250 OF BKLI£F. [ksSAY party has the strength and the inexorablenesa to employ it, that it is perhaps beyond the prowess of human nature to stand up against.
The mind of the enquiring man is engaged in a course of perpetual research; and ingenuousness prompts us never to be satisfied with the efibrts that we have made, but to press forward. But mind, as well as body, has a certain t^* inertut^ and moves only as it is acted upon by impulses from without. With respect to the adopting new opi- nions, and the discovery of new truths, we must be indebted in the last resort, either to books, or die oral communications of our fellow-men, or to ideas immediately suggested to us by the phenomena of man or nature. The two former are the ordinary causes of a change of judgment to men: they are for the most part minds of a superior class only, that are susceptible of hints derived straight from the external world, without the understandings of other men intervening, and serving as a conduit to the new conceptions introduced. The two former serve, so to express it, for the education of man, and enable us to master, in our own persons, die points already secured, and the wisdom laid up iit the great magazine of human knowledge; the last imparts to us the power of adding to the stock, and carrying forward by one step and another the im- provements of which our nature is susceptible.
It is much that books, the unchanging records of the thoughts of men in former ages, are able to Xni J OF BELIEF. 35 1 impart to us. For many of the happiest moments of our liveSj for many of the purest and most ex>- alted feelings of the human hearty we are indebted to them. Education is their province; we derive from them civilization and refinement; and we may affirm of literature, what Otway has said of woman^ "We had been brutes without you." It is thus that the acquisitions of the wise are handed down from age to age, and that we are enabled to mount step after step on the ladder of paradise, till we reach the skies.
But, inestimable as is the benefit we derive from books, there is something more searching and soul-stirring in the impulse of oral communication. We cannot shut our ears, as we shut our books; we cannot escape from the appeal of the man who addresses us with earnest speech and living convic- tion. It is thus, we are told, that, when Cicero pleaded before Caesar for the life of Ligarius, the conqueror of the world was troubled, and changed colour again and again, till at length the scroll pre- paiied for the condemnation of the patriot fell from his hand. Sudden and irresistible conviction rs. chiefly the offspring of living speech. We may arm oilrselves against the arguments of an fiuthor; but the strength of reasoning in him who addresses us, takes us at unawares. It is in the reciprocation of answer and rejoinder that the power of conversion / specially lies. A book is an abstraction. It is but imperfectly that we feel, that a real man addresses // 252 OF B£L1£F. [essay US in it^ and that what he delivers is the entire and deep-wrought sentiment of a being of flesh and blood like ourselves, a being who claims our attention^ and is entitled to our deference. The living human voice^ with a countenance and manner correspond- / ing, constrains us to weigh what is said, shoots, through us like a stroke of electricity, will not away from our memory, and haunts our very dreams. II is by means of this peculiarity in the nature of mind, that it has been often observed that there is from time to time an Augustan age in the intellect of nations, that men of superior powers shock with each other, and that light is struck from the colli- sion, which most probably no one of these men ' would have given birth to, if they had not been thrown into mutual society and communion. And even so, upon a narrower scale, he that would aspire to do the most of which his faculties are susceptible^ should Seek the intercourse of his fellows, that his powers may be strengthened, and he may be kept free from that torpor and indolence of soul, which, without external excitement, are ever apt to take possession of us.
The man, who lives in solitude, and seldom com- municates with minds of the same class as his own, works out his opinions with patient scrutiny, re- turns to the investigation again and again, imagines that he had examined the question on all sides, and at length arrives at what is to him a satisfactory conclusion. He resumes the view of this conclu^ XIII.] OF BELIEF. 253 sion day after day; he finds in it an unalterable validity; he says in his heart, "Thus much I have gained; this is a real advance in the search after truth; I have added in a defined and palpable degree to what I knew before.*' And yet it has sometimes happened, that this person, after having been shut up for weeks, or for a longer period, in his sanctuary, living, so far as related to an exchange of oral disquisitions with his fellow-men, like Ro- binson Crusoe in the desolate island, shall come into the presence of one, equally clear-sighted, cu- rious and indefatigable with himself, and shall hear from him an obvious and palpable statement, which in a moment shivers his sightly and glittering fa- bric into atoms. The statement was palpable and near at hand; it was a thin, an almost impercepti- ble partition that hid it from him; he wonders in his heart that it never occurred to his meditations. And yet so it is: it was hid from him for weeks, or perhaps for a longer period: it might have been hid from him for twenty years, if it had not been for the accident that supplied it. And he no sooner sees it, than he instantly perceives that the discovery upon which he plumed himself, was an absurdity, of which even a schoolboy might be ashamed.
A circumstance not less curious, among the phe- nomena which belong to this subject of belief, is the repugnance incident to the most ingenuous minds, which we harbour against the suddenly dis- carding an opinion we have previously entertained, 254 OF BELIEF. [essay and the adopting one which qomes recommended to ua with almost the force of demonstration. Nothing / can be better founded than this repugnance. The mind of man is of a peculiar nature. It has been diaputed whether we can entertain more than one idea at a time. But certain it is^ that the views of the mind at any one time are considerably narrowed. The mind is like the slate of a schoolboy, which caxi contain only a certain number of characters of H given size, or like a moveable panorama, which places a given scene or landscape before me, and the space assigned, and which comes within the li- mits marked out to my perception, is full. Many things are therefore almost inevitably shut out, which, had it not been so, might have essentially changed the view of the case, and have taught me that it was a very different conclusion at which I ought to have arrived.
At first sight nothing can appear more unreason- able, than that I should hesitate to admit the seem* ingly irresistible force of the argument presented to me. An ingenuous disposition would appear to require that, the moment the truth, or what seems to be the truth, is set before me, I should pay to it the allegiance to which truth is entitled. If I do otherwise, it would appear to argue a pusillanimous disposition, a mind not prompt and disengaged to receive the impression of evidence, a temper that lores something else better than the lustre which aU mfdd are bound to recognise, and that has a reserve XIII.] OF bi:li£F. 255 in fiivour of ancient prejudice^ and of an opinion no longej supported by reason.
In fact however I shall act most wisely, and in the way most honourable to my character, if I re- aolve to adjourn the debate. No matter how com- plete the view may seem which is now presented to my consideration, or how irresistible the arguments: truth is too majestic a divinity, and it is of too much importance that I should pot follow a delu- sive semblance that may shew like truth, not to make it in the highest degree proper that I should examine again and again, before I come to the con- clusion to which I mean to affix my seal, and annex my sanction, ^^This is the truth.'* The ancient Goths of Grermany, we are told, had a custom of debating every thing of importance to their state twice^ once in the high animation of a convivial meeting, and once in the serene stillness of a morn- ing consultation. Philip of Macedon having de- cided a cause precipitately, the party condemned by him immediately declared his resolution to appeal from the sentence. And to whom, said the king, wilt thou appeal? To Philip, was the answer, in the entire possession of his understanding.
Such is the nature of the human mind — at least, such I find to be the nature of my own<— that many (tains of thinking, many chains of evidence, the lesult of accumulated facts, will often not present themselves, at the time when their presence would be of the highest importance. The view which now 266 OF BELIEF. [B86AY comes before me is of a substance so close and well- woven, and of colours so brilliant and dazzling, that other matters in a certain degree remote, though of no less intrinsic importance, and equally entitled to influence my judgment in the question in hand, shall be entirely shut out, shall be killed, and fail to offer themselves to my perceptions.
It is a curious circumstance which Pope, a man of eminent logical power and acuteness, relates, that, having at his command in his youth a collection of all the tracts that had been written on both sides in the reign of James the Second, he applied himself with great assiduity to their perusal, and the conse- quence was, that he was a Papist and Protestant by turns, according to the last book he read*.
This circumstance in the structure of the hiiman understanding is well known, and is the foundation of many provisions that occur in the constitution of political society. How each man shall form his creed, and arrange those opinions by which his con- duct shall be regulated, is of course a matter excli>- sively subjected to his own discretion. But, when he is called upon to act in the name of a commu- nity, and to decide upon a question in which the public is interested, he of necessity feels himself called upon to proceed with the utmost caution. A judge on the bench, a chancellor, is not contented with that sudden ray of mental illumination to which an ingenuous individual is often disposed to » Correspondence with Atterbury, Letter IV.
XIIJ.] OF B£LI£F. 257 yield in an affair of abstract speculation. He feels that be is obliged to wait for evidence, the nature of which he does not yet anticipate, and to adjourn his decision. A deliberative council or assembly is aware of the necessity of examining a question again and again. It is upon this principle that the two houses of the English parliament are required to give a first, a second and a third reading, together with various other forms and technicalities, to the provision that is brought before them, previously to its passing into a law. And there is many a fundamental dogma and comer-stone of the senti- ments that I shall emphatically call my own, that is of more genuine importance to the individual, than to a nation is a number of those regulations, which by courtesy we call acts of parliajnent.
Nothing can have a more glaring tendency to subvert the authority of my opinion among my fel- low-men, than instability. " What went ye out into the wilderness to see? " said Jesus Christ: " a reed shaken with the wind?'* We ought at all times to be open to conviction. We ought to be ever ready to listen to evidence. But, conscious of our human frailty, it is seldom that we ought immediately to subscribe to the propositions, however specious, that are now for the first time presented to us. It is our duty to lay up in our memory the suggestions offered upon any momentous question, and not to puffer them to lose their inherent weight and im- pressiveness; but it is only through the mediums 258 OF BELLEF. [eSSAY « of consideration and reconsideration^ that they can become entitled to our full and unreserved assent. ' The nature of belief, or opinion, has been weU illustrated by Lord Shaftesbury^. There are many notions or judgments floating in the mind of erety tn'axiy which are mutually destructive of each other. In this sense men's opinions are governed by high and low spirits, by the state of the solids and fluids of the human body, and by the state of the breather. But in a paramount sense that only can be said to be aman's opinion which he entertains in his cleatest moments, and from which, when he is most himself, he is least subject to vary. In this emphatical setise, I should say, a man does not always know what is his real opinion. We cannot strictly be said to believe any thing, in cases where we afterwards change our opinion without the introduction of some evidence that was unknown to us before. But how many are the instances in which we can be af- firmed to be in the adequate recollection of all the evidences and reasonings which have at some time occurred to us, and of the opinions, together with the grounds on which they rested, which we con- ceived we had justly and rationally entertained?
The considerations here stated however should by no means be allowed to inspire us with indifl^e- rence in matters of opinion. It is the glory and, histre of our nature, that we are capable of receiv- ing evidence, and weighing the reasons for and ■ *> Enquiry concerning Virtue, Book I, Part I, Section ii.
XIII.] OF BELIEF. 259 against any important proposition in the balance of an impartial and enlightened understanding. The only eflFect that should be produced in us, by the reflection that we can at last by no means be secure that we have attained to a perfect result, should be to teach us a wholsome diffidence and humility, and induce us to confess that, when we have done all, we are ignorant, dim-sighted and fal- lible, that our best reasonings may betray, and our wisest conclusions deceive us.
s2 260 OF YOUTH AND AGE. [esSAT ESSAY XIV.
OF YOUTH AND AGE.
Magna debetur pueris reverentia.
QUINTILIAN.
I AM more doubtful in writing the following Essay than in any of those which precede^ how far I am treating of human nature generally, or to a certain degree merely recording my own feelings as an in- dividual. I am guided however in composing it, by the principle laid down in my Preface, that the purpose of my book in each instance should be to expand some new and interesting truth, or some old truth viewed under a new aspect, which had never by any preceding writer been laid before the public.
Education, in the conception of those whose office it is to direct it, has various engines by means of which it is to be made effective, and among these are reprehension and chastisement.
The philosophy of the wisest man that ever ex- isted, is mainly derived from the act of introspec- tion. We look into our own bosoms, observe attentively every thing that passes there, anatomise our motives, trace step by step the operations of thought, and diligently remark the effects of exter- nal impulses upon our feelings and conduct. Phi- losophers, ever since the time in which Socrates XIV.] OF YOUTH AND AGE. 361 flourished, to carry back our recollections no fur-* ther^ have found that the minds of men in the most essential particulars are framed so far upon the same model, that the analysis of the individual may stand in general consideration for the analysis of the species. Where this principle fails, it is not easy to suggest a proceeding that shall supply the deficiency. I look into my own breast; I observe steadily and with diligence what passes there; and with all the parade of the philosophy of the human mind I can do little more than this.
In treating therefore of education in the point of view in which it has just been proposed, I turn my observation upon myself, and I proceed thus. — -If I do not stand as a competent representative for the whole of my species, I suppose I may at least as- sume to be the representative of no inconsiderable number of them.
I find then in myself, for as long a time as I can trace backward the records of memory, a promi- nent vein of docility. Whatever it was proposed to. teach me, that was in any degree accordant with my constitution and capacity, I was willing to learn. And this limit is sufficient for the topic I am pro- posing to treat. I do not intend to consider edu- cation of any other sort, than that which has some- thing in it of a Uberal and ingenuous nature. I am not here discussing the education of a peasant^ an artisan, or a slave.
In addition to this vein of docility, which easily 262 OF YOUTH AND AG£. [ESSAY prompted me to learn whatever was proposed for my instruction and improvement, I felt in myself a sentiment of ambition, a desire to possess the qua- lifications which I found to be productive of esteem, and that should enable me to excel among my con- temporaries. I was ambitious to be a leader, and to be regarded by others with feelings of complacency. I had no wish to rule by brute force and compulsion; but I was desirous to govern by love, and honour, and " the cords of a man."
I do not imagine that, when I aver thus much of myself, I am bringing forward any thing unprece- dented, or that multitudes of my fellow-men do not largely participate with me.
The question therefore I am considering is, through what agency, and with what engines^ a youth thus disposed, and with these qualifications^ is to be initiated in all liberal arts.
I will go back no further than to the commence- ment of the learning of Latin. All before was so easy to me, as never to have presented the idea of a task. I was immediately put into the accidence. No explanation wa§i attempted to be given why Latin was to be of use to me, or why it was neces- sary to commit to memory the cases of nouns and the tenses of verbs. I know not whether this was owing to the unwillingness of my instructor to give himself the trouble, or to my supposed incapacity to apprehend the explanation. The last of these I do not admit. My docility however came to my XIV.] OF YOUTH AND AGB. 269 aid; and I did not for a moment harbour any re- pugnance to the doing what was required of me. At first, and unassisted in the enquiry^ I felt a diffi- culty in supposing that the English language, all the books in my father s library, did not contain every thing that it would be necessary for me to know. In no long time however I came to expe- rience a pleasure in turning the thoughts expressed in an unknown tongue into my own; and I spee- dily understood that I could never be on a level with those eminent scholars whom it was my ambition to rival, without the study of the classics.
What then were the obstacles, that should in any degree counteract my smooth and rapid progress in the studies suggested to me? I can conceive only two.
First, the versatility and fickleness which in a greater or less degree beset all human minds, par- ticularly in the season of early youth. However docile we may be, and willing to learn, there will be periods, when either some other object powerfully solicits us^ or satiety creeps in, and makes us wish to occupy our attention with any thing else rather than with the task prescribed us. But this is no powerful obstacle. The authority of the instructor, a grave look, and the exercise of a moderate degree of patience will easily remove it in such a proba- tioner as we are here considering.
Another obstacle is presmnption. The scholar is willing to conceive well of his own capacity; He 3^ OF VOUTH AND AGB. [essAT has a vanity in accomplishing the task prescribed him in the shortest practicable time. He is impa- tient to go away from the business imposed upon him^ to things of his own election, and occupations which his partialities and his temper prompt him to pursue. He has a pride in saying to himself, *^This, which was a business given to occupy me for several hours, I can accomplish in less than one/' But the presumption arising out of these views is easily subdued. If the pupil is wrong in his calculation, the actual experiment will speedily convince him of his error. He is humbled by and ashamed of his mistake. The merely being sent back to study his lesson afresh, is on the face of the thing punishment enough.
It follows from this view of the matter, that an ingenuous youth, endowed with sufficient capacity for the business prescribed him, may be led on in the path of intellectual acquisition and improve- ment with a silken cord. It will demand a certain degree of patience on the part of the instructor. But Heaven knows, that this patience is sufficiently called into requisition when the instructor shall be the greatest disciplinarian that ever existed. Kind tones and encouragement will animate the learner amidst many a difficult pass. A grave remark may perhaps sometimes be called for. And, if the pre- ceptor and the pupil have gone on like friends, a grave remark, a look expressive of rebuke, will be found a very powerful engine. The instructor XIV.] OF YOUTH AND AGE. 1166 should smooth the business of instruction to his pupil, by appealing to his understanding, develop- ing his taste, and assisting him to remark the beau- ties of the composition on which he is occupied.
I come now then to the consideration of the two engines mentioned in the commencement of this Essay, reprehension and chastisement. And here, as in what went before, I am reduced to the refer- ring to my own experience, and looking back into the history of my own mind.
I say then, that reprehension and reprimand can scarcely ever be necessary. The pupil should un- doubtedly be informed when he is wrong. He should be told what it is that he ought to have omitted, and that he ought to have done. There should be no reserve in this. It will be worthy of the highest censure, if on these points the instruc- tor should be mealy-mouthed, or hesitate to tell the pupil in the plainest terms, of his faults, his bad habits, and the dangers that beset his onward and honourable path.
But this may be best, and most beneficially done, and in a way most suitable to the exigence, and to the party to be corrected, in a few words. The rest is all an unwholsome tumour, the disease of speech, and not the sound and healthful substance through which its circulation and life are conveyed.
There is always danger of this excrescence of speech, where the speaker is the umpire, and feels himself at liberty, unreproved, to say what he 266 OF YOUTH AND AGE, [ESSAY pleaaes. He is charmed with the sound of his own voice. The periods flow numerous from his tongue, and he gets on at his ease. There is in all this an image of empire; and the human mind is ever prone to be delighted in the exercise of unrestricted authority. The pupil in this case stands before his instructor in an attitude humble^ submissive^ and bowing to the admonition that is communicated to him. The speaker says more than it was in his purpose to say; and he knows not how to arrest himself in his triumphant career. He believes that he is in no danger of excess, and recollects the old proverb that "words break no bones."
But a syllable more than is necessary and justly measured, is materially of evil operation to inge- nuous youth. The mind of such a youth is tender and flexible, and easily swayed one way or the other. He believes almost every thing that he is bid to believe; and the admonition that is given him with all the symptoms of friendliness and sin- cerity he is prompt to subscribe to. If this is wan- tonly aggravated to him, he feels the oppression, ajid is galled with the injustice. He knows himself guiltless of premeditated wrong. He has not yet learned that his condition is that of a slav^; and he feels a certain impatience at his being coi;isi- dered as such, though he probably does not venture to express it. He shuts up the sense of this des- potism in his own bosom; and it is his first lesson of independence and rebellion and original sin.
XIV.] OF YOUTH AND AGE. 267 It is one of the grossest mistakes of which we can be guilty, if we confound different offences and offenders together. The great and the small alike appear before us in the many-coloured scene of hu- man society; Jind, if we reprehend bitterly and rate a juvenile sinner for the fault, which he scarcely un- derstood, and assuredly had not premeditated, we break down at once a thousand salutary boundaries, and reduce the ideas of right and virrong in his mind to a portentous and terrible chaos. The commu- nicator of liberal knowledge assuredly ought not to confound his office with that of a magistrate at a quarter-sessions, who though he does not sit in judgment upon transgressions of the deepest and most atrocious character, yet has brought before him in many cases defaulters of a somewhat hard- ened disposition, whose lot has been cast among the loose and the profligate, and who have been carefully trained to a certain audacity of temper, taught to look upon the paraphernalia of justice with scorn, and to place a sort of honour in sus- taining hard words and the lesser visitations of pu* nishment with unflinching nerve...■,> . If this is the judgment we ought to pass upon, the bitter and galling and humiliating terms of cepre^ hension apt to be made use of by the instructor to his pupil, it is unnecessary to say a word on the subject of chastisement. If such an expedient is ever to be had recourse to, it can only be in cases of contumaciousness and rebellion; and then the 268 OF YOUTH AND AGE. [ESSAY instructor cannot too unreservedly say to himself^ ^'This is matter of deep humiliation to me: I ought to have succeeded by an appeal to the understanding and ingenuous feelings of youth; but I am reduced to a confession of my impotence.*" But the topic which^ most of all^ I was desirous to bring forward in this Essay, is that of the lan- guage so customarily employed by the impatient and irritated preceptor, *^ Hereafter, in a state of mature and ripened judgment, you wUl thank me for the severity I now exercise towards you."
No; it may safely be answered: that time will never arrive.
As, in one of my earlier Essays % I undertook to shew that there is not so much difference between the talents of one man and another as has often been apprehended, so we are guilty of a gross error in the way in which we divide the child from the man, and consider him as if he belonged to a dis- tinct species of beings.
I go back to the recollections of my youth, and can scarcely find where to draw the line between in- eptness and maturity. The thoughts that occurred to me, as far back as I can recollect them, were often shrewd; the suggestions ingenious; the judg- ments not seldom acute. I feel myself the same in- dividual all through. Sometimes I was unreasonably presumptuous, and sometimes unnecessarily,dis- trustful. Experience has taught me in various in- ' Essay II.
XIV.] OF YOUTH AND AGE. 269 stances a sober confidence in my decisions; but tbat is all the difference. So to express it^ I bad then the same tools to work with as now; but the magazine of materials upon which I had to operate was scantily supplied. Like the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, the faculty, such as it was, was within me; but my shelves contained but a small amount of furniture: A beggarly account of empty boxes^ Remnants of packthread^ and old cakes of roses.
Which, thinly scattered, served to make a shew.
In speaking thus of the intellectual powers of my youth, I am however conceding too much. It is true, "Practice maketh perfect." But it is sur- prising, in apt and towardly youth, how much there is to commend in the first essays. The novice, who has his faculties lively and on the alert, will strike with his hammer almost exactly where the blow ought to be placed, and give nearly the precisely right force to the act. He will seize the thread it was fitting to seize; and, though he fail again and again, will shew an adroitness upon the whole that we scarcely know how to account for. The man whose career shall ultimately be crowned with suc- cess, will demonstrate in the beginning that he was destined to succeed.
There is therefore no radical difference between the child and the man. His flesh becomes more firm and sinewy; his bones grow more solid and powerful; his joints are more completely stnmg.
270 or YOUTH AND AGE. [ESSAY But he is still essentially the same being that he was. When a genuine philosopher holds a new-bom child in his arms, and carefully examines it^ he per*- ceives in it various indications of temper and seeds of character. It was all there, though folded up and confused, and not obtruding itself upon the remark of every careless spectator. It continues with the child through life, grows with his growth, and never leaves him till he is at last consigned to the tomb. How absurd then by artful rules and positive insti- tutions to undertake to separate what can never be divided! The child is occasionally grave and reflect- ing, and deduces well-founded inferences; he draws on the past, and plunges into the wide ocean of the future. In proportion as the child advances into the youth, his intervals of gravity increase, and he builds up theories and judgments, some of which no future time shall suffice to overturn. It is idle to suppose that the first activity of our faculties, when every thing is new and produces an unbated impression, when the mind is uncumbered, and every interest and ev^ry feeling bid us be observing and awake, should pass for nothing. We lay up stores then, which shall never be exhausted. Our minds are thie reverse of worn and obtuse. We bring faculties into the world with us fresh from the hands of the aU-bounteous giver; they are not yet moulded to a senseless routine; they are not yet corrupted by the ill lessons of effrontery, impudence and vice. Child- hood is beautiful; youth is ingenuous; and it can