interfere, and the
attention is not roused. Even the most intellectual beings of
our species pass no inconsiderable portion of every day in a
similar condition. Such is our state for the most part during
the time that is given to bodily exercise, and during the time in
which we read books of amusement merely, or are employed in
witnessing public shews and exhibitions.

That portion of every day of our existence which is occupied by
us with a mind attentive and on the alert, I would call life in a
transcendant sense. The rest is scarcely better than a state of
vegetation.

And yet not so either. The happiest and most valuable thoughts
of the human mind will sometimes come when they are least sought
for, and we least anticipated any such thing. In reading a
romance, in witnessing a performance at a theatre, in our idlest
and most sportive moods, a vein in the soil of intellect will
sometimes unexpectedly be broken up, "richer than all the tribe"
of contemporaneous thoughts, that shall raise him to whom it
occurs, to a rank among his species altogether different from any
thing he had looked for. Newton was led to the doctrine of
gravitation by the fall of an apple, as he indolently reclined
under the tree on which it grew. "A verse may find him, who a
sermon flies."  Polemon, when intoxicated, entered the school of
Xenocrates, and was so struck with the energy displayed by the
master, and the thoughts he delivered, that from that moment he
renounced the life of dissipation he had previously led, and
applied himself entirely to the study of philosophy. --But these
instances are comparatively of rare occurrence, and do not
require to be taken into the account.

It is still true therefore for the most part, that not more than
eight hours in the day are passed by the wisest and most
energetic, with a mind attentive and on the alert. The remainder
is a period of vegetation only. In the mean time we have all of
us undoubtedly to a certain degree the power of enlarging the
extent of the period of transcendant life in each day of our
healthful existence, and causing it to encroach upon the period
either of mental indolence or of sleep.--With the greater part of
the human species the whole of their lives while awake, with the
exception of a few brief and insulated intervals, is spent in a
passive state of the intellectual powers. Thoughts come and go,
as chance, or some undefined power in nature may direct,
uninterfered with by the sovereign will, the steersman of the
mind. And often the understanding appears to be a blank, upon
which if any impressions are then made, they are like figures
drawn in the sand which the next tide obliterates, or are even
lighter and more evanescent than this.

Let me add, that the existence of the child for two or three
years from the period of his birth, is almost entirely a state of
vegetation. The impressions that are made upon his sensorium
come and go, without either their advent or departure being
anticipated, and without the interference of the will. It is
only under some express excitement, that the faculty of will
mounts its throne, and exercises its empire. When the child
smiles, that act is involuntary; but, when he cries, will
presently comes to mix itself with the phenomenon. Wilfulness,
impatience and rebellion are infallible symptoms of a mind on the
alert. And, as the child in the first stages of its existence
puts forth the faculty of will only at intervals, so for a
similar reason this period is but rarely accompanied with memory,
or leaves any traces of recollection for our after-life.

There are other memorable states of the intellectual powers,
which if I did not mention, the survey here taken would seem to
be glaringly imperfect. The first of these is madness. In this
humiliating condition of our nature the sovereignty of reason is
deposed:

               Chaos umpire sits,
               And by decision more embroils the fray.

The mind is in a state of turbulence and tempest in one instant,
and in another subsides into the deepest imbecility; and, even
when the will is occasionally roused, the link which preserved
its union with good sense and sobriety is dissolved, and the
views by which it has the appearance of being regulated, are all
based in misconstruction and delusion.

Next to madness occur the different stages of spleen, dejection
and listlessness. The essence of these lies in the passiveness
and neutrality of the intellectual powers. In as far as the
unhappy sufferer could be roused to act, the disease would be
essentially diminished, and might finally be expelled. But long
days and months are spent by the patient in the midst of all
harassing imaginations, and an everlasting nightmare seems to sit
on the soul, and lock up its powers in interminable inactivity.
Almost the only interruption to this, is when the demands of
nature require our attention, or we pay a slight and uncertain
attention to the decencies of cleanliness and attire.

In all these considerations then we find abundant occasion to
humble the pride and vain-glory of man. But they do not overturn
the principles delivered in the preceding Essay respecting the
duration of human life, though they certainly interpose
additional boundaries to limit the prospects of individual
improvement.

ESSAY IX.
OF LEISURE.

The river of human life is divided into two streams; occupation
and leisure--or, to express the thing more accurately, that
occupation, which is prescribed, and may be called the business
of life, and that occupation, which arises contingently, and not
so much of absolute and set purpose, not being prescribed: such
being the more exact description of these two divisions of human
life, inasmuch as the latter is often not less earnest and intent
in its pursuits than the former.

It would be a curious question to ascertain which of these is of
the highest value.

To this enquiry I hear myself loudly and vehemently answered from
all hands in favour of the first. "This," I am told by unanimous
acclamation, "is the business of life."

The decision in favour of what we primarily called occupation,
above what we called leisure, may in a mitigated sense be
entertained as true. Man can live with little or no leisure, for
millions of human beings do so live: but the species to which we
belong, and of consequence the individuals of that species,
cannot exist as they ought to exist, without occupation.

Granting however the paramount claims that occupation has to our
regard, let us endeavour to arrive at a just estimate of the
value of leisure.

It has been said by some one, with great appearance of truth,
that schoolboys learn as much, perhaps more, of beneficial
knowledge in their hours of play, as in their hours of study.

The wisdom of ages has been applied to ascertain what are the
most desirable topics for the study of the schoolboy. They are
selected for the most part by the parent. There are few parents
that do not feel a sincere and disinterested desire for the
welfare of their children. It is an unquestionable maxim, that
we are the best judges of that of which we have ourselves had
experience; and all parents have been children. It is therefore
idle and ridiculous to suppose that those studies which have for
centuries been chosen by the enlightened mature for the
occupation of the young, have not for the most part been well
chosen. Of these studies the earliest consist in the arts of
reading and writing. Next follows arithmetic, with perhaps some
rudiments of algebra and geometry. Afterward comes in due order
the acquisition of languages, particularly the dead languages; a
most fortunate occupation for those years of man, in which the
memory is most retentive, and the reasoning powers have yet
acquired neither solidity nor enlargement. Such are the
occupations of the schoolboy in his prescribed hours of study.

But the schoolboy is cooped up in an apartment, it may be with a
number of his fellows. He is seated at a desk, diligently
conning the portion of learning that is doled out to him, or,
when he has mastered his lesson, reciting it with anxious brow
and unassured lips to the senior, who is to correct his errors,
and pronounce upon the sufficiency of his industry. All this may
be well: but it is a new and more exhilarating spectacle that
presents itself to our observation, when he is dismissed from his
temporary labours, and rushes impetuously out to the open air,
and gives free scope to his limbs and his voice, and is no longer
under the eye of a censor that shall make him feel his
subordination and dependence.

Meanwhile the question under consideration was, not in which
state he experienced the most happiness, but which was productive
of the greatest improvement.

The review of the human subject is conveniently divided under the
heads of body and mind.

There can be no doubt that the health of the body is most
promoted by those exercises in which the schoolboy is engaged
during the hours of play. And it is further to be considered
that health is required, not only that we may be serene,
contented and happy, but that we may be enabled effectually to
exert the faculties of the mind.

But there is another way, in which we are called upon to consider
the division of the human subject under the heads of body and
mind.

The body is the implement and instrument of the mind, the tool by
which most of its purposes are to be effected. We live in the
midst of a material world, or of what we call such. The greater
part of the pursuits in which we engage, are achieved by the
action of the limbs and members of the body upon external matter.

Our communications with our fellow-men are all of them carried on
by means of the body.

Now the action of the limbs and members of the body is infinitely
improved by those exercises in which the schoolboy becomes
engaged during his hours of play. In the first place it is to be
considered that we do those things most thoroughly and in the
shortest time, which are spontaneous, the result of our own
volition; and such are the exercises in which the schoolboy
engages during this period. His heart and soul are in what he
does. The man or the boy must be a poor creature indeed, who
never does any thing but as he is bid by another. It is in his
voluntary acts and his sports, that he learns the skilful and
effective use of his eye and his limbs. He selects his mark, and
he hits it. He tries again and again, effort after effort, and
day after day, till he has surmounted the difficulty of the
attempt, and the rebellion of his members. Every articulation
and muscle of his frame is called into action, till all are
obedient to the master-will; and his limbs are lubricated and
rendered pliant by exercise, as the limbs of the Grecian athleta
were lubricated with oil.

Thus he acquires, first dexterity of motion, and next, which is
of no less importance, a confidence in his own powers, a
consciousness that he is able to effect what he purposes, a
calmness and serenity which resemble the sweeping of the area,
and scattering of the saw-dust, upon which the dancer or the
athlete is to exhibit with grace, strength and effect.

So much for the advantages reaped by the schoolboy during his
hours of play as to the maturing his bodily powers, and the
improvement of those faculties of his mind which more immediately
apply to the exercise of his bodily powers.

But, beside this, it is indispensible to the well-being and
advantage of the individual, that he should employ the faculties
of his mind in spontaneous exertions. I do not object,
especially during the period of nonage, to a considerable degree
of dependence and control. But his greatest advancement, even
then, seems to arise from the interior impulses of his mind. The
schoolboy exercises his wit, and indulges in sallies of the
thinking principle. This is wholsome; this is fresh; it has
twice the quickness, clearness and decision in it, that are to be
found in those acts of the mind which are employed about the
lessons prescribed to him.

In school our youth are employed about the thoughts, the acts and
suggestions of other men. This is all mimicry, and a sort of
second-hand business. It resembles the proceeding of the
fresh-listed soldier at drill; he has ever his eye on his
right-hand man, and does not raise his arm, nor advance his foot,
nor move his finger, but as he sees another perform the same
motion before him. It is when the schoolboy proceeds to the
playground, that he engages in real action and real discussion.
It is then that he is an absolute human being and a genuine
individual.

The debates of schoolboys, their discussions what they shall do,
and how it shall be done, are anticipations of the scenes of
maturer life. They are the dawnings of committees, and vestries,
and hundred-courts, and ward-motes, and folk-motes, and
parliaments. When boys consult when and where their next
cricket-match shall be played, it may be regarded as the embryo
representation of a consult respecting a grave enterprise to be
formed, or a colony to be planted. And, when they enquire
respecting poetry and prose, and figures and tropes, and the
dictates of taste, this happily prepares them for the
investigations of prudence, and morals, and religious principles,
and what is science, and what is truth.

It is thus that the wit of man, to use the word in the old Saxon
sense, begins to be cultivated. One boy gives utterance to an
assertion; and another joins issue with him, and retorts. The
wheels of the engine of the brain are set in motion, and, without
force, perform their healthful revolutions. The stripling feels
himself called upon to exert his presence of mind, and becomes
conscious of the necessity of an immediate reply. Like the
unfledged bird, he spreads his wings, and essays their powers.
He does not answer, like a boy in his class, who tasks his
understanding or not, as the whim of the moment shall prompt him,
where one boy honestly performs to the extent of his ability, and
others disdain the empire assumed over them, and get off as
cheaply as they can. He is no longer under review, but is
engaged in real action. The debate of the schoolboy is the
combat of the intellectual gladiator, where he fences and parries
and thrusts with all the skill and judgment he possesses.

There is another way in which the schoolboy exercises his powers
during his periods of leisure. He is often in society; but he is
ever and anon in solitude. At no period of human life are our
reveries so free and untrammeled, as at the period here spoken
of. He climbs the mountain-cliff; and penetrates into the depths
of the woods. His joints are well strung; he is a stranger to
fatigue. He rushes down the precipice, and mounts again with
ease, as though he had the wings of a bird. He ruminates, and
pursues his own trains of reflection and discovery, "exhausting
worlds," as it appears to him, "and then imagining new."  He
hovers on the brink of the deepest philosophy, enquiring how came
I here, and to what end. He becomes a castle-builder,
constructing imaginary colleges and states, and searching out the
businesses in which they are to be employed, and the schemes by
which they are to be regulated. He thinks what he would do, if
he possessed uncontrolable strength, if he could fly, if he could
make himself invisible. In this train of mind he cons his first
lessons of liberty and independence. He learns self-reverence,
and says to himself, I also am an artist, and a maker. He
ruffles himself under the yoke, and feels that he suffers foul
tyranny when he is driven, and when brute force is exercised upon
him, to compel him to a certain course, or to chastise his
faults, imputed or real.

Such are the benefits of leisure to the schoolboy: and they are
not less to man when arrived at years of discretion. It is good
for us to have some regular and stated occupation. Man may be
practically too free; this is frequently the case with those who
have been nurtured in the lap of opulence and luxury. We were
sent into the world under the condition, "In the sweat of thy
brow shalt thou eat bread."  And those who, by the artificial
institutions of society, are discharged from this necessity, are
placed in a critical and perilous situation. They are bound, if
they would consult their own well-being, to contrive for
themselves a factitious necessity, that may stand them in the
place of that necessity which is imposed without appeal on the
vast majority of their brethren.

But, if it is desirable that every man should have some regular
and stated occupation, so it is certainly not less desirable,
that every man should have his seasons of relaxation and leisure.

Unhappy is the wretch, whose condition it is to be perpetually
bound to the oar, and who is condemned to labour in one certain
mode, during all the hours that are not claimed by sleep, or as
long as the muscles of his frame, or the fibres of his fingers
will enable him to persevere. "Apollo himself," says the poet,
"does not always bend the bow."  There should be a season, when
the mind is free as air, when not only we should follow without
restraint any train of thinking or action, within the bounds of
sobriety, and that is not attended with injury to others, that
our own minds may suggest to us, but should sacrifice at the
shrine of intellectual liberty, and spread our wings, and take
our flight into untried regions. It is good for man that he
should feel himself at some time unshackled and autocratical,
that he should say, This I do, because it is prescribed to me by
the conditions without which I cannot exist, or by the election
which in past time I deliberately made; and this, because it is
dictated by the present frame of my spirit, and is therefore that
in which the powers my nature has entailed upon me may be most
fully manifested. In addition to which we are to consider, that
a certain variety and mutation of employments is best adapted to
humanity. When my mind or my body seems to be overwrought by one
species of occupation, the substitution of another will often
impart to me new life, and make me feel as fresh as if no labour
had before engaged me. For all these reasons it is to be
desired, that we should possess the inestimable privilege of
leisure, that in the revolving hours of every day a period should
arrive, at which we should lay down the weapons of our labour,
and engage in a sport that may be no less active and strenuous
than the occupation which preceded it.

A question, which deserves our attention in this place, is, how
much of every day it behoves us to give to regular and stated
occupation, and how much is the just and legitimate province of
leisure. It has been remarked in a preceding Essay[17], that, if
my main and leading pursuit is literary composition, two or three
hours in the twenty-four will often be as much as can
advantageously and effectually be so employed. But this will
unavoidably vary according to the nature of the occupation: the
period above named may be taken as the MINIMUM.

[17]  See above, Essay 7.

Such, let us say, is the portion of time which the man of letters
is called on to devote to literary composition.

It may next be fitting to enquire as to the humbler classes of
society, and those persons who are engaged in the labour of the
hands, how much time they ought to be expected to consume in
their regular and stated occupations, and how much would remain
to them for relaxation and leisure. It has been said[18], that
half an hour in the day given by every member of the community to
manual labour, might be sufficient for supplying the whole with
the absolute necessaries of life. But there are various
considerations that would inevitably lengthen this period. In a
community which has made any considerable advance in the race of
civilisation, many individuals must be expected to be excused
from any portion of manual labour. It is not desirable that any
community should be contented to supply itself with necessaries
only. There are many refinements in life, and many advances in
literature and the arts, which indispensibly conduce to the
rendering man in society a nobler and more exalted creature than
he could otherwise be; and these ought not to be consigned to
neglect.

[18] Political Justice, Book VIII, Chap. VI.

On the other hand however it is certain, that much of the
ostentation and a multitude of the luxuries which subsist in
European and Asiatic society are just topics of regret, and that,
if ever those improvements in civilisation take place which
philosophy has essayed to delineate, there would be a great
abridgment of the manual labour that we now see around us, and
the humbler classes of the community would enter into the
inheritance of a more considerable portion of leisure than at
present falls to their lot.

But it has been much the habit, for persons not belonging to the
humbler classes of the community, and who profess to speculate
upon the genuine interests of human society, to suppose, however
certain intervals of leisure may conduce to the benefit of men
whose tastes have been cultivated and refined, and who from
education have many resources of literature and reflection at all
times at their beck, yet that leisure might prove rather
pernicious than otherwise to the uneducated and the ignorant.
Let us enquire then how these persons would be likely to employ
the remainder of their time, if they had a greater portion of
leisure than they at present enjoy.--I would add, that the
individuals of the humbler classes of the community need not for
ever to merit the appellation of the uneducated and ignorant.

In the first place, they would engage, like the schoolboy, in
active sports, thereby giving to their limbs, which, in rural
occupation and mechanical labour, are somewhat too monotonously
employed, and contract the stiffness and experience the waste of
a premature old age, the activity and freedom of an athlete, a
cricketer, or a hunter. Nor do these occupations only conduce to
the health of the body, they also impart a spirit and a juvenile
earnestness to the mind.

In the next place, they may be expected to devote a part of the
day, more than they do at present, to their wives and families,
cultivating the domestic affections, watching the expanding
bodies and minds of their children, leading them on in the road
of improvement, warning them against the perils with which they
are surrounded, and observing with somewhat of a more jealous and
parental care, what it is for which by their individual qualities
they are best adapted, and in what particular walk of life they
may most advantageously be engaged. The father and the son would
grow in a much greater degree friends, anticipating each other's
wishes, and sympathising in each other's pleasures and pains.

Thirdly, one infallible consequence of a greater degree of
leisure in the lower classes would be that reading would become a
more common propensity and amusement. It is the aphorism of one
of the most enlightened of my contemporaries, "The schoolmaster
is abroad:" and many more than at present would desire to store
up in their little hoard a certain portion of the general
improvement. We should no longer have occasion to say,

     But knowledge to their eyes her ample page,      
      Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unrol.

Nor should we be incited to fear that ever wakeful anticipation
of the illiberal, that, by the too great diffusion of the wisdom
of the wise, we might cease to have a race of men adapted to the
ordinary pursuits of life. Our ploughmen and artificers, who
obtained the improvements of intellect through the medium of
leisure, would have already received their destination, and
formed their habits, and would be disposed to consider the new
lights that were opened upon them, as the ornament of existence,
not its substance. Add to which, as leisure became more
abundant, and the opportunities of intellectual improvement
increased, they would have less motive to repine at their lot.
It is principally while knowledge and information are new, that
they are likely to intoxicate the brain of those to whose share
they have fallen; and, when they are made a common stock upon
which all men may draw, sound thinking and sobriety may be
expected to be the general result.

One of the scenes to which the leisure of the laborious classes
is seen to induce them to resort, is the public-house; and it is
inferred that, if their leisure were greater, a greater degree of
drunkenness, dissipation and riot would inevitably prevail.

In answer to this anticipation, I would in the first place
assert, that the merits and demerits of the public-house are very
unjustly rated by the fastidious among the more favoured orders
of society.

We ought to consider that the opportunities and amusements of the
lower orders of society are few. They do not frequent
coffee-houses; theatres and places of public exhibition are
ordinarily too expensive for them; and they cannot engage in
rounds of visiting, thus cultivating a private and familiar
intercourse with the few whose conversation might be most
congenial to them. We certainly bear hard upon persons in this
rank of society, if we expect that they should take all the
severer labour, and have no periods of unbending and amusement.

But in reality what occurs in the public-house we are too much in
the habit of calumniating. If we would visit this scene, we
should find it pretty extensively a theatre of eager and earnest
discussion. It is here that the ardent and "unwashed artificer,"
and the sturdy husbandman, compare notes and measure wits with
each other. It is their arena of intellectual combat, the ludus
literarius of their unrefined university. It is here they learn
to think. Their minds are awakened from the sleep of ignorance;
and their attention is turned into a thousand channels of
improvement. They study the art of speaking, of question,
allegation and rejoinder. They fix their thought steadily on the
statement that is made, acknowledge its force, or detect its
insufficiency. They examine the most interesting topics, and
form opinions the result of that examination. They learn maxims
of life, and become politicians. They canvas the civil and
criminal laws of their country, and learn the value of political
liberty. They talk over measures of state, judge of the
intentions, sagacity and sincerity of public men, and are likely
in time to become in no contemptible degree capable of estimating
what modes of conducting national affairs, whether for the
preservation of the rights of all, or for the vindication and
assertion of justice between man and man, may be expected to be
crowned with the greatest success: in a word, they thus become,
in the best sense of the word, citizens.

As to excess in drinking, the same thing may be expected to occur
here, as has been remarked of late years in better company in
England. In proportion as the understanding is cultivated, men
are found to be less the victims of drinking and the grosser
provocatives of sense. The king of Persia of old made it his
boast that he could drink large quantities of liquor with greater
impunity than any of his subjects. Such was not the case with
the more polished Greeks. In the dark ages the most glaring
enormities of that kind prevailed. Under our Charles the Second
coarse dissipation and riot characterised the highest circles.
Rochester, the most accomplished man and the greatest wit of our
island, related of himself that, for five years together, he
could not affirm that for any one day he had been thoroughly
sober. In Ireland, a country less refined than our own, the
period is not long past, when on convivial occasions the master
of the house took the key from his door, that no one of his
guests might escape without having had his dose. No small number
of the contemporaries of my youth fell premature victims to the
intemperance which was then practised. Now wine is merely used
to excite a gayer and livelier tone of the spirits; and inebriety
is scarcely known in the higher circles. In like manner, it may
readily be believed that, as men in the lower classes of society
become less ignorant and obtuse, as their thoughts are less
gross, as they wear off the vestigia ruris, the remains of a
barbarous state, they will find less need to set their spirits
afloat by this animal excitement, and will devote themselves to
those thoughts and that intercourse which shall inspire them with
better and more honourable thoughts of our common nature.

ESSAY X.
OF IMITATION AND INVENTION.

Of the sayings of the wise men of former times none has been
oftener repeated than that of Solomon, "The thing that hath been,
is that which is; and that which is done, is that which shall be
done; and there is no new thing under the sun."

The books of the Old Testament are apparently a collection of the
whole literary remains of an ancient and memorable people, whose
wisdom may furnish instruction to us, and whose poetry abounds in
lofty flights and sublime imagery. How this collection came
indiscriminately to be considered as written by divine
inspiration, it is difficult to pronounce. The history of the
Jews, as contained in the Books of Kings and of Chronicles,
certainly did not require the interposition of the Almighty for
its production; and the pieces we receive as the compositions of
Solomon have conspicuously the air of having emanated from a
conception entirely human.

In the book of Ecclesiastes, from which the above sentence is
taken, are many sentiments not in accordance with the religion of
Christ. For example; "That which befalleth the sons of men,
befalleth beasts; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they
have all one breath, so that a man hath no preeminence above a
beast: all go to one place; all are of the dust, and turn to
dust again. Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better,
than that a man should rejoice in his works."  And again, "The
living know that they shall die; but the dead know not any thing;
their love, and their hatred, and their envy are perished;
neither have they any more a reward."  Add to this, "Wherefore I
praise the dead which are already dead, more than the living
which are yet alive: yea, better is he than both they, which
hath not yet been."  There can therefore be no just exception
taken against our allowing ourselves freely to canvas the maxim
cited at the head of this Essay.

It certainly contains a sufficient quantity of unquestionable
truth, to induce us to regard it as springing from profound
observation, and comprehensive views of what is acted "under the
sun."

A wise man would look at the labours of his own species, in much
the same spirit as he would view an ant-hill through a
microscope. He would see them tugging a grain of corn up a
declivity; he would see the tracks that are made by those who go,
and who return; their incessant activity; and would find one day
the copy of that which went before; and their labours ending in
nothing: I mean, in nothing that shall carry forward the
improvement of the head and the heart, either in the individual
or society, or that shall add to the conveniences of life, or the
better providing for the welfare of communities of men. He would
smile at their earnestness and zeal, all spent in supplying the
necessaries of the day, or, at most, providing for the revolution
of the seasons, or for that ephemeral thing we call the life of
man.

Few things can appear more singular, when duly analysed, than
that articulated air, which we denominate speech. It is not to
be wondered at that we are proud of the prerogative, which so
eminently distinguishes us from the rest of the animal creation.
The dog, the cat, the horse, the bear, the lion, all of them have
voice. But we may almost consider this as their reproach. They
can utter for the greater part but one monotonous, eternal sound.

The lips, the teeth, the palate, the throat, which in man are
instruments of modifying the voice in such endless variety, are
in this respect given to them in vain: while all the thoughts
that occur, at least to the bulk of mankind, we are able to
express in words, to communicate facts, feelings, passions,
sentiments, to discuss, to argue, to agree, to issue commands on
the one part, and report the execution on the other, to inspire
lofty conceptions, to excite the deepest feeling of
commiseration, and to thrill the soul with extacy, almost too
mighty to be endured.

Yet what is human speech for the most part but mere imitation?
In the most obvious sense this stands out on the surface. We
learn the same words, we speak the same language, as our elders.
Not only our words, but our phrases are the same. We are like
players, who come out as if they were real persons, but only
utter what is set down for them. We represent the same drama
every day; and, however stale is the eternal repetition, pass it
off upon others, and even upon ourselves, as if it were the
suggestion of the moment. In reality, in rural or vulgar life,
the invention of a new phrase ought to be marked down among the
memorable things in the calendar. We afford too much honour to
ordinary conversation, when we compare it to the exhibition of
the recognised theatres, since men ought for the most part to be
considered as no more than puppets. They perform the
gesticulations; but the words come from some one else, who is hid
from the sight of the general observer. And not only the words,
but the cadence: they have not even so much honour as players
have, to choose the manner they may deem fittest by which to
convey the sense and the passion of what they speak. The
pronunciation, the dialect, all, are supplied to them, and are
but a servile repetition. Our tempers are merely the work of the
transcriber. We are angry, where we saw that others were angry;
and we are pleased, because it is the tone to be pleased. We
pretend to have each of us a judgment of our own: but in truth
we wait with the most patient docility, till he whom we regard as
the leader of the chorus gives us the signal, Here you are to
applaud, and Here you are to condemn.

What is it that constitutes the manners of nations, by which the
people of one country are so eminently distinguished from the
people of another, so that you cannot cross the channel from
Dover to Calais, twenty-one miles, without finding yourself in a
new world? Nay, I need not go among the subjects of another
government to find examples of this; if I pass into Ireland,
Scotland or Wales, I see myself surrounded with a new people, all
of whose characters are in a manner cast in one mould, and all
different from the citizens of the principal state and from one
another. We may go further than this. Not only nations, but
classes of men, are contrasted with each other. What can be more
different than the gentry of the west end of this metropolis, and
the money-making dwellers in the east? From them I will pass to
Billingsgate and Wapping. What more unlike than a soldier and a
sailor? the children of fashion that stroll in St. James's and
Hyde Park, and the care-worn hirelings, that recreate themselves,
with their wives and their brats, with a little fresh air on a
Sunday near Islington? The houses of lords and commons have each
their characteristic manners. Each profession has its own, the
lawyer, the divine, and the man of medicine. We are all apes,
fixing our eyes upon a model, and copying him, gesture by
gesture. We are sheep, rushing headlong through the gap, when
the bell-wether shews us the way. We are choristers,
mechanically singing in a certain key, and giving breath to a
certain tone.

Our religion, our civil practices, our political creed, are all
imitation. How many men are there, that have examined the
evidences of their religious belief, and can give a sound "reason
of the faith that is in them?"  When I was a child, I was taught
that there were four religions in the world, the Popish, the
Protestant, the Mahometan, the Pagan. It is a phenomenon to find
the man, who has held the balance steadily, and rendered full and
exact justice to the pretensions of each of these. No: tell me
the longitude and latitude in which a man is born, and I will
tell you his religion.

      By education most have been misled;
      So they believe, because they so were bred:
      The priest continues what the nurse began,
      And thus the child imposes on the man.

And, if this happens, where we are told our everlasting salvation
is at issue, we may easily judge of the rest.

The author, with one of whose dicta I began this Essay, has
observed, "One generation passeth away, and another generation
cometh; but the earth abideth for ever."  It is a maxim of the
English constitution, that "the king never dies;" and the same
may with nearly equal propriety be observed of every private man,
especially if he have children. "Death," say the writers of
natural history, "is the generator of life:" and what is thus
true of animal corruption, may with small variation be affirmed
of human mortality. I turn off my footman, and hire another; and
he puts on the livery of his predecessor: he thinks himself
somebody; but he is only a tenant. The same thing is true, when
a country-gentleman, a noble, a bishop, or a king dies. He puts
off his garments, and another puts them on. Every one knows the
story of the Tartarian dervise, who mistook the royal palace for
a caravansera, and who proved to his majesty by genealogical
deduction, that he was only a lodger. In this sense the
mutability, which so eminently characterises every thing
sublunary, is immutability under another name.

The most calamitous, and the most stupendous scenes are nothing
but an eternal and wearisome repetition: executions, murders,
plagues, famine and battle. Military execution, the demolition
of cities, the conquest of nations, have been acted a hundred
times before. The mighty conqueror, who "smote the people in
wrath with a continual stroke," who "sat in the seat of God,
shewing himself that he was God," and assuredly persuaded himself
that he was doing something to be had in everlasting remembrance,
only did that which a hundred other vulgar conquerors had done in
successive ages of the world, whose very names have long since
perished from the records of mankind.

Thus it is that the human species is for ever engaged in
laborious idleness. We put our shoulder to the wheel, and raise
the vehicle out of the mire in which it was swallowed, and we
say, I have done something; but the same feat under the same
circumstances has been performed a thousand times before. We
make what strikes us as a profound observation; and, when fairly
analysed, it turns out to be about as sagacious, as if we told
what's o'clock, or whether it is rain or sunshine. Nothing can
be more delightfully ludicrous, than the important and emphatical
air with which the herd of mankind enunciate the most trifling
observations. With much labour we are delivered of what is to us
a new thought; and, after a time, we find the same in a musty
volume, thrown by in a corner, and covered with cobwebs and dust.

This is pleasantly ridiculed in the well known exclamation,
"Deuce take the old fellows who gave utterance to our wit, before
we ever thought of it!"

The greater part of the life of the mightiest genius that ever
existed is spent in doing nothing, and saying nothing. Pope has
observed of Shakespear's plays, that, "had all the speeches been
printed without the names of the persons, we might have applied
them with certainty to every speaker."  To which another critic
has rejoined, that that was impossible, since the greater part of
what every man says is unstamped with peculiarity. We have all
more in us of what belongs to the common nature of man, than of
what is peculiar to the individual.

It is from this beaten, turnpike road, that the favoured few of
mankind are for ever exerting themselves to escape. The
multitude grow up, and are carried away, as grass is carried away
by the mower. The parish-register tells when they were born, and
when they died: "known by the ends of being to have been."  We
pass away, and leave nothing behind. Kings, at whose very glance
thousands have trembled, for the most part serve for nothing when
their breath has ceased, but as a sort of distance-posts in the
race of chronology. "The dull swain treads on" their relics
"with his clouted shoon."  Our monuments are as perishable as
ourselves; and it is the most hopeless of all problems for the
most part, to tell where the mighty ones of the earth repose.

All men are aware of the frailty of life, and how short is the
span assigned us. Hence every one, who feels, or thinks he feels
the power to do so, is desirous to embalm his memory, and to be
thought of by a late posterity, to whom his personal presence
shall be unknown. Mighty are the struggles; everlasting the
efforts. The greater part of these we well know are in vain. It
is Aesop's mountain in labour: "Dire was the tossing, deep the
groans:" and the result is a mouse. But is it always so?

This brings us back to the question: "Is there indeed nothing
new under the sun?"

Most certainly there is something that is new. If, as the beast
dies, so died man, then indeed we should be without hope. But it
is his distinguishing faculty, that he can leave something
behind, to testify that he has lived. And this is not only true
of the pyramids of Egypt, and certain other works of human
industry, that time seems to have no force to destroy. It is
often true of a single sentence, a single word, which the
multitudinous sea is incapable of washing away:

      Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens
      Possit diruere, aut innumerabilis
      Annorum series, et fuga temporum.

It is the characteristic of the mind and the heart of man, that
they are progressive. One word, happily interposed, reaching to
the inmost soul, may "take away the heart of stone, and introduce
a heart of flesh."  And, if an individual may be thus changed,
then his children, and his connections, to the latest page of
unborn history.

This is the true glory of man, that "one generation doth not pass
away, and another come, velut unda supervenit undam; but that we
leave our improvements behind us. What infinite ages of
refinement on refinement, and ingenuity on ingenuity, seem each
to have contributed its quota, to make up the accommodations of
every day of civilised man; his table, his chair, the bed he lies
on, the food he eats, the garments that cover him! It has often
been said, that the four quarters of the world are put under
contribution, to provide the most moderate table. To this what
mills, what looms, what machinery of a thousand denominations,
what ship-building, what navigation, what fleets are required!
Man seems to have been sent into the world a naked, forked,
helpless animal, on purpose to call forth his ingenuity to supply
the accommodations that may conduce to his well-being. The
saying, that "there is nothing new under the sun," could never
have been struck out, but in one of the two extreme states of
man, by the naked savage, or by the highly civilised beings among
whom the perfection of refinement has produced an artificial
feeling of uniformity.

The thing most obviously calculated to impress us with a sense of
the power, and the comparative sublimity of man, is, if we could
make a voyage of some duration in a balloon, over a considerable
tract of the cultivated and the desert parts of the earth. A
brute can scarcely move a stone out of his way, if it has fallen
upon the couch where he would repose. But man cultivates fields,
and plants gardens; he constructs parks and canals; he turns the
course of rivers, and stretches vast artificial moles into the
sea; he levels mountains, and builds a bridge, joining in giddy
height one segment of the Alps to another; lastly, he founds
castles, and churches, and towers, and distributes mighty cities
at his pleasure over the face of the globe. "The first earth has
passed away, and another earth has come; and all things are made
new."

It is true, that the basest treacheries, the most atrocious
cruelties, butcheries, massacres, violations of all the
restraints of decency, and all the ties of nature, fields covered
with dead bodies, and flooded with human gore, are all of them
vulgar repetitions of what had been acted countless times
already. If Nero or Caligula thought to perpetrate that which
should stand unparalleled, they fell into the grossest error.
The conqueror, who should lay waste vast portions of the globe,
and destroy mighty cities, so that "thorns should come up in the
palaces, and nettles in the fortresses thereof, and they should
be a habitation of serpents, and a court for owls, and the wild
beasts of the desert should meet there," would only do what
Tamerlane, and Aurengzebe, and Zingis, and a hundred other
conquerors, in every age and quarter of the world, had done
before. The splendour of triumphs, and the magnificence of
courts, are so essentially vulgar, that history almost disdains
to record them.

And yet there is something that is new, and that by the reader of
discernment is immediately felt to be so.

We read of Moses, that he was a child of ordinary birth, and,
when he was born, was presently marked, as well as all the male
children of his race, for destruction. He was unexpectedly
preserved; and his first act, when he grew up, was to slay an
Egyptian, one of the race to whom all his countrymen were slaves,
and to fly into exile. This man, thus friendless and alone, in
due time returned, and by the mere energy of his character
prevailed upon his whole race to make common cause with him, and
to migrate to a region, in which they should become sovereign and
independent. He had no soldiers, but what were made so by the
ascendancy of his spirit no counsellors but such as he taught to
be wise, no friends but those who were moved by the sentiment
they caught from him. The Jews he commanded were sordid and low
of disposition, perpetually murmuring against his rule, and at
every unfavourable accident calling to remembrance "the land of
Egypt, where they had sat by the fleshpots, and were full."  Yet
over this race he retained a constant mastery, and finally made
of them a nation whose customs and habits and ways of thinking no
time has availed to destroy. This was a man then, that possessed
the true secret to make other men his creatures, and lead them
with an irresistible power wherever he pleased. This history,
taken entire, has probably no parallel in the annals of the
world.

The invasion of Greece by the Persians, and its result, seem to
constitute an event that stands alone among men. Xerxes led
against this little territory an army of 5,280,000 men. They
drank up rivers, and cut their way through giant-mountains. They
were first stopped at Thermopylae by Leonidas and his three
hundred Spartans. They fought for a country too narrow to
contain the army by which the question was to be tried. The
contest was here to be decided between despotism and liberty,
whether there is a principle in man, by which a handful of
individuals, pervaded with lofty sentiments, and a conviction of
what is of most worth in our nature, can defy the brute force,
and put to flight the attack, of bones, joints and sinews, though
congregated in multitudes, numberless as the waves of the sea, or
the sands on its shore. The flood finally rolled back: and in
process of time Alexander, with these Greeks whom the ignorance
of the East affected to despise, founded another universal
monarchy on the ruins of Persia. This is certainly no vulgar
history.

Christianity is another of those memorable chapters in the annals
of mankind, to which there is probably no second. The son of a
carpenter in a little, rocky country, among a nation despised and
enslaved, undertook to reform the manners of the people of whom
he was a citizen. The reformation he preached was unpalatable to
the leaders of the state; he was persecuted; and finally suffered
the death reserved for the lowest malefactors, being nailed to a
cross. He was cut off in the very beginning of his career,
before he had time to form a sect. His immediate representatives
and successors were tax-gatherers and fishermen. What could be
more incredible, till proved by the event, than that a religion
thus begun, should have embraced in a manner the whole civilised
world, and that of its kingdom there should be no visible end?
This is a novelty in the history of the world, equally if we
consider it as brought about by the immediate interposition of
the author of all things, or regard it, as some pretend to do, as
happening in the course of mere human events.

Rome, "the eternal city," is likewise a subject that stands out
from the vulgar history of the human race. Three times, in three
successive forms, has she been the mistress of the world. First,
by the purity, the simplicity, the single-heartedness, the
fervour and perseverance of her original character she qualified
herself to subdue all the nations of mankind. Next, having
conquered the earth by her virtue and by the spirit of liberty,
she was able to maintain her ascendancy for centuries under the
emperors, notwithstanding all her astonishing profligacy and
anarchy. And, lastly, after her secular ascendancy had been
destroyed by the inroads of the northern barbarians, she rose
like the phoenix from her ashes, and, though powerless in
material force, held mankind in subjection by the chains of the
mind, and the consummateness of her policy. Never was any thing
so admirably contrived as the Catholic religion, to subdue the
souls of men by the power of its worship over the senses, and, by
its contrivances in auricular confession, purgatory, masses for
the dead, and its claim magisterially to determine controversies,
to hold the subjects it had gained in everlasting submission.

The great principle of originality is in the soul of man. And
here again we may recur to Greece, the parent of all that is
excellent in art. Painting, statuary, architecture, poetry, in
their most exquisite and ravishing forms, originated in this
little province. Is not the Iliad a thing new, and that will for
ever remain new? Whether it was written by one man, as I
believe, or, as the levellers of human glory would have us think,
by many, there it stands: all the ages of the world present us
nothing that can come in competition with it.

Shakespear is another example of unrivalled originality. His
fame is like the giant-rivers of the world: the further it
flows, the wider it spreads out its stream, and the more
marvellous is the power with which it sweeps along.

But, in reality, all poetry and all art, that have a genuine
claim to originality, are new, the smallest, as well as the
greatest.

It is the mistake of dull minds only, to suppose that every thing
has been said, that human wit is exhausted, and that we, who have
unfortunately fallen upon the dregs of time, have no alternative
left, but either to be silent, or to say over and over again,
what has been well said already.

There remain yet immense tracts of invention, the mines of which
have been untouched. We perceive nothing of the strata of earth,
and the hidden fountains of water, that we travel over,
unconscious of the treasures that are immediately within our
reach, till some person, endowed with the gift of a superior
sagacity, comes into the country, who appears to see through the
opake and solid mass, as we see through the translucent air, and
tells us of things yet undiscovered, and enriches us with
treasures, of which we had been hitherto entirely ignorant. The
nature of the human mind, and the capabilities of our species are
in like manner a magazine of undiscovered things, till some
mighty genius comes to break the surface, and shew us the
wonderful treasures that lay beneath uncalled for and idle.

Human character is like the contents of an ample cabinet, brought
together by the untired zeal of some curious collector, who
tickets his rarities with numbers, and has a catalogue in many
volumes, in which are recorded the description and qualities of
the things presented to our view. Among the most splendid
examples of character which the genius of man has brought to
light, are Don Quixote and his trusty squire, sir Roger de
Coverley, Parson Adams, Walter Shandy and his brother Toby. Who
shall set bounds to the everlasting variety of nature, as she has
recorded her creations in the heart of man? Most of these
instances are recent, and sufficiently shew that the enterprising
adventurer, who would aspire to emulate the illustrious men from
whose writings these examples are drawn, has no cause to despair.

Vulgar observers pass carelessly by a thousand figures in the
crowded masquerade of human society, which, when inscribed on the
tablet by the pencil of a master, would prove not less wondrous
in the power of affording pleasure, nor less rich as themes for
inexhaustible reflection, than the most admirable of these. The
things are there, and all that is wanting is an eye to perceive,
and a pen to record them.

As to a great degree we may subscribe to the saying of the wise
man, that "there is nothing new under the sun," so in a certain
sense it may also be affirmed that nothing is old. Both of these
maxims may be equally true. The prima materia, the atoms of
which the universe is composed, is of a date beyond all record;
and the figures which have yet been introduced into the most
fantastic chronology, may perhaps be incompetent to represent the
period of its birth. But the ways in which they may be
compounded are exhaustless. It is like what the writers on the
Doctrine of Chances tell us of the throwing of dice. How many
men now exist on the face of the earth? Yet, if all these were
brought together, and if, in addition to this, we could call up
all the men that ever lived, it may be doubted, whether any two
would be found so much alike, that a clear-sighted and acute
observer might not surely distinguish the one from the other.
Leibnitz informs us, that no two leaves of a tree exist in the
most spacious garden, that, upon examination, could be pronounced
perfectly similar[19].

[19] See above, Essay 2.

The true question is not, whether any thing can be found that is
new, but whether the particulars in which any thing is new may
not be so minute  and trifling, as scarcely to enter for any
thing, into that grand and comprehensive view of the whole, in
which matters of obvious insignificance are of no account.

But, if art and the invention of the human mind are exhaustless,
science is even more notoriously so. We stand but on the
threshold of the knowledge of nature, and of the various ways in
which physical power may be brought to operate for the
accommodation of man. This is a business that seems to be
perpetually in progress; and, like the fall of bodies by the
power of gravitation, appears to gain in momentum, in proportion
as it advances to a greater distance from the point at which the
impulse was given. The discoveries which at no remote period
have been made, would, if prophesied of, have been laughed to
scorn by the ignorant sluggishness of former generations; and we
are equally ready to regard with incredulity the discoveries yet
unmade, which will be familiar to our posterity. Indeed every
man of a capacious and liberal mind is willing to admit, that the
progress of human understanding in science, which is now going
on, is altogether without any limits that by the most penetrating
genius can be assigned. It is like a mighty river, that flows on
for ever and for ever, as far as the words, "for ever," can have
a meaning to the comprehension of mortals. The question that
remains is, our practicable improvement in literature and morals,
and here those persons who entertain a mean opinion of human
nature, are constantly ready to tell us that it will be found to
amount to nothing. However we may be continually improving in
mechanical knowledge and ingenuity, we are assured by this party,
that we shall never surpass what has already been done in poetry
and literature, and, which is still worse, that, however
marvellous may be our future acquisitions in science and the
application of science, we shall be, as much as ever, the
creatures of that vanity, ostentation, opulence and the spirit of
exclusive accumulation, which has hitherto, in most countries
(not in all countries), generated the glaring inequality of
property, and the oppression of the many for the sake of
pampering the folly of the few.

There is another circumstance that may be mentioned, which,
particularly as regards the question of repetition and novelty
that is now under consideration, may seem to operate in an
eminent degree in favour of science, while it casts a most
discouraging veil over poetry and the pure growth of human fancy
and invention. Poetry is, after all, nothing more than new
combinations of old materials. Nihil est in intellectu, quod non
fuit prius in sensu. The poet has perhaps in all languages been
called a maker, a creator: but this seems to be a vain-glorious
and an empty boast. He is a collector of materials only, which
he afterwards uses as best he may be able. He answers to the
description I have heard given of a tailor, a man who cuts to
pieces whatever is delivered to him from the loom, that he may
afterwards sew it together again. The poet therefore, we may be
told, adds nothing to the stock of ideas and conceptions already
laid up in the storehouse of mind. But the man who is employed
upon the secrets of nature, is eternally in progress; day after
day he delivers in to the magazine of materials for thinking and
acting, what was not there before; he increases the stock, upon
which human ingenuity and the arts of life are destined to
operate. He does not, as the poet may be affirmed by his
censurers to do, travel for ever in a circle, but continues to
hasten towards a goal, while at every interval we may mark how
much further he has proceeded from the point at which his race
began.

Much may be said in answer to this, and in vindication and honour
of the poet and the artist. All that is here alleged to their
disadvantage, is in reality little better than a sophism. The
consideration of the articles he makes use of, does not in sound
estimate detract from the glories of which he is the artificer.
Materiem superat opus. He changes the nature of what he handles;
all that he touches is turned into gold. The manufacture he
delivers to us is so new, that the thing it previously was, is no
longer recognisable. The impression that he makes upon the
imagination and the heart, the impulses that he communicates to
the understanding and the moral feeling, are all his own; and,
"if there is any thing lovely and of good report, if there is any
virtue and any praise," he may well claim our applauses and our
thankfulness for what he has effected.

There is a still further advantage that belongs to the poet and
the votarist of polite literature, which ought to be mentioned,
as strongly calculated to repress the arrogance of the men of
science, and the supercilious contempt they are apt to express
for those who are engrossed by the pursuits of imagination and
taste. They are for ever talking of the reality and
progressiveness of their pursuits, and telling us that every step
they take is a point gained, and gained for the latest posterity,
while the poet merely suits himself to the taste of the men among
whom he lives, writes up to the fashion of the day, and, as our
manners turn, is sure to be swept away to the gulph of oblivion.
But how does the matter really stand? It is to a great degree
the very reverse of this.

The natural and experimental philosopher has nothing sacred and
indestructible in the language and form in which he delivers
truths. New discoveries and experiments come, and his individual
terms and phrases and theories perish. One race of natural
philosophers does but prepare the way for another race, which is
to succeed. They "blow the trumpet, and give out the play."  And
they must be contented to perish before the brighter knowledge,
of which their efforts were but the harbingers. The Ptolemaic
system gave way to Tycho Brahe, and his to that of Copernicus.
The vortices of Descartes perished before the discoveries of
Newton; and the philosophy of Newton already begins to grow old,
and is found to have weak and decaying parts mixed with those
which are immortal and divine. In the science of mind Aristotle
and Plato are set aside; the depth of Malebranche, and the
patient investigation of Locke have had their day; more
penetrating, and concise, and lynx-eyed reasoners of our own
country have succeeded; the German metaphysicians seem to have
thrust these aside; and it perhaps needs no great degree of
sagacity to foresee, that Kant and Fichte will at last fare no
better than those that went before them.

But the poet is immortal. The verses of Homer are of workmanship
no less divine, than the armour of his own Achilles. His poems
are as fresh and consummate to us now, as they were to the
Greeks, when the old man of Chios wandered in person through the
different cities, rehearsing his rhapsodies to the accompaniment
of his lute. The language and the thoughts of the poet are
inextricably woven together; and the first is no more exposed to
decay and to perish than the last. Presumptuous innovators have
attempted to modernise Chaucer, and Spenser, and other authors,
whose style was supposed to have grown obsolete. But true taste
cannot endure the impious mockery. The very words that occurred
to these men, when the God descended, and a fire from heaven
tingled in all their veins, are sacred, are part of themselves;
and you may as well attempt to preserve the man when you have
deprived him of all his members, as think to preserve the poet
when you have taken away the words that he spoke. No part of his
glorious effusions must perish; and "the hairs of his head are
all numbered."

ESSAY XI.
OF SELF-LOVE AND BENEVOLENCE.

NO question has more memorably exercised the ingenuity of men who
have speculated upon the structure of the human mind, than that
of the motives by which we are actuated in our intercourse with
our fellow-creatures. The dictates of a plain and
unsophisticated understanding on the subject are manifest; and
they have been asserted in the broadest way by the authors of
religion, the reformers of mankind, and all persons who have been
penetrated with zeal and enthusiasm for the true interests of the
race to which they belong.

"The end of the commandment," say the authors of the New
Testament, "is love."  "This is the great commandment of the law,
Thou shalt love thy maker with all thy heart; and the second is
like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."  "Though
I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and give my body to be
burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing."  "For none
of us liveth to himself; and no man dieth to himself."

The sentiments of the ancient Greeks and Romans, for so many
centuries as their institutions retained their original purity,
were cast in a mould of a similar nature. A Spartan was seldom
alone; they were always in society with each other. The love of
their country and of the public good was their predominant
passion, they did not imagine that they belonged to themselves,
but to the state. After the battle of Leuctra, in which the
Spartans were defeated by the Thebans, the mothers of those who
were slain congratulated one another, and went to the temples to
thank the Gods, that their children had done their duty; while
the relations of those who survived the defeat were inconsolable.

The Romans were not less distinguished by their self-denying
patriotism. It was in this spirit that Brutus put his two sons
to death for conspiring against their country. It was in this
spirit that the Fabii perished at their fort on the Cremera, and
the Decii devoted themselves for the public. The rigour of
self-denial in a true Roman approached to a temper which moderns
are inclined to denominate savage.

In the times of the ancient republics the impulse of the citizens
was to merge their own individuality in the interests of the
state. They held it their duty to live but for their country.
In this spirit they were educated; and the lessons of their early
youth regulated the conduct of their riper years.

In a more recent period we have learned to model our characters
by a different standard. We seldom recollect the society of
which we are politically members, as a whole, but are broken into
detached parties, thinking only for the most part of ourselves
and our immediate connections and attachments.

This change in the sentiments and manners of modern times has
among its other consequences given birth to a new species of
philosophy. We have been taught to affirm, that we can have no
express and pure regard for our fellow-creatures, but that all
our benevolence and affection come to us through the strainers of
a gross or a refined self-love. The coarser adherents of this
doctrine maintain, that mankind are in all cases guided by views
of the narrowest self-interest, and that those who advance the
highest claims to philanthropy, patriotism, generosity and
self-sacrifice, are all the time deceiving others, or deceiving
themselves, and use a plausible and high-sounding language
merely, that serves no other purpose than to veil from
observation "that hideous sight, a naked human heart."

The more delicate and fastidious supporters of the doctrine of
universal self-love, take a different ground. They affirm that
"such persons as talk to us of disinterestedness and pure
benevolence, have not considered with sufficient accuracy the
nature of mind, feeling and will. To understand," they say, "is
one thing, and to choose another. The clearest proposition that
ever was stated, has, in itself, no tendency to produce voluntary
action on the part of the percipient. It can be only something
apprehended as agreeable or disagreeable to us, that can operate
so as to determine the will. Such is the law of universal
nature. We act from the impulse of our own desires and
aversions; and we seek to effect or avert a thing, merely because
it is viewed by us as an object of gratification or the contrary.

The virtuous man and the vicious are alike governed by the same
principle; and it is therefore the proper business of a wise
instructor of youth, and of a man who would bring his own
sentiments and feelings into the most praise-worthy frame, to
teach us to find our interest and gratification in that which
shall be most beneficial to others."

When we proceed to examine the truth of these statements, it
certainly is not strictly an argument to say, that the advocate
of self-love on either of these hypotheses cannot consistently be
a believer in Christianity, or even a theist, as theism is
ordinarily understood. The commandments of the author of the
Christian religion are, as we have seen, purely disinterested:
and, especially if we admit the latter of the two explanations of
self-love, we shall be obliged to confess, on the hypothesis of
this new philosophy, that the almighty author of the universe
never acts in any of his designs either of creation or
providence, but from a principle of self-love. In the mean time,
if this is not strictly an argument, it is however but fair to
warn the adherents of the doctrine I oppose, of the consequences
to which their theory leads. It is my purpose to subvert that
doctrine by means of the severest demonstration; but I am not
unwilling, before I begin, to conciliate, as far as may be, the
good-will of my readers to the propositions I proceed to
establish.

I will therefore further venture to add, that, upon the
hypothesis of self-love, there can be no such thing as virtue.
There are two circumstances required, to entitle an action to be
denominated virtuous. It must have a tendency to produce good
rather than evil to the race of man, and it must have been
generated by an intention to produce such good. The most
beneficent action that ever was performed, if it did not spring
from the intention of good to others, is not of the nature of
virtue. Virtue, where it exists in any eminence, is a species of
conduct, modelled upon a true estimate of the good intended to be
produced. He that makes a false estimate, and prefers a trivial
and partial good to an important and comprehensive one, is
vicious[20].

[20] Political Justice, Book 11, Chap. IV.

It is admitted on all hands, that it is possible for a man to
sacrifice his own existence to that of twenty others. But the
advocates of the doctrine of self-love must say, that he does
this that he may escape from uneasiness, and because he could not
bear to encounter the inward upbraiding with which he would be
visited, if he acted otherwise. This in reality would change his
action from an act of virtue to an act of vice. So far as
belongs to the real merits of the case, his own advantage or
pleasure is a very insignificant consideration, and the benefit
to be produced, suppose to a world, is inestimable. Yet he
falsely and unjustly prefers the first, and views the latter as
trivial; nay, separately taken, as not entitled to the smallest
regard. If the dictates of impartial justice be taken into the
account, then, according to the system of self-love, the best
action that ever was performed, may, for any thing we know, have
been the action, in the whole world, of the most exquisite and
deliberate injustice. Nay, it could not have been otherwise,
since it produced the greatest good, and therefore was the
individual instance, in which the greatest good was most directly
postponed to personal gratification[21]. Such is the spirit of
the doctrine I undertake to refute.

[21] Political Justice, Book IV, Chap. X.

But man is not in truth so poor and pusillanimous a creature as
this system would represent.

It is time however to proceed to the real merits of the question,
to examine what in fact is the motive which induces a good man to
elect a generous mode of proceeding.

Locke is the philosopher, who, in writing on Human Understanding,
has specially delivered the doctrine, that uneasiness is the
cause which determines the will, and urges us to act. He
says[22], "The motive we have for continuing in the same state,
is only the present satisfaction we feel in it; the motive to
change is always some uneasiness: nothing setting us upon the
change of state, or upon any new action, but some uneasiness.
This is the great motive that works on the mind."

[22] Book II, Chap. XXI, Sect. 29.

It is not my concern to enquire, whether Locke by this statement
meant to assert that self-love is the only principle of human
action. It has at any rate been taken to express the doctrine
which I here propose to refute.

And, in the first place, I say, that, if our business is to
discover the consideration entertained by the mind which induces
us to act, this tells us nothing. It is like the case of the
Indian philosopher[23], who, being asked what it was that kept
the earth in its place, answered, that it was supported by an
elephant, and that elephant again rested on a tortoise. He must
be endowed with a slender portion of curiosity, who, being told
that uneasiness is that which spurs on the mind to act, shall
rest satisfied with this explanation, and does not proceed to
enquire, what makes us uneasy?

[23] Locke on Understanding, Book 11, Chap. XIII, Sect. 19.

An explanation like this is no more instructive, than it would
be, if, when we saw a man walking, or grasping a sword or a
bludgeon, and we enquired into the cause of this phenomenon, any
one should inform us that he walks, because he has feet, and he
grasps, because he has hands.

I could not commodiously give to my thoughts their present form,
unless I had been previously furnished with pens and paper. But
it would be absurd to say, that my being furnished with pens and
paper, is the cause of my writing this Essay on Self-love and
Benevolence.

The advocates of self-love have, very inartificially and
unjustly, substituted the abstract definition of a voluntary
agent, and made that stand for the motive by which he is prompted
to act. It is true, that we cannot act without the impulse of
desire or uneasiness; but we do not think of that desire and
uneasiness; and it is the thing upon which the mind is fixed that
constitutes our motive. In the boundless variety of the acts,
passions and pursuits of human beings, it is absurd on the face
of it to say that we are all governed by one motive, and that,
however dissimilar are the ends we pursue, all this dissimilarity
is the fruit of a single cause.

One man chooses travelling, another ambition, a third study, a
fourth voluptuousness and a mistress. Why do these men take so
different courses?

Because one is partial to new scenes, new buildings, new manners,
and the study of character. Because a second is attracted by the
contemplation of wealth and power. Because a third feels a
decided preference for the works of Homer, or Shakespear, or
Bacon, or Euclid. Because a fourth finds nothing calculated to
stir his mind in comparison with female beauty, female
allurements, or expensive living.

Each of these finds the qualities he likes, intrinsically in the
thing he chooses. One man feels himself strongly moved, and
raised to extacy, by the beauties of nature, or the magnificence
of architecture. Another is ravished with the divine
excellencies of Homer, or of some other of the heroes of
literature. A third finds nothing delights him so much as the
happiness of others, the beholding that happiness increased, and
seeing pain and oppression and sorrow put to flight. The cause
of these differences is, that each man has an individual internal
structure, directing his partialities, one man to one thing, and
another to another.

Few things can exceed the characters of human beings in variety.
There must be something abstractedly in the nature of mind, which
renders it accessible to these varieties. For the present we
will call it taste. One man feels his spirits regaled  with the
sight of those things which constitute wealth, another in
meditating the triumphs of Alexander or Caesar, and a third in
viewing the galleries of the Louvre. Not one of these thinks in
the outset of appropriating these objects to himself; not one of
them begins with aspiring to be the possessor of vast opulence,
or emulating the triumphs of Caesar, or obtaining in property the
pictures and statues the sight of which affords him so exquisite
delight. Even the admirer of female beauty, does not at first
think of converting this attractive object into a mistress, but
on the contrary desires, like Pygmalion, that the figure he
beholds might become his solace and companion, because he had
previously admired it for itself.

Just so the benevolent man is an individual who finds a peculiar
delight in contemplating the contentment, the peace and heart's
ease of other men, and sympathises in no ordinary degree with
their sufferings. He rejoices in the existence and diffusion of
human happiness, though he should not have had the smallest share
in giving birth to the thing he loves. It is because such are
his tastes, and what above all things he prefers, that he
afterwards becomes distinguished by the benevolence of his
conduct.

The reflex act of the mind, which these new philosophers put
forward as the solution of all human pursuits, rarely presents
itself but to the speculative enquirer in his closet. The savage
never dreams of it. The active man, engaged in the busy scenes
of life, thinks little, and on rare occasions of himself, but
much, and in a manner for ever, of the objects of his pursuit.

Some men are uniform in their character, and from the cradle to
the grave prefer the same objects that first awakened their
partialities. Other men are inconsistent and given to change,
are "every thing by starts, and nothing long."  Still it is
probable that, in most cases, he who performs an act of
benevolence, feels for the time that he has a peculiar delight in
contemplating the good of his fellow-man.

The doctrine of the modern philosophers on this point, is in many
ways imbecil and unsound. It is inauspicious to their creed,
that the reflex act of the mind is purely the affair of
experience. Why did the liberal-minded man perform his first act
of benevolence? The answer of these persons ought to be, because
the recollection of a generous deed is a source of the truest
delight. But there is an absurdity on the face of this solution.

We do not experimentally know the delight which attends the
recollection of a generous deed, till a generous deed has been
performed by us. We do not learn these things from books. And
least of all is this solution to the purpose, when the business
is to find a solution that suits the human mind universally, the
unlearned as well as the learned, the savage as well as the sage.

And surely it is inconsistent with all sound reasoning, to
represent that as the sole spring of our benevolent actions,
which by the very terms will not fit the first benevolent act in
which any man engaged.

The advocates of the doctrine of "self-love the source of all our
actions," are still more puzzled, when the case set before them
is that of the man, who flies, at an instant's warning, to save
the life of the child who has fallen into the river, or the
unfortunate whom he beholds in the upper story of a house in
flames. This man, as might be illustrated in a thousand
instances, treats his own existence as unworthy of notice, and
exposes it to multiplied risks to effect the object to which he
devotes himself.

They are obliged to say, that this man anticipates the joy he
will feel in the recollection of a noble act, and the cutting and
intolerable pain he will experience in the consciousness that a
human being has perished, whom it was in his power to save. It
is in vain that we tell them that, without a moment's
consideration, he tore off his clothes, or plunged into the
stream with his clothes on, or rushed up a flaming stair-case.
Still they tell us, that he recollected what compunctious
visitings would be his lot if he remained supine--he felt the
sharpest uneasiness at sight of the accident before him, and it
was to get rid of that uneasiness, and not for the smallest
regard to the unhappy being he has been the means to save, that
he entered on the hazardous undertaking.

Uneasiness, the knowledge of what inwardly passes in the mind, is
a thing not in the slightest degree adverted to but in an
interval of leisure. No; the man here spoken of thinks of
nothing but the object immediately before his eyes; he adverts
not at all to himself; he acts only with an undeveloped, confused
and hurried consciousness that he may be of some use, and may
avert the instantly impending calamity. He has scarcely even so
much reflection as amounts to this.

The history of man, whether national or individual, and
consequently the acts of human creatures which it describes, are
cast in another mould than that which the philosophy of self-love
sets before us. A topic that from the earliest accounts
perpetually presents itself in the records of mankind, is
self-sacrifice, parents sacrificing themselves for their
children, and children for their parents. Cimon, the Athenian,
yet in the flower of his youth, voluntarily became the inmate of
a prison, that the body of his father might receive the honours
of sepulture. Various and unquestionable are the examples of
persons who have exposed themselves to destruction, and even
petitioned to die, that so they might save the lives of those,
whose lives they held dearer than their own. Life is indeed a
thing, that is notoriously set at nothing by generous souls, who
have fervently devoted themselves to an overwhelming purpose.
There have been instances of persons, exposed to all the horrors
of famine, where one has determined to perish by that slowest and
most humiliating of all the modes of animal destruction, that
another, dearer to him than life itself, might, if possible, be
preserved.

What is the true explanation of these determinations of the human
will? Is it, that the person, thus consigning himself to death,
loved nothing but himself, regarded only the pleasure he might
reap, or the uneasiness he was eager to avoid? Or, is it, that
he had arrived at the exalted point of self-oblivion, and that
his whole soul was penetrated and ingrossed with the love of
those for whom he conceived so exalted a partiality?

This sentiment so truly forms a part of our nature, that a
multitude of absurd practices, and a multitude of heart-rending
fables, have been founded upon the consciousness of man in
different ages and nations, that these modes of thinking form a
constituent part of our common existence. In India there was
found a woman, whose love to the deceased partner of her soul was
so overwhelming, that she resolved voluntarily to perish on his
funeral pile. And this example became so fascinating and
admirable, that, by insensible degrees, it grew into a national
custom with the Hindoos, that, by a sort of voluntary constraint,
the widows of all men of a certain caste, should consign
themselves to the flames with the dead bodies of their husbands.
The story of Zopyrus cutting off his nose and ears, and of
Curtius leaping into the gulph, may be fictitious: but it was
the consciousness of those by whom these narratives were written
that they drew their materials from the mighty store-house of the
heart of man, that prompted them to record them. The
institutions of clientship and clans, so extensively diffused in
different ages of the world, rests upon this characteristic of
our nature, that multitudes of men may be trained and educated
so, as to hold their existence at no price, when the life of the
individual they were taught unlimitedly to reverence might be
preserved, or might be defended at the risk of their destruction.

The principal circumstance that divides our feelings for others
from our feelings for ourselves, and that gives, to satirical
observers, and superficial thinkers, an air of exclusive
selfishness to the human mind, lies in this, that we can fly from
others, but cannot fly from ourselves. While I am sitting by the
bed-side of the sufferer, while I am listening to the tale of his
woes, there is comparatively but a slight line of demarcation,
whether they are his sorrows or my own. My sympathy is
vehemently excited towards him, and I feel his twinges and
anguish in a most painful degree. But I can quit his apartment
and the house in which he dwells, can go out in the fields, and
feel the fresh air of heaven fanning my hair, and playing upon my
cheeks. This is at first but a very imperfect relief. His image
follows me; I cannot forget what I have heard and seen; I even
reproach myself for the mitigation I involuntarily experience.
But man is the creature of his senses. I am every moment further
removed, both in time and place, from the object that distressed
me. There he still lies upon the bed of agony: but the sound of
his complaint, and the sight of all that expresses his suffering,
are no longer before me. A short experience of human life
convinces us that we have this remedy always at hand ["I am
unhappy, only while I please"[24]; and we soon come therefore to
anticipate the cure, and so, even while we are in the presence of
the sufferer, to feel that he and ourselves are not perfectly
one.

[24] Douglas.

But with our own distempers and adversities it is altogether
different. It is this that barbs the arrow. We may change the
place of our local existence; but we cannot go away from
ourselves. With chariots, and embarking ourselves on board of
ships, we may seek to escape from the enemy. But grief and
apprehension enter the vessel along with us; and, when we mount
on horseback, the discontent that specially annoyed us, gets up
behind, and clings to our sides with a hold never to be
loosened[25].

[25] Horace.

Is it then indeed a proof of selfishness, that we are in a
greater or less degree relieved from the anguish we endured for
our friend, when other objects occupy us, and we are no longer
the witnesses of his sufferings? If this were true, the same
argument would irresistibly prove, that we are the most generous
of imaginable beings, the most disregardful of whatever relates
to ourselves. Is it not the first ejaculation of the miserable,
"Oh, that I could fly from myself? Oh, for a thick, substantial
sleep!" What the desperate man hates is his own identity. But he
knows that, if for a few moments he loses himself in
forgetfulness, he will presently awake to all that distracted
him. He knows that he must act his part to the end, and drink
the bitter cup to the dregs. He can do none of these things by
proxy. It is the consciousness of the indubitable future, from
which we can never be divorced, that gives to our present
calamity its most fearful empire. Were it not for this great
line of distinction, there are many that would feel not less for
their friend than for themselves. But they are aware, that his
ruin will not make them beggars, his mortal disease will not
bring them to the tomb, and that, when he is dead, they may yet
be reserved for many years of health, of consciousness and
vigour.

The language of the hypothesis of self-love was well adapted to
the courtiers of the reign of Louis the Fourteenth. The language
of disinterestedness was adapted to the ancient republicans in
the purest times of Sparta and Rome.

But these ancients were not always disinterested; and the moderns
are not always narrow, self-centred and cold. The ancients paid,
though with comparative infrequency, the tax imposed upon
mortals, and thought of their own gratification and ease; and the
moderns are not utterly disqualified for acts of heroic
affection.

It is of great consequence that men should come to think
correctly on this subject. The most snail-blooded man that
exists, is not so selfish as he pretends to be. In spite of all
the indifference he professes towards the good of others, he will
sometimes be detected in a very heretical state of sensibility
towards his wife, his child or his friend; he will shed tears at
a tale of distress, and make considerable sacrifices of his own
gratification for the relief of others.

But his creed is a pernicious one. He who for ever thinks, that
his "charity must begin at home," is in great danger of becoming
an indifferent citizen, and of withering those feelings of
philanthropy, which in all sound estimation constitute the
crowning glory of man. He will perhaps have a reasonable
affection towards what he calls his own flesh and blood, and may
assist even a stranger in a case of urgent distress.--But it is
dangerous to trifle with the first principles and sentiments of
morality. And this man will scarcely in any case have his mind
prepared to hail the first dawnings of human improvement, and to
regard all that belongs to the welfare of his kind as parcel of
his own particular estate.

The creed of self-love will always have a tendency to make us
Frenchmen in the frivolous part of that character, and Dutchmen
in the plodding and shopkeeping spirit of barter and sale. There
is no need that we should beat down the impulse of heroism in the
human character, and be upon our guard against the effervescences
and excess of a generous sentiment. One of the instructors of my
youth was accustomed to say to his pupils, "Do not be afraid to
commit your thoughts to paper in all the fervour and glow of your
first conception: when you come to look at them the next day,
you will find this gone off to a surprising degree."  As this was
no ill precept for literary composition, even so in our actions
and moral conduct we shall be in small danger of being too
warm-hearted and too generous.

Modern improvements in education are earnest in recommending to
us the study of facts, and that we should not waste the time of
young persons upon the flights of imagination. But it is to
imagination that we are indebted for our highest enjoyments; it
tames the ruggedness of uncivilised nature, and is the
never-failing associate of all the considerable advances of
social man, whether in throwing down the strong fences of
intellectual slavery, or in giving firmness and duration to the
edifice of political freedom.

And who does not feel that every thing depends upon the creed we
embrace, and the discipline we exercise over our own souls?

The disciple of the theory of self-love, if of a liberal
disposition, will perpetually whip himself forward "with loose
reins," upon a spiritless Pegasus, and say, "I will do generous
things; I will not bring into contempt the master I serve--though
I am conscious all the while that this is but a delusion, and
that, however I brag of generosity, I do not set a step forward,
but singly for my own ends, and my own gratification."
Meanwhile, this is all a forced condition of thought; and the man
who cherishes it, will be perpetually falling back into the cold,
heartless convictions he inwardly retains. Self-love is the
unwholesome, infectious atmosphere in which he dwells; and,
however he may seek to rise, the wings of his soul will eternally
be drawn downwards, and he cannot be pervaded, as he might have
been, with the free spirit of genuine philanthropy. To be
consistent, he ought continually to grow colder and colder; and
the romance, which fired his youth, and made him forget the
venomous potion he had swallowed, will fade away in age,
rendering him careless of all but himself, and indifferent to the
adversity and sufferings of all of whom he hears, and all with
whom he is connected.

On the other hand, the man who has embraced the creed of
disinterested benevolence, will know that it is not his fitting
element to "live for himself, or to die for himself."  Whether he
is under the dominion of family-affection, friendship,
patriotism, or a zeal for his brethren of mankind, he will feel
that he is at home. The generous man therefore looks forward to
the time when the chilling and wretched philosophy of the reign
of Louis the Fourteenth shall be forgotten, and a fervent desire
for the happiness and improvement of the human species shall
reign in all hearts.

I am not especially desirous of sheltering my opinions under the
authority of great names: but, in a question of such vital
importance to the true welfare of men in society, no fair
advantage should be neglected. The author of the system of
"self-love the source of all our actions" was La Rochefoucault;
and the whole herd of the French philosophers have not been
ashamed to follow in the train of their vaunted master. I am
grieved to say, that, as I think, the majority of my refining and
subtilising countrymen of the present day have enlisted under his
banner. But the more noble and generous view of the subject has
been powerfully supported by Shaftesbury, Butler, Hutcheson and
Hume. On the last of these I particularly pique myself; inasmuch
as, though he became naturalised as a Frenchman in a vast variety
of topics, the greatness of his intellectual powers exempted him
from degradation in this.

That however which I would chiefly urge in the way of authority,
is the thing mentioned in the beginning of this Essay, I mean,
the sentiments that have animated the authors of religion, that
characterise the best ages of Greece and Rome, and that in all
cases display themselves when the loftiest and most generous
sentiments of the heart are called into action. The opposite
creed could only have been engendered in the dregs of a corrupt
and emasculated court; and human nature will never shew itself
what it is capable of being, till the last remains of a doctrine,
invented in the latter part of the seventeenth century, shall
have been consigned to the execration they deserve.

ESSAY XII.
OF THE LIBERTY OF HUMAN ACTIONS.

The question, which has been attended with so long and obstinate
debates, concerning the metaphysical doctrines of liberty and
necessity, and the freedom of human actions, is not even yet
finally and satisfactorily settled.

The negative is made out by an argument which seems to amount to
demonstration, that every event requires a cause, a cause why it
is as it is and not otherwise, that the human will is guided by
motives, and is consequently always ruled by the strongest
motive, and that we can never choose any thing, either without a
motive of preference, or in the way of following the weaker, and
deserting the stronger motive[26].

[26] Political Justice, Book IV, Chap. VII.

Why is it then that disbelief or doubt should still subsist in a
question so fully decided?

For the same reason that compels us to reject many other
demonstrations. The human mind is so constituted as to oblige
us, if not theoretically, at least practically, to reject
demonstration, and adhere to our senses.

The case is thus in the great question of the non-existence of an
external world, or of matter. How ever much the understanding
may be satisfied of the truth of the proposition by the arguments
of Berkeley and others, we no sooner go out into actual life,
than we become convinced, in spite of our previous scepticism or
unbelief, of the real existence of the table, the chair, and the
objects around us, and of the permanence and reality of the
persons, both body and mind, with whom we have intercourse. If
we were not, we should soon become indifferent to their pleasure
and pain, and in no long time reason ourselves into the opinion
that the one was not more desirable than the other, and conduct
ourselves accordingly.

But there is a great difference between the question of a
material world, and the question of liberty and necessity. The
most strenuous Berkleian can never say, that there is any
contradiction or impossibility in the existence of matter. All
that he can consistently and soberly maintain is, that, if the
material world exists, we can never perceive it, and that our
sensations, and trains of impressions and thinking go on wholly
independent of that existence.

But the question of the freedom of human actions is totally of
another class. To say that in our choice we reject the stronger
motive, and that we choose a thing merely because we choose it,
is sheer nonsense and absurdity; and whoever with a sound
understanding will fix his mind upon the state of the question
will perceive its impossibility.

In the mean time it is not less true, that every man, the
necessarian as well as his opponent, acts on the assumption of
human liberty, and can never for a moment, when he enters into
the scenes of real life, divest himself of this persuasion.

Let us take separately into our consideration the laws of matter
and of mind. We acknowledge generally in both an established
order of antecedents and consequents, or of causes and effects.
This is the sole foundation of human prudence and of all
morality. It is because we foresee that certain effects will
follow from a certain mode of conduct, that we act in one way
rather than another. It is because we foresee that, if the soil
is prepared in a certain way, and if seed is properly scattered
and covered up in the soil thus prepared, a crop will follow,
that we engage in the labours of agriculture. In the same
manner, it is because we foresee that, if lessons are properly
given, and a young person has them clearly explained to him,
certain benefits will result, and because we are apprised of the
operation of persuasion, admonition, remonstrance, menace,
punishment and reward, that we engage in the labours of
education. All the studies of the natural philosopher and the
chemist, all our journeys by land and our voyages by sea, and all
the systems and science of government, are built upon this
principle, that from a certain method of proceeding, regulated by
the precepts of wisdom and experience, certain effects may be
expected to follow.

Yet, at the same time that we admit of a regular series of cause
and effect in the operations both of matter and mind, we never
fail, in our reflections upon each, to ascribe to them an
essential difference. In the laws by which a falling body
descends to the earth, and by which the planets are retained in
their orbits, in a word, in all that relates to inanimate nature,
we readily assent to the existence of absolute laws, so that,
when we have once ascertained the fundamental principles of
astronomy and physics, we rely with perfect assurance upon the
invariable operation of these laws, yesterday, to-day, and for
ever. As long as the system of things, of which we are
spectators, and in which we act our several parts, shall remain,
so long have the general phenomena of nature gone on unchanged
for more years of past ages than we can define, and will in all
probability continue to operate for as many ages to come. We
admit of no variation, but firmly believe that, if we were
perfectly acquainted with all the causes, we could, without
danger of error, predict all the effects. We are satisfied that,
since first the machine of the universe was set going, every
thing in inanimate nature has taken place in a regular course,
and nothing has happened and can happen, otherwise than as it
actually has been and will be.

But we believe, or, more accurately speaking, we feel, that it is
otherwise in the universe of mind. Whoever attentively observes
the phenomena of thinking and sentient beings, will be convinced,
that men and animals are under the influence of motives, that we
are subject to the predominance of the passions, of love and
hatred, of desire and aversion, of sorrow and joy, and that the
elections we make are regulated by impressions supplied to us by
these passions. But we are fully penetrated with the notion,
that mind is an arbiter, that it sits on its throne, and decides,
as an absolute prince, this may or that; in short, that, while
inanimate nature proceeds passively in an eternal chain of cause
and effect, mind is endowed with an initiating power, and forms
its determinations by an inherent and indefeasible prerogative.

Hence arises the idea of contingency relative to the acts of
living and sentient beings, and the opinion that, while, in the
universe of matter, every thing proceeds in regular course, and
nothing has happened or can happen, otherwise than as it actually
has been or will be, in the determinations and acts of living
beings each occurrence may be or not be, and waits the mastery of
mind to decide whether the event shall be one way or the other,
both issues being equally possible till that decision has been
made.

Thus, as was said in the beginning, we have demonstration, all
the powers of our reasoning faculty, on one side, and the
feeling, of our minds, an inward persuasion of which with all our
efforts we can never divest ourselves, on the other. This
phenomenon in the history of every human creature, had aptly
enough been denominated, the "delusive sense of liberty[27]."

[27] The first writer, by whom this proposition was distinctly
enunciated, seems to have been Lord Kaimes, in his Essays on the
Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, published in 1751.
But this ingenious author was afterwards frightened with the
boldness of his own conclusions, and in the subsequent editions
of his work endeavoured ineffectually to explain away what he had
said.

And, though the philosopher in his closet will for the most part
fully assent to the doctrine of the necessity of human actions,
yet this indestructible feeling of liberty, which accompanies us
from the cradle to the grave, is entitled to our serious
attention, and has never obtained that consideration from the
speculative part of mankind, which must by no means be withheld,
if we would properly enter into the mysteries of our nature. The
necessarian has paid it very imperfect attention to the impulses
which form the character of man, if he omits this chapter in the
history of mind, while on the other hand the advocate of free
will, if he would follow up his doctrine rigorously into all its
consequences, would render all speculations on human character
and conduct superfluous, put an end to the system of persuasion,
admonition, remonstrance, menace, punishment and reward,
annihilate the very essence of civil government, and bring to a
close all distinction between the sane person and the maniac.

With the disciples of the latter of these doctrines I am by no
means specially concerned. I am fully persuaded, as far as the
powers of my understanding can carry me, that the phenomena of
mind are governed by laws altogether as inevitable as the
phenomena of matter, and that the decisions of our will are
always in obedience to the impulse of the strongest motive.

The consequences of the principle implanted in our nature, by
which men of every creed, when they descend into the scene of
busy life, pronounce themselves and their fellow-mortals to be
free agents, are sufficiently memorable.

From hence there springs what we call conscience in man, and a
sense of praise or blame due to ourselves and others for the
actions we perform.

How poor, listless and unenergetic would all our performances be,
but for this sentiment! It is in vain that I should talk to
myself or others, of the necessity of human actions, of the
connection between cause and effect, that all industry, study and
mental discipline will turn to account, and this with infinitely
more security on the principle of necessity, than on the opposite
doctrine, every thing I did would be without a soul. I should
still say, Whatever I may do, whether it be right or wrong, I
cannot help it; wherefore then should I trouble the master-spirit
within me? It is either the calm feeling of self-approbation, or
the more animated swell of the soul, the quick beatings of the
pulse, the enlargement of the heart, the glory sparkling in the
eye, and the blood flushing into the cheek, that sustains me in
all my labours. This turns the man into what we conceive of a
God, arms him with prowess, gives him a more than human courage,
and inspires him with a resolution and perseverance that nothing
can subdue.

In the same manner the love or hatred, affection or alienation,
we entertain for our fellow-men, is mainly referable for its
foundation to the "delusive sense of liberty."  "We approve of a
sharp knife rather than a blunt one, because its capacity is
greater. We approve of its being employed in carving food,
rather than in maiming men or other animals, because that
application of its capacity is preferable. But all approbation
or preference is relative to utility or general good. A knife is
as capable as a man, of being employed in purposes of utility;
and the one is no more free than the other as to its employment.
The mode in which a knife is made subservient to these purposes,
is by material impulse. The mode in which a man is made
subservient, is by inducement and persuasion. But both are
equally the affair of necessity[28]."  These are the sentiments
dictated to us by the doctrine of the necessity of human actions.

[28] Political Justice, Book IV, Chap. VIII.

But how different are the feelings that arise within us, as soon
as we enter into the society of our fellow-creatures! "The end
of the commandment is love."  It is the going forth of the heart
towards those to whom we are bound by the ties of a common
nature, affinity, sympathy or worth, that is the luminary of the
moral world. Without it there would have been "a huge eclipse of
sun and moon;" or at best, as a well-known writer[29] expresses
it in reference to another subject, we should have lived in "a
silent and drab-coloured creation."  We are prepared by the power
that made us for feelings and emotions; and, unless these come to
diversify and elevate our existence, we should waste our days in
melancholy, and scarcely be able to sustain ourselves. The
affection we entertain for those towards whom our partiality and
kindness are excited, is the life of our life. It is to this we
are indebted for all our refinement, and, in the noblest sense of
the word, for all our humanity. Without it we should have had no
sentiment (a word, however abused, which, when properly defined,
comprises every thing that is the crown of our nature), and no
poetry.--Love and hatred, as they regard our fellow-creatures, in
contradistinction to the complacency, or the feeling of an
opposite nature, which is excited in us towards inanimate
objects, arc entirely the offspring of the delusive sense of
liberty.

[29] Thomas Paine.

The terms, praise and blame, express to a great degree the same
sentiments as those of love and hatred, with this difference,
that praise and blame in their simplest sense apply to single
actions, whereas love and hatred are produced in us by the sum of
those actions or tendencies, which constitute what we call
character. There is also another difference, that love and
hatred are engendered in us by other causes as well as moral
qualities; but praise and blame, in the sense in which they are
peculiarly applied to our fellow-mortals, are founded on moral
qualities only. In love and hatred however, when they are
intense or are lasting, some reference to moral qualities is
perhaps necessarily implied. The love between the sexes, unless
in cases where it is of a peculiarly transient nature, always
comprises in it a belief that the party who is the object of our
love, is distinguished by tendencies of an amiable nature, which
we expect to see manifesting themselves in affectionate
attentions and acts of kindness. Even the admiration we
entertain for the features, the figure, and personal graces of
the object of our regard, is mixed with and heightened by our
expectation of actions and tones that generate approbation, and,
if divested of this, would be of small signification or
permanence. In like manner in the ties of affinity, or in cases
where we are impelled by the consideration, "He also is a man as
well as I," the excitement will carry us but a little way, unless
we discover in the being towards whom we are moved some
peculiarities which may beget a moral partiality and regard.

And, as towards our fellow-creatures, so in relation to
ourselves, our moral sentiments are all involved with, and take
their rise in, the delusive sense of liberty. It is in this that
is contained the peculiar force of the terms virtue, duty, guilt
and desert. We never pronounce these words without thinking of
the action to which they refer, as that which might or might not
be done, and therefore unequivocally approve or disapprove in
ourselves and others. A virtuous man, as the term is understood
by all, as soon as we are led to observe upon those qualities,
and the exhibition of those qualities in actual life, which
constitute our nature, is a man who, being in full possession of
the freedom of human action, is engaged in doing those things
which a sound judgment of the tendencies of what we do pronounces
to be good.

Duty is a term that can scarcely be said to have a meaning,
except that which it derives from the delusive sense of liberty.
According to the creed of the necessarian, it expresses that mode
of action on the part of the individual, which constitutes the
best possible application of his capacity to the general
benefit[30]. In the mean time, if we confine ourselves to this
definition, it may as well be taken to describe the best
application of a knife, or any other implement proceeding from
the hands of the manufacturer, as of the powers of a human being.

But we surely have a very different idea in our minds, when we
employ the term duty. It is not agreeable to the use of language
that we should use this term, except we speak of a being in the
exercise of volition.

[30] Political Justice, Book II, Chap. IV.

Duty then means that which may justly be required of a human
creature in the possession of liberty of action. It includes in
its proper sense the conception of the empire of will, the notion
that mind is an arbiter, that it sits on its throne, and decides,
as an absolute prince, this way or that.

Duty is the performance of what is due, the discharge of a debt
(debitum). But a knife owes nothing, and can in no sense be said
to be held to one sort of application rather than another; the
debt can only belong to a human being in possession of his
liberty, by whom the knife may be applied laudably or otherwise.

A multitude of terms instantly occur to us, the application of
which is