Suspends the infant audience with her tales, Each trembling heart with grateful terrors quell'd.' If man could have been made to know that his existence depended upon certain acquisitions of knowledge, without any love of the knowledge itself, he might, perhaps, have made the acquisitions that were believed to be so important. But to learn, if there had been no curiosity or pleasure in learning, would then have been a task; and, like other mere tasks, would probably have been imperfectly executed. Something would have been neglected altogether, or very inaccurately examined, the accurate knowledge of which might have been essential to life itself. Nature, by the constitution which she has given us, has attained the same end, and attained it without leaving to us the possibility of failure. She has given us the desire of knowing what it is of importance for us to know; she has made the knowledge delightful in itself; she has made it painful to us to know imperfectly. There is no task, therefore, imposed on us. In executing her benevolent will, we have only to gratify one of the strongest of our passions, to learn with delight what it is salutary to have learned, and to derive thus a sort of double happiness from the wis1 Pleasures of Imagination, Book. I. v. 232-270. dom which we acquire, and from the very effort by which we acquire it. LECTURE LXVIII. III. Prospective Emotions.-6. Desire of Power-of Direct Power, as in Ambition. GENTLEMEN, after the emotions which I considered in my last Lecture, that which is next in the order of our arrangement is the desire of power. I do not speak at present of the desire of mere freedom from constraint, though, where any unjust restraint is actually imposed, the desire of freedom from it is, perhaps, the strongest passion which man can feel, and a passion which, in such circumstances, will always be more ardent as the mind is nobler. While it remains, the slave is not wholly a slave. His true degradation begins when he has lost, not his liberty, merely, but the very desire of liberty, and when he has learned to look calmly on himself as a mere breathing and moving instrument of the wishes of another, to be moved by those wishes more than by his own, a part of some external pomp necessary to the splendour of some other being, to which he contributes, indeed, but only like the car, or the sceptre, or the purple robe, a trapping of adventitious greatness, and one of many decorative trappings that are all equally insignificant in themselves, whether they be living or inanimate. He who can feel this, and feel it without any rising of his heart against the tyranny which would keep him down, or even a wish that he were free, may indeed be considered as scarcely worthy of freedom; and if tyranny produced only the evil of such mental degradation, without any of the other evils to which it gives rise directly and indirectly, it would scarcely merit less than at present, the detestation of all who know what man is and is capable of becoming as a free man, and that wretched thing which he is and must ever continue to be as a slave. There are minds, indeed, which, long habituated to corruption, can see, in the tyrannical possessor of a power unjustly arrogated, only a source of favour, and of all the partial and prodigal largesses of favour, more easy to be obtained, as requiring, in return, only that profligate subserviency to every vice, which such minds are always sufficiently ready to pay; but what long usage of corruption does it require, before tyranny itself can cease to be hated? If to a young audience, in those early years when they know little more of the nature of political institutions, than that under some governments men are more or less happy, and more or less free, than under others, we were to relate the history of one of those glorious struggles which the oppressed have sometimes made against their oppressors, can we doubt for a moment to whom the sympathy and eager wishes of the whole audience would be given? While the first band of patriots might perhaps be overthrown, and their leader a fugitive, seeking a temporary shelter, but seeking still more the means of asserting again the same great cause, with the additional motive of avenging the fallen, how eagerly would every heart be trembling for him, hoping for him, exulting as he came forth again with additional numbers, shrinking and half-despairing at each slight repulse in the longcontinued combat, but rejoicing and confiding still more at each renewal of the charge, and feeling almost the very triumph of the deliverer himself, when his standard waved at last without any foe to oppose it, and nothing was to be seen upon the field but those who had perished, and those who were free. In listening to such a narrative, even he who was perhaps, in more advanced years, to be himself the ready instrument of oppression or corruption, and to smile with derision at the very name of liberty, would feel the interest which every other heart was feeling, and would rejoice in the overthrow of despotism like that of which he was afterwards to be the willing slave, or of which he was to be at all times ready to become the slave, if the liberties of a nation could be sold by his single voice. Such is the instant sympathy of our nature, with all who are oppressed. We may cease to feel it, indeed; but many years of sordid selfishness must first have quenched in us every thing which is noble, and made us truly as much slaves ourselves as those whose virtue and happiness are indifferent to us. To be free, to have the mind of a free man, is not to consider liberty as a privilege which a few only are to enjoy, and which, like some narrow and limited good, would become less by distribution; it is to wish, and to wish ardently, that all partook the blessing. What should we think of any one who, enjoying the pleasures of vision, and the inestimable instruction which that delightful sense has yielded to him, and continues every moment to yield, could hear without pity of a whole nation of the blind? And yet, how slight would be the cruelty of such indifference, compared with the guilt of those who, enjoying themselves the blessings of a liberal system of government, should yet feel a sort of malignant triumph in the thought that other nations do not enjoy a liberty like that which they so justly prize,-that there are many millions of human beings, gathered together in tribes, which exist still, as their ancestors have for ages existed, in a state of moral darkness, compared with which blindness to the mere sunshine is but an evil of little moment! O liberty! thou goddess, heavenly bright, Givest beauty to the sun, and pleasure to the day.' The power, however, which consists in mere freedom from constraint, is but a negative power. That of which we are at present to consider the desire, is the positive power which one individual may exercise over other individuals. In a former lecture, in which we considered the desire of action, we saw the very important advantage of this desire, that prompts man incessantly to rise from the indolence in which he might otherwise lie torpid. Our desire of power may be considered as in a great measure connected with this general desire of action. We feel a pleasure of no slight kind in the consciousness of our mere animal energies, as energies inherent in our nature, and obedient to our will. This pride of exercise is one of the first pleasures which we discover in the infant, whose eye shows visible delight at all the little wonders which he is capable of producing himself, far more than at such as are merely exhibited to him. He is pleased, indeed, when we shake for the first time the bells of his little rattle, Letter from Italy, by Addison. |