The other, on the contrary, might remind us of the zealots for legitimate succession after the decease of our sixth Edward, who not content with having placed the rightful sovereign on the throne, would wreak their vengeance on "the meek usurper," who had been seated on it by a will against which she had herself been the first to remonstrate. For with that unhealthful preponderance of impulse over motive, which, though no part of genius, is too often its accompaniment, he lives in continued hostility to prudence, or banishes it altogether; and thus deprives virtue of her guide and guardian, her prime functionary, yea, the very organ of her outward life. Hence a benevolence that squanders its shafts and still misses its aim, or like the charmed bullet that, levelled at the wolf brings down the shepherd! Hence desultoriness, extremes, exhaustion And thereof comes in the end despondency and madness! WORDSWORTH. Let it not be forgotten, however, that these evils are the disease of the man, while the records of biography furnish ample proof, that genius, in the higher degree, acts as a preservative against them: more remarkably, and in more frequent instances, when the imagination and preconstructive power have taken a scientific or philosophical direction: as in Plato, indeed in almost all the first-rate philosophers-in Kepler, Milton, Boyle, Newton, Leibnitz, and Berkley. At all events, a certain number of speculative minds is necessary to a cultivated state of society, as a condition of its progressiveness; and nature herself has provided against any too great increase in this class of her productions. As the gifted masters of the divining Rod to the ordinary miners, and as the miners of a country to the husbandmen, mechanics, and artisans, such is the proportion of the Trismegisti, to the sum total of speculative minds, even of those, I mean, that are truly such; and of these again, to the remaining mass of useful laborers and "operatives" in science, literature, and the learned professions. man had, as it were, two versions of his Bible, one in the common language of the country, another in acts, objects, and products of his own particular craft. There are not many things in our elder popular literature, more interesting to me than those contests, or Amoibean eclogues, between workmen for the superior worth and dignity of their several callings, which used to be sold at our village fairs, in stitched sheets, neither untitled or undecorated, though without the superfluous costs of a separate title-page. With this good old miner I was once walking through a corn-field at harvest time, when that part of the conversation to which I have alluded, took place. At times, said I, when you were delving in the bowels of the arid mountain or foodless rock, it must have occurred to your mind as a pleasant thought, that in providing the scythe and sword you were virtually reaping the harvest and protecting the harvest-man. Ah! he replied with a sigh, that gave a fuller meaning to his smile, out of all earthly things there come both good and evil: the good through God, and the evil from the evil heart. From the look and weight of the ore I learnt to make a near guess, how much iron it would yield; but neither its heft, nor its hues, nor its breakage would prophesy to me, whether it was to become a thievish pick-lock, a murderer's dirk, a slave's collar, or the woodman's axe, the feeding ploughshare, the defender's sword, or the mechanic's tool. So perhaps, my young friend! I have cause to be thankful, that the opening upon a fresh vein gives me a delight so full as to allow no room for other fancies, and leaves behind it a hope and a love that support me in my labor, even for the labor's sake. As, according to the eldest philosophy, life being in its own nature aeriform, is under the necessity of renewing itself by inspiring the connatural, and therefore assimilable air, so is it with the intelligential soul with respect to truth: for it is itself of the nature of truth. revoμévn k dewpras, kai diapa Stier, φύσιν ἔχειν φιλοθεάμονα ὑπάρχει. PLOTINUS. But the occasion and brief history of the decline of true speculative philosophy, with the origin of the sepa ration of ethics from religion, I must defer to the following number. POSTSCRIPT. This train of thought brings to my recollection a conversation with a friend of my youth, an old man of humble estate; but in whose society I had great pleasure. The reader will, I hope, pardon me if I embrace the opportunity of recalling old affections, afforded me by its fitness to illustrate the present subject. A sedate man he was, and had been a miner from his boyhood. Well did he represent the old As I see many good, and can anticipate no ill con"long syne," when every trade was a mystery and sequences, in the attempt to give distinct and approhad its own guardian saint; when the sense of self-priate meanings to words hitherto synonymous, or at importanee was gratified at home, and Ambition had least of indefinite and fluctuating application, if only a hundred several lotteries, in one or other of which the proposed sense be not passed upon the reader as the existing and authorized one, I shall make no other every freeman had a ticket, and the only blanks were drawn by Sloth, Intemperance, or inevitable Calam- apology for the use of the word, Talent, in this preity; when the detail of each art and trade (like the ceding Essay and elsewhere in my works than by oracles of the prophets, interpretable in a double annexing the following explanation. I have been in sense) was ennobled in the eyes of its professors by the habit of considering the qualities of intellect, the being spiritually improved into symbols and memen- comparative eminence in which characterizes inditos of all doctrines and all duties, and every crafts- viduals and even countries, under four kinds Nature, it should seem, makes no distinction between manuscripts and money-drafts, though the law does. GENIUS, TALENT, SENSE, and CLEVERNESS. The first I use in the sense of most general acceptance, as the faculty which adds to the existing stock of power and knowledge by new views, new combinations, &c. In short, I define GENIUS, as originality in intellectual construction: the moral accompaniment and actuating principle of which consists, perhaps, in the carrying on of the freshness and feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood. By TALENT, on t'e other hand, I mean the comparative facility of sequiring, arranging, and applying the stock furnished by others and already existing in books or other conservatories of intellect. By SENSE I understand that just balance of the faculties which is to the judgment what health is to the body. The mind seems to act en masse, by a synhetic rather than an analytic process: even as the outward senses, from which the metaphor is taken, perceive immediately, each as it were by a peculiar tact or intuition, without any consciousness of the mechanism by which the perception is realized. This is often exemplified in well-bred, unaffected, and innocent women. I know a lady, on whose judgment, from constant experience of its rectitude, I could rely almost as on an oracle. But when she has sometimes proceeded to a detail of the grounds and reasons for her opinion-then, led by similar experience, I have been tempted to interrupt her with-"I will take your advice," or, "I shall act on your opinion: for I am sure you are in the right. But as to the fors and becauses, leave them to me to find out." The general accompaniment of Sense is a disposition to avoid extremes, whether in theory or in practice, with a desire to remain in sympathy with the general mind of the age or country, and a feeling of the necessity and utility of compromise. If Genius be the initiative, and Talent the administrative, Sense is the conservative branch, in the intellectual republic. The latter chiefly as exhibited in wild combination and in pomp of ornament. N B. Imagination is implied in Genius. ENGLAND. SENSE, HUMOR. FRANCE. CLEVERNESS, TALENT, WIT. So again with regard to the forms and effects, in which the qualities manifest themselves, i. e. intellectually. GERMANY. IDEA, or Law anticipated,* ENGLAND. FRANCE. Lastly, we might exhibit the same qualities in their moral, religious, and political manifestations: in the cosmopolitism of Germany, the contemptuous nationBy CLEVERNESS (which I dare not with Dr. John-ality of the Englishman, and the ostentatious and son call a low word, while there is a sense to be expressed which it alone expresses) I mean a comparative readiness in the invention and use of means, for the realizing of objects and ideas-often of such ideas, which the man of genius only could have originated, and which the clever man perhaps neither fully comprehends nor adequately appreciates, even at the moment that he is prompting or executing the machinery of their accomplishment. In short, Cleverness is a sort of genius for instrumentality. It is the brain in the hand. In literature Cleverness is more frequently accompanied by wit, Genius and Sense by humor. If I take the three great countries of Europe, in respect of intellectual character, namely, Germany, England, and France, I should characterize them thus-premising only that in the first line of the two first tables I mean to imply that Genius, rare in all countries, is equal in both of these, the instances equally numerous-and characteristic therefore not in relation to each other, but in relation to the third country. The other qualities are more general characteristics. GERMANY. GENIUS, TALENT, FANCY. This as co-ordinate with Genius in the first table, applies likewise to the few only and conjoined with the two following qualities, as general characteristics of German intellect, includes or supposes, as its consequences and accompaniments, speculation, system, method; which in a somewhat lower class of minds appear as notionality (or a predilection for noumena, mundus intelligibilis, as contra-distinguished from phænomena, or mundus sensibilis) scheme; arrangement; orderliness. In totality I imply encyclopædic learning, exhaustion of the subjects treated of, and the passion for completing and the love of the complete. See the following Essays on Method. It might have been expressed as the contemplation of ideas objectively, as existing powers, while the German of equal genius is predisposed to contemplate law subjectively, with anticipation of a correspondent in nature. Tendency to individualize, embody, insulate, er. gr. the vitreous and the resinous fluids instead of the positive and negative forces of the power of electricity. Thus too, it was not sufficient that oxygen was the principal, and with one exception, the only then known acidifying substance; the power and principle of acidification must be embodied and as it were impersonated and hypostasized in this gas. Hence the idolism of the French, here expressed in one of its results, viz. palpability. Ideas are here out of the question. I had almost said, that Ideas and a Parisian Philosopher are incompatible terms, since the latter half, I mean, of the reign of Lewis XVI. But even the Conceptions of a Frenchman, whatever he admits to be conceivable, must be imageable, and the imageable must be fancied tangible-the non-apparency of either or both being accounted for by the disproportion of our senses, not by the nature of the conceptions. 507 boastful nationality of the Frenchman. The craving of sympathy marks the German: inward pride the Englishman: vanity the Frenchman. So again, enthusiasm, visionariness seems the tendency of the German: zeal, zealotry of the English: fanaticism of the French. But the thoughtful reader will find these and many other characteristic points contained in, and deducible from the relations in which the mind of the three countries bears to TIME. GERMANY. PAST and FUTURE. ENGLAND. PAST and PRESENT. FRANCE. THE PRESENT. case had respect to this life exclusively. But to show the desirableness of an object, or the contrary, is one thing: to excite the desire, to constitute the aversion, is another: the one being to the other as a common guide-post to the "chariot instinct with spirit,” which at once directs and conveys, or (to use a more trivial image) as the hand, and hour-plate, or at the utmost the regulator, of a watch to the spring and wheel work, or rather to the whole watch. Nay, where the sufficiency and exclusive validity of the former are adopted as the maxim (regula maxima) of the moral sense, it would be a fairer and fuller comparison to say, that it is to the latter as the dial to the sun, indicating its path by intercepting its radiance. But let it be granted, that in certain individuals from a happy evenness of nature, formed into a habit by the strength of education, the influence of example, and by favorable circumstances in general, the actions diverging from self-love as their centre should be precisely the same as those produced from the Christian principle, which requires of us that we should place our self and our neighbor at an equidistance, and love both alike as modes in which we realize and exhibit the love of God above all : wherein would the difference be then? I answer boldly: even in that, for which all actions have their whole worth and their main value-in the agents themselves. So much indeed is this of the very substance of genuine morality, that wherever the latter has given way in the general opinion to a scheme of ethics founded on utility, its place is soon challenged by the spirit of HONOR. Paley, who degrades the spirit of honor into a mere club-law among the higher classes originating in selfish convenience, and A whimsical friend of mine, of more genius than discretion, characterizes the Scotchman of literature (confining his remark, however, to the period since the Union) as a dull Frenchman and a superficial German. But when I recollect the splendid exceptions of HUME, ROBERTSON, SMOLlett, Reid, ThOMSON (if this last instance be not objected to as savoring of geographical pedantry, that truly amiable man, and genuine poet having been born but a few furlongs from the English border,) DUGALD STEWART, BURNS, WALTER SCOTT, HOGG and CAMPBELL-not to mention the very numerous physicians and prominent dissenting ministers, born and bred beyond the Tweed-I hesitate in recording so wild an opinion, which derives its plausibility, chiefly from the circumstance so honorable to our northern sister, that Scotchmen generally have more, and a more learned, education than the same ranks in other countries, be-enforced by the penalty of excommunication from the low the first class; but in part likewise, from the common mistake of confounding the general character of an emigrant, whose objects are in one place and his best affections in another, with the particular character of a Scotchman: to which we may add, perhaps, the clannish spirit of provincial literature, fostered undoubtedly by the peculiar relations of Scotland, and of which therefore its metropolis may be a striking, but is far from being a solitary, instance. ESSAY II. Η όδος κατω. HERACLIT. Fragment. AMOUR de moi moi-même; mais bien calculé; was the motto and maxim of a French philosopher. Our fancy inspirited by the more imaginative powers of hope and fear enables us to present to ourselves the future as the present: and thence to accept a scheme of self-love for a system of morality. And doubtless, an enlightened self-interest would recommend the same course of outward conduct, as the sense of duty would do; even though the motives in the former society which habit had rendered indispensable to the happiness of the individuals, has misconstrued it not less than Shaftsbury, who extols it as the noblest influence of noble natures. The spirit of honor is more indeed than a mere conventional substitute for honesty; but on the other hand instead of being a finer form of moral life, it may be more truly described as the shadow or ghost of virtue deceased. For to take the word in a sense, which no man of honor would acknowledge, may be allowed to the writer of satires, but not to the moral philosopher. Honor implies a reverence for the invisible and supersensual in our nature, and so far it is virtue; but it is a virtue that neither understands itself or its true source, and therefore often unsubstantial, not seldom fantastic, and always more or less capricious. Abstract the notion from the lives of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, or Henry the Fourth of France: and then compare it with the 1 Corinth. xiii. and the epistle to Philemon, or rather with the realization of this fair ideal in the character of St. Paul* himself. I know not a better *This has struck the better class even of infidels. Collins, one of the most learned of our English Deists, is said to have declared, that contradictory as miracles appeared to his reason, he would believe in them notwithstanding, if it could be proved to him that St. Paul had asserted any one as having been worked by himself in the modern sense of the word, miracle; adding, "St. Paul was so perfect a gentleman and a man of honor!" When I call duelling, and similar aberrs test. Nor can I think of any investigation, that would be more instructive where it would be safe, but none likewise of greater delicacy from the probability of misinterpretation, than a history of the rise of HONOR in the European monarchies as connected with the corruptions of Christianity; and an inquiry into the specific causes of the inefficacy which has attended the combined efforts of divines and moralists against the practice and obligation of duelling. immanem tamque barbaram, quæ non significari futura et a quibusdam intelligi prædicique posse censeat.* I confess, I can never read the De Divinatione of this great orator, statesman, and patriot, without feeling myself inclined to consider this opinion as an instance of the second class, namely, of fractiona! truths integrated by fancy, passion, accident, and that preponderance of the positive over the negative in the memory, which makes it no less tenacious of coincidences than forgetful of failures. Countess. What! dost thou not believe, that oft in dreams Wallenstein. I will not doubt that there may have been such voices; Voices of warning, that announce to us Yet I would not call them Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image Of a widely different character from this moral pois, yet as a derivative from the same root, we may contemplate the heresies of the Gnostics in the A voice of warning speaks prophetic to us? early ages of the church, and of the family of love, with other forms of Antinomianism, since the Reformation to the present day. But lest in uttering truth I should convey falsehood and fall myself into the error which it is my object to expose, it will be requisite to distinguish an apprehension of the whole of a truth, even where that apprehension is dim and indistinct, from a partial perception of the same rashly assumed, as a preception of the whole. The first is rendered inevitable in many things for many, in some points for all, men from the progressiveness no less than from the imperfection of humanity, which itself dictates and enforces the precept, Believe that thou mayest understand. The most knowing must at times be content with the facit of a sum too complex or subtle for us to follow nature through the antecedent process. The Greek verb, avvicvat, which we render by the word, understand, is literally the same as our own idiomatic phrase, to go along with. Hence in subjects not under the cognizance of the senses wise men have always attached a high value to general and long-continued assent, as a presumption of truth. After all the subtle reasonings and fair analogies which logic and induction could supply to a mighty intellect, it is yet on this ground that the Socrates of Plato mainly rests his faith in the immortality of the soul, and the moral Government of the universe. It had been held by all nations in all ages, but with deepest conviction by the best and wisest men, as a belief connatural with goodness and akin to prophecy. The same argument is adopted by Cicero, as the principal ground of his adherence to divination. Gentem quidem nullam video neque tam tions of honor, a moral heresy; I refer to the force of the Greek átperts as signifying a principle or opinion taken up by the will for the will's sake, as a proof and pledge to itself of its own power of self-determination, independent of all other motives. In the gloomy gratification derived or anticipated from the exercise of this awful power-the condition of all moral good while it is latent, and hidden, as it were, in the centre; but the essential cause of fiendish guilt, when it makes itself existential and peripheric-si quando in circumferentiam erumpat: (in both cases Ihave purposely adopted the language of the old mystic theosophers) —I find the only explanation of a moral phenomenon not very uncommon in the last moments of condemned felons--viz. the obstinate denial, not of the main guilt, which might be accounted for by ordinary motives, but of some particular act which had been proved beyond all possibility of doubt, and attested by the criminal's own accomplices and fellow sufferers in their last eonfessions: and this too an act, the non-perpetration of which, if believed, could neither mitigate the sentence of the law, nor even the opinions of men after the sentence had been carried into execution. WALLENSTEIN, part ii. act v. scene i. I am indeed firmly persuaded, that no doctrine was ever widely diffused, among various nations through successive ages, and under different religions (such for instance, as the tenets of original sin and redemp‐ tion, those fundamental articles of every known reli. gion professing to have been revealed,) which is not founded either in the nature of things, or in the necessities of human nature. Nay, the more strange *(Translation.)-I find indeed no people or nation, however civilized or cultivated, or however wild and barbarous. but have deemed that there are antecedent signs of future events, and some men capable of understanding and predicting them. I am tempted to add a passage from my own translation of Schiller's Wallenstein, the more so that the work has been long ago used up, as "winding sheets for pilchards," or extant only by (as I would fain flatter myself) the kind partiality of the trunk-makers: though with exception of works for which public admiration supersedes or includes individual commendations, I scarce remember a book that has been more honored by the express attestations in its favor of eminent and even of popular literati, among whom I take this opportunity of expressing my acknowledgments to the author of Waverley. Guy Mannering, &c. How (asked Ulysses, addressing his guardian goddess) shall I be able to recognize Proteus, in the swallow that skims round our houses whom I have been accustomed to behold as a swan of Phoebus measuring his movements to a celestial music? In both alike, she replied, thou canst recognize the god. So supported, I dare avow that I have thought my translation worthy of a more favorable reception from the public and their literary guides and purveyors. But when I recollect, that a much better and very far more valuable work, the Rev. Mr. Carey's incomparable translation of Dante, had very nearly met with the same fate, I lose all right, and, I trust, all inclination to complain: an inclination, which the mere sense of its folly and uselessness will not always suffice to preclude. 509 and irreconcileable such a doctrine may appear to the testimony? Is not this the one infallible criterion of understanding, the judgments of which are ground- miracles, by which a man can know whether they be ed on general rules abstracted from the world of the of God? The abhorrence in which the most savage senses, the stronger is the presumption in its favor. or barbarous tribes hold witchcraft, in which howFor whatever satirist may say, or sciolists imagine, ever their belief is so intense* as even to control the the human mind has no predilection for absurdity. I springs of life,-is not this abhorrence of witchcraft would even extend the principle (proportionately I under so full a conviction of its reality a proof, how mean) to sundry tenets, that from their strangeness or little of divine, how little fitting to our nature, a miradangerous tendency, appear only to be generally re- cle is, when insulated from spiritual truths, and disprobated, as eclipses in the belief of barbarous tribes connected from religion as its end? What then can are to be frightened away by noises and execrations; we think of a theological theory, which adopting a but which rather resemble the luminary itself in this scheme of prudential legality, common to it with one respect, that after a longer or shorter interval of the sty of Epicurus" as far at least as the springs occultation, they are still found to re-emerge. It is of moral action are concerned, makes its whole relithese, the re-appearance of which (nomine tantum gion consist in the belief of miracles! As well mutato,) from age to age, gives to ecclesiastical his- might the poor African prepare for himself a fetisch tory a deeper interest than that of romance and by plucking out the eyes from the eagle or the lynx, scarcely less wild, for every philosophic mind. I am and, enshrining the same, worship in them the power far from asserting that such a doctrine (the Antino- of vision. As the tenet of professed Christians (I mian, for instance, or that of a latent mystical sense speak of the principle not of the men, whose hearts in the words of Scripture, according to Emanuel will always more or less correct the errors of their Swedenborg) shall be always the best possible, or not understandings) it is even more absurd, and the prea distorted and dangerous, as well as partial, repre- text for such a religion more inconsistent than the resentation of the truth, on which it is founded. For ligion itself. For they profess to derive from it their the same body casts strangely different shadows in whole faith in that futurity, which if they had not different positions and different degrees of light. But previously believed on the evidence of their own I dare, and do, affirm that it always does shadow out consciences, of Moses and the Prophets, they are assome important truth, and from it derives its main in-sured by the great Founder and Object of Christianfluence over the faith of its adherents, obscure as ity, that neither will they believe it, in any spiritual their perception of this truth may be, and though and profitable sense, though a man should rise from they may themselves attribute their belief to the su- the dead. pernatural gifts of the founder, or the miracles by which his preaching had been accredited. See Wesley's Journal. But we have the highest possible authority, that of Scripture itself, to justify us in putting the question: Whether miracles can, of themselves, work a true conviction in the mind? There are spi-ings will set up their standard against the understandritual truths which must derive their evidence from within, which whoever rejects, "neither will he be lieve though a man were to rise from the dead" to confirm them. And under the Mosaic law a miracle in attestation of a false doctrine subjected the miracle-worker to death: whether really or only seem ingly supernatural, makes no difference in the present argument, its power of convincing, whatever that power may be, whether great or small, depending on the fulness of the belief in its miraculous nature. Est quibus esse videtur. Or rather, that I may express the same position in a form less likely to of fend, is not a true efficient conviction of a moral truth, is not "the creating of a new heart," which collects the energies of a man's whole being in the focus of the conscience, the one essential miracle, the same and of the same evidence to the ignorant and learned, which no superior skill can counterfeit, human or dæmoniacal? Is it not emphatically that leading of the Father, without which no man can come to Christ? Is it not that implication of doctrine in the miracle, and of miracle in the doctrine, which is the bridge of communication between the senses and the soul? That predisposing warmth that renders the understanding susceptible of the specific impression from the historic, and from all other outward seals of For myself, I cannot resist the conviction, built on particular and general history, that the extravagances of Antinomianism and Solifidianism are little more than the counteractions to this Christian paganism: the play, as it were, of antagonist muscles. The feel ing, whenever the understanding has renounced its allegiance to the reason: and what is faith but the personal realization of the reason by its union with the will? If we would drive out the demons of fanaticism from the people, we must begin by exorcising the spirit of Epicureanism in the higher ranks, and restore to their teachers the true Christian enthusiasm,t the vivifying influences of the altar, the censer, and the sacrifice. They must neither be ashamed of, nor disposed to explain away, the articles of prevenient and auxiliary grace, nor the necessity of being born again to the life from which our nature had become apostate. They must administer indeed the necessary medicines to the sick, the motives of fear as well as of hope; but they must not withhold from them the idea of health, or conceal from them that the medicines for the sick are not the diet of the healthy. Nay, they must make it a part of the curative process to induce the patient, on the first symp I refer the reader to Hearne's Travels among the Copper Indians, and to Bryan Edwards's account of the Oby in the West Indies, grounded on judicial documents and personal observation. †The original meaning of the Greek, Enthousiasmos, is: the influence of the divinity, such as was supposed to take possession of the priest during the performance of the ser vices at the altar. |