resembles, or coincides with, the doctrines of my German predecessor, though contemporary, be wholly attributed to him: provided, that the absence of distinct references to his books, which I could not at all times make with truth as 5 designating citations or thoughts actually derived from him ; and which, I trust, would, after this general acknowledgement be superfluous; be not charged on me as an ungenerous concealment or intentional plagiarism. I have not indeed (eheu! res angusta domi!) been hitherto able to procure 10 more than two of his books, viz. the 1st volume of his collected Tracts, and his System of Transcendental Idealism; to which, however, I must add a small pamphlet against Fichte, the spirit of which was to my feelings painfully incongruous with the principles, and which (with the usual 15 allowance afforded to an antithesis) displayed the love of wisdom rather than the wisdom of love. I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist: I care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words are audible and intelligible. "Albeit, I must confess to be half in doubt, 20 whether I should bring it forth or no, it being so contrary to the eye of the world, and the world so potent in most men's hearts, that I shall endanger either not to be regarded or not to be understood." 25 MILTON: Reason of Church Government. And to conclude the subject of citation, with a cluster of citations, which, as taken from books not in common use, may contribute to the reader's amusement, as a voluntary before a sermon. Dolet mihi quidem deliciis literarum inescatos subito jam homines adeo esse, præsertim qui 30 Christianos se profitentur, ut legere nisi quod ad delectationem facit sustineant nihil: unde et disciplinæ severiores et philosophia ipsa jam fere prorsus etiam a doctis negliguntur. Quod quidem propositum studiorum, nisi mature corrigitur, tam magnum rebus incommodum dabit, quam dedit Bar35 baries olim. Pertinax res Barbaries est, fateor: sed minus potest tamen, quam illa mollities et persuasa prudentia literarum, quae si ratione caret, sapientiæ virtutisque specie mortales misere circumducit. Succedet igitur, ut arbitror, haud ita multo post, pro rusticanâ seculi nostri ruditate captatrix illa communi-loquentia robur animi virilis omne, 5 omnem virtutem masculam, profligatura, nisi cavetur." "SIMON GRYNÆUS, candido lectori," prefixed to the Latin translation of Plato, by Marsilius Ficinus. Lugduni, 1557. A too prophetic remark, which has been in fulfilment from the year 1680, to the present 1815. N.B. By "persuasa 10 prudentia," Grynæus means self-complacent common sense as opposed to science and philosophic reason. "Est medius ordo, et velut equestris, Ingeniorum quidem sagacium, et rebus humanis commodorum, non tamen in primam magnitudinem patentium. Eorum hominum, ut ita 15 dicam, major annona est. Sedulum esse, nihil temere loqui, assuescere labori, et imagine prudentiæ & modestiæ tegere angustiores partes captûs, dum exercitationem et usum, quo isti in civilibus rebus pollent, pro natura et magnitudine ingenii plerique accipiunt."-BARCLAII ARGENIS 20 P. 71. "As therefore physicians are many times forced to leave such methods of curing as themselves know to be fittest, and being overruled by the sick man's impatience, are fain to try the best they can in like sort, considering how the case 25 doth stand with this present age, full of tongue and weak of brain, behold we would (if our subject permitted it) yield to the stream thereof. That way we would be contented to prove our thesis, which being the worse in itself, notwithstanding is now by reason of common imbecility the fitter 30 and likelier to be brooked."-HOOKER. If this fear could be rationally entertained in the controversial age of Hooker, under the then robust discipline of the scholastic logic, pardonably may a writer of the present times anticipate a scanty audience for abstrusest themes, 35 5 and truths that can neither be communicated or received without effort of thought, as well as patience of attention. 'Che s'io non erro al calcular de' punti, Che se allora un sol huom sembrava un Asino, CHAPTER X A chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude preceding that on the nature and genesis of the imagination or plastic power-On pedantry and pedantic expressions-Advice to young authors respecting publication-Various anecdotes of the author's literary life, and the progress of his opinions in religion and politics. 66 Esemplastic. The word is not in Johnson, nor have I 10 met with it elsewhere." Neither have I. I constructed it myself from the Greek words, eis ềv tλátteiv, to shape into one; because, having to convey a new sense, I thought that a new term would both aid the recollection of my meaning, and prevent its being confounded with the usual import of 15 the word, imagination. "But this is pedantry !" Not necessarily so, I hope. If I am not misinformed, pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company. The language of the market would be in the schools as pedantic, though it might not be reprobated by 20 that name, as the language of the schools in the market. The mere man of the world, who insists that no other terms but such as occur in common conversation should be employed in a scientific disquisition, and with no greater precision, is as truly a pedant as the man of letters, who 25 either over-rating the acquirements of his auditors, or misled by his own familiarity with technical or scholastic terms, converses at the wine-table with his mind fixed on his musæum or laboratory; even though the latter pedant instead of desiring his wife to make the tea should bid her add to the quant. suff. of thea Sinensis the oxyd of hydrogen saturated with caloric. To use the colloquial (and in truth somewhat vulgar) metaphor, if the pedant of the cloyster, and the 5 pedant of the lobby, both smell equally of the shop, yet the odour from the Russian binding of good old authenticlooking folios and quartos is less annoying than the steams from the tavern or bagnio. Nay, though the pedantry of the scholar should betray a little ostentation, yet a well- 10 conditioned mind would more easily, methinks, tolerate the fox brush of learned vanity, than the sans culotterie of a contemptuous ignorance, that assumes a merit from mutilation in the self-consoling sneer at the pompous incumbrance of tails. 15 The first lesson of philosophic discipline is to wean the student's attention from the DEGREES of things, which alone form the vocabulary of common life, and to direct it to the KIND abstracted from degree. Thus the chemical student is taught not to be startled at disquisitions on the heat in ice, 20 or on latent and fixible light. In such discourse the instructor has no other alternative than either to use old words with new meanings (the plan adopted by Darwin in his Zoonomia ;) or to introduce new terms, after the example of Linnæus, and the framers of the present chemical nomen- 25 clature. The latter mode is evidently preferable, were it only that the former demands a twofold exertion of thought in one and the same act. For the reader, or hearer, is required not only to learn and bear in mind the new definition; but to unlearn, and keep out of his view, the old and 30 habitual meaning; a far more difficult and perplexing task, and for which the mere semblance of eschewing pedantry seems to me an inadequate compensation. Where, indeed, it is in our power to recall an unappropriate term that had without sufficient reason become obsolete, it is doubtless 35 a less evil to restore than to coin anew. Thus to express in one word, all that appertains to the perception, considered as passive, and merely recipient, I have adopted from our elder classics the word sensuous; because sensual is not at 5 present used, except in a bad sense, or at least as a moral distinction; while sensitive and sensible would each convey a different meaning. Thus too I have followed Hooker, Sanderson, Milton, &c., in designating the immediateness of any act or object of knowledge by the word intuition, used 10 sometimes subjectively, sometimes objectively, even as we use the word, thought, now as the thought, or act of thinking, and now as a thought, or the object of our reflection; and we do this without confusion or obscurity, The very words, objective and subjective, of such constant recur15 rence in the schools of yore, I have ventured to re-introduce, because I could not so briefly or conveniently by any more familiar terms distinguish the percipere from the percipi. Lastly, I have cautiously discriminated the terms, THE REASON, and THE UNDERSTANDING, encouraged and con20 firmed by the authority of our genuine divines and philosophers, before the revolution. 25 "both life, and sense, Fancy, and understanding; whence the soul * Is oftest your's, the latter most is our's, I say, that I was confirmed by authority so venerable for *But for sundry notes on Shakespeare, &c., and other pieces which have fallen in my way, I should have deemed it unnecessary to observe, that discourse here, or elsewhere, does not mean what we now call discoursing; but the discursion of the mind, the processes of generalization and subsumption, of deduction and conclusion. Thus, Philosophy has hitherto been DISCURSIVE; while Geometry is always and essentially IN TUITIVE. |