I am well aware, that words will appear to many as inefficacious medicines when administered to minds agitated with manifold passions, as when they are muttered by way of charm over bodily ailments. But neither does it escape me on the other hand, that, as the diseases of the mind are invisible, invisible must the remedies likewise be. Those who have been entrapped by false opinions are to be liberated by convincing truths: that thus having imbibed the poison through the ear they may receive the antidote by the same channel. THAT 66 HAT our elder writers to Jeremy Taylor inclusive quoted to excess, it would be the very blindness of partiality to deny. More than one might be mentioned, whose works might be characterized in the words of Milton, as a paroxysm of citations, pampered metaphors, and aphorisming pedantry." On the other hand, it seems to me that we now avoid quotations with an anxiety that offends in the contrary extreme. Yet it is the beauty and independent worth of the citations far more than their appropriateness which have made Johnson's Dictionary popular even as a reading book-and the mottos with the translations of them are known to add considerably to the value of the Spectator. With this conviction I have taken more than common pains in the selection of the mottos for The Friend: and of two mottos equally appropriate prefer always that from the book which is least likely to have come into my readers' hands. For I often please myself, with the fancy, now that I may have saved from oblivion the only striking passage in a whole volume, and now that I may have attracted notice to a writer undeservedly forgotten. If this should be attributed to a silly ambition in the display of various reading, I can do no more than deny any consciousness of having been so actuated: and for the rest, I must console myself by the reflection, that if it be one of the most foolish, it is at the same time one of the most harmless, of human vanities. The passages prefixed lead at once to the question, which will probably have more than once occurred to the reflecting reader of the preceding essay. How will these rules apply to the most important mode of communication? to that, in which one man may utter his thonghts to myriads of men at the same time, and to myriads of myriads at various times and through successions of generations? How do they apply to authors, whose foreknowledge assuredly does not inform them who, or how many, or of what description their readers will be? How do these rules apply to books, which once published, are as likely to fall in the way of the incompetent as of the judicious, and will be fortunate indeed if they are not many times looked at through the thick mists of ignorance, or amid the glare of prejudice and passion?—We answer in the first place, that this is not universally true. The readers are not seldom picked and chosen. Relations of certain pretended miracles performed a few years ago, at Holywell, in consequence of prayers to the Virgin Mary, on female servants, and these relations moralized by the old Roman Catholic arguments without the old Protestant answers, have to my knowledge been sold by travelling pedlars in villages and farmhouses, not only in a form which placed them within the reach of the narrowest means, but sold at a price less than their prime cost, and doubtless, thrown in occasionally as the make-weight in a bargain of pins and stay-tape. Shall I be told, that the publishers and reverend authorizers of these base and vulgar delusions had exerted no choice as to the purchasers and readers? But waiving this, or rather having first pointed it out, as an important exception, we further reply: that if the author have clearly and rightly established in his own mind the class of readers, to which he means to address his communications; and if both in this choice, and in the particulars of the manner and matter of his work, he conscientiously observe all the conditions which reason and conscience have been shown to dictate, in relation to those for whom the work was designed; he will, in most instances, have effected his design and realized the desired circumscription. The posthumous work of Spinoza (Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata) may, indeed, accidentally fall into the hands of an incompetent reader. But (not to mention, that it is written in a dead language) it will be entirely harmless, because it must needs be utterly unintelligible. I venture to assert, that the whole first book, De Deo, might be read in a literal English translation to any congregation in the kingdom, and that no individual, who had not been habituated to the strictest and most laborious processes of reasoning, would even suspect its orthodoxy or piety, however heavily the few who listened would complain of its obscurity and want of interest. This, it may be objected, is an extreme case. But it is not so for the present purpose. We are speaking of the probability of injurious consequences from the communication of truth. This I have denied, if the right means have been adopted, and the necessary conditions adhered to, for its actual communication. Now the truths conveyed in a book are either evident of themselves, or such as require a train of deductions in proof: and the latter will be either such as are authorized and generally received, or such as are in opposition to received and authorized opinions; or lastly, truths presented for the appropriate test of examination, and still under trial (adhuc sub lite). Of this latter class I affirm, that in neither of the three sorts can an instance be brought of a preponderance of ill consequences, or even of an equilibrium of advantage and injury from a work, in which the understanding alone has been appealed to, by results fairly deduced from just premises, in terms strictly appropriate. Alas! legitimate reasoning is impossible without severe thinking, and thinking is neither an easy nor an amusing employment. The reader, who would follow a close reasoner to the summit and absolute principle of any one important subject, has chosen a chamoishunter for his guide. Our guide will, indeed, take us the shortest way, will save us many a wearisome and perilous wandering, and warn us of many a mock road that had formerly led himself to the brink of chasms and precipices, or at best in an idle circle to the spot from whence he started. But he cannot carry us on his shoulders: we must strain our own sinews, as he has strained his; and make firm footing on the smooth rock for ourselves, by the blood of toil from our own feet. Examine the journals of our humane and zealous missionaries in Hindostan. How often and how feelingly do they describe the difficulty of making the simplest chain of reasoning intelligible to the ordinary natives the rapid exhaustion of their whole power of attention, and with what pain and distressful effort it is exerted, while it lasts. Yet it is among this class, that the hideous practices of self-torture chiefly, indeed almost exclusively, prevail. O! if folly were no easier than wisdom, it being often so very much more grievous, how certainly might not these miserable men be converted to Christianity? But alas! to swing by hooks passed through the back, or to walk on shoes with nails of iron pointed upward on the soles, all this is so much less difficult, demands so very inferior an exertion of the will than to think, and by thought to gain knowledge and tranquillity! It is not true, that ignorant persons have no notion of the advantages of truth and knowledge. They confess, they see, those advantages in the conduct, the immunities, and the superior powers of the possessors. Were these attainable by pilgrimages the most toilsome, or penances the most painful, we should assuredly have as many pilgrims and as many self-tormentors in the service of true religion and virtue, as now exist under the tyranny of Papal or Brahman superstition. This inefficacy of legitimate reason, from the want of fit objects, this its relative weakness and how narrow at all times its immediate sphere of action must be, is proved to us by the impostors of all professions. What, I pray, is their fortress, the rock which is both their quarry and their foundation, from which and on which they are built? The desire of arriving at the end without the effort of thought and will, which are the appointed means. Let us look backward three or four centuries. Then as now the great mass of mankind were governed by the three main wishes, the wish for vigour of body, including the absence of painful feelings for weaith, or the power of procuring the external conditions of bodily enjoyment: these during life-and security from pain, and continuance of happiness, after death. Then, as now, men were desirous to attain them by some easier means than those of temperance, industry, and strict justice. They gladly therefore applied to the priest, who could insure them happiness hereafter without the performance of their duties here; to the lawyer, who could make money a substitute for a right cause; to the physician, whose medicines promised to take the sting out of the tail of their sensual indulgences, and let them fondle : and play with vice, as with a charmed serpent; to the alchemist, whose gold-tincture would enrich them without toil or economy; and to the astrologer, from whom they could purchase foresight without knowledge or reflection. The established professions were, without exception, no other than licensed modes of witchcraft. The wizards, who would now find their due reward in Bridewell, and their appropriate honours in the pillory, sat then on episcopal thrones, candidates for saintship, and already canonized in the belief of their deluded contemporaries; while the one or two real teachers and discoverers of truth were exposed to the hazard of fire and faggot, a dungeon the best shrine that was vouchsafed to a Roger Bacon and a Galileo! ESSAY VIII. Pray, why is it, that people say that men are not such fools now-a-days as they were in the days of yore? I would fain know, whether you would have us understand by this same saying, as indeed you logically may, that formerly men were fools, and in this generation are grown wise? How many and what dispositions made them fools? How many and what dispositions were wanting to make 'em wise? Why were those fools? How should these be wise? Pray, how came you to know that men were formerly fools? How did you find that they are now wise? Who made them fools? Who in Heaven's name made us wise? Who d'ye think are most, those that loved mankind foolish, or those that love it wise? How long has it been wise? How long otherwise? Whence proceeded the foregoing folly? Whence the following wisdom? Why did the old folly end now and no later? Why did the modern wisdom begin now and no sooner? What were we the worse for the former folly? What the better for the succeeding wisdom? How should the ancient folly have come to nothing? How should this same new wisdom be started up and established? Now answer me, an't please you! FR. RABELAIS' Preface to his 5th Book. ONSTERS and madmen canonized, and Galileo blind in a dungeon! least, we are, if not better, yet better off than our forefathers! But to what, and to whom (under Providence) do we owe the improvement? To any radical change in the moral affections of mankind in general? Perhaps the great majority of men are now fully conscious that they are born with the God-like faculty of reason, and that it is the business of life to develop and apply it? The Jacob's ladder of truth, let down from heaven, with all its numerous rounds, is now the common highway, on which we are content to toil upward to the objects of our desires? We are ashamed of expecting the end without the means? In order to answer these questions in the affirmative, I must have forgotten the animal magnetists; the proselytes of Brothers and of Joanna Southcote ; and some hundred thousand fanatics less original in their creeds, but not a whit more rational in their expectations. I must forget the infamous empirics, whose advertisements pollute and disgrace all our newspapers, and almost paper the walls of our cities; and the vending of whose poisons and poisonous drams (with shame and anguish be it spoken) supports a shop in every market-town! I must forget that other opprobrium of the nation, that mother-vice, the lottery! I must forget, that a numerous class plead prudence for keeping their fellow-men ignorant and incapable of intellectual enjoyments, and the revenue for upholding such temptations as men so ignorant will not withstand—yes! that even senators and officers of state hold forth the revenue as a sufficient plea for upholding, at every fiftieth door throughout the kingdom, temptations to the most pernicious vices, which fill the land with mourning, and fit the labouring classes for sedition and religious fanaticism! Above all I must forget the first years of the French Revolution, and the millions throughout Europe who confidently expected the best and choicest results of knowledge and virtue, namely, liberty and universal peace, from the votes of a tumultuous assembly-that is, from the mechanical agitation of the air in a large room at Paris-and this too in the most light, unthinking, sensual and profligate of the European nations, a nation, the very phrases of whose language are so composed, that they can scarcely speak without lying!-No! let us not deceive ourselves. Like the man who used to pull off his hat with great demonstration of respect whenever he spoke of himself, we are fond of styling our own the enlightened age: though as Jortin, I think, has wittily remarked, the golden age would be more appropriate. But in spite of our great scientific discoveries, for which praise be given to whom the praise is due, and in spite of that general indifference to all the truths and all the principles of truth that belong to our permanent being, and therefore do not lie within the sphere of our senses, (that same indifference which makes toleration so easy a virtue with us, and constitutes nine-tenths of our pretended illumination,) it still remains the character of the mass of mankind to seek for the attainment of their necessary ends by any means rather than the appointed ones; and for this cause only, that the latter imply the exertion of the reason and the will. But of all things this demands the longest apprenticeship, even an apprenticeship from infancy ; which is generally neglected, because an excellence, that may and should belong to all men, is expected to come to every man of its own accord. To whom then do we owe our ameliorated condition? To the successive Few in every age (more indeed in one generation than in another, but relatively to the mass of mankind always few) who by the intensity and permanence of their action have compensated for the limited sphere, within which it is at any one time intelligible; and whose good deeds posterity reverences in their results, though the mode in which we repair the inevitable waste of time, and the style of our additions, too generally furnish a sad proof how little we understand the principles. I appeal to the histories of the Jewish, the Grecian, and the Roman republics, to the records of the Christian Church, to the his |