The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 07 (of 12) (part 3 of 3)
I do not think I should illustrate the foregoing reasoning so well by any thing I could add on the subject as by relating the manner in which it first struck me.—There are moments in the life of a solitary thinker which are to him what the evening of some great victory is to the conqueror and hero—milder triumphs long remembered with truer and deeper delight. And though the shouts of multitudes do not hail his success, though gay trophies, though the sounds of music, the glittering of armour, and the neighing of steeds do not mingle with his joy, yet shall he not want monuments and witnesses of his glory, the deep forest, the willowy brook, the gathering clouds of winter, or the silent gloom of his own chamber, ‘faithful remembrancers of his high endeavour, and his glad success,’ that, as time passes by him with unreturning wing, still awaken the consciousness of a spirit patient, indefatigable in the search of truth, and a hope of surviving in the thoughts and minds of other men. I remember I had been reading a speech which Mirabeau (the author of the System of Nature) has put into the mouth of a supposed atheist at the Last Judgment; and was afterwards led on by some means or other to consider the question whether it could properly be said to be an act of virtue in any one to sacrifice his own final happiness to that of any other person or number of persons, if it were possible for the one ever to be made the price of the other. Suppose it were my own case—that it were in my power to save twenty other persons by voluntarily consenting to suffer for them: why should I not do a generous thing, and never trouble myself about what might be the consequence to myself the Lord knows when?—The reason why a man should prefer his own future welfare to that of others is that he has a necessary, absolute interest in the one which he cannot have in the other, and this again is a consequence of his being always the same individual, of his continued identity with himself. The difference I thought was this, that however insensible I may be to my own interest at any future period, yet when the time comes I shall feel differently about it. I shall then judge of it from the actual impression of the object, that is truly and certainly; and as I shall still be conscious of my past feelings and shall bitterly regret my own folly and insensibility, I ought as a rational agent to be determined now by what I shall then wish I had done when I shall feel the consequences of my actions most deeply and sensibly. It is this continued consciousness of my own feelings which gives me an immediate interest in whatever relates to my future welfare, and makes me at all times accountable to myself for my own conduct. As therefore this consciousness will be renewed in me after death, if I exist again at all—But stop—As I must be conscious of my past feelings to be myself, and as this conscious being will be myself, how if that consciousness should be transferred to some other being? How am I to know that I am not imposed upon by a false claim of identity?—But that is ridiculous because you will have no other self than that which arises from this very consciousness. Why then this self may be multiplied in as many different beings as the Deity may think proper to endue with the same consciousness, which if it can be renewed at will in any one instance, may clearly be so in an hundred others. Am I to regard all these as equally myself? Am I equally interested in the fate of all? Or if I must fix upon some one of them in particular as my representative and other self, how am I to be determined in my choice?—Here then I saw an end put to my speculations about absolute self-interest, and personal identity. I saw plainly that the consciousness of my own feelings which is made the foundation of my continued interest in them could not extend to what had never been, and might never be, that my identity with myself must be confined to the connection between my past and present being, that with respect to my future feelings or interests, they could have no communication with, or influence over my present feelings and interests merely because they were future, that I shall be hereafter affected by the recollection of my past feelings and actions, and my remorse be equally heightened by reflecting on my past folly and late-earned wisdom whether I am really the same being, or have only the same consciousness renewed in me, but that to suppose that this remorse can react in the reverse order on my present feelings, or give me an immediate interest in my future feelings, before it exists, is an express contradiction in terms. It can only affect me as an imaginary idea, or an idea of truth. But so may the interests of others; and the question proposed was whether I have not some real, necessary, absolute interest in whatever relates to my future being in consequence of my immediate connection with myself, independently of the general impression which all positive ideas have on my mind. How then can this pretended unity of consciousness which is only reflected from the past, which makes me so little acquainted with the future that I cannot even tell for a moment how long it will be continued, whether it will be entirely interrupted by or renewed in me after death, and which might be multiplied in I don’t know how many different beings and prolonged by complicated sufferings without my being any the wiser for it, how I say can a principle of this sort identify my present with my future interests, and make me as much a participator in what does not at all affect me as if it were actually impressed on my senses? It is plain as this conscious being may be decompounded, entirely destroyed, renewed again, or multiplied in a great number of beings, and as, whichever of these takes place, it cannot produce the least alteration in my present being, that what I am does not depend on what I am to be, and that there is no communication between my future interests, and the motives by which my present conduct must be governed. This can no more be influenced by what may be my future feelings with respect to it than it will then be possible for me to alter my past conduct by wishing that I had acted differently. I cannot therefore have a principle of active self-interest arising out of the immediate connection between my present and future self, for no such connection exists, or is possible. I am what I am in spite of the future. My feelings, actions, and interests must be determined by causes already existing and acting, and are absolutely independent of the future. Where there is not an intercommunity of feelings, there can be no identity of interests. My personal interest in any thing must refer either to the interest excited by the actual impression of the object which cannot be felt before it exists, and can last no longer than while the impression lasts, or it may refer to the particular manner in which I am mechanically affected by the idea of my own impressions in the absence of the object. I can therefore have no proper personal interest in my future impressions, since neither my ideas of future objects, nor my feelings with respect to them can be excited either directly or indirectly by the impressions themselves, or by any ideas or feelings accompanying them, without a complete transposition of the order in which effects follow one another in nature.—The only reason for my preferring my future interest to that of others must arise from my anticipating it with greater warmth of present imagination. It is this greater liveliness and force with which I can enter into my future feelings, that in a manner identifies them with my present being; and this notion of identity being once formed, the mind makes use of it to strengthen it’s habitual propensity, by giving to personal motives a reality and absolute truth which they can never have. Hence it has been inferred that my real, substantial interest in any thing must be derived in some indirect manner from the impression of the object itself, as if that could have any sort of communication with my present feelings, or excite any interest in my mind but by means of the imagination, which is naturally affected in a certain manner by the prospect of future good or evil.
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Footnote 72:
The question whether abstract or merely intellectual ideas have ever much influence on the conduct has not been fairly stated. The point is not whether an abstract proposition (no matter whether true or false) of which I became convinced yesterday, will be able to overturn all my previous habits, and prejudices, but whether ideas of this kind may not be made the foundation of inveterate prejudices themselves and the strongest principles of action. The ideas concerning religion are of a sufficiently abstract nature: and yet it will not be disputed that early impressions of this kind have some influence on a man’s future conduct in life. Two persons accidentally meeting together, and who had never seen one another before shall conceive a more violent antipathy to each other in consequence of a dispute on religion or politics than they might have done from having been personally at variance half their lives. It is objected that this proceeds from wounded vanity. But why is our vanity more easily irritated upon these subjects than upon any other but from the importance attached to them by the understanding? Questions of morality do not always excite the same violent animosity; and this I think is because they do not so properly admit of dispute in themselves, also because they are not so often made the instruments of cabal, and power, and therefore depend less on opinion, or the number of votes, and because every one appealing to his own breast for the truth of his opinion attributes the continuance of the contest not to any want of force in his own arguments, but to a want of proper feelings in his opponent.—I will add here a remark in some measure connected with the last-mentioned observation, that the reason why men are generally more anxious about the opinion entertained of their understanding than their honesty is not so much that they really think this last of less consequence as that a man always believes himself to be the best judge of what passes in his own breast. He therefore thinks very little the better of himself for the good opinion of others. Indeed he considers their suffrages in this respect as a sort of impertinence at best, as implying some doubt upon the subject: and as to their direct censures, he will always find some feelings, or motives in his own mind, or some circumstances with which they are not acquainted, which will in his opinion make a total difference in the case. With respect to manners, and those moral qualities which are denominated pleasing, these again depend on the judgment of others; and we find the same jealousy of the opinions of others manifested with respect to these as with respect to our sense, wit, &c.
Footnote 73:
The distinction between the motives to action and the reasons for it cannot affect the argument here insisted on. When it is said, that though I am not really governed by such and such motives, I ought to be governed by them, this must mean (or it means nothing) that such would be the effect of a proper exertion of my faculties. The obligation to act in this or that manner must therefore be deduced from the nature of those faculties, and the possibility of their being impressed in a certain manner by certain objects.
Footnote 74:
Similarity has been defined to be partial sameness. Curve lines have a general resemblance, or analogy to one another as such. Does this resemblance then consist in their being partially the same? This may be said where the difference arises from drawing out the same sort of curve to a greater extent because by adding to the shorter curve I can make it equal to the other. But I cannot by adding any other line to an oval convert it into a circle, because these two sorts of curves can never coincide even in their smallest conceivable parts. It should seem then that their similarity is not to be deduced from partial sameness, or their having some one thing exactly the same, common to them both. But they have the same general nature as curves. True: but in what does this abstract identity consist? Is it not the same with similarity? So that we return to the same point from which we set out. I confess no light appears to me to be thrown on the subject by saying that it is partial identity. The same sort of reasoning is applicable to the question whether all good is not to be resolved into one simple principle, or essence, or whether all that is really good or pleasurable in any sensation is not the same identical feeling, an infusion of the same level of good, and that all the rest is perfectly foreign to the nature of good and is merely the form or vehicle in which it is conveyed to the mind. I cannot however persuade myself that our sensations differ only as to more, or less; or that the pleasure derived from seeing a fine picture, or hearing a fine piece of music, that the gratification derived from doing a good action and that which accompanies the swallowing of an oyster are in reality and at bottom the same pleasure. The liquor tastes of the vessel through which it passes. It seems most reasonable to suppose that our feelings differ in their nature according to the nature of the objects by which they are excited, though not necessarily in the same proportion, as objects may excite very distinct ideas which have little or nothing to do with feeling. Why should there be only two sorts of feeling, pleasure and pain? I am convinced that any one who has reflected much on his own feelings must have found it impossible to refer them all to the same fixed invariable standard of good or evil, or by throwing away the mere husk and refuse without losing any thing essential to the feeling to arrive at some one simple principle, the same in all cases, and which determines by it’s quantity alone the precise degree of good or evil in any sensation. Some sensations are like others; this is all we know of the matter, and all that is necessary to form a class, or genus. The contrary method of reasoning appears to proceed on a supposition that things differing at all in kind must differ in toto, must be quite different from each other; so that a resemblance in kind must imply an absolute coincidence in part, or in as far as the things resemble one another.—See USHER on the Human Mind.
Footnote 75:
It is a gross mistake to consider all habit as necessarily depending on association of ideas. We might as well consider the strength which is given to a muscle by habitual exertion as a case of the association of ideas. The strength, delicacy, &c. given to any feeling by frequent exercise is owing to habit. When any two feelings, or ideas are often repeated in connection, and the properties belonging to the one are by this means habitually transferred to the other, this is association.
Footnote 76:
‘Ainsi se forment les premiers liens qui l’unissent’ [le jeune homme] ‘à son espèce. En dirigeant sur elle sa sensibilité naissante ne craignez pas qu’elle embrassera d’abord tous les hommes, & que ce mot de genre-humain signifiera pour lui quelque chose. Non, cette sensibilité se bornera premièrement à ses semblables, & ses semblables ne seront point pour lui des inconnus, mais ceux avec lesquels il a des liaisons, ceux que l’habitude lui a rendus chers, ou nécessaires, ceux qu’il voit évidemment avoir avec lui des manières de penser & de sentir communes, ceux qu’il voit exposés aux peines qu’il a souffertes, & sensibles aux plaisirs qu’il a goutés; ceux, en un mot, en qui l’identité de nature plus manifestée lui donne une plus grande disposition à aimer. Ce ne sera qu’après avoir cultivé son naturel en milles maniéres, après bien des réflections sur ses propres sentimens, & sur ceux qu’il observera dans les autres, qu’il pourra parvenir à généraliser ses notions individuelles sous l’idée abstraite d’humanité & joindre à ses affections particulières celles qui peuvent l’identifier avec son espèce.’ Emile, t. 2, p. 192.—It is needless to add any thing on this passage. It speaks for itself.
‘L’amour du genre-humain n’est autre chose en nous que l’amour de la justice.’ Ibid. p. 248.
Footnote 77:
This account is loose enough. I shall endeavour to give a better, as to the manner in which ideas may be supposed to be connected with volition, at the end of this essay. In the mean time I wish the reader to be apprized, that I do not use the word imagination as contradistinguished from or opposed to reason, or the faculty by which we reflect upon and compare our ideas, but as opposed to sensation, or memory. It has been shewn above that by the word idea is not meant a merely abstract idea.
Footnote 78:
I take it for granted that the only way to establish the selfish hypothesis is by shewing that our own interest is in reality brought home to the mind as a motive to action by some means or other by which that of others cannot possibly affect it. This is unavoidable, unless we ascribe a particular genius of selfishness to each individual which never suffers his affections to wander from himself for a moment; or shall we suppose that a man’s attachment to himself is because he has a long nose or a short one, because his hair is black or red, or from an unaccountable fancy for his own name, for all these make a part of the individual, and must be deemed very weighty reasons by those who think it self-evident that a man must love himself because he is himself?
Footnote 79:
See the last note but one.
Footnote 80:
The general clue to that ænigma, the character of the French, seems to be that their feelings are very imperfectly modified by the objects exciting them. That is, the difference between the several degrees and kinds of feeling in them does not correspond as much as it does in most other people with the different degrees and kinds of power in the external objects. They want neither feeling nor ideas in the abstract; but there seems to be no connection in their minds between the one and the other. Consequently their feelings want compass and variety, and whatever else must depend on the ‘building up of our feelings through the imagination.’ The feelings of a Frenchman seem to be all one feeling. The moment any thing produces a change in him, he is thrown completely out of his character, he is quite beside himself. This is perhaps in a great measure owing to their quickness of perception. They do not give the object time to be thoroughly impressed on their minds, their feelings are roused at the first notice of its approach, and if I may so express myself, fairly run away from the object. Their feelings do not grapple with the object. The least stimulus is sufficient to excite them and more is superfluous, for they do not wait for the impression, or stop to inquire what degree or kind it is of. There is not resistance sufficient in the matter to receive those sharp incisions, those deep, marked, and strongly rooted impressions, the traces of which remain for ever. From whatever cause it proceeds, the sensitive principle in them does not seem to be susceptible of the same modification and variety of action as it does in others; and certainly the outward forms of things do not adhere to, do not wind themselves round their feelings in the same manner. For any thing that appears to the contrary, objects might be supposed to have no direct communication with the internal sense of pleasure or pain, but to act upon it through some intermediate, very confined organ, capable of transmitting little more than the simple impulse. But the same thing will follow, if we suppose the principle itself to be this very organ, that is, to want comprehensiveness, elasticity, and plastic force. (It is difficult to express this in English: but there is a French word, ressort, which expresses it exactly. This is possibly owing to their feeling the want of it; as there is no word in any other language to answer to the English word, comfort, I suppose, because the English are the most uncomfortable of all people). It will rather follow from what has been here said than be inconsistent with it that the French must be more sensible of minute impressions and slight shades of difference in their feelings than others, because having, as is here supposed, less real variety, a narrower range of feeling, they will attend more to the differences contained within that narrow circle, and so produce an artificial variety. In short their feelings are very easily set in motion and by slight causes, but they do not go the whole length of the impression, nor are they capable of combining a great variety of complicated actions to correspond with the distinct characters and complex forms of things. Hence they have no such thing as poetry. This however must not be misunderstood. I mean then that I never met with any thing in French that produces the same kind of feeling in the mind as the following passage. If there is any thing that belongs even to the same class with it, I am ready to give the point up.
Antony. Eros, thou yet behold’st me.
Eros. Ay, noble Lord.
Ant. Sometimes we see a cloud that’s Dragonish, A vapour sometimes like a Bear, or Lion, A tower’d Citadel, a pendant Rock, A forked Mountain, or blue Promontory With Trees upon’t, that nod unto the World And mock our Eyes with Air. Thou hast seen these Signs, They are black Vesper’s Pageants.
Eros. Ay, my Lord.
Ant. That which is now a Horse, even with a Thought The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct As Water is in Water.
Eros. It does, my Lord.
Ant. My good Knave, Eros, now thy Captain is Even such a body, &c.
It is remarkable that the French, who are a lively people and fond of shew and striking images, should be able to read and hear with such delight their own dramatic pieces, which abound in nothing but general maxims, and vague declamation, never embodying any thing, and which would appear quite tedious to an English audience, who are generally considered as a dry, dull, plodding people, much more likely to be satisfied with formal descriptions and grave reflections. This appears to me to come to the same thing that I have said before, namely, that it is characteristic of the French that their feelings let go their hold of things almost as soon as the impression is made. Except sensible impressions therefore (which have on that account more force, and carry them away without opposition while they last) all their feelings are general; and being general, not being marked by any strong distinctions, nor built on any deep foundation of inveterate associations, one thing serves to excite them as well as another, the name of the general class to which any feeling belongs, the words pleasure, charming, delicious, &c., convey just the same meaning, and excite the same kind of emotion in the mind of a Frenchman, and at the same time do this more readily, than the most forcible description of real feelings, and objects. The English on the contrary are not so easily moved with words, because being in the habit of retaining individual images and of brooding over the feelings connected with them, the mere names of general classes, or (which is the same thing) vague and unmeaning descriptions or sentiments must appear perfectly indifferent to them. Hence the French are delighted with Racine, the English (I mean some of them) admire Shakespear. Rousseau is the only French writer I am acquainted with (though he by the bye was not a Frenchman) who from the depth of his feelings, without many distinct images, produces the same kind of interest in the mind that is excited by the events and recollections of our own lives. If he had not true genius, he had at least something which was a very good substitute for it. The French generalise perpetually, but seldom comprehensively: they make an infinite number of observations, but have never discovered any great principle. They immediately perceive the analogy between a number of facts of the same class, and make a general inference, which is done the more easily, the fewer particulars you trouble yourself with; it is in a good measure the art of forgetting. The difficult part of philosophy is, when a number of particular observations and contradictory facts have been stated, to reconcile them together by finding out some other distinct view of the subject, or collateral circumstance, applicable to all the different facts or appearances, which is the true principle from which, when combined with particular circumstances, they are all derived. Opposite appearances are always immediately incompatible with each other, and cannot therefore be deduced from the same immediate cause, but must be accounted for from a combination of different causes, the discovery of which is an affair of comprehension, and not of mere abstraction.
Footnote 81:
Berkeley’s Essay on Vision.
Footnote 82:
See page 392, and the following pages.
Footnote 83:
The sum of the matter is this. Individuality may relate either to absolute unity, to the identity, or similarity of the parts of any thing, or to an extraordinary degree of connection between things neither the same nor similar. This last alone in fact determines the positive use of the word, at least with respect to man, and other organized beings. (Indeed the term is hardly ever applied to other things in common language.) When I speak of the difference between one individual and another, this must refer ultimately to the want of such connection between them, or to my perceiving that a number of things are so connected as to have a mutual and intimate dependence on one another, making one individual, and that they are so disconnected with a number of other things as not to have the least habitual dependence upon or influence over them, which makes them two distinct individuals. As to the other distinctions between one individual and another, namely those of number and properties, the first of these subsists as necessarily between the parts of the individual, as between one individual and another, and the second frequently subsists in a much greater degree between those parts, than between different individuals. Two distinct individuals can certainly never be the same: that is, supposing the number of parts in each individual to be as 10, 10 can never make 20. But neither can 10 ever be made into an unit; so that we should have ten individuals instead of one by insisting on the absolute distinction of numbers. When I say therefore that one individual differs from another, I must be understood by implication to mean, in some way in which the parts of that individual do not differ from each other or not by any means in the same degree. The mind is however extremely apt to fasten on the distinctions of number and properties where they co-exist with the other distinction, and almost loses sight of those distinctions between things that have a very close connection with each other. When therefore we include the distinctions of number and properties in our account of the difference between one individual and another, this can only be true in an absolute sense, and not if it be meant to imply that the same distinctions do not exist in the same individual.—This account is altogether very crude and unsatisfactory.
Footnote 84:
I remember a story somewhere in the Arabian Nights of a man with a silver thigh. Why may not a fable serve for an illustration as well as any thing else? Metaphysics themselves are but a dry romance. Now suppose this thigh to have been endued with a power of sensation and to have answered every other purpose of a real thigh. What difference would this make in its outward appearance either to the man himself or to any one else? Or how by means of sight would he know it to be his thigh, more than it was? It would still look just like what it did, a silver thigh and nothing more. It’s impression on the eye would not depend on it’s being a sensible substance, on it’s having life in it, or being connected with the same conscious principle as the eye, but on it’s being a visible substance, that is having extension, figure, and colour.
Footnote 85:
To avoid an endless subtlety of distinction I have not here given any account of consciousness in general: but the same reasoning will apply to both.
Footnote 86:
Suppose a number of men employed to cast a mound into the sea. As far as it has gone, the workmen pass backwards and forwards on it, it stands firm in it’s place, and though it recedes farther and farther from the shore, it is still joined to it. A man’s personal identity and self-interest have just the same principle and extent, and can reach no farther than his actual existence. But if a man of a metaphysical turn, seeing that the pier was not yet finished, but was to be continued to a certain point and in a certain direction, should take it into his head to insist that what was already built and what was to be built were the same pier, that the one must afford as good footing as the other, and should accordingly walk over the pier-head on the solid foundation of his metaphysical hypothesis—he would argue a great deal more ridiculously, but not a whit more absurdly than those who found a principle of absolute self-interest on a man’s future identity with his present being. But say you, the comparison does not hold in this, that the man can extend his thoughts (and that very wisely too) beyond the present moment, whereas in the other case he cannot move a single step forwards. Grant it. This will only shew that the mind has wings as well as feet, which of itself is a sufficient answer to the selfish hypothesis.
Footnote 87:
See Preface to Wordsworth’s Poems.
REMARKS ON THE SYSTEMS OF HARTLEY AND HELVETIUS
I find I owe the reader two explanations, one relating to the association of ideas, from which Hartley and other writers have deduced the origin of all our affections, even of self-love itself, the other relating to the mechanical principle of self-interest stated by Helvetius.[88] It was my first intention to have given at the end of the preceding essay a general account of the nature of the will, and to have tried at least to dig down a little deeper into the foundation of human thoughts and actions than I have hitherto done. At present I have laid aside all thoughts of this kind as I have neither time nor strength for such an undertaking; and the most that I shall attempt is to point out such contradictions and difficulties in both these systems as may lessen the weight of any objections drawn from them against the one I have stated, and leave the argument as above explained in it’s original force.
To begin with the doctrine of association.
The general principle of association as laid down by Hartley is this, that if any given sensation, idea, or motion be for a number of times either accompanied, or immediately followed by any other sensation, idea, or muscular motion, the recurrence of the one will afterwards mechanically give rise to that of the other. By immediately followed I mean closely followed: for suppose A to be associated with B, and B with C, A will not only produce B and C intermediately, but will in time produce C immediately without the intervention of B. A mathematician would perhaps here ask how this can ever be actually proved: for though it seems reasonable to suppose that the influence of A if it extend to B should also go a little farther to the next idea, and join indirectly and secretly with B in producing C, yet as the connection between A and B must be stronger than that between A and C, if in any case the connection between the former become gradually so weakened as to dissolve of itself, the latter must fail of course, and therefore C can never follow A, except when B stands equivocally between them. This question would go upon the supposition, that B and C must always be impressions of exactly the same kind and degree of strength, which is not the case. A, though more remote from C, may yet be more intimately connected with it than with B from several other causes, from the greater strength of the impression, from similarity, &c. (This implies by the bye that the effect of association depends on the conjunction of many circumstances, and principles of action, and is not simply determined by the relation of proximity or remoteness between our ideas with respect to time or place.) Thus if a person has done a number of good actions, which have been observed with pleasure by another, this approbation will be afterwards associated with the idea of the person, and the recollection of the benevolent disposition which gave birth to those actions remains when the particular manner in which it was exerted is forgotten. First, because the feeling is the principal or strongest circumstance. Secondly, the association of our ideas with moral qualities is evidently assisted, and forced into the same general direction by the simplicity and uniform character of our feelings compared with the great variety of things and actions, which makes it impossible to combine such a number of distinct forms under the same general notion.
What I have here stated is I believe the whole extent and compass of the law of association. It has been said that this principle is of itself sufficient to account for all the phenomena of the human mind, and is the foundation of every rule of morality. My design is to shew that both these assertions are absolutely false, or that it is an absurdity, and an express contradiction to suppose that association is either the only mode of operation of the human mind, or that it is the primary and most general principle of thought and action.—But first of all it will be necessary to consider the account which Hartley himself has given of this principle as depending on the mechanical communication of motion from the seat of one idea to that of the next and so on, according to a certain local arrangement of these ideas in the brain, as certainly if thought is carried on in this manner, that is, by means of vibrations, it is difficult to conceive of it’s being produced by any other means than the accidental justling of these one against the other, which is what is meant by association.
There are two or three general observations which will be of use in conducting us through this inquiry. In the first place it appears to me certain that every impression or idea is produced in such a manner as to affect or be perceived by the whole brain at once, or in immediate succession, that is, before the action ceases. For if we suppose a certain degree of resemblance to subsist between two ideas, the perception of the one will always be sure to excite a recollection of the other, if it is at all worth remembering. I mean for instance if a person should in some strange place suddenly see an excellent picture of their dead father or mother, I suppose there can be no doubt but the picture would call up the memory of the person whom it resembled with an instantaneous and irresistible force. Now this could not always happen but on the supposition that the visible impression of the picture was conveyed to every part of the brain, as otherwise it must be a mere accident whether it would ever come in contact with that part of it, where that distinct set of recollections was lodged which it was calculated to excite. It is evident that the force with which the impression of the picture acts upon the mind is subsequent to the recollection of the likeness and not the cause of it, since the picture of any other person would act physically upon my mind in the same manner. It may be worth remarking here that the strength, or habitual or recent recurrence of any idea makes it more easily recollected. I might see a picture of a person whom I had not often seen and whose face did not at all interest me at the time without recollecting whose it was, though the likeness should be never so great. The frequent recurrence of the imitation on the other hand if it has had it’s usual effect renders the recollection of the object less certain or at any rate less vivid every time, till at last what remains of it is entirely lost, and confounded with the imitation.[89] Again, it is also certain that the proximity of the parts of an object to one another, or of one object to another object is of itself a sufficient and necessary reason for their recollection in succession or together, in the same order in which they were actually perceived. Unless this were the case, we could never recollect any thing at all, as every object is necessarily composed of parts, and those again of others without end. Now how are we to reconcile this with the first-mentioned inference that thought is uniformly and necessarily communicated to every part of the thinking substance? If thought is produced in such a manner, that the shock is immediately felt in those parts nearest the seat of the individual impression, and is indeed sure to excite thought in them without ever affecting the remote parts of the brain in the same manner, it seems strange that it’s own communication over the whole brain should be so rapid and certain, while the force with which it is sent along (as implied in its confined power of producing other thoughts by simple impulse) is so unequal.
The reader will I hope have the good-nature to pardon some inconsistencies of expression in treating of this subject. In order to disprove the theory which I am combating I must first assume it’s truth, and go on talking of the seats of our ideas, the different parts of the brain, the communication of thought by impulse, &c. till it is clearly shewn that the hypothesis to which all these expressions refer is in reality good for nothing.
Though I do not see my way out of the dilemma here stated, and find I have engaged in an undertaking I am not equal to, I think I have seen enough of the difficulties belonging to it to be able to reject the Hartleian hypothesis as directly incompatible with a fair and comprehensive view of the subject. For, first, it has been shewn above that every idea, or perception is communicated to all the parts of the brain, or to the whole sentient principle, whatever this is supposed to be. Or the same thing might be shewn from the nature of consciousness.[90] That there is some faculty of this sort which opens a direct communication between our ideas, so that the same thinking principle is at the same time conscious of different impressions, and of their relations to each other, is what hardly any person who attends in the least to what passes in his own mind and is not determined to reason himself out of his senses will I should think deny. In other words, when any two ideas or parts of an idea (for there is no difference in this respect) as those of two lighted candles, or the top and bottom of the same candle are impressed at the same time on different parts of the brain, before these ideas can be perceived in connection as making parts of a whole, or can be accompanied with a consciousness of each other’s existence, we must suppose them mutually to affect the seats of action belonging to each other, or else to be united in some common principle of thought, the same comparing power being exerted upon both. Without supposing their distinct impressions thus to meet in the same point, it seems a thing impossible to conceive how any comparison can take place between different impressions existing at the same time, or between our past, and present impressions, or ever to explain what is meant by saying, I perceive such and such objects, I remember such and such events, since these different impressions are evidently referred to the same conscious being, which idea of individuality could never have been so much as conceived of if there were no other connection between our ideas than that which arises from the juxtaposition of the particles of matter on which they are severally impressed. The mere juxtaposition of the parts of the thinking substance on which different ideas are impressed will never produce any thing more than the actual juxtaposition of the ideas themselves, unaccompanied by any consciousness of their having this relation to each other: for the mind in this case consisting of nothing more than a succession of material points, each part will be sensible of the corresponding part of any object which is impressed upon it, but can know nothing of the impression which is made on any other part of the same substance, except from it’s reaction on the seat of the first, which is contrary to the supposition. In short, to attempt accounting at all for the nature of consciousness from the proximity of different impressions, or of their fluxional parts to each other in the brain seems no less absurd than it would be to imagine that by placing a number of persons together in a line we should produce in them an immediate consciousness and perfect knowledge of what was passing in each other’s minds. If consciousness is to be deduced at all from the circumstance of place, it must be that different impressions occupy exactly the same place. One place has no identity with another: however thin the partition between one idea and another, the distinction must be as absolute and complete, and must confine each idea as effectually within it’s own bounds in this fantastical mosaic-work of the brain, as if the solid skulls of ten philosophers were interposed between each. There is another consideration to be attended to, which is that sensible impressions appear to be continually made on the same part of the brain in succession:—with respect to those received by the eye, a new set of objects is almost every moment impressed on the whole organ, and consequently transmitted along the nerves to the same receptacle in the brain.[91] It follows from this last observation in particular (which is not a speculative refinement but a plain matter of fact) that the sphere occupied by different vibrations is constantly the same, or that the same region of the brain belongs equally to a thousand different impressions, and consequently that the mere circumstance of situation is insufficient to account for that complete distinctness, of which our ideas are capable.
From all these considerations taken together I cannot help inferring the fallacy of the Hartleian doctrine of vibrations, which all along goes on the supposition of the most exact distinction and regular arrangement of the places of our ideas, and which therefore cannot be effectually reconciled with any reasoning that excludes all local distinction from having a share in the mechanical operations of the human mind. For if we suppose the succession of our ideas to be carried on by the communication of the impulse belonging to one idea to the contiguous cell, or dormitory of another idea formerly associated with it, and if we at the same time suppose each idea to occupy a separate cell which is inviolable, and which it has entirely to itself, then undoubtedly the ideas thus called up will follow one another in the same order in which they were originally excited. But if we take away this imaginary allotment of separate parcels of the brain to different ideas and suppose the same substance or principle to be constantly impressed with a succession of different ideas, then there seems to be no assignable reason why a vibratory motion accompanied with thought in passing from one part of the thinking substance to the next should not excite any other idea which had been impressed there, as well as the one with which that particular vibration had been originally associated, or why it should not by one general impulse equally excite them all. It is like supposing that you might tread on a nest of adders twined together, and provoke only one of them to sting you. On the other hand to say that this species of elective affinity is determined in it’s operation by the greater readiness with which the idea of a particular impression recalls the memory of another impression which co-existed with it in a state of sensible excitement is to repeat the fact but not (that I can perceive) in any manner to account for it. Let any one compare this account with the one given by Hartley of his own principle, and he will be able to judge.
But farther, even if it could be shewn that the doctrine of vibrations accounts satisfactorily for the association of the ideas of any one sense, (as those of the sight for example) yet surely the very nature of that principle must cut off every sort of communication between the ideas of different senses, (as those of sight and hearing) which may have been associated in the order of time, but which with respect to actual situation must be farther removed from one another than any ideas of the same sense, at whatever distance of time they may have been severally impressed. If from the top of a long cold barren hill I hear the distant whistle of a thrush which seems to come up from some warm woody shelter beyond the edge of the hill, this sound coming faint over the rocks with a mingled feeling of strangeness and joy, the idea of the place about me, and the imaginary one beyond will all be combined together in such a manner in my mind as to become inseparable. Now the doctrine of vibration appears absolutely to exclude the possibility of the union of all these into one associated idea, because as the whole of that principle is founded on the greater ease and certainty with which one local impression is supposed to pass into the seat of the next, and the greater force with which it acts there than it can do farther off, the idea of a visible object can never run into the notion of a sound, nor vice versâ, these impressions being of course conveyed along different nerves to different and very remote parts of the brain. Perhaps it will be said that all ideas impressed at the same moment of time may be supposed to be assigned to particular compartments of the brain as well as where the external objects are contiguous. To this I should answer that such a supposition does not at all account for what I have said above with respect to consciousness and the association of ideas from similarity, &c. and secondly, this supposition is neither included in Hartley’s theory, nor does it seem to be compatible with it, as there is no other reason on the common material hypothesis for inferring the contiguity of our ideas in the brain than the contiguity of their external objects, and the impression of those objects on corresponding parts of the external sensible organ.
The whole of Hartley’s system is founded on what seems an entirely gratuitous supposition, viz. the imaginary communication of our ideas to particular places in the brain to correspond not only with the relations of external objects, but with the order of time. This supposition can never be reconciled with the inference mentioned above (to go no farther) that thought is communicated to every part of the thinking substance by an immediate and uniform impulse. For though we should suppose that it is communicated in one manner to what may be called it’s primary seat, and in a different manner over the rest of the brain, yet we shall still be as much at a loss as ever to shew a reason why it’s primary action should always excite the associated or contiguous ideas, while it’s indirect or secondary action has no power at all to excite any of the ideas, with the spheres of which it necessarily comes in contact in it’s general diffusion over the whole brain, that is by it’s simple impulse. This is not all. There is another circumstance which must entirely prevent the least use being made of this distinction, which is that associated ideas are not properly such as are contiguous in place, but all such as are connected in point of time, the relation of place not being at all essential in the question, for ideas that have been impressed together are always recollected as parts of the same complex impression, without any regard to the proximity or remoteness of their direct, primary seats in the brain, considered as distinct local impressions. As has been explained above with respect to sounds and visible objects, where the association must evidently arise from what I have called their secondary, or relative actions, or, if you will, their conscious ideas, that is those which are not confined to a particular spot in the circumference of the brain, but affect the general principle of thought, whatever this may be, whether composed of extended, material parts, or indivisible. Now if these secondary or conscious ideas which we may represent as continually posting backwards and forwards like couriers in all directions through all quarters of the brain to meet each other and exchange accounts are in fact the only instruments of association, it is plain that the account given by Hartley of that principle falls to the ground at once, first because that account affords no explanation of any of the associations which take place in the mind, except when there is an immediate communication between the primary seats of the associated ideas; secondly, because these secondary or conscious ideas being spread over the whole brain, or rather being impressed on the same thinking principle cannot have any particular connection with or power to call up one another or the contrary from any circumstances of local distinction, which is thus completely done away.—The doctrine of vibrations supposes the order of place and the order of time to correspond exactly in all combinations of our ideas, and that it is owing to this circumstance entirely that those ideas which have been impressed nearly at the same time have afterwards a power to call up one another from the facility with which they must be supposed to pass from their own primary seats into the contiguous ones of the associated ideas. I have endeavoured to shew on the contrary not only that there is no regular local arrangement of our ideas to correspond exactly with the order in which they cohere together in the mind, but that there appears to be no distinction whatever in this respect, that they all belong absolutely to the same place or internal seat of consciousness, that this want of distinction is an evident fact with respect to the successive impressions which are made on the same parts of the body, and consequently on the same parts of the thinking substance, and that it may be deduced generally from the nature of thought itself, and the associations which arise from similarity, &c. that this principle must be entirely nugatory with respect to the associations of the ideas of different senses, even though it should hold true with respect to those of any one sense,[92] lastly that all ideas impressed at the same time acquire a power of exciting one another ever after without any regard to the coincidence of their imaginary seats in the brain (according to the material hypothesis) and that therefore the true account of the principle of association must be derived from the first cause, viz. the coincidence of time, and not from the latter which bears no manner of proportion to the effects produced.
The account indeed which Hartley has in one place given of successive association as distinct from synchronous seems to have no necessary connection with this last-mentioned principle. He says, page 69, ‘If A and B be vibrations impressed successively, then will the latter part of A, viz. that part which remains after the impression of the object ceases, be modified and altered by B, at the same time that it will a little modify and alter it, till at last it be quite overpowered by it, and end in it. It follows therefore that the successive impression of A and B sufficiently repeated will so alter the medullary substance, as that when A is impressed alone, it’s latter part shall not be such as the sole impression of A requires, but lean towards B, and end in C at last. But B will not excite a in a retrograde order, since, by supposition, the latter part of B was not modified and altered by A, but by some other vibration, such as C or D.’ First of all, this account seems to imply that the associated impressions A and B are the only ones made on the mind, and that they extend over the whole medullary substance. In this case when the action of A ceases or grows very weak, we may suppose that the tendency to B will be gradually revived, and at last completely overpower that of A, because these are the only impressions existing in the mind, and it must consequently incline to one or other of them, which would be equally the case, whether they had been impressed together, or not. Otherwise we must suppose the impressions thus made successively to have a distinct local communication with each other, or there is no reason given why A should excite b more than any other vibration impressed on the brain in general, or on the seat of b in particular. We must besides this suppose the vibrations A and B to have a particular line of direction, as well as primary sphere of action in the brain to account for B’s not exciting a in the reverse order, &c. The question is how the impression of different objects at the same time, or in quick succession gives the idea of one of those objects a power to excite the idea of the other, though the object is absent; and it is no answer to this question to say, that A being often repeated in connection with B, when it is afterwards excited, ‘leans towards B, and ends in it.’ Hartley says by way of breaking the difficulty, that the latter part of A is altered and modified by B. This is evident enough while B really acts upon the senses: but why should it be modified by it in the absence of B? This modification of the latter part of A by B is not the intermediate cause of the excitement of b, for b, the representative of B, must be excited, at least imperfectly, before it can modify A (B itself being nothing) and the point is how A, or a excites the movement connected with B and that only, not how, supposing this connection between them to be established, the one gradually passes into the other, and ends in it. I think Hartley constantly mistakes tracing the order of palpable effects, or overt acts of the mind for explaining the causes of the connection between them, which he hardly ever does with a true metaphysical feeling. Even where he is greatest, he is always the physiologist rather than the metaphysician.[93]
Perhaps a better way to set about discovering the clue to the principle of association, setting aside all ideas of extension, contiguity, &c. would be by considering the manner in which the same conscious principle may be supposed to adapt itself to, to combine, and as it were reconcile together the actions of different objects impressed on it at once, and to all of which it is forced to attend at the same time; by which means these several impressions thus compelled into agreement, and a kind of mutual understanding one with another afterwards retain a particular tendency or disposition to unite together, that is to say, the mind when thrown back into the same state by the recurrence of any one of these ideas is of course put into the way of admitting or passing more readily to any other of the same set of ideas than to any other ideas of a different set not so blended and harmonized with it. It seems as if the mind was laid open to all the impressions which had been made upon it at any given time, the moment any one of them recalls a state of feeling habitually in unison with the rest. By touching a certain spring, all obstacles are removed, the doors fly open, and the whole gallery is seen at a single glance.—The mind has a capacity to perform any complex action the easier for having performed the same action before. It will consequently have a disposition to perform that action rather than any other, the other circumstances being the same. I imagine that association is to be accounted for on the very same principle as a man’s being able to comprehend or take in a mathematical demonstration the better for going over it a number of times, or to recognise any well-known object, as the figure of a man for instance in the middle of a common, sooner than a stump of a tree, or piece of a rock of twice the size, and of just as remarkable a shape.—In like manner, or at least consistently with this, we may suppose, if one impression is very like another, though not associated with it, that the mind will in that case slide more naturally, will feel less repugnance in passing from the recollection of the one to that of the other, that is from it’s actual state into a state very little different from it than into one of a totally different kind. When any particular idea becomes predominant, the turn which is thus given to the mind must be favourable to the reception or recollection of any other idea, which requires but little alteration in the state of the mind to admit it. A slight turn of the screws on which the tension of the mind depends will set it right to the point required. When the actual state of the mind agrees, or falls in with some previous tendency, the effort which the latent idea makes to pass into a state of excitement must be more powerful than it would be without this co-operation, and where the other circumstances are indifferent must always be effectual. Thus the actual feeling of warmth must have a tendency to call up any old ideas of the same kind: e.g. to-day being a very warm day put me in mind of a walk I took in a hot day last summer. Here however another difficulty occurs: for the very opposition of our feelings as of heat and cold frequently produces a transition in the mind from the one to the other. This may be accounted for in a loose way by supposing, that the struggle between very opposite feelings producing a violent and perturbed state of mind excites attention, and makes the mind more sensible to the shock of the contrary impression to that by which it is preoccupied, as we find that the body is more liable to be affected by any opposite extremes, as of heat and cold, immediately succeeding, and counteracting each other. Be this as it may, all things naturally put us in mind of their contraries, cold of heat, day of night, &c. These three, viz. association, similarity, and contrast I believe include all the general sources of connection between our ideas, for as to that of cause and effect, it seems to be referable (as remarked by Priestley) or at least chiefly so to the first class, that of common association.—I hope no one will think me weak enough to imagine that what I have here stated is even a remote and faint approach to a satisfactory account of the matter. Every attempt of this sort must be light and ineffectual without first ascertaining (if that were possible) the manner in which our ideas are produced, and the nature of consciousness, both of which I am utterly unable to comprehend. I have endeavoured simply to point out what it is that is to be accounted for, the general feeling with which a reflecting man should set out in search of the truth, and the impossibility of ever arriving at it, if at the outset we completely cover over our own feelings with maps of the brain, dry skulls, musical chords, pendulums, and compasses, or think of looking into the bottom of our own minds by means of any other instrument than a sharpened intellect.
What I at first proposed was to shew, that association, however we may suppose it to be carried on, is not the only source of connection between our ideas, or mode of operation of the human mind. This has been assumed indirectly, and I think proved with respect to similarity, &c. Here however a shrewd turn has been given to the argument by the Hartleians, who, admitting similarity among the causes of connection between our ideas, deny that it is any objection to their doctrine, for that this very example is easily resolved into a case of mere association. Similarity they say is nothing but partial sameness, and that where part of a thing has been first associated with certain circumstances, and is afterwards conjoined with others, making in fact two different objects, it’s recurrence in the second instance will necessarily recall the circumstances with which it was associated in the first.[94]—In general we suppose that if we meet a person in the street with a face resembling some other face with which we are well acquainted, the reason why the one puts us in mind of the other is that the one is like the other; and we should be little disposed to believe any one who told us seriously that in reality we had before seen the one man’s nose upon the other’s face, and that this old impression or very identical object brought along with it the other ideas with which it had been formerly associated. This account would be sufficiently contrary to common sense and feeling, and I hope to shew that it has as little connection with any true subtlety of thinking. No metaphysician will I am sure be disposed to controvert this, who takes the trouble accurately to compare the meaning of the explanation with the terms and necessary import of the law of association. For let an impression which I received yesterday be in every possible respect the same with the one which I received to-day, still the one impression is not the other; they are two distinct impressions existing at different times, and by the supposition associated with very different circumstances. The one from having been co-existent with certain circumstances has a power by the law of association of exciting the recollection of those circumstances whenever it is itself recollected: the other has the same power over that particular combination of circumstances with which it was associated, merely because they were so impressed together on the mind at the same moment of time. To say therefore that a particular property of an object has a power of exciting the ideas of several other properties of another object, of which it never made a part, on the principle of association, is a contradiction in terms. It’s being essentially or comparatively the same with another property which did actually make part of such an object no more proves the consequences which fairly result from the principle of association than it would follow from my looking at the same object at which another has been looking, that I must forthwith be impressed with all the ideas, feelings and imaginations which have been passing in his mind at the time. This last observation has been objected to on the ground that there is no connection whatever between one man’s ideas, and another’s. No doubt: but then it follows as clearly (and that is all I meant to shew) that the abstract identity of the objects or impressions does not of itself produce this connection, so that the perception of the one must needs bring along with it the associated ideas belonging to the other. The objects or ideas are the same in both cases, if that were all: but this is not sufficient to prove that they must have the same accompaniments, or associations, because in the one case they are impressed on different minds, and in the other on the same mind at different times, which is expressly contrary to the principle of association, unless we assume by the help of a verbal sophism that the same generical idea is the same associated idea, and this again would lead to the absurd consequence above stated. It is not here necessary to give a regular definition or account of what in general constitutes sameness, or to inquire whether strictly speaking such a relation can ever be said to subsist between any two assignable objects. Such an inquiry would be quite foreign to the purpose, and I wish to avoid as much as possible all useless common-place subtleties, all such as whichever way they are determined can make no alteration in the state of the argument. It is plain in the present instance for example that when it is stated that a particular idea having been once associated with given circumstances, the same idea will ever afterwards excite the recollection of those circumstances, all that is meant is that the idea in the latter case must be a production, continuation, or properly a recollection of the former one, so as to retain the impression of the accidental modifications by which that idea was originally affected. It must be so far the same as to bear the same relation to the surrounding ideas, as to depend for what it is on what it has been, and connect the present with the past. It must be the old idea lurking in the mind with all it’s old associations hanging about it, and not an entirely new impression with entirely new associations. This idea must therefore be originally derived from an individual impression in contradistinction to half a dozen different ones possessing the same absolute properties: for the whole point turns upon this, that such and such ideas have not naturally any sort of connection with certain other ideas, but that any one of these ideas having been actually associated with any of the others, this accidental relation begets a peculiar and artificial connection between them which is continued along with the remembrance of the ideas themselves.
Mr. Mac-Intosh, I remember, explained this principle in his lectures in the following manner. If, says he, any gentleman who has heard me in this place to-day should by chance pass by this way to-morrow, the sight of Lincoln’s-Inn Hall will upon the principle we are now examining bring along with it the recollection of some of the persons he has met with the day before, perhaps of some of the reasonings which I have the honour to deliver to this audience, or in short any of those concomitant circumstances with which the sight of Lincoln’s-Inn Hall has been previously associated in his mind. This is a correct verbal statement, but it is liable to be misunderstood. Mr. Mac-Intosh is no doubt a man of a very clear understanding, of an imposing elocution, a very able disputant, and a very metaphysical lawyer, but by no means a profound metaphysician, not quite a Berkeley in subtlety of distinction. I will try as well as I am able to help him out in his explanation. It is clear that the visible image of Lincoln’s-Inn Hall which any one has presented to his senses at any given moment of time cannot have been previously associated with other images and perceptions. Neither is a renewed sensible impression of a particular object the same with or in any manner related to a former recollected impression of the same object except from the resemblance of the one to the other. There can be no doubt then of the connection between my idea or recollection of Lincoln’s-Inn Hall yesterday, and the associated ideas of the persons whom I saw there, or the things which I heard, the question is how do I get this idea of yesterday’s impression from seeing Lincoln’s-Inn Hall to-day. The difficulty I say is not in connecting the links in the chain of previously associated ideas, but in arriving at the first link,—in passing from a present sensation to the recollection of a past object. Now this can never be by an act of association, because it is self-evident that the present can never have been previously associated with the past. Every beginning of a series of associations, that is every departure from the continued beaten track of old impressions or ideas remembered in regular succession therefore implies and must be accounted for from some act of the mind which does not depend on association.
Association is an habitual relation between continuations of the same ideas which act upon one another in a certain manner simply because the original impressions were excited together. Let A B C represent any associated impressions. Let a b c be the ideas left in the mind by these impressions, and then let A M N represent a repetition of A in conjunction with a different set of objects. Now a the idea of A when excited will excite b c or the ideas of B C by association, but A as part of the sensible impression A M N cannot excite b c by association, because it has never been associated with B C, because it is not, like a, the production of the former impression A, but an entirely new impression made from without, totally unconnected with the first. I understand then from the nature of association how a will excite b c, but not how A excites a. I understand how my thinking of Lincoln’s-Inn Hall, the impression of yesterday, should also lead me to think of other things connected with that impression according to the principle of association: but I cannot see how, according to this principle, there is any more connection between my seeing Lincoln’s-Inn Hall to-day, and recollecting my having seen it yesterday than there is between the palace of St. Cloud, and the hovel in which Jack Shepherd hid himself when he escaped out of Newgate. Certainly the new impression is not the old one, nor the idea of the old one. What is it then that when this second impression is made on the mind determines it to connect itself with the first more than with any other indifferent impression, what carries it forward in that particular direction which is necessary to it’s finding out it’s fellow, or setting aside this geographical reasoning, what is there in the action of the one on the mind that necessarily revives that of the other? All this has clearly nothing to do with association.
A question however occurs here which perplexes the subject a good deal, and which I shall state and answer as concisely as I can. I have hitherto endeavoured to shew that a particular present impression cannot excite the recollection of a past impression by association, that is, that ideas cannot be said to excite one another by association which have never been associated. But still it may be asked whether a present impression may not excite the ideas associated with any similar impression, without first exciting a distinct recollection of the similar impression with which they were associated. Now, however we may reconcile it with the foregoing reasoning, it is certainly a fact that it does do so. And I conceive it will not be difficult to account for this, according to the explanation above hinted at of the principle of association: for we may in general suppose any similar state of mind to be favourable to the readmission, or recollection of the ideas already associated with such a state of mind, whether the similarity is produced by a revival of the old idea, or by the recurrence of a similar external object. In this case however we must suppose that association is only a particular and accidental effect of some more general principle, not the sole-moving spring in all combinations which take place between our ideas: and still more, that similarity itself must be directly a very strong source of connection between them, since it extends beyond the similar ideas themselves to any ideas associated with them. On the other hand according to the Hartleian theory of association as carried on by the connection of different local impressions, which alone makes it difficult to admit similarity as a distinct source of connection between our ideas, I am utterly unable to conceive how this effect can ever take place, that is, I contend that there must be in this case a direct communication between the new impression, and the similar old one before there can be any possible reason for the revival of the associated ideas, and then the same difficulty will return as before, why one similar impression should have a natural tendency to excite another, which tendency cannot be accounted for from association, for it goes before it, and on this hypothesis is absolutely necessary to account for it.—Whatever relates to local connection must be confined to the individual impression and cannot possibly extend to the class or genus. Suppose association to depend on the actual juxtaposition of two, or more local impressions which being thus accidentally brought together have thrown a sort of grappling irons over one another, and continue to act in concert in consequence of this immediate local communication. It is clear that in this case none but the individual, or numerical impressions so united can have any power over each other. No matter how like any other impression may be to any of the associated ones,—if it does not agree in place as well as kind, it might as well not exist at all; it’s influence can no more be felt in the seat of the first, than if it were parcel of another intellect, or floated in the regions of the moon. Again suppose association to consist not in connecting different local impressions, but in reconciling different heterogeneous actions of the same thinking principle, ‘in subduing the one even to the very quality of the other,’ here the disposition of the mind being the chief thing concerned, not only those very identical impressions will coalesce together which have been previously associated, but any other very similar impressions to these will have a facility in exciting one another, that is in acting upon the mind at the same time, their association depending solely on the habitual disposition of the mind to receive such and such impressions when preoccupied by certain others, their local relation to each other being the same in all cases.—The moment it is admitted not to be necessary to association that the very individual impressions should be actually revived, the foundation of all the inferences which have been built on this principle is completely done away.
Association is then only one of the ways in which ideas are recollected or brought back into the mind. Another view of the subject remains which is to consider their effects after they get there as well as how they are introduced, why certain ideas affect the mind differently from others, and by what means we are enabled to form comparisons and draw inferences.
If association were every thing, and the cause of every thing, there could be no comparison of one idea with another, no reasoning, no abstraction, no regular contrivance, no wisdom, no general sense of right and wrong, no sympathy, no foresight of any thing, in short nothing that is essential, or honourable to the human mind would be left to it. Accordingly the abettors of this theory have set themselves to shew, that judgment, imagination, &c. are mere words that really signify nothing but certain associations of ideas following one another in the same mechanical order in which they were originally impressed, and that all our feelings, tastes, habits and actions spring from the same source. As I know of no proof whatever that has, or can be given of either of these paradoxes but that many of our opinions are prejudices, and that many of our feelings arise from habit, I shall state as concisely as I can my reasons for thinking that association alone does not account either for the proper operations of the understanding, or for our moral feelings, and voluntary actions, or that there are other general, original, independent faculties equally necessary and more important in the ‘building up of the human mind.’ In every comparison made by the mind of one idea with another, that is perception of agreement, or disagreement, or of any kind of relation between them, I conceive that there is something implied which is essentially different from any association of ideas. Before I proceed, however, I must repeat that in this question I stand merely on the defensive. I have no positive inferences to make, nor any novelties to bring forward, and I have only to defend a common-sense feeling against the refinements of a false philosophy. I understand by association of ideas the recollecting or perceiving any two or more ideas together, or immediately one after the other. Now it is contended that this immediate succession, coexistence or juxtaposition of our ideas is all that can be meant by their comparison. It is therefore a question in this case what becomes of the ideas of likeness, equality, &c. for if there is no other connection between our ideas than what arises from positive association, it seems to follow that all objects seen, or if you please thought of together must be equally like, and that the likeness is completely done away by separating the objects or supposing them to be separated. As these ideas are some of the clearest and most important we have, it may be reasonably demanded that any attempt to account for them by resolving them into other ideas with which they have not at first sight the least connection should be perfectly clear and satisfactory. Let us see how far this has been done. It has been contended then that the only idea of equality which the mind can possibly have is the recollection of the sensible impression made by the meeting of the contiguous points, or ends of two strait lines for example.[95] Here two questions will arise. The first is whether the idea of equality is merely a particular way of considering contiguity. Secondly, whether association, that is the succession or juxtaposition of our ideas can ever of itself produce the idea of this relation between them. My first object will be to inquire whether the perception of the equality of two lines is the same with the perception of the contiguity of their extremities, whether the one idea necessarily includes every thing that is contained in the other.
I see two points touch one another, or that there is no sensible interval between them. What possible connection is there between this idea, and that of their being the boundaries of two lines of equal length? It is only by drawing out those points to a certain distance that I get the idea of any lines at all; they must be drawn out to the same distance before they can be equal; and I can have no idea of their being equal without dividing that equal distance into two distinct parts or lines, both of which I must consider at the same time as contained with the same limits. If the ideas merely succeeded one another, or even co-existed as distinct images, they would still be perfectly unconnected with each other, each being absolutely contained within itself, and there being no common act of attention to both to unite them together. Now the question is whether this perception of the equality of these two lines is not properly an idea of comparison, (in the sense in which every one uses and feels these words) which idea cannot possibly be expressed or defined by any other relation between our ideas, or whether it is only a round-about way of getting at the old idea of the coincidence of their points or ends, which certainly is not an idea of comparison, or of the relation between equal quantities simply because there are no quantities to be compared. The one relates to the agreement of the things themselves one with another, the other to their local situation. There is no proving any farther that these ideas are different, but by appealing to every man’s own breast. If any one should choose to assert that two and two make six, or that the sun is the moon, I can only answer by saying that these ideas as they exist in my mind are totally different. In like manner I am conscious of certain operations in my own mind in comparing two equal lines together essentially different from the perception of the contiguity of their extremities, and I therefore conclude that the ideas of equality and contiguity are not the same.
The second question is whether the idea of contiguity itself is an idea of mere association, that is whether it is nothing more than the recollection of a compound sensation. If by sensation is to be understood the direct impression of the parts of any outward object on corresponding parts of an extended living substance, by which means the general mass is converted from a dead into a living thing, and that this is the only difference that takes place, then I deny that this combination of living atoms, this diffusion of animal sensibility, however exquisite or thrilling to the slightest touch, will ever give the idea of relation of any kind whether of contiguity, coexistence, or any thing else either immediately at the time or by recollection afterwards. It has been said that to feel is to think, ‘sentir est penser.’ I believe that this is true of the human mind, because the human mind is a thinking principle, it is natural to it to think, it cannot feel without thinking: but this maxim would not be at all true of such a human mind as is described by these philosophers, which would be equally incapable both of thought, and feeling as it exists in us. As this distinction is very difficult to be expressed, I hope I may be allowed to express it in the best way that I am able. Suppose a number of animalculæ as a heap of mites in a rotten cheese lying as close together as they can stick (though the example should be of something ‘more drossy and divisible,’ of something less reasonable, approaching nearer to pure sensation than we can conceive of any creature that exercises the functions of the meanest instinct.) No one will contend that in this heap of living matter there is any idea of the number, position, or intricate involutions of that little, lively, restless tribe. This idea is evidently not contained in any of the parts separately, nor is it contained in all of them put together. That is, the aggregate of many actual sensations is, we here plainly see, a totally different thing from the collective idea, comprehension, or consciousness of those sensations as many things, or of any of their relations to each other. We may go on multiplying and combining sensations to the end of time without ever advancing one step in the other process, or producing one single thought. But to what I would ask does this supposition differ from that of many distinct particles of matter, full of animation, tumbling about, and pressing against each other in the same brain, except that we make use of this brain as a common medium to unite their different desultory actions in the same general principle of thought, or consciousness? Therefore if there is no power in this principle but to repeat the old story of sensation over again, if the mind is but a sort of inner room where the images of external things like pictures in a gallery are lodged safe, and dry out of the reach of the turbulence of the senses, but remaining as distinct from, and if I may so say as perfectly unknown to one another as the pictures on a wall, there being no general faculty to overlook and give notice of their several impressions, this medium is without any use, the hypothesis is so far an encumbrance, not an advantage. To perceive the relation of one thing to another it is not only necessary that the ideas of the things themselves should co-exist (which would signify nothing) but that they should be perceived to co-exist by the same conscious understanding, or that their different actions should be felt at the same instant by the same being in the strictest sense. If I am asked if I conceive clearly how this is possible, I answer no:—perhaps no one ever will, or can. But I do understand clearly, that the other supposition is an absurdity, and can never be reconciled with the nature of thought, or consciousness, of that power of which I have an absolute certainty in my own mind. If any one who still doubts of this will give me a satisfactory reason why he denies the same consciousness to different minds, or thinks it necessary to circumscribe this principle within the limits of the same brain but upon the supposition that one brain is one power, in some sort modifying and reacting upon all the ideas contained in it, I shall then be ready to give up my dull, cloudy, English mysticism for the clear sky of French metaphysics. Till then it is in vain to tell me that the mind thinks by sensations, that it then thinks most emphatically, then only truly when by decompounding it’s essence it comes at last to reflect the naked impression of material objects. It is easy to make a bold assertion, and just as easy to deny it; and I do not know that there is any authority yet established by which I am bound to yield an implicit assent to every extravagant opinion which some man of celebrity has been hardy enough to adopt, and make others believe. It does not surely follow that a thing is to be disbelieved, the moment any one thinks proper to deny it, merely because it has been generally believed, as if truth were one entire paradox, and singularity the only claim to authority.[96]
I never could make much of the subject of real relations in nature. But in whatever way we determine with respect to them, whether they are absolutely true in nature, or are only the creatures of the mind, they cannot exist in nature after the same manner that they exist in the human mind. The forms of things in nature are manifold; they only become one by being united in the same common principle of thought. The relations of the things themselves as they exist separately and by themselves must therefore be very different from their relations as perceived by the mind where they have an immediate communication with each other. The things themselves can only have the same relation to each other that the ideas of things have in different minds, or that our sensible impressions must have to one another before we refer them to some inward conscious principle. Without this connection between our ideas in the mind there could be no preference of one thing to another, no choice of means to ends, that is, no voluntary action. Suppose the ideas or impressions of any two objects to be perfectly distinct and vivid, suppose them moreover to be mechanically associated together in my mind, and that they bear in fact just the same proportion to each other that the objects do in nature, that the one is attended with just so much more pleasure than the other, and is so much more desirable, what effect can this of itself have but to produce a proportionable degree of unthinking complacency in the different feelings belonging to each, and a proportionable degree of vehemence in the blind impulse, by which I am attached to each of them separately and for the moment? If there is no perception of the relation between different feelings, no proper comparison of the one with the other, there may indeed be a stronger impulse towards the one than there is towards the other in the different seats of perception which they severally affect, but there can be no reasonable attachment, no preference of the one to the other in the same general principle of thought and action. And consequently on this supposition if the objects or feelings are incompatible with each other, I, or rather the different sensible beings within me will be drawn different ways, each according to it’s own particular bias, blindly persisting in it’s own choice without ever thinking of any other interest than it’s own, or being in the least affected by any idea of the general good of the whole sentient being, which would be a thing utterly incomprehensible.—To perceive relations, if not to choose between good and evil, to prefer a greater good to a less, a lasting to a transient enjoyment belongs only to one mind, or spirit, the mind that is in man, which is the centre in which all his thoughts meet, and the master-spring by which all his actions are governed. Every thing is one in nature, and governed by an absolute impulse. The mind of man alone is relative to other things, it represents not itself but many things existing out of itself, it does not therefore represent the truth by being sensible of one thing but many things (for nature, it’s object, is manifold) and though the things themselves as they really exist cannot go out of themselves into other things, or compromise their natures, there is no reason why the mind which is merely representative should be confined to any one of them more than to any other, and a perfect understanding should comprehend them all as they are all contained in nature, or in all. No one object or idea therefore ought to impel the mind for it’s own sake but as it is relative to other things, nor is a motive true or natural in reference to the human mind merely because it exists, unless we at the same time suppose it to be stronger than all others.
But to return. I conceive first that volition necessarily implies thought or foresight, that is, that it is not accounted for from mere association. All voluntary action implies a view to consequences, a perception of the analogy between certain actions already given, and the particular action then to be employed, also a knowledge of the connection between certain actions and the effects to be produced by them; and lastly, a faculty of combining all these with particular circumstances so as to be able to judge how far they are likely to impede or assist the accomplishment of our purposes, in what manner it may be necessary to vary our exertions according to the nature of the case, whether a greater or less degree of force is required to produce the effect, &c. Without this ‘discourse of reason,’ this circumspection and comparison, it seems to be as impossible for the human mind to pursue any regular object as it would be for a man hemmed in on all sides by the walls of houses and blind alleys to see his way clearly before him from one end of London to the other, or to go in a straight line from Westminster to Wapping. One would think it would be sufficient to state the question in order to shew that mere association or the mechanical recurrence of any old impressions in a certain order, which can never exactly correspond with the given circumstances, would never satisfactorily account (without the aid of some other faculty) for the complexity and subtle windings and perpetual changes in the motives of human action. On the hypothesis here spoken of, I could have no comprehensive idea of things to check any immediate, passing impulse, nor should I be able to make any inference with respect to the consequences of my actions whenever there was the least alteration in the circumstances in which I must act. If however this general statement does not convince those who are unwilling to be convinced on the subject, I hope the nature of the objection will be made sufficiently clear in the course of the argument.
Secondly, it is necessary to volition that we should suppose the imaginary or general ideas of things to be efficient causes of action. It is implied in the theory we are combating that some sort of ideas are efficient motives to action, because association itself consists of ideas. Habit can be nothing but the impulsive force of certain physical impressions surviving in their ideas, and producing the same effects as the original impressions themselves. Why then should we refuse to admit the same, or a similar power in any ideas of the same kind, because they have been combined by the imagination with different circumstances, or because a great many different ideas have gone to make up one general feeling? Why, if the inherent qualities of the ideas are not changed, should not the effects which depend on those qualities be the same also? It cannot be pretended that there is something in the nature of all ideas which renders them inadequate to the production of muscular action, the one being a mental, the other a physical essence. For ideas are evidently the instruments of association, and must therefore one way or other be the efficient causes of voluntary action. The ideas of imagination and reason must be analogous to those of memory and association, or they could not represent their several objects, which is absurd.—It is to be remembered that the tendency of any ideas to produce action cannot be ascribed in the first instance to the accidental association between the original impression and some particular action, for the action is an immediate and natural consequence of the impression, and would equally follow from the same impression in any other circumstances, and ought to follow from any other idea partaking of the same general nature and properties. The proper effects of association can only apply to those cases, where an impression or idea by being associated with another has acquired a power of exciting actions to which it was itself perfectly indifferent. But this power cannot always be transferred from one impression to another, for there must be some original impression which has an inherent independent power to produce action.
I do not know how far the rules of philosophizing laid down by Sir Isaac Newton apply to the question, but it appears to me an evident conclusion of common sense not to seek for a remote and indirect cause of any effect where there is a direct and obvious one. Whenever therefore a particular action follows a given impression, if there is nothing in the impression itself incompatible with such an effect, it seems an absurdity to go about to deduce that action from some other impression, which has no more right to it’s production than that which is immediately and obviously connected with it. In general it may be laid down as a principle of all sound reasoning that where there are many things actually existing which may be assigned as the causes of several known effects, it is best to divide those effects among them, not arbitrarily to lay the whole weight of a complicated series of effects on the shoulders of some one of them, generally singled out for no other reason than because it is the most remote and therefore the least probable. For this there can be no more reason than for supposing when I see a large building standing on a number of pillars, that the whole of it is secretly upheld by some main pillar in the centre, and that all the other pillars stand there for shew, not use. The principle that the fewest causes possible are to be admitted is certainly not true in the abstract; and the injudicious application of it has I think been productive of a great deal of false reasoning. Unquestionably, where there is no appearance of the existence of certain causes, they are to be admitted with caution: we are not fancifully to multiply them ad libitum merely because we are not satisfied with those that do appear, much less are we to multiply them gratuitously, without any reason at all. But where the supposed causes actually exist, where they are known to exist, and have an obvious connection with certain effects, why deprive any of these causes of the real activity which they seem to possess to make some one of them reel and stagger under a weight of consequences which nature never meant to lay upon it? This mistaken notion of simplicity has been the general fault of all system-makers, who are so wholly taken up with some favourite hypothesis or principle, that they make that the sole hinge on which every thing else turns, and forget that there is any other power really at work in the universe, all other causes being set aside as false and nugatory, or else resolved into that one.—There is another principle which has a deep foundation in nature that has also served to strengthen the same feeling, which is, that things never act alone, that almost every effect that can be mentioned is a compound result of a series of causes modifying one another, and that the true cause of anything is therefore seldom to be looked for on the surface, or in the first distinct agent that presents itself. This principle consistently followed up does not however lead to the supposition that the immediate and natural causes of things are nothing, but that the most trifling and remote are something, it proves that the accumulated weight of a long succession of real, efficient causes is generally far greater than that of any one of them separately, not that the operation of the whole series is in itself null and void but as the efficacy of the first sensible cause is transmitted downwards by association through the whole chain. Association has been assumed as the leading principle in the operations of the human mind, and then made the only one, forgetting first that nature must be the foundation of every artificial principle, and secondly that with respect to the result, even where association has had the greatest influence, habit is at best but a half-worker with nature, for in proportion as the habit becomes inveterate, we must suppose a greater number of actual impressions to have concurred in producing it.[97]
Association may relate only to feelings, habit implies action, a disposition to do something. Let us suppose then that it were possible to account in this way for all those affections which relate to old objects, and ideas, which depend on recalling past feelings by looking back into our memories. But the moment you introduce action (if it is any thing more than an involuntary repetition of certain motions without either end or object, a mere trick, and absence of mind) this principle can be of no use without the aid of some other faculty to enable us to apply old associated feelings to new circumstances, and to give the will a new direction.
Mr. Mac-Intosh in his public lectures used to deny the existence of such a feeling as general benevolence or humanity, on the ground that all our affections necessarily owe their rise to particular previous associations, and that they cannot exist at all unless they have been excited before in the same manner by the same objects. If I were disposed to enter particularly into this question, I might say in the first place that such a feeling as general benevolence or kindness to persons whom we have never seen or heard of before does exist. I should not scruple to charge any one who should deny this with the mala fides, with prevaricating either to himself, or others. It is a maxim which these gentlemen seem to be unacquainted with that it is necessary to strain an hypothesis to make it fit the facts, not to deny the facts because they do not square with the hypothesis. It generally happens, that, when a metaphysical paradox is first started, it is thought sufficient by a vague and plausible explanation to reconcile it tolerably well with known facts: afterwards it is found to be a shorter way and savours more of a certain agreeable daring in matters of philosophy and dashes the spirit of opposition sooner to deny the facts on the strength of the hypothesis.—Independently however of all experimental proof, the reasoning as it is applied confutes itself. It is said that habit is necessary to produce affection. Now suppose this, in what sense is the principle true? If the persons, feelings and actions must be exactly and literally the same in both cases, there can be no such thing as habit: the same objects and circumstances that influenced me to-day cannot possibly influence me to-morrow. Take the example of a child to whose welfare the attention of the parent is constantly directed. The simple wants of the child are never exactly the same in themselves, the accidental circumstances with which they are combined are necessarily varying every moment, nor are the sentiments and temper of the father less liable to constant and imperceptible fluctuations. These subtle changes, however, and this dissimilarity in subordinate circumstances do not prevent the father’s affection for the child from becoming an inveterate habit. If therefore it is merely an extraordinary degree of resemblance in the objects which produces an extraordinary degree of strength in the habitual affection, a more remote and imperfect resemblance in the objects ought to produce proportionable effects. For example, the cries of a stranger’s child in want of food are similar to those of his own when hungry, the expressions of their countenances are similar, it is also certain that wholesome food will produce similar effects upon both, &c. I am not here inquiring into the degree of interest which the mind will feel for an entire stranger (though that question was well answered long ago by the story of the Samaritan.) My object is to shew that as to mere theory there is no essential difference between the two cases; that a continued habit of kindness to the same person implies the same power in the mind as a general disposition to feel for others in the same situation; and that the attempt to reason us out of a sense of right and wrong and make men believe that they can only feel for themselves, or their immediate connections is not only an indecent but a very bungling piece of sophistry.—The child’s being personally the same has nothing to do with the question. The idea of personal identity is a perfectly generical and abstract idea, altogether distinct from association. Any other artificial, and general connection between our ideas (as that of the same species) might as well pass for association.
The commentators on Hartley have either not studied or not understood him. Otherwise his system could not have been supposed to favour the doctrine of selfishness. My quarrel with it is not that it proves any thing against the notion of disinterestedness, but that it proves nothing. He supposes that the human mind is neither naturally selfish, nor naturally benevolent; that we are equally indifferent to our own future happiness or that of others, and equally capable of becoming interested in either according to circumstances. [See his account of the origin of self-love, page 370.] The difference between this account, and the one I have endeavoured to defend is that I suppose that the idea of any particular positive known good either relating to ourselves or others is in itself an efficient motive to action, whereas according to Hartley no idea either of our own interest or that of others has the least tendency to produce any such effect except from association. He infers that there is no essential, original desire of happiness in the human mind, because this desire varies according to circumstances, or is different in different persons, and in the same person at different times according to the humour he is in, &c. This objection indeed holds true if applied to the desire of happiness as a general indefinite unknown object, that is, to a necessary, mechanical, uniform disposition in man as a metaphysical agent to the pursuit of good as an abstract essence without any regard to the manner in which it is impressed on his imagination, to the knowledge which he can possibly have of any object as good, or to his immediate disposition to be affected by it. I have however all along contended that the desire of happiness is natural to the mind only in consequence of the idea, or knowledge of it, in the same manner that it is natural to the eye to see when the object is presented to it; to which it is no objection that this organ is endued with different degrees of sharpness in different persons, or that we sometimes see better than at others. Neither can I conceive how the associated impulses, spoken of in the passage above referred to, without an inherent, independent power in the ideas of certain objects to modify the will, and in the will to influence our actions can ever in any instance whatever account for voluntary action. I need not attempt to shew that the mechanical impulses to the pursuit of our own good or that of any other person derived from past associations cannot be supposed to correspond exactly and uniformly with the particular successive situations, in which it is necessary for us to act, often with a view to a great number of circumstances, and for very complex ends. To suppose that the mechanical tendencies impressed on the muscles by any particular series of past objects can only require to be unfolded to produce regular and consistent action is like supposing that a hand-organ may be set to play a voluntary, or that the same types will serve without any alteration to print a column of a newspaper and a page of Tristram Shandy. A child for instance in going into a strange house soon after he had learned to walk would not be able to go from one room to another from the mere force of habit, that is from yielding to, or rather being blindly carried forward by the impulse of his past associations with respect to walking when at home. He would run against the doors, get entangled among the chairs, fall over the stair case: he would commit more blunders with his eyes wide open than he would otherwise do blind-folded. He would be worse off without his understanding than without his sight. He might feel his way without his eyes, but without his understanding neither his hands nor eyes would be of any use to him. He would be incorrigible to falls and bruises. Whoever has seen a blind horse stagger against a wall and then start back from it awkward and affrighted, may have some idea of the surprise which we should constantly feel at the effects of our own actions, but not of the obstinate stupidity with which we should persist in them.
To this it is replied, that the account here given does not include all the associations which really take place: that the associations are general as well as particular, that there is the association of the general idea of a purpose, of the words to walk, to go forwards, &c. and that these general associated ideas, and the feelings connected with them are sufficient to carry the child forward to the place he has in view according to it’s particular situation. Association they say does not imply that the very same mechanical motions should be again excited in the same order in which they were originally excited, for that long trains of active associations may be transferred from one object to another from the accidental coincidence of a single circumstance, from a vague abstraction, from a mere name. This principle does not therefore resemble a book, but an alphabet, the loose chords from which the hand of a master draws their accustomed sounds in what order he pleases, not the machinery by which an instrument is made to play whole tunes of itself in a set order.
I have no objection to make to this account of association but that nothing will follow from it, and that nothing is explained by it. Let us see how it will affect the question in dispute.—We will therefore return once more to the case of the child learning to walk. How then does this explanation account for his not running against any object which stands in his way in the pursuit of a favourite play-thing, if he has not been used to meet with the same interruption before? Why does he not go straight on in the old direction in which he has always followed it?—Because he is afraid of the blow, which would be the consequence of his doing so, and he therefore goes out of his way to avoid it. This supposes that he has met with blows before, though not in running after his ball, nor from that particular object which he dreads, nor from one situated in the same way, or connected with the same associations. But this difference is of no importance according to the gloss: for it is not necessary that his fear or the effort which it leads him to make should proceed from the recollection of a former blow recurring in it’s proper place, and stopping him by mechanical sympathy, as it had actually done before, in the midst of his career. He is stopped by the idea of a pain which he has not yet felt, and which can only affect him as a general, or representative idea of pain, the object being new, and there being nothing in his past associations in the order in which they are recalled by memory to produce the necessary action. Here then he evidently constructs an artificial idea of pain beyond his actual experience, or he takes the old idea of pain which subsisted in his memory, and connects it by that act of the mind which we call imagination with an entirely new object; and thus torn out of it’s place in the lists of memory, not strengthened by it’s connection with any old associated ideas, nor moving on with the routine of habitual impulses, it does not fail on that account to influence the will and through that the motions of the body.—Now if any one chooses to consider this as the effect of association, he is at liberty to do so. The same kind of association, however, must apply to the interest we take in the feelings of others, though perfect strangers to us, as well as to the interest we feel for ourselves. All that can ever take place in the imaginary anticipation either of our own feelings or those of others can be nothing more than some sort of transposition and modification of the old ideas of memory, or if there is any thing peculiar to this act of the mind, it is equally necessary to our feeling any interest in our own future impressions, or those of others. According to this account therefore the old idea of physical pain must be called up whenever I see any other person in the like danger, and the associated action along with it, just as much as if I were exposed to the same danger myself. This is I believe the doctrine of sympathy advanced by Adam Smith in his ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments.’ It is in fact neither self-love nor benevolence, neither fear nor compassion, nor voluntary attachment to any thing, but an unmeaning game of battledore and shuttlecock kept up between the nerves and muscles. But it seems to me a much more rational way to suppose that the idea does not lose it’s efficacy by being combined with different circumstances, that it retains the same general nature as the original impression, that it therefore gives a new and immediate impulse to the mind, and that it’s tendency to produce action is not entirely owing to the association between the original impression, and a particular action, which it mechanically excites over again. First, because the connection between the impression and action was not accidental but necessary, and therefore the connection between the idea and action is not to be attributed to association, but to the general nature of the human mind by which similar effects follow from similar causes. Secondly, if the imaginary or general idea were entirely powerless in itself except as a means of exciting some former impulse connected with physical pain, none but the very identical action formerly excited could result from it, that is if I could not avoid an object in the same way that I had formerly done I should not attempt to avoid it at all, but remain quite helpless. Thirdly, because the ideas of future objects having no effect at all on my feelings or actions, and the connection between the original associated impressions being the strongest and most certain of all others, any particular train of mechanical impulses being once set in motion would necessarily go on in the old way unrestrained by any idea of consequences till they were stopped again by actual pain.—It is plain however that the activity of the understanding prevents this rough rebuke of experience, that the will (and our actions with it) bends and turns and winds according to every change of circumstances and impulse of imagination, that we need only foresee certain evils as the consequences of our actions in order to avoid them. The supposition that the idea of any particular motion necessary to a given end, or of the different motions which combined together constitute some regular action is sufficient to produce that action by a subtle law of association can only apply to those different motions after they are willed, not to the willing them. That is, there must be a previous determination of the will, or feeling of remote good connected with the idea of the action before it can have any effect. The idea of any action must be in itself perfectly indifferent, being always advantageous, useless, or mischievous according to circumstances. I cannot therefore see any reason according to this hypothesis why I should will or be inclined to make any exertions not originating in some mechanical impulse that happens to be strongest at the time, merely because they may be necessary to avoid an imaginary evil which of itself does not cause the slightest emotion in my mind: on the contrary, if the barely thinking of any external action is always immediately to be followed by that action without a particular warrant from the will, there could be no such thing as reasonable action among men, our actions would be more ridiculous than those of a monkey, or of a man possessed with St. Vitus’s dance; they would resemble the diseased starts and fits of a madman, not the actions of a reasonable being. We should thrust our hands into the fire, dash our heads against the wall, leap down precipices, and commit more absurdities every moment of our lives than were performed by Don Quixote with so much labour and study by way of penance in the heart of the Brown Mountain. The momentum of the will is necessary to give direction and constancy to any of our actions; and this again can only be determined by the ideas of future good and evil, and the connection which the mind perceives between certain actions, and the attainment of the one or the prevention of the other. If our actions did not naturally slide into this track, if they did not follow the direction of reason wherever it points the way, they must fall back again at every step into the old routine of blind mechanical impulse, and headlong associations that neither hear, nor see, nor understand any thing.—Lastly the terms general association mean nothing of themselves. I have done a particular action with a certain purpose, or I have had in my mind at the time the general idea of a purpose, of something useful connected with my action. What has this to do with my ability to perform any other action, be it ever so different, because it is also connected with a purpose? The associated idea either of a particular purpose, or of a purpose generally speaking can only have an immediate tendency to excite that particular action, with which it was associated, not any action whatever, merely because it may have a connection with some remote good. So of any number of actions. For let ever so many different actions have been associated with the idea of a purpose, this will not in the least enable me to perform any intermediate action, or to combine the old actions in a different order with a view to a particular purpose, unless we give to the idea of this particular purpose as a general idea of good an absolute power to controul our actions, and force them into their proper places. I grant indeed that having once admitted a direct power in ideas of the same general nature to affect the will in the same manner we may by a parity of reasoning suppose that this power is capable of being transferred by association to the most indifferent ideas, which, as far as they resemble one another, will operate as general motives to action, or give a necessary bias to the will. But if this analogy holds with respect to secondary and artificial motives which are not in their own nature allied to action, surely it must hold much more with respect to the direct, original motives themselves, the ideas of good and evil, where the power inheres in the very nature of the object. My being led to perform different actions with which the same abstract idea of utility is connected is not therefore properly owing to association, but because any ideas or motives of the same kind whether derived from a new impression, or made out by the imagination, or only general feelings must naturally influence the will in the same manner, and this impulse being once given, the understanding makes choice of such means as are perceived to be necessary to the attainment of the given object. For, after all, the execution of our purposes must be left to the understanding. The simple or direct ideas of things might excite emotion, volition, or action; but it would be the volition of the objects or feelings themselves, not of the means necessary to produce them. Feeling alone is therefore insufficient to the production of voluntary action. Neither is it to be accounted for from association. The actual means necessary to the production of a given end are willed, not because those very means have been already associated with that particular end (for this does not happen once in a thousand times) but because those means are known to be inseparable from the attainment of that end in the given circumstances.
There is however another objection to the disinterested hypothesis, which was long ago stated by Hobbes, Rochefocault, and the author of the Fable of the Bees, and has been since adopted and glossed over by Helvetius. It is pretended that in wishing to relieve the distresses of others we only wish to remove the uneasiness which pity creates in our own minds, that all our actions are necessarily selfish, as they all arise from some feeling of pleasure or pain existing in the mind of the individual, and that whether we intend our own good or that of others, the immediate gratification connected with the idea of any object is the sole motive which determines us in the pursuit of it.
First, this objection does not at all affect the question in dispute. For if it is allowed that the idea of the pleasures or pains of others excites an immediate interest in the mind, if we feel sorrow and anxiety for their imaginary distresses exactly in the same way that we do for our own, and are impelled to action by the same motives, whether the action has for it’s object our own good or that of others, the nature of man as a voluntary agent must be the same, the effect of the principle impelling him must be the same, whether we call this principle self-love, or benevolence, or whatever refinements we may introduce into our manner of explaining it. The relation of man to himself and others as a moral being is plainly determined, for whether a regard to the future welfare of himself and others is the real, or only the ostensible motive of his actions, they all tend to one or other of these objects, and to one as directly as the other, which is the only thing worth inquiring about. All that can be meant by the most disinterested benevolence must be this immediate sympathy with the feelings of others, and it could never be supposed that man is more immediately affected by the interests of others than he can be even by his own. If by self-love we understand any thing beyond the impulse of the present moment, it can be no more a mechanical thing than the most refined and comprehensive benevolence. I only contend then that we are naturally interested in the welfare of others in the same sense in which we are said to be interested in our own future welfare. Self-love used in the sense which the above objection implies must therefore mean something very different from an exclusive principle of deliberate, calculating selfishness, which must render us indifferent to every thing but our own advantage, or from the love of physical pleasure and aversion to physical pain, which would produce no interest in any but sensible impressions.
Supposing therefore that our most generous feelings and actions were equivocal, the object only bearing a shew of disinterestedness, the motive being always selfish, this would be no reason for rejecting the common use of the term disinterested benevolence, which expresses nothing more than an immediate reference of our actions to the good of others, as self-love expresses a conscious reference of them to our own good, as means to an end. This is the proper meaning of the terms. If there is any impropriety in the one, the other must be equally objectionable, the same fallacy lurks under both.
Secondly, the objection is not true in itself, that is, I see no reason for resolving the feelings of compassion, &c. into a principle of mechanical self-love. That the motive to action exists in the mind of the person who acts is what no one can deny. The passion excited and the impression producing it must necessarily affect the individual. There must always be some one to feel and act, or there could be no such thing as feeling or action.[98] It cannot therefore be implied as a condition in the love of others, that this love should not be felt by the person who loves them, for this would be to say that he must love them and not love them at the same time, which is palpable nonsense. This absurd inference, I say, could never be implied in the common use of the terms, as it could never be imagined that in order to feel for others, we must in reality feel nothing. This distinction proves clearly that it is always the individual who loves, but not that he always loves himself; for it is to be presumed that the word self has some meaning in it, and it would have absolutely none at all, if nothing more were intended by it than any object or impression existing in the mind. Self-love would merely signify the love of something, and the distinction between ourselves and others be quite confounded. It therefore becomes necessary to set limits to the meaning of the term.
First, it may signify, as explained above, the love or affection excited by the idea of our own good, and the conscious pursuit of it as a general, remote, ideal thing. In this sense, that is considered with respect to the proposed end of our actions, I have shewn sufficiently that there is no exclusive principle of self-love in the human mind which constantly impels us to pursue our own advantage and nothing but that, and that it must be equally absurd to consider either self-love or benevolence as a physical operation.
Another sense of the term may be, that the indulgence of certain affections necessarily tends without our thinking of it to our immediate gratification, and that the impulse to prolong a state of pleasure and put a stop to whatever gives the mind the least uneasiness is the real spring and overruling principle of our actions. No matter whether the impression existing in my mind is a sensation or an idea, whether it is an idea of my own good or that of another, it’s effect on the mind is entirely owing to this involuntary attachment to whatever contributes to my own gratification, and aversion from actual pain. Or the mind is so constructed that without forethought or any reflection on itself it has a natural tendency to prolong and heighten a state of pleasurable feeling, and instantly remove every painful feeling. This tendency must be wholly unconscious; the moment my own gratification is indirectly adverted to by the mind as the consequence of indulging certain feelings, and so becomes a distinct motive to action, it returns back into the limits of deliberate, calculating selfishness; and it has been shewn that there is nothing in the idea of our own good which makes it a proper motive of action more than that of others. There appears to be as little propriety in making the mechanical tendency to our own good the foundation of human actions. In the first place, it may be sufficient to deny the mere matter of fact, that such is the natural disposition of the human mind. We do not on every occasion blindly consult the interest of the moment, there is no instinctive, unerring bias to our own good, controuling all other impulses, and guiding them to it’s own purposes. It is not true that in giving way to the feelings either of sympathy or rational self-interest (by one or other of which feelings my actions are constantly governed[99]) I always yield to that impulse which is accompanied with most pleasure at the time. It is true that I yield to the strongest inclination, but not that my strongest inclination is to pleasure. The idea of the relief I may afford to a person in extreme distress is not necessarily accompanied by a correspondent degree of pleasurable sensation to counterbalance the painful feeling his immediate distress occasions in my mind. It is certain that sometimes the one and sometimes the other may prevail without altering my purpose in the least: I am held to my purpose by the idea (which I cannot get rid of) of what another suffers, and that it is in my power to alleviate his suffering, not that that idea is always the most agreeable contemplation I could have. The mind is often haunted by painful images and recollections, not that we court their company, but that we cannot shake them off, even though we strive to do it. Why does a woman of the town always turn round to look at another finer than herself? Why does the envious man torment himself by dwelling on the advantages of his rival? Not from the pleasure it affords him. Why then should it be maintained that the feelings of compassion, generosity, &c. cannot possibly actuate the mind, but because and in as far as they contribute to our own satisfaction? Those who willingly perform the most painful duties of friendship or humanity do not do this from the immediate gratification attending it; it is as easy to turn away from a beggar as to relieve him; and if the mind were not governed by a sense of truth, and of the real consequences of it’s actions, we should treat the distresses of others with the same sort of feeling as we go to see a tragedy because we know that the pleasure will be greater than the pain. There is indeed a false and bastard kind of feeling which is governed altogether by a regard to this reaction of pity on our own minds, and which therefore serves more strongly to distinguish the true. So there is a false fear, as well as a refined self-interest. We very often shrink from immediate pain, though we know that it is necessary to our obtaining some important object; and at other times undergo the most painful operations in order to avoid some greater evil at a distance.—In the sense which the objection implies, my love of another is not the love of myself but as it operates to produce my own good. The mind is supposed to be mechanically attached to, or to fly from every idea or impression simply as it affects it with pleasure, or pain. And if this were the case, it might with some propriety be said to be actuated by a principle of mechanical or practical self-love. If however there is no such principle regulating my attachment to others by my own convenience, very little foundation will be left for the mechanical theory. For, secondly, the real question is, why do we sympathize with others at all? It seems we are first impelled by self-love to feel uneasiness at the prospect of another’s suffering, in order that the same principle of tender concern for ourselves may afterwards impel us to get rid of that uneasiness by endeavouring to prevent the suffering which is the cause of it. It is absurd to say that in compassionating the distress of others we are only affected by our own pain or uneasiness, since this very pain arises from our compassion. It is putting the effect before the cause. Before I can be affected by my own pain, I must first be put in pain. If I am affected by, or feel pain and sorrow at an idea existing in my mind, which idea is neither pain itself nor an idea of my own pain, I wonder in what sense this can be called the love of myself. Again, I am equally at a loss to conceive how if the pain which this idea gives me does not impel me to get rid of it as it gives me pain or as it actually affects myself as a distinct, momentary impression, but as it is connected with other ideas, that is, is supposed to affect another, how I say this can be considered as the effect of self-love. The object, effort or struggle of the mind is not to remove the idea or immediate feeling of pain from the individual or to put a stop to that feeling as it affects his temporary interest, but to produce a disconnection (whatever it may cost him) between certain ideas of other things existing in his mind, namely the idea of pain, and the idea of another person. Self, mere physical self, is entirely forgotten both practically and consciously. My own good is neither the exciting cause nor the immediate result of the feeling by which I am actuated. I do not shrink from the idea of the pain which another feels as it affects myself, but it excites repugnance, uneasiness, or active aversion in my mind as it affects, or is connected with the idea of another; and it is because I know that certain actions will prevent or remove that pain from that other person according to the manner in which I have perceived effects to be connected together in nature, that I will those actions for that purpose, or that their ideas take hold of my mind, and affect it in such a manner as to produce their volition. In short, the change which the mind endeavours to produce is not in the relation of a certain painful idea to itself as perceiving it, but in the relation of certain ideas of external things to one another. If this is not sufficient to make the distinction intelligible, I cannot express it any better. ‘Oh, but’ (it will be said) ‘I cannot help feeling pain when I see another in actual pain, or get rid of the idea by any other means than by relieving the person, and knowing that it exists no longer.’ But will this prove that my love of others is regulated by my love of myself, or that my self-love is subservient to my love of others? What hinders me from immediately removing the painful idea from my mind but that my sympathy with others stands in the way of it? That this independent attachment to the good of others is a natural, unavoidable feeling of the human mind is what I do not wish to deny. It is also, if you will, a mechanical feeling; but then it is neither a physical, nor a selfish mechanism. I see colours, hear sounds, feel heat, and cold, and believe that two and two make four by a certain mechanism, or from the necessary structure of the human mind; but it does not follow that all this has any thing to do with self-love.—One half of the process, namely the connecting the sense of pain with the idea of it, is evidently contrary to self-love; nor do I see any more reason for ascribing the uneasiness, or active impulse which follows to that principle, since my own good is neither thought of in it, nor does it follow from it except indirectly, slowly and conditionally. The mechanical tendency to my own ease or gratification is so far from being the real spring or natural motive of compassion that it is constantly overruled and defeated by it. If it should be answered that these restrictions and modifications of the principle of self-love are a necessary consequence of the nature of a thinking being, then I say that it is nonsense to talk of mechanical self-love in connection with a power of reflection, that is, a mind capable of perceiving the consequences of things beyond itself, and of being affected by them. To ask therefore whether if it were possible to get rid of my own uneasiness without supposing the uneasiness of another to be removed I should wish to remove it, is foreign to the purpose; for it is to suppose that the idea of another’s uneasiness is not an immediate object of uneasiness to me, or that by making a distinction of reflection between the idea of what another suffers, and the uneasiness it causes in me, the former will cease to give me any uneasiness, which is a contradiction. A question might as well be put whether if pleasure gave me pain, and pain pleasure, I should not like pain, and dislike pleasure. So long as the idea of what another suffers is a necessary source of uneasiness to me, and the motive and guide of my actions, it is not true that my only concern is for myself, or that I am governed solely by a principle of self-interest.—The body has a mechanical tendency to shrink from physical pain: this may be called mechanical self-love, because, though the good of the individual is not the object of the action, it is the immediate and natural effect of it. The movement which is dictated by nature is directly followed by the cessation of the pain by which the individual was annoyed. The evil is completely removed with respect to the individual, the moment the object is at a distance from him; but it only exists as it affects the individual, it is therefore completely at an end when it ceases to affect him. The only thing necessary therefore is to produce this change in the relation of the body to the object; now this is the exact tendency of the impulse produced by bodily pain, that is, it shrinks at the pain and from the object. The being does not suffer a moment longer than he can help it: for there is nothing that should induce him to remain in pain. The body is not tied down to do penance under the discipline of external objects, till by fulfilling certain conditions, from which it reaps no benefit, it obtains a release; all it’s exertions tend immediately to it’s own relief. The body (at least according to the account here spoken of) is a machine so contrived, that, as far as depends on itself, it always tends to it’s own good, in the mind, on the contrary, there are numberless lets and impediments that interfere with this object inseparable from it’s very nature; the body strives to produce such alterations in it’s relation to other things as conduce to it’s own advantage, the mind seeks to alter the relations of other things to one another; the body loves it’s own good, for it tends to it, the understanding is not governed solely by this principle, for it is constantly aiming at other objects. To make the two cases of physical uneasiness, and compassion parallel, it would be necessary to suppose either an involuntary tendency in the muscles to remove every painful object from another through mechanical sympathy, or that the real object of compassion was to remove the nervous uneasiness, occasioned by the idea of another’s pain, as an abstract sensation existing in my mind, totally unconnected with the idea which gave rise to it.
Lastly, should any desperate metaphysician persist in affirming that my love of others is still the love of myself because the impression exciting my sympathy must exist in my mind and so be a part of myself, I should answer that this is using words without affixing any distinct meaning to them. The love or affection excited by any general idea existing in my mind can no more be said to be the love of myself than the idea of another person is the idea of myself because it is I who perceive it. This method of reasoning, however, will not go a great way to prove the doctrine of an abstract principle of self-interest, for by the same rule it would follow that I hate myself in hating any other person. Indeed upon this principle the whole structure of language is a continued absurdity. Whatever can be made the object of our thoughts must be a part of ourselves, the whole world is contained within us, I am no longer John or James, but every one that I know or can think of, I am the least part of myself, my self-interest is extended as far as my thoughts can reach, I can love no one but I must love myself in him, in hating others I also hate myself. In this sense no one can so much as think of, much less love any one besides himself, for he can only think of his own thoughts. If our generous feelings are thus to be construed into selfishness, our malevolent ones must at least be allowed to be disinterested, for they are directed against ourselves, that is against the ideas of certain persons in our minds. If I can have no feeling for any one but myself, I can have no feeling about any one but myself. Suppose I am seized with a fit of rage against a man, and take up a knife to stab him, the quantity of malice, which according to the common notion is here directed against another, must according to this system fall upon myself. I see a man sitting on the opposite side of a table, towards whom I think I feel the greatest rancour, but in fact I only feel it against myself. For what is this man whom I think I see before me but an object existing in my mind, and therefore a part of myself? The sword which I see is not a real sword, but an image impressed on my mind; and the mental blow which I strike with it is not aimed at another being out of myself, (for that is impossible) but at an idea of my own, at the being whom I hate within myself, at myself. If I am always necessarily the object of my own thoughts and actions, I must hate, love, serve, or stab myself as it happens. It is pretended by a violent assumption that benevolence is only a desire to prolong the idea of another’s pleasure in one’s own mind, because that idea exists there: malevolence must therefore be a disposition to prolong the idea of pain in one’s own mind for the same reason, that is, to injure one’s-self, for by this philosophy no one can have a single idea which does not refer to, nor any impulse which does not originate in self.—If by self-love be meant nothing more than the attachment of the mind to any object or idea existing in it, or the connection between any object or idea producing affection and the state of mind produced by it, this is merely the common connection between cause and effect, and the love of every thing must be the love of myself, for the love of every thing must be the love of the object exciting it. On the contrary, if by self-love be meant my attachment to or interest in any object in consequence of it’s affecting me personally or from the stronger and more immediate manner in which certain objects and impressions act upon me, then it cannot be affirmed without an absurdity that all affection whatever is self-love. So if I see a man wounded, and this sight occasions in me a painful feeling of sympathy, I do not in this case feel for myself, because between that idea or object impressed on my mind and the painful feeling which follows there is no such positive connection as there is between the infliction of the same wound on my own body; and the physical pain which follows it. Will it be pretended by any one, on whose brain the intricacies of metaphysics have not had the same effect as the reading of romances had on the renowned knight of La Mancha, that a piece of wood which I see a man cutting in pieces, and so is an object existing in my mind, is a part of myself in the same sense as a leg or an arm? For my own part, as I am not at all affected by the hacking and hewing which this piece of wood receives, or all the blows with which it rings, which are to me mere harmless flourishes in the air, it seems to me a very different thing. The one idea is myself in a simple, very abstract sense indeed, the other idea is myself in the common emphatical sense, it is a reduplication or aggravation of the idea, the object becomes myself by a double right, I am sensible in the object as well as to it. I should say, then, that when the sight of another person wounded excites a feeling of compassion in my mind, this is not a selfish feeling in any narrow or degrading sense of the word, which is the only thing in dispute. (If selfishness is to mean generosity, there is an end at once of the dispute.) And that for this plain reason, that the connection between the visible impression and the feeling of pain is of a totally different kind from the connection between the feeling of pain, and the same wound when inflicted on my own body. The one is an affair of sensation, the other is entirely an affair of imagination. My love of others cannot therefore be built upon the love of myself, considering this last as the effect of ‘physical sensibility,’ and the moment we resolve self-love into the rational pursuit of a remote object, it has been shewn that the same reasoning applies to both, and that the love of others has the same necessary foundation in the human mind as the love of ourselves.
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Footnote 88:
I do not mean that Helvetius was the first who conceived the hypothesis here spoken of (for I do not think he had wit enough to invent even an ingenious absurdity) but it was through him I believe that this notion has attained it’s present popularity, and in France particularly it has had, I am certain, a very general influence on the national character. It was brought forward in the most forcible manner by the writers of the last century, and it is expressly stated, and clearly answered by Bishop Butler in the Preface to his Sermons at the Rolls’ Chapel. After Berkeley’s Essay on Vision, I do not know of any work better worth the attention of those who would learn to think than these same metaphysical Discourses preached at the Rolls’ Chapel.
Footnote 89:
No doubt the picture is always looked at with a very different feeling from what it would have been, if the idea of the person had never been distinctly associated with it.
Footnote 90:
Consciousness is here and all along (where any particular stress is laid upon it) used in it’s etymological sense, as literally the same with conscientia, the knowing or perceiving many things by a simple act.
Footnote 91:
Those of the touch admit of the greatest variety in this respect from the general diffusion of that sense over the whole body, and those which depend on hearing from the small part of the ear which is in general distinctly affected by sound at the same time. As to the taste and smell, the stimulants applied to these senses are such as for the most part to act on a large proportion of the organ at once, though only at intervals. The direction of smells is hardly distinguishable like that of sounds.
Footnote 92:
The method taken by Hartley in detailing the associations, which take place between the ideas of each of the senses one by one, saves him the trouble of explaining those which take place between the ideas of different senses at the same time.
Footnote 93:
I have always had the same feeling with respect to Hartley (still granting his power to the utmost) which is pleasantly expressed in an old author, Roger Bacon, quoted by Sir Kenelm Digby in his answer to Brown. ‘Those students,’ he says, ‘who busy themselves much with such notions as relate wholly to the fantasie, do hardly ever become idoneous for abstracted metaphysical speculations; the one having bulky foundation of matter or of the accidents of it to settle upon, (at the least with one foot:) the other flying continually, even to a lessening pitch, in the subtil air. And accordingly, it hath been generally noted, that the exactest mathematicians, who converse altogether with lines, figures, and other differences of quantity, have seldom proved eminent in metaphysicks or speculative divinity. Nor again, the professors of these sciences in the other arts. Much less can it be expected, that an excellent physician, whose fancy is always fraught with the material drugs that he prescribeth his apothecary to compound his medicines of, and whose hands are inured to the cutting up, and eyes to the inspection of anatomized bodies, should easily and with success, flie his thoughts at so towring a game, as a pure intellect, a separated and unbodied soul.’—I confess I feel in reading Hartley something in the way in which the Dryads must have done shut up in their old oak trees. I feel my sides pressed hard, and bored with points of knotty inferences piled up one upon another without being able ever to recollect myself, or catch a glimpse of the actual world without me. I am somehow wedged in between different rows of material objects, overpowering me by their throng, and from which I have no power to escape, but of which I neither know nor understand any thing. I constantly see objects multiplied upon me, not powers at work, I know no reason why one thing follows another but that something else is conjured up between them, which has as little apparent connection with either as they have with one another;—he always reasons from the concrete object, not from the abstract or essential properties of things, and in his whole book I do not believe that there is one good definition. It would be a bad way to describe a man’s character to say that he had a wise father or a foolish son, and yet this is the way in which Hartley defines ideas by stating what precedes them in the mind, and what comes after them. Thus he defines the will to be ‘that idea, or state of mind which precedes action,’ or ‘a desire, or aversion sufficiently strong to produce action,’ &c. He gives you the outward signs of things in the order in which he conceives them to follow one another, never the demonstration of certain consequences from the known nature of their causes, which alone is true reasoning. Nevertheless, it is not to be forgotten, that he was also a great man. See his Chapter on Memory, &c.
Footnote 94:
See Priestley’s Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever.
Footnote 95:
See Essays by T. Cooper of Manchester. This very curious analysis was also delivered with great gravity by Mr. Mac-Intosh to the metaphysical students of Lincoln’s-Inn. I confess I like ingenuity, however misapplied, if it is but a man’s own: but the dull, affected, pompous repetition of nonsense is not to be endured with patience. In retailing what is not our own, the only merit must be in the choice, or judgment. A man, however, without originality may yet have common sense and common honesty. To be a hawker of worn-out paradoxes, and a pander to sophistry denotes indeed a desperate ambition.
Footnote 96:
This subject of consciousness, the most abstruse, the most important of all others, the most filled with seeming inexplicable contradictions, that which bids the completest defiance to the matter-of-fact philosophy and can only be developed by the patient soliciting of a man’s own spirit has been accordingly passed over by the herd of philosophers from Locke downwards. There is a short note about it in Hartley in which he flatly denies the possibility of any such thing. Lest what I have already said should therefore be insufficient to fix the attention of the reader on a subject which he may think quite exploded, I will add the account which Rousseau has given of the same subject, whose authority does not weigh the less with me because it is unsupported by the Logic of Condillac, or the book De l’Esprit.
‘Me voici déjà tout aussi sûr de l’existence de l’univers, que de la mienne. Ensuite je réfléchis sur les objets de mes sensations, et trouvant en moi la faculté de les comparer, je me sens doué d’une force active que je ne savois pas avoir auparavant.
‘Appercevoir, c’est sentir; comparer, c’est juger: juger et sentir ne sont pas la même chose. Par la sensation, les objets s’offrent à moi séparés, isolés, tels qu’ils sont dans la Nature; par la comparaison, je les remue, je les transporte, pour ainsi dire, je les pose l’un sur l’autre, pour prononcer sur leur différence ou sur leur similitude, et généralement sur tous leurs rapports. Selon moi, la faculté distinctive de l’être actif, ou intelligent est de pouvoir donner un sens à ce mot, est. Je cherche en vain dans l’être purement sensitif cette force intelligente, qui superpose, et puis qui prononce; je ne la saurois voir dans sa nature. Cet être passif sentira chaque objet séparément, ou même il sentira l’objet total formé des deux, mais n’ayant aucune force pour les replier l’un sur l’autre, il ne les comparera jamais, il ne les jugera point.
‘Voir deux objets à la fois, n’est pas voir leurs rapports, ni juger de leurs différences; appercevoir plusieurs objets les uns hors des autres, n’est pas les nombrer. Je puis avoir au même instant l’idée d’un grand bâton et d’un petit bâton sans les comparer, sans juger que l’un est plus petit que l’autre, comme je puis voir à la fois ma main entière sans faire le compte de mes doigts. Ces idées comparatives, plus grande, plus petite, de même que les idées numériques d’un, de deux, &c. ne sont certainement pas des sensations, quoique mon esprit ne les produise, qu’à l’occasion de mes sensations.
‘On nous dit que l’être sensitif distingue les sensations les unes des autres par les différences qu’ont entr’elles ces mêmes sensations: ceci demande explication. Quand les sensations sont différentes, l’être sensitif les distingue par leurs différences: quand elles sont semblables, il les distingue parce qu’il sent les unes hors des autres. Autrement, comment dans une sensation simultanée distingueroit-il deux objets égaux? Il faudroit nécessairement qu’il confondît ces deux objets, et les prît pour le même, sur-tout dans un systême où l’on prétend que les sensations représentatives de l’étendue ne sont point étendues.
‘Quand les deux sensations à comparer sont apperçues, leur impression est faite, chaque objet est senti, les deux sont sentis; mais leur rapport n’est pas senti pour cela. Si le jugement de ce rapport n’étoit qu’une sensation, & me venoit uniquement de l’objet, mes jugemens ne me tromperoient jamais, puisqu’il n’est jamais faux que je sente ce que je sens.
‘Pourquoi donc est-ce que je me trompe sur le rapport de ces deux bâtons, sur-tout s’ils ne sont pas parallèles? Pourquoi, dis-je, par exemple, que le petit bâton est le tiers du grand, tandis qu’il n’en est que le quart? Pourquoi l’image, qui est la sensation, n’est elle pas conforme à son modèle, qui est l’objet? C’est que je suis actif quand je juge, que l’opération qui compare est fautive, et que mon entendement, qui juge les rapports, mêle ses erreurs à la vérité des sensations qui ne montrent que les objets.
‘Ajoutez à cela une réflexion qui vous frappera, je m’assure, quand vous y aurez pensé; c’est que si nous étions purement passifs dans l’usage de nos sens, il n’y auroit entr’eux aucun communication; il nous seroit impossible de connoître que le corps que nous touchons, et l’objet que nous voyons sont le même. Ou nous ne sentirions jamais rien hors de nous, ou il y auroit pour nous cinq substances sensibles, donc nous n’aurions nul moyen d’appercevoir l’identité.
‘Qu’on donne tel ou tel nom à cette force de mon esprit qui rapproche et compare mes sensations; qu’on l’appelle attention, méditation, réflexion, ou comme on voudra; toujours est-il vrai qu’elle est en moi et non dans les choses, que c’est moi seul qui la produis, quoique je ne la produise qu’à l’occasion de l’impression que font sur moi les objets. Sans être maître de sentir ou de ne pas sentir, je le suis d’examiner plus ou moins ce que je sens.
‘Je ne suis donc pas simplement un être sensitif et passif, mais un être actif et intelligent, et quoi qu’en dise la philosophie, j’oserai prétendre à l’honneur de penser, &c.’—EMILE, beginning of the third, or end of the second volume.
Footnote 97:
I here speak of association as distinct from imagination or the effects of novelty.
Footnote 98:
See preface to Butler’s Sermons.
Footnote 99:
As far as the love of good or happiness operates as a general principle of action, it is in this way. I have supposed this principle to be at the bottom of all our actions, because I did not desire to enter into the question. If I should ever finish the plan which I have begun, I shall endeavour to shew that the love of happiness even in the most general sense does not account for the passions of men. The love of truth, and the love of power are I think distinct principles of action, and mix with, and modify all our pursuits. See Butler as quoted above.
NOTES
THE PLAIN SPEAKER
ESSAY I. ON THE PROSE STYLE OF POETS
PAGE
1. Do you read, etc. See vol. viii. p. 319 (A View of the English Stage).
5. Feathered, two-legged things.
‘That unfeather’d two-legged thing, a son.’ Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, l. 170.
Unpleasing flats and sharps. Cf. 4 ‘Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps.’ Romeo and Juliet, III. 5.
His Muse has been silent. Waverley was published in 1814, the Lord of the Isles in 1815; other novels followed, and, with the exception of Harold the Dauntless, published in 1817, Sir Walter’s work was confined to novels until the issue of Halidon Hill in 1822. Scott publicly acknowledged his authorship of the Waverley Novels on Feb. 23, 1827.
6. The translation of Ossian’s poems. James Macpherson’s (1736–1796) so-called translations were published in 1761–1763.
Shaftesbury’s Characteristics. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times (1711), a collection of the works of Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671–1713) third Earl of Shaftesbury, who, says Sidgwick, was ‘the first to make psychological experience the basis of ethics.’ Mr. W. C. Hazlitt says that Hazlitt’s attention was drawn to this work in Baskerville’s edition, which his father is represented as reading in the oil painting executed in 1804.
Foregone conclusion. Othello, III. 3.
Horne Tooke. John Horne Tooke (1736–1812) was elected Member for Old Sarum in 1801, after unsuccessfully contesting Westminster in 1790 and 1797.
The Portraits of Kneller, Richardson, and others. Sir Godfrey Kneller (1648–1723), painter of the Kit-Cat Club Portraits, and Jonathan Richardson (c. 1665–1745), who, after Kneller’s death, was considered the head of his profession.
7. He murmurs by the running brooks. Wordsworth’s ‘A Poet’s Epitaph.’
Charles Fox. Charles James Fox (1749–1806).
Lord Stormont. David Murray (1727–1796), diplomatist and statesman, second Earl of Mansfield (1793) and eldest son of David, sixth Viscount Stormont, who died in 1748.
8. To come trippingly off the tongue. Hamlet, III. 2.
Invita Minervâ. ‘Tu nihil invita dices faciesve Minerva,’ Horace, De Arte Poet., 385.
9. Like Goldsmith ... a Noble Lord. Prior, in his Life of Goldsmith, II. pp. 66–68, refers to this as a ‘ludicrous story’ which has ‘long been told.’ He describes it as ‘wholly a fabrication.’
10. Treads the primrose path. Hamlet, I. 3.
The highest [brightest] heaven of invention. King Henry V. Prologue.
He is nothing if not fanciful [critical]. Othello, II. 1.
Bristol-stones. Brilliant crystals of colourless quartz, found on St. Vincent’s Rocks near Bristol, go by the name of Bristol Diamonds.
On the unstedfast footing of a spear. 1 King Henry IV., I. 3.
11. To make us heirs. Wordsworth’s ‘Personal Talk,’ Poems of Sentiment XIII. [by heavenly lays].
Like beauty making beautiful old rime. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 106.
Letter to a Noble Lord. Published 1796.
12. Buttress, frieze ... pendant bed. Macbeth, I. 6.
At one fell swoop. Macbeth, IV. 4.
Sharp and sweet. Cf. ‘As sweet as sharp.’ All’s Well that Ends Well, IV. 4.
13. From Windsor’s heights. Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. [‘Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey’].
The so much admired description. Speech on the motion made for papers relative to the directions for charging the Nabob of Arcot’s private debts to Europeans on the Revenues of the Carnatick, February 28th, 1785.
The Abbe Sieyes ... ‘pigeon-holes.’ Burke’s A Letter to a Noble Lord, p. 142 (Works, Bohn, V.).
The comparison of the Duke of Bedford. A Letter to a Noble Lord, (Ib.) p. 129.
That sea-beast. Paradise Lost, I. 200–2.
Put his hook in the nostrils. The Book of Job, xli. 1–2.
The death of Lord Castlereagh. Robert Stewart (1769–1822), Viscount Castlereagh 1796, and second Marquis of Londonderry 1821. See vol. III., Political Essays, note to p. 36. He committed suicide in a fit of insanity.
14. Mr. Montgomery. James Montgomery (1771–1854) began the Sheffield Iris in 1794, and edited it until 1825.
15. Poets have been said to succeed best in fiction. The reply of Edmund Waller to Charles II., who had complained of the inferiority of the poet’s verses on the Restoration as compared with his panegyric on Cromwell.
Forlorn way obscure. Cf. Paradise Lost, II. 615. ‘In confused march forlorn.’
16. Old Fuller, and Burton, and Latimer. Thomas Fuller (1608–1661) of the Worthies (1662); Robert Burton (1577–1640) of the Anatomy of Melancholy (1621); and Hugh Latimer (1491–1555), Bishop, and writer of The Ploughers (1549).
The poet-laureat. Robert Southey (1774–1843) was made poet-laureate in 1813.
Extravagant and erring spirit. Hamlet, I. 1.
Stoops to earth. Cf. ‘But stoop’d to Truth, and moraliz’d his song.’ Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, l. 341.
The words of Mercury. Love’s Labour’s Lost, v. 2.
16. Wat Tyler. Published 1817.
The Author of Rimini, and Editor of the Examiner. Leigh Hunt’s poem, The Story of Rimini, was published in 1816. The first number of The Examiner, a Sunday Paper on Politics, Domestic Economy and Theatricals, appeared on Jan. 3, 1808.
17. His effusions in the Indicator. This paper lasted from Oct. 13, 1819 to March 21, 1821. A second series lasted from March 28, 1821 to Oct. 13, 1821.
ESSAY II. ON DREAMS
From The New Monthly Magazine, ‘Table Talk, VI.,’ ‘Dreaming,’ No. 27, Vol. 7, 1823.
17. Dr. Spurzheim. J. G. Spurzheim, phrenologist (1776–1832). See The Physiognomical System of Drs. Gall and Spurzheim, founded on an Anatomical and Physiological Examination of the Nervous System in general, and of the Brain in particular, 1815. See also the Essay on p. 137, et seq., ante, ‘On Dr. Spurzheim’s Theory.’
18. Imparted in dreadful secresy. Hamlet, I. 2.
21. That which was now a horse. Antony and Cleopatra, IV. 14.
22. Heat-oppressed brain. Macbeth, II. 1.
24. Bishop Atterbury. Francis Atterbury (1662–1732), Bishop of Rochester, Jacobite and controversialist, and correspondent of Pope and Swift. See also vol. VIII. Lectures on the English Comic Writers, p. 14.
Intus et in cute. Persius, Sat. III. 30.
The New Eloise. Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse (1760), Sixième Partie, Lettre XII.
ESSAY III. ON THE CONVERSATION OF AUTHORS
From The London Magazine, ‘Table Talk, III.,’ Sep. 20, 1820, signed ‘T., Winterslow Hut,’ vol. 2. The footnote which follows was not reprinted from the Magazine. The Essay was also published as ‘Table Talk, V.’ The New Monthly Magazine, No. 24, Vol. 5, 1822. See the Essay ‘On Persons one would wish to have seen.’
‘Of all persons spouters at Debating Societies are the most intolerable and troublesome as acquaintance. They have a constant desire to hear themselves talk, and never know what any one else wishes to hear. They talk incessantly, and say nothing. They are loud, offensive, and common-place. They try to get the ear of the company as they get the ear of the Chair, which, having got, they will not let go. They bait some unpretending individual (as if it was a case-hardened antagonist) with gross and vapid assurance, and turn a drawing-room into a bear-garden. They have all the prolixity and unwieldiness of authorship, without any of the solidity, and have all the ambition of orators to shine, without the ability, the excuse, or the inclination on the part of others to attend to them. I know one of this class in particular who has no more business in any party of ladies and gentlemen, with his splay-foot manners and long train of awkward speeches, than the Dragon of Wantley.’
25. And of his port. Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, 69.
He is one that cannot make a good leg. The Return from Parnassus, II. 6. See vol. V., Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, p. 284.
Tull’s Husbandry. New Horse-hoing Husbandry, or an Essay on the Principles of Tillage and Vegetation; wherein is shewn a sort of Vineyard Culture into the Corn Fields, in order to increase their Product, and diminish the Common Expense by Instruments described in the Cuts. By Jethro Tull (1733). The Fourth edition contained an Introduction by William Cobbett. See also vol. VI., Table Talk, p. 102 and note.
The Philosopher of Botley. William Cobbett (1762–1835), who settled at Botley, Hampshire, in the early years of the nineteenth century.
26. Dilworth’s Spelling Book. ? Thomas Dilworth’s A New Guide to the English Tongue, an eighteenth century book.
Fearn’s Treatise on Contingent Remainders. Charles Fearne’s (1742–1794) An Essay on the Learning of Contingent Remainders and Executory Devises (1772). a book which made him an authority.
Etherial mould, sky-tinctured. Cf. Paradise Lost, II. 139, and V. 285.
Breathe in other air less pure. Paradise Lost, XI. 284.
Confined and cabin’d in. Macbeth, III. 4; ‘cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in.’
Verily we have our reward. S. Matthew, vi. 2.
27. Should go about to cozen fortune. Merchant of Venice, II. 9.
Because we are scholars [virtuous]. Twelfth Night, II. 3.
27. The wretched slave. King Henry V., IV. 1.
28. Tell his tale. Milton’s L’Allegro.
Stocks and stones. ‘You blocks, you stones, etc.’ Julius Cæsar, I. 1.
29. Miss ——. The reference is probably to Fanny Burney (1752–1840), and her novels Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782).
Whose is the superscription? S. Matthew, xxii. 20.
G—— C——. Probably Godwin and Coleridge.
32. The fear of being silent strikes us dumb [‘makes us mute’]. Cowper, Conversation, 352.
33. Grimm’s Memoirs. Colburn published in 1813 an abridgment in 4 vols. of the Mémoires historiques, littéraires et anecdotiques of Frederic Melchior, Baron de Grimm (1723–1807). They are full of entertaining information concerning eighteenth century French writers. See Vol. I. The Round Table, p. 131 et seq.
We had good talk, sir. Boswell’s Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, II. 66.
I once knew a very ingenious man. Probably Sir John Stoddart, Hazlitt’s brother-in-law. He was a friend of the Bourbons. See vol. III. Political Essays, p. 169 et seq.
Sterne ... Yorick. A Sentimental Journey: The Passport, Versailles.
34. Villainous, and shews a pitiful ambition. Hamlet, III. 2.
When Greek meets Greek. ‘When Greeks joined Greeks, then was the tug of war.’ Nathaniel Lee’s (1655–1692) Alexander the Great, IV. 2.
C——. Coleridge.
ESSAY IV. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
35. L——‘s. Lamb’s. See the chapter entitled ‘Lamb’s Wednesdays’ in the Memoirs of W. Hazlitt, Vol. I. p. 271 et seq.
The Small-coal man’s musical parties. Thomas Britton (1654–1714), a dealer in small coal and a collector of every musical book he could meet with. He was frightened to death by a ventriloquist.
John Buncle. See Vol. I. The Round Table, p. 51 et seq., and Lamb’s Essay on ‘Imperfect Sympathies.’
36. And, in our flowing cups.
‘Then shall our names, Familiar in their mouths as household words ... Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.’ King Henry V. IV. 3.
The cartoons at Hampton Court. See Hazlitt’s essay on ‘The Pictures at Hampton Court.’
A list of persons. See the essay entitled ‘On Persons one would wish to have seen.’
36. C——. Coleridge, here and throughout the essay.
37. Ned P——. Edward Phillips, secretary to Charles Abbott, Speaker of the House of Commons. See Lamb’s Letters, ed. Hazlitt, I. pp. 76, 419, etc.
Captain ——. Rear-Admiral James Burney (1750–1821), brother of Fanny Burney and author of the famous Chronological History of the Voyages and Discoveries in the South Sea or Pacific Ocean (1803–1817), 5 vols. He sailed with Captain Cook in two of his voyages.
Jem White, the author of Falstaff’s Letters. Original Letters, etc., of Sir John Falstaff and his Friends, now first made public by a Gentleman, a descendant of Dame Quickly, from genuine MSS. which have been in the possession of the Quickly Family near four hundred years (1796). See Lamb’s Letters, ed. Hazlitt, I. 10, 90, etc. and The Lambs, 1897, pp. 24–6.
Turning like the latter end of a lover’s lute. Letters of Sir John Falstaff, etc. (see above), in a letter from ‘Davy to Shallow.’ Said of Master Abram, who dies of love for sweet Anne Page. See Lamb’s review of the Letters in The Examiner, Sep. 5, 1819, and Leigh Hunt’s reprint of it in The Indicator, Jan. 24, 1821. Lamb was suspected of having had a share in his friend and schoolmate’s book.
A——. William Ayrton (1777–1858), musical critic and editor of Charles Knight’s Musical Library.
Mrs. R——. Mrs. Reynolds, Lamb’s ‘sage woman.’
M. B. Martin Charles Burney, Lamb’s friend, the son of Admiral Burney.
The author of ‘the Road to Ruin.’ Thomas Holcroft. See Vol. II. p. 121 et seq.
The Critique of Pure Reason. Immanuel Kant’s work was published in 1781.
Mitre-court. In the Temple, where the Lambs resided for eight years at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
38. The Biographia Literaria. Coleridge’s book was published in 1817.
Like Angels’ visits. ‘Like those of angels, short and far between.’ Blair’s The Grave, 582. Cf. Vol. V. Lectures on the English Poets, p. 150.
Mr. Douce of the Museum. Francis Douce (d. 1834), antiquarian, Shakespearian scholar, and keeper of manuscripts in the British Museum.
L. H—— ... tropical blood. Leigh Hunt’s father, Isaac Hunt, was a Barbadian.
Aliquando sufflaminandus erat. Probably quoted from Ben Jonson’s Discoveries, LXIV., De Shakespeare Nostrati. See Vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, note to p. 336.
39. Mr. Northcote. James Northcote (1746–1831).
40. Hear a sound so fine. James Sheridan Knowles’s Virginius (1820), V. 2.
41. Fuseli. Heinrich Fuessly or Henry Fuseli, portrait-painter and art critic (1741–1825). Cf. Vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, p. 233.
Curran. John Philpot Curran (1750–1817), the Irish advocate.
Mrs. Inchbald. Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821), novelist, dramatist and actress.
Mary Woolstonecroft. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1759–1797), of the Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792).
From noon to dewy eve. Paradise Lost, I. 743.
A Table Talk. See note on source of this essay, above.
Peter Pindar. John Wolcot, ‘Peter Pindar’ (1738–1819), physician, satirist and poet.
Mrs. M——. Mrs. Montagu, Basil Montagu’s third wife, the widow of Thomas Skepper and mother (by Skepper) of Mrs. Bryan Waller Procter. She married Montagu about 1806.
42. H—t’s. Hunt’s.
N——‘s. Northcote’s.
H—y—dn’s. Haydon’s.
A Doctor Tronchin. Theodore Tronchin (1709–1781), Genevan physician and friend of Rousseau.
Sir Fopling Flutter. In Sir George Etherege’s comedy The Man of Mode.
For wit is like a rest. Master Francis Beaumont’s Letter to Ben Jonson, printed in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Comedies (1647) [the best gamesters].
L—— once came down. To Winterslow. See Vol. VI. Table Talk, notes to pp. 90 and 188.
Like the most capricious poet [honest] Ovid. As You Like It, III. 3.
Walked gowned. Lamb’s Sonnet, written at Cambridge, August 15, 1819.
The person I mean. Undoubtedly George Dyer. See Lamb’s description of him in ‘Oxford in the Vacation’ (Essays of Elia).
ESSAY V. ON REASON AND IMAGINATION
44. This breathing world. King Richard III., I. 1.
45. In the world’s volume. Cymbeline, III. 4. ‘Seems as of it.’
There are more things. Hamlet I. 5.
46. The shadows in Plato’s cave. The Republic, Book VII.
As mice in an air-pump. Burke, A Letter to a Noble Lord (Works, Bohn, V. p. 142). Cf. also Young, Love of Fame, V. 177, and The Spectator, No. 21.
All the mighty world of eye and ear. Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey.
The Last Moments of Mr. Fox. Circumstantial details of the Long Illness and last moments of the Rt. Hon. Charles James Fox, together with some strictures on his Public and Private Life, 1806. The remark about Burke’s style does not seem to have been made by Lord Holland.
Lord Holland. Henry Richard Vassall Fox, third Lord Holland (1773–1840).
Words that glow. ‘Thoughts that breathe and words that burn.’ Gray’s Progress of Poesy, 110.
48. Granville Sharp. The abolitionist (1735–1813), whose Memoirs by Prince Hoare were published in 1810.
49. Mr. Bentham. See Vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, pp. 189, et seq.
Paley’s Moral Philosophy. William Paley’s (1743–1805) Moral and Political Philosophy was published in 1785.
Tucker’s Light of Nature. Abraham Tucker’s (1705–1774) The Light of Nature Pursued (7 vols., 1768–1778) was abridged by Hazlitt. See Vol. IV. of the present edition, pp. 371–385.
50. The tyrant’s plea. Paradise Lost, IV. 393.
Casts its shadow before. Campbell’s Lochiel’s Warning.
51. The classical administration of Mr. Canning. The oratory of George Canning (1770–1827) was noted for its classical turn.
Ex uno omnes. Cf. ‘ab uno disce omnes,’ Virgil’s Æneid, II. 65–6.
What can we reason. Pope’s Essay on Man, Ep. I. 18.
52. A breath can mar [make] them. Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, 54.
His Social Contract. Published 1762.
54. ‘Duchess of Malfy.’ Webster’s tragedy (1623).
Give the mind pause. Cf. ‘Give us pause.’ Hamlet, III. 1.
One touch of nature. Troilus and Cressida, III. 3.
Thou hast no speculation. Macbeth, III. 4.
55. Both at the first and now. Hamlet, III. 2.
To feel what others are. Gray, Ode to Adversity.
ESSAY VI. ON APPLICATION TO STUDY
From The New Monthly Magazine, No. 35, Vol. VIII., 1823, ‘Table Talk, X.’
55. Wilson the Painter. Richard Wilson (1714–1782), ‘The English Claude.’
56. Morland. George Morland (1763–1804), painter of country scenes and humble life.
Invita Minervâ. See ante, note to p. 8.
The labour we delight in. Macbeth, II. 1.
Denner. Balthasar Denner, a German portrait painter (1685–1749).
To him a kingdom was. Cf. ‘My mind to me a kingdom is,’ by Sir Edward Dyer.
A lucid mirror. Cowper, The Task, I. 701–2.
Begun in gladness. Wordsworth’s Resolution and Independence, St. 8.
57. The Children in the Fiery Furnace. Daniel, iii. 6.
Terræ filii. Cf. Persius, Sat. VI. 59, ‘Terræ est jam filius.’
Highest [brightest] Heaven of invention. King Henry V. Prologue.
58. Nice customs curtesy. King Henry V. V. 2.
A jest’s prosperity. Love’s Labour’s Lost, V. 2.
59. The random, blindfold blows.
‘Strike in the dark, offending but by chance, Such are the blindfold blows of Ignorance.’ Dryden, The Hind and the Panther, I. 323–4.
Had drawn in their breath and puffed it forth again.
‘As fast As I had puffed it forth and sucked it in Like breath.’ Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster, V. 5.
The sounding cataract. Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey.
60. Propulsive force. Cf.
‘Like to the Pontic sea Whose icy current and compulsive course Ne’er feels retiring ebb, etc. Othello, III. 3.
Grows with our growth. Pope’s Essay on Man, Epis. II. 136.
61. The Prince of Painters. The title is generally given to Parrhasius, the Greek painter (c. 400 B.C.), but Hazlitt refers to Raphael.
Salvator. Salvator Rosa, Neapolitan painter, musician and poet (1615–1673).
Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses. Published 1771, etc.
The Rev. W. Shepherd. His Life of Poggio Bracciolini was published at Liverpool in 1802.
62. Unfold the book. Hamlet, I. 5.
Spiritus precipitandus est. See Vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, note to p. 309.
Mr. Cobbett. See Vol. IV., The Spirit of the Age, pp. 334 et seq.
63. Perseverance, dear my lord. Troilus and Cressida, III. 3.
64. Ned Softly, in the Tatler. See No. 163, April 25, 1710.
65. Never ending, still beginning. Dryden, Alexander’s Feast, 102. Also cf. ‘Still ending and beginning still,’ Cowper’s The Task, III. 627.
Physician, heal thyself. S. Luke, iv. 23.
66. Dr. Burney. Charles Burney the elder (1726–1814), historian of music.
ESSAY VII. ON LONDONERS AND COUNTRY PEOPLE
From The New Monthly Magazine, No. 32, vol. VIII. 1823, ‘Table Talk, VII.’
66. Mr. Blackwood ... Cockney. See Vol. VI. Table Talk, note to p. 98.
67. Beyond Hyde Park. Etherege’s The Man of Mode, V. 2.
68. He is owner of all he surveys. ‘I am monarch of all I survey.’ Cowper’s Verses supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk.
69. A barker in Monmouth Street. A shop-tout or sham auctioneer. See vol. VI. Mr. Northcote’s Conversations, note to p. 459.
A slop-seller in Radcliffe Highway. It will be remembered that the Marrs kept a lace and pelisse warehouse, 29 Ratcliffe Highway. See De Quincey’s Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts.
Pennant. Some Account of London, 1790. 4to. A well-known and much appreciated topographical account that passed through several editions in the early years of last century.
Where Hicke’s Hall formerly stood. Hicks’s Hall, formerly in St. John Street, Clerkenwell. The milestones on the Great North Road were measured from here.
70. Cider-Cellar. The tavern at 20, Maiden Lane, a favourite resort of Porson’s, who furnished the Latin motto over the door, ‘Honos erit huic quoque homo.’
Shorter excursions tries. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 737–8.
White-conduit House. For this (Pentonville) and Bagnigge Wells (King’s Cross) see Vol. IV. note to p. 108.
Rosemary Branch. At Peckham. See Vol. VI. Table Talk, note to p. 88.
Catch the breezy air. Wordsworth, ‘Lines written in Early Spring’ (Lyrical Ballads, 1798).
There’s nought so sweet on earth. One of Moore’s ‘Irish Melodies.’
Brahams. John Abraham, tenor singer (1774–1856). ‘He was,’ said Sir Walter Scott, ‘a beast of an actor, but an angel of a singer.’ He began life by selling lead pencils in London streets as a boy, made an enormous fortune as the greatest tenor singer of his day, and squandered it in building St. James’s Theatre and buying the Colosseum in Regent’s Park (See Vol. VI. Mr. Northcote’s Conversations, note to p. 429).
Durusets. J. B. Duruset, singer (See the Literary Gazette of June 26 and July 3, 1824).
71. An hour by St. Dunstan’s clock. Cf. ‘We rose both at an instant, and fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock.’ 1 King Henry IV. V. 4.
Copenhagen-house. A tavern and tea-garden in North London between Maiden Lane and Hogbush Lane. See Vol. VI. Table Talk, p. 86–89.
72. For how should the soul of Socrates. The Road to Ruin, Act III. 2.
Hole in the Wall. In Chancery Lane, kept by Randall the pugilist. See Vol. VI. Table Talk, note to p. 202.
The poet Jago. Richard Jago (1715–1781), author of Edge Hill.
Anthony Collins. The deist (1676–1729), author of a Discourse of Freethinking (1713).
73. Mr. Dunster ... the fishmonger in the Poultry. See Memoirs of W. Hazlitt. II. 310. His real name was, apparently, Fisher, of Duke Street, St. James’s.
74. The Story of the King of Bohemia. Tristram Shandy, viii. 19.
76. See Round Table, Vol. II. p. 116. See Vol. I. pp. 122, et seq.
This bottle’s the sun of our table. R. B. Sheridan’s The Duenna, III. 5. 76. Bannister, King. John Bannister (1760–1836), Thomas King (1730–1805).
Mr. Justice Shallow. 2 King Henry IV., III. 2.
77. A species alone. ‘The Phœnix Pindar is a vast species alone.’ Cowley, The Praise of Pindar.
ESSAY VIII. ON THE SPIRIT OF OBLIGATIONS
From The New Monthly Magazine, ‘Table Talk, XI.,’ No. 37, Vol. X. 1824.
78. Nihil humani. Terence, Heautontimorumenos, I. 1.
80. Make mouths at the invisible event. Hamlet, IV. 4.
Born for their use, etc. Young’s The Revenge, V. 2.
81. Wise saws. As You Like It, II. 7.
82. Mr. Wilberforce. William Wilberforce (1759–1833), the parliamentary leader of the anti-slavery cause. See Vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, pp. 331, et seq.
83. If to their share. Pope, The Rape of the Lock, II., 17–18.
‘If to her share some female errors fall, Look on her face, and you’ll forget ’em all.’
A Howard. John Howard (1726–1790), prison philanthropist.
A Sir Hudson Lowe. 1769–1844. As jailor of Napoleon in St. Helena he endured much obloquy.
Charity covers a multitude of sins. 1 Peter, iv. 8.
The meanest peasant on the bleakest mountain. Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. The Bourbonnois.
Talma. François Joseph Talma (1763–1826), one of the greatest of French tragic actors.
84. Mr. Justice Fielding. William, eldest son of the novelist (1748–1820). He was magistrate for Westminster.
Colonel Bath. In Amelia.
Administer to a mind diseased. Macbeth, V. 3.
85. A little lower than the angels. Psalms viii. 5.
And when I think that his immortal wings. Heaven and Earth, Part I. Scene 1.
The person whose doors I enter with most pleasure. ? Northcote’s.
86. Enter [Open] Sessami. The words that opened the cave door in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.
87. The late Mr. Sheridan. Richard Brinsley Sheridan died in 1816.
Coin his smile for drachmas. ‘I had rather coin my heart, and drop my blood for drachmas.’ Julius Cæsar, IV. 3.
ESSAY IX. ON THE OLD AGE OF ARTISTS
From The New Monthly Magazine, No. 33, Vol. VIII., 1823, ‘Table Talk, VIII.’
88. Mr. Nollekens. Joseph Nollekens, died in 1823.
‘A man’s a man for a’ that.’ Burns, ‘Is there for honest poverty.’
89. Chantry. Sir Francis Legatt Chantrey (1781–1841). The wealth he accumulated by means of his art was given to the Royal Academy for the purchase of works of art executed in Great Britain.
Have wrought himself to stone. Cf. ‘I have not yet forgot myself to stone.’ Pope, Eloisa to Abelard, 24.
As when a vulture on Imaus bred. Paradise Lost, III. 431.
89. Bernini. Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), painter, sculptor and architect. He was called the Michael Angelo of his times.
Roubilliac. Louis Francis Roubilliac, French sculptor (d. 1762). He executed the statue of Sir Isaac Newton, Trinity College, Cambridge. The monument to the Duke of Argyle, in Westminster Abbey, is his.
Day. Alexander Day, miniature painter and picture-dealer (1772–1841).
Barry. James T. Barry, painter and art critic (1741–1806), who was patronised by Burke.
And by the force of blear illusion.
‘As by the strength of their illusion Shall draw him on to his confusion.’ Macbeth, III. 5.
See also ‘blear illusion,’ Comus, 155, and vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, p. 214, where the same combination occurs.
90. Flaxman. John Flaxman (1755–1826), sculptor and designer.
Cosway. Richard Cosway (d. 1821), the miniaturist.
Bears a charmed life. Macbeth, V. 7.
Exhibition at Somerset-house. The Royal Academy’s rooms were there. See vol. VI. Conversations of James Northcote, note to p. 435.
91. His life spins round on its soft axle.
‘Or she from west her silent course advance With inoffensive pace that spinning sleeps On her soft axle.’ Paradise Lost, VIII. 165.
Age cannot wither. Antony and Cleopatra, II. 2.
92. Captain Englefield and his crew. ‘Captain Englefield and his crew escaping from the wreck of the Centaur’ was Northcote’s first ‘historical’ picture.
One Jeffrey ... artist. ? James Jeffreys (1757–1784), who obtained the gold medal for the best historical picture in 1774, and whose ‘Destruction of the Spanish Batteries before Gibraltar’ was engraved by Woollett.
93. His story of Isabella. The Decameron, Fourth Day, Fifth Novel.
West (the late President of the Royal Academy). Benjamin West, who was elected P.R.A. on the death of Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1792. He died in 1820.
94. Of no mark or likelihood. 1 King Henry IV., III. 2.
95. Loutherbourg. Philip James Loutherbourg (1740–1812), landscape painter.
Blake. William Blake, poet and artist (1759–1827).
Sharp. William Sharp, engraver (1740–1824). He was a follower of Mesmer, Swedenborg and Joanna Southcott.
Varley. John Varley, landscape-painter (1778–1842).
96. Mr. Cipriani. Giambattista Cipriani, a painter of Florentine birth and one of the original members of the Royal Academy (1727–1785).
Shall look upon his like again. Hamlet, I. 2.
97. Present no mark to the foe-man [enemy]. 2 King Henry IV., III. 4.
Defy augury. Hamlet, V. 2.
ESSAY X. ON ENVY (A DIALOGUE)
Teniers. David Teniers, the younger (1610–1694). See vol. VIII. Lectures on the English Comic Writers, pp. 139 and 141 and notes.
Wilkie. Sir David Wilkie (1785–1841).
98. Hoppner. John Hoppner (1759–1810), portrait and landscape painter, who excelled in portraits of women and children.
——. Mr. W. C. Hazlitt suggests that Godwin is meant.
99. Turner. J. M. W. Turner, the greatest English landscape painter (1775–1851).
The wisest, meanest of mankind. Pope’s Essay on Man, Ep. IV. 281, applied to Bacon.
W***. Wellington.
100. Lord Castlereagh. See ante, note to p. 13.
To throw a cruel sunshine on a fool. Armstrong, The Art of Preserving Health, Book IV.
The Miss Hornecks. See vol. VI. Table Talk, note to p. 93.
Mr. C——. Croker.
101. Note. Richard Cumberland (1732–1811), the dramatist, described by Goldsmith as ‘the Terence of England.’
102. Incredulus odi. Horace, De Arte Poet., 188.
103. Acis and Galatea. A serenata by John Gay (1688–1732), produced at the Haymarket with Handel’s music, 1732. See the 1st chorus in part II.
104. Mr. Croley. George Croly (1780–1860), author of the romance of Salathiel (1829), and numerous other works.
105. The Royal Society of Authors. Probably the Royal Society for the advancement of General Literature, founded 1823. Croly was on the council.
Sir Andrew Wylie. John Galt’s (1779–1839) novel, Sir Andrew Wylie of that Ilk, was published in 1822.
107. Galled his kibe. Hamlet, V. 1.
Sir Peter Lely. Pieter Van der Faes (1618–1680), whose father changed the family name to Lely; painter (of Westphalian birth) of the Beauties of the Court of Charles II.
ESSAY XI. ON SITTING FOR ONE’S PICTURE
From The New Monthly Magazine, No. 35, Vol. VIII., 1823, ‘Table Talk, IX.’
107. The beggar in the street. The Author himself painted a small portrait in oils of a poor old woman whom he met near Manchester in 1803. [W. C. H.]
108. When he sat to me. In 1804, when the sitter was in his 67th year, and Unitarian Minister at Wem in Shropshire.... The picture is still in a fair state of preservation. [W. C. H.]
109. The late Mr. Opie. John Opie (1761–1807), historical painter.
Invisible or dimly seen. Paradise Lost, V. 157.
111. The Bunburys. See vol. VI. Mr. Northcote’s Conversations, note to p. 454.
Happy alchemy of mind. Cf. vol. V. Lectures on the English Poets, note to p. 107.
Vandyke married a daughter of Earl Gower. He married, about 1639, Maria Ruthven, granddaughter of the first Earl of Gowrie. See Conversations of James Northcote, R.A., with James Ward, p. 92, where Northcote is reported as wroth with Hazlitt for having given the Earl’s name as Cowper. The change from Cowper to Gower, as given in the present text, is because of an erratum-direction to that effect behind the ‘Contents of the First Volume,’ in the original edition.
A painter of the name of Astley ... Lady ——. John Astley, portrait-painter (?1730–1787), married Lady Daniell. See Redgrave’s Dictionary.
112. Had Petrarch gained his Laura, etc.
‘Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, He would have written sonnets all his life?’ Don Juan, Canto III. Stanza 8.
112. St. Preux. In Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1760).
113. Till the sense aches at it. Othello, IV. 2.
Amorous toys of light-winged Cupid.
‘Light-wing’d toys of feather’d Cupid.’ Othello, I. 3.
Canova. Antonio Canova (1757–1822), Venetian sculptor.
114. The world forgetting. Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard, 208.
Or stock-dove plain amid the forest deep. Thomson, The Castle of Indolence, I. 4.
Think of its crimes. Thomson, An Hymn on Solitude.
115. Lord Keppel. Augustus Viscount Keppel (1725–1786), one of the English Admirals. He and his second in command, Sir Hugh Palliser, were court-martialled for permitting the French fleet to escape after an indecisive battle off Ushant, 27th July 1778. Both were acquitted.
Mr. C——r ... made the House stare. See Hansard, N. S., IX., 1211, June 25, 1823, for Croker’s remarks.
116. To lie like Whitfield. Whitfield was buried in 1770. When the coffin was opened in 1784, the body was found to be perfect. See L. Tyerman’s Life, II. 602–3. Possibly it is to this that Hazlitt refers.
Warm, kneaded motion to a clog.
This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod. Measure for Measure, III. 1.
ESSAY XII. WHETHER GENIUS IS CONSCIOUS OF ITS POWERS
117. Bolingbroke. Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1672–1751), statesman, writer and friend of Pope.
Sir William Temple. Diplomatist and essayist (1628–1700).
Sees not itself. Julius Cæsar, I. 2.
A phœnix gazed by all. Paradise Lost, V. 272.
118. Materiam superabat opus. Ovid, Met., II. 5.
Our poesy is a gum which issues [oozes]. Timon of Athens, I. 1.
119. Invita Minervâ. See ante, note to p. 8.
120. The glory, the intuition, the amenity. Lamb’s ‘Lines on the Celebrated Picture by Leonardo da Vinci, called “The Virgin of the Rocks.”’
Through happiness or pains. Pope’s Epistle to Mr. Jervas, l. 68.
I write this at Winterslow. See vol. VI. Table Talk, note to p. 90.
My mind to me a kingdom is. From Sir Edward Dyer’s lyric in Byrd’s Psalms and Sonnets (1588).
That character of Millimant. See vol. VIII. Lectures on the English Comic Writers, pp. 73–4.
Signior Orlando Friscobaldo. In Dekker’s The Honest Whore, Part II. See vol. V. Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, pp. 335, et seq.
122. Webster or Deckar. John Webster (? d. 1625) and Thomas Dekker (c. 1570–c. 1637). See vol. v. Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth.
Schlegel. In his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. See vol. I. Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, note to p. 171.
The Descent of Liberty. Leigh Hunt’s Mask, with a dedication from Surrey Jail was published in 1815.
122. When the mighty fell. Napoleon.
123. Cried out upon in the top of the compass. Cf. Hamlet, III. 2.
‘You would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass.’
and II. 2.
‘An eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question.’
Mr. Jerdan recommends the volume of Characteristics. See vol. III. of the present edition for Hazlitt’s Characteristics, and particulars of their publication. The book was favourably reviewed in the Literary Gazette for July 12, 1823.
The Story of Rimini. Published in 1816, and savagely reviewed in Blackwood’s Magazine, May 1818.
An Adonis of fifty. See vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, note to p. 358.
Return, Alpheus. Lycidas, 132–3.
Look abroad into universality. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Book I.
124. A. P. E. Alexander Pope, Esquire.
They take in vain. Exodus, XX. 7.
It is all one as we should love. All’s Well that Ends Well, I. 1.
125. Fast-anchored in the deep abyss of time [space]. Cowper, Retirement, l. 84.
The face of heaven so bright. See Romeo and Juliet, II. 2, 20–2.
Bartlemy-Fair. A famous fair was held at West Smithfield, 1133–1855 about the time of the festival of St. Bartholomew, August 24.
The high endeavour and the glad success. Cowper, The Task, V. 901.
126. Bis repetita crambe. ‘Occidit miseros crambe repetita magistros,’ Juvenal, VII. 154.
Annibal Caracci. Annibale Caracci (1560–1609), painter of the Farnese Gallery, in Rome.
127. ‘Love for Love.’ Congreve’s comedy, 1695.
Miss Mellon. Harriet Mellon (1775–1837), later, Duchess of St. Alban’s. She began on the stage as a child in boys’ parts, was introduced by Sheridan to London, where she played ‘Lydia Languish’ in The Rivals, at Drury Lane, January 1795, and became a popular hoyden. Mr. Coutts, the banker, fell in love with her, and married her soon after the death of his wife in 1814, and when he died in 1822 his wealth passed to her. In 1827 she married William, Duke of St. Alban’s, whose age was 27. After providing handsomely for him, she left the bulk of her property to Mr. Coutts’ granddaughter, Miss Angela Burdett.
Bob Palmer. (1757–?1805.)
Bannister. John Bannister (1760–1836).
ESSAY XIII. ON THE PLEASURE OF HATING
Lines to a Spider. Probably those in The Liberal (Byron, Shelley and Hunt’s Quarterly), vol. II. 177.
128. The milk of human kindness. Macbeth, I. 5.
As Mr. Burke observes. Sublime and Beautiful, Part I. § 15. Last line but one, matter, ? a slip for ‘nature.’
129. We subscribe to new editions of Fox’s Book of Martyrs. A folio edition was published by subscription by Thomas Kelly, London, 1811.
Off, you lendings! Lear, III. 4.
Panopticons. Jeremy Bentham’s name for his method of prison supervision. See vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, note to p. 197.
129. Mr. Owen’s impassable Parallelograms. Cf. vol. III. Political Essays, pp. 121–7.
Mr. Irving ... Caledonian Chapel. See vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, p. 222, et seq.
’Tis pretty, though a plague. All’s Well that Ends Well, I. I.
Upon this bank and shoal of time. Macbeth, I. 7.
130. Outdo [o’er doing] termagant. Hamlet, III. 2.
A most. ? A misprint for ‘almost.’
That which was luscious as locusts. Othello, I. 3.
131. Epistle to Robert Southey, Esq. See the Letter of Elia to Robert Southey, Esq., in The London Magazine, Oct. 1823.
That I myself have celebrated. See ante, the Essay ‘On the Conversation of Authors.’
132. H—— ? Joseph Hume of the Pipe Office, not the Radical M.P. (See Lamb’s Letters, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, I. 361, note 1).
Carve them as a dish fit for the Gods. Julius Cæsar, II. I.
L—— H—— Leigh Hunt.
John Scott. ? John Scott (1783–1821), Editor of The London Magazine, who died from a wound received in a duel from Christie, Lockhart’s friend.
Mrs. —— Montagu.
B—— ? Burney.
Sans intermission, for hours by the dial. As You Like It, II. 7.
Fellows of no mark. 1 King Henry IV., III. 2.
——‘s ? Hume.
133. Mr. Washington Irvine a very fine writer. Cf. vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age.
Mr. Liston. John Liston (1776–1846).
134. Gone into the wastes of time. ‘But thou among the wastes of time must go.’ Shakespeare’s Sonnets, XII.
Mr. Moore’s Loves of the Angels. Of Mr. Moore’s poem, published on Jan. 1, 1823, five editions were exhausted in one year.
Sitting in my window. Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster, V. 5.
[Heaved from a sheepcote].
The wine of poetry is drank.
‘The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees Is left this vault to brag of.’ Macbeth, II. 3.
135. Play [sport] with Amaryllis in the shade. Lycidas, 68.
Fonthill. The residence of ‘Vathek’ Beckford.
To every good work reprobate. Epistle to Titus, i. 16.
136. Of whom the world was not worthy. Epistle to the Hebrews, xi. 38.
This was some time a mystery. ‘This was some time a paradox, but now the time gives it proof.’ Hamlet, III. 1.
The rose plucked from the forehead of a virtuous love.
‘Takes off the rose From the fair forehead of an innocent love And sets a blister there.’ Hamlet, III. 4.
137. Note. The Sentinel. See vol. VI. Conversations of James Northcote, p. 518, and footnote.
Daddy Ratton. In Scott’s Heart of Midlothian.
ESSAY XIV. ON DR. SPURZHEIM’S THEORY
137. Drs. Gall and Spurzheim. See ante, Essay On Dreams.
138. A book where men may read strange matters. Macbeth, I. 5.
Draws the curtain. Twelfth Night, I. 5.
139. Whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders. Othello. I. 3.
140. Here be truths ... dashed and brewed with lies. Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, I. 114. Cf. also a similar passage in Addison (The Spectator, 580).
With other matters of like pith and moment. Cf. ‘enterprizes of great pith and moment.’ Hamlet, III. I.
If these things are done in the green tree. S. Luke, xxiii. 31.
141. The Alchemist. By Ben Jonson, 1610.
144. Malebranche. Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), whose De la Recherche de la Vérité was published in 1674.
146. Gaubius Gobbo. ‘Good Launcelot Gobbo,’ Merchant of Venice, II. 2.
147. There needs no ghost to tell us that. Hamlet, I. 5.
149. The Wonderful Magazine. The Wonderful Magazine, or Marvellous Chronicle, or New Weekly Entertainer, a journal of the latter half of the eighteenth century, with varying titles.
King Ferdinand. Possibly the reference is to the Cortes having let Ferdinand leave Cadiz (whither they had carried him) during the siege by the French on Oct. 1, 1813, in order to make terms with the French.
153. It follows, as the night the day. Hamlet, I. 3.
155. So as with a difference. Hamlet, IV. 5.
156. Note. Dr. Combe of Edinburgh. The phrenological Combes were George (1788–1858), W.S. and moral philosopher, and his brother, Andrew (1797–1847), doctor of medicine.
Fancy in himself. ‘I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.’ 2 King Henry IV., I. 2.
157. Note. Squandering glances. As You Like It, II. 7.
ESSAY XV. ON EGOTISM
158. King Cambyses’ vein. 1 King Henry IV., II. 4.
Vain and self-conceit. ‘Self and vain conceit,’ King Richard II., III. 2.
Getting the start of the majestic world. Julius Cæsar, I. 2.
160. Mr. —— Mill. See post, note to p. 183.
The present Lord Chancellor. John Scott, Lord Eldon (1751–1838), who had no love for literature or art.
Madame Catalani. Angelica Catalani (1779–1849) the popular Italian singer. She made £10,000 in four months in London.
161. The late Chancellor (Erskine). Thomas Erskine, 1750–1823.
162. Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. Juvenal, VIII. 83.
163. Wisdom is justified of her children. S. Matthew, xi. 19.
Throw our bread upon the waters. Eccles., xi. 1.
When Goldsmith was talking one day. See Boswell’s Johnson (ed. G. B. Hill), II. 231.
Hervey’s Meditations. The Rev. James Hervey’s (1714–1758) Meditations and Contemplations were highly esteemed in their day.
164. Westall. Richard Westall (1765–1836).
Angelica Kauffman. Maria Anna Angelica Kauffmann (1741–1807), a Swiss painter of (chiefly) female characters, many of which were engraved by Bartolozzi.
165. Arkwright. Sir Richard Arkwright (1732–1792).
166. A cell of ignorance. Cymbeline, III. 3.
The only great man in modern times. Napoleon, of course. He died on May 5, 1821, of cancer in the stomach.
Mandeville. Bernard Mandeville (1670?–1733) author of The Fable of the Bees (1714).
167. Forget the things that are behind. Philippians, iii. 13.
168. Nothing is but what is not. Macbeth, I. 3.
Goldsmith was ever jealous of beauty in the other sex. See ante, p. 100.
Through listening [wond’ring] senates. Pope’s Moral Essays, I. 184–5.
ESSAY XVI. HOT AND COLD
169. Hot, cold, moist, and dry. Paradise Lost, II. 298.
Neat-handed Phyllises. L’Allegro, 86.
Native and endued into that element. Hamlet, IV. 7.
172. Whose name signifies love.
‘It is a familiar beast to man, and signifies love.’ Merry Wives of Windsor, I. 1.
To be supped upon. Cf. Hamlet, IV. III. 18.
‘King. At supper! where?
Ham. Not where he eats, but where he is eaten.’
173. Here all is conscience. Chaucer, Prologue, 150.
The quills upon the fretful porcupine. Hamlet, I. 5.
So drossy and divisible are they. Dryden, The Hind and the Panther, I. 319.
Voltaire’s traveller. See Histoire des Voyages de Scarmentado.
174. Note. Mr. Scarlett. Probably James Scarlett, afterwards Lord Abinger, who practised in the Northern Circuit and Lancashire Sessions till 1807. Hazlitt received a complimentary letter from Scarlett on the publication of Principles of Human Action. (See Four Generations of a Literary Family, I. 92–3, and Memoirs, I. 112, and post, note to Principles of Human Action).
Sterne asks why a sword. Tristram Shandy, Bk. IX. chap. 33.
Note. Mr. Shepherd. See ante, note to p. 61.
175. The sovereign’st thing on earth. 1 King Henry IV., I. 3.
Makes the odds all even. Measure for Measure, III. I.
Hacquet’s Travels in Carpathia. Balthasar Hacquet’s (1740–1815) book was published in 1790–6 at Nürnberg.
176. Dull, cold winter does inhabit here. ‘But dead-cold winter must inhabit here.’ The Two Noble Kinsmen, Act II. 1.
Long purples. Hamlet, IV. 7.
Take the good the Gods provide them. Dryden, Alexander’s Feast, 105.
Appliances and means to boot. 2 King Henry IV., III. 1.
‘A man,’ says Yorick, ‘finds an apple.’ Tristram Shandy, III. 34.
ESSAY XVII. THE NEW SCHOOL OF REFORM
180. Good haters. Mrs. Piozzi, in her Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson (Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill, I. 204), writes: ‘Dear Bathurst (said he to me one day) was a man to my very heart’s content: he hated a fool, and he hated a rogue, and he hated a Whig; he was a very good hater.’ See also vol. I. The Round Table, p. 103.
181. Right-hand defections. Scott’s Heart of Midlothian, vol. I. chap. XII.
A consummation. ‘Devoutly to be wished.’ Hamlet, III. 1.
What more felicity can fall to creature? Spenser’s Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterflie, 27.
183. Good œillades. Cf. Merry Wives, I. 3, ‘judicious œillades,’ and King Lear, IV. 5, ‘strange œillades.’
Mr. Hobhouse. John Cam Hobhouse (1786–1869), Byron’s friend.
One of them has a place at the India House. James Mill (1773–1836), who, in spite of his radical opinions, was appointed Assistant-Examiner of Indian Correspondence in 1819.
Their attacks on the Edinburgh Review. The Westminster Review, financed by Bentham and edited by Bowring, was founded in January 1824. Its first numbers contained a series of assaults on the Edinburgh (Cf. post, p. 381); Redgauntlet was damned in the third number (July 1824, vol. II. p. 179); and the article on Moore’s Life of Sheridan appeared in the number for October, 1825, vol. IV. pp. 371–407. The allusion to Sheridan as an unsuccessful adventurer will be found on p. 404.
184. A discipline of humanity. Bacon’s Essays, Of Marriage and Civil Life.
The treatment of Mr. Buckingham. James Silk Buckingham (1786–1855) established at Calcutta in 1818 a paper called The Calcutta Journal, which censured the abuses of the Indian Government, and was suppressed by John Adams, temporary Governor-General, in April, 1823.
Mr. Hall. Robert Hall, the celebrated Baptist preacher (1764–1831). His removal from Leicester, where he had served as pastor of the Baptist congregation for twenty years, to Bristol, took place in 1826, when he succeeded Dr. Ryland as head of the Baptist College at Bristol and pastor of Broadmead Chapel.
185. Sir Richard Blackmore. Court physician to William and Anne. He died in 1729, after having written six epics in sixty books.
186. Sir Robert Peel ... calico printing. 1750–1830. He carried on a cotton factory at Bury with great success, and devoted much time to the improvement of machinery.
Elements of Political Economy, by James Mill. James Mill’s work was published in 1821.
Principles of Political Economy. By John Ramsay M’Culloch (1789–1864). Published 1820.
Strange! that such difference there should be. John Byrom, On the Feuds between Handel and Bononcini.
Mr. M——. ? James Mill (1773–1836).
Mr. P. Is Thomas Love Peacock is meant? He was the author of Rhododaphne (1818), the poem possibly referred to as Rhodope in Hazlitt’s note to p. 187. Peacock attacked poetry in his Four Ages of Poetry, contributed to Ollier’s Literary Pocket Book in 1820, and was answered by Shelley in his Defence of Poetry. Though Peacock has not been associated with Utilitarianism, yet his place at the India-House, where he was a fellow-clerk of James Mill’s, may have lent colour to the assumption that he was ‘one of them.’
Mr. Pl——. Francis Place, radical reformer (1771–1854).
The Last Man. Thomas Campbell’s poem The Last Man was printed in the New Monthly Magazine, vol. 8, No. 33, 1823. Perhaps Hazlitt had its title in mind.
188. Thereafter as it happens. 2 King Henry IV., III. 2. ‘Thereafter as they be.’
Primrose paths. Hamlet, I. 3.
The Hypocrite. Bickerstaff’s comedy (1768), based, through The Nonjuror (1717), on Molière’s Tartuffe (1664).
192. Swear, with Lord Peter. The Tale of a Tub, Section IV.
Its quality is not strained. Merchant of Venice, IV. 1.
193. Dignum (the singer). Charles Dignum (1765?–1827), of Drury Lane.
Suett. Richard Suett (d. 1805), a comic actor, very popular at Drury Lane.
‘No Song, No Supper.’ A musical entertainment of Hoare’s (1790), with music by Storace. See a letter from Hazlitt to his father (Memoirs, I. 17–18), from which it appears that it was at Liverpool in 1790 (not 1792) that he saw this piece.
The false Florimel. The Faerie Queen, Bk. III. canto 8.
The grinding law of necessity. The reference here and elsewhere is to Malthus. See vol. IV. A Reply to Malthus and The Spirit of the Age.
194. Opens all the cells where memory slept. Cowper, The Task, VI. 11–12.
Who enters there. Dante’s Inferno, III. 1. 9.
ESSAY XVIII. ON THE QUALIFICATIONS NECESSARY TO SUCCESS IN LIFE
From The London Magazine, vol. I., June 1820, ‘Table Talk, 1.’
195. The race is not to the swift. Eccles. ix. 11.
A Minister of State. Probably Castlereagh, who led the House of Commons until, upon his father’s death in April 1821, he became Lord Londonderry.
196. Aspiring to be Gods. Pope’s Essay on Man, I. 127–8.
Appliances and means to boot. 2 King Henry IV., III. 1.
Some trick not worth an egg. Coriolanus, IV. 4.
There’s but the twinkling of a star. Butler’s Hudibras, Part II. Canto III. 956.
197. Constrained by mastery. Cf. Wordsworth, The Excursion, VI.
‘That Love will not submit to be controlled By mastery.’
198. George Psalmanazar. The literary impostor (1679–1763). He was a native of France and pretended to be a Formosan. To keep up the imposition he invented an alphabet and a Formosan grammar.
Enquiry concerning Political Justice. Godwin’s book (1793).
Diversions of Purley. John Horne Tooke’s book was published in 1786–1805. See vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, p. 231.
Interminable babble. ‘Intarissable babil’ in the Magazine.
Tongue with a garnish of brains. Goldsmith, Retaliation, 6.
Wimbledon. Where Horne Tooke lived.
With a nostrum in his mouth. See Alexander Stephens’s Memoirs of John Horne Tooke, Esq., vol. II. p. 445, ‘While yet in perfect possession of his senses, and uncertain of his impending fate, although conscious it could not be long protracted, the patient eagerly inquired’ [of Sir Francis Burdett] ‘concerning the effect produced on the House of Commons by the motion relative to the punishment of soldiers?...
‘As he had once more been relieved by cordials, notwithstanding he was told it was now in vain, the member for Westminster prepared to administer one with his own hand. Having knelt for this purpose, the dying man opened his eyes for the last time, and seeing who it was that presented the potion, he swallowed it with avidity.’
The late Professor Porson. Richard Porson (1759–1808), Greek scholar and critic.
198. The Member for Old Sarum. See ante, note to p. 6.
The man of perhaps the greatest ability now living. Coleridge. Cf. The Spirit of the Age.
199. Duns Scotus to Jacob Behmen. John Duns, the ‘subtle doctor’; Jacob Bœhmen (1575–1624), German mystic.
Discoursed in eloquent music. Hamlet, III. 2.
Ten thousand great ideas. Thomson’s Castle of Indolence, I. lix.
Non ex quovis ligno fit Mercurius. Erasmus, Adagiorum Chiliades, ‘Munus aptum.’
Though he had all knowledge. 1 Corinthians, xiii. 1, 2.
200. You cannot gather grapes of thorns. S. Matthew, vii. 16.
Respice finem. See vol. VI. Table Talk, note to p. 27.
To get the start of the majestic world. Julius Cæsar, I. 2.
201. Mens divinior. Horace, Sat. I. IV. 43.
202. Vox faucibus hæsit. Vergil, Æneid, II. 774.
With a confident brow. 2 King Henry IV., II. 1.
Too deep for his hearers. Goldsmith’s Retaliation, 35.
A soul as fair. Thomson, Castle of Indolence, II. 33.
Fell flat, and shamed their worshippers. Paradise Lost, I. 461.
How he cuts up in the caul. Burke, A Letter to a Noble Lord (Works, Bohn, V. 145).
203. Sterne’s description of Mr. Hammond Shandy. Tristram Shandy, III. 10.
On that point. The Magazine adds ‘Petulant set his mark.’ Congreve, The Way of the World, V. 3.
For women, born to be controll’d. Waller: Of Love, 13–16:
‘For women (born to be control’d) Stoop to the forward and the bold: Affect the haughty and the proud, The gay, the frolic, and the loud.’
Scrub in the farce. In Farquhar’s Beaux’ Stratagem.
204. Doubtless, the pleasure is as great. Butler’s Hudibras, Part II. Canto III. 1.
The art of being well deceived. See vol. I. The Round Table, p. 84.
A writer whom I know very well. Himself.
Sup at the Shakespeare. The noted theatrical tavern in the Piazza, Covent Garden. See Timbs’ History of Clubs and Club-Life in London, ed. 1886, p. 427.
205. His next answer to Vetus. See vol. III. Political Essays, p. 57 and note.
The graceful ornaments, etc. Cf. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, II. 164).
‘Don’t you remember,’ says Gray. Letter to Richard West, May 27, 1742.
A man of genius a coxcomb in dress. Cf. vol. I. The Round Table, p. 95.
Prince Prettyman. In the Duke of Buckingham’s Rehearsal (1671).
206. Nihil humani. Terence, Heautontimorumenos, I. 1.
The flattery that soothes the dull cold ear of death. Gray’s Elegy, 11.
207. Lady Mary Wortley Montague. (c. 1690–1762), the correspondent of Pope and Addison.
A. P. E. Alexander Pope, Esquire.
Ere we have shuffled off that mortal coil. Hamlet, III. 1.
The real story of David Ritchie. David Ritchie, a dwarf, of Manor, Peeblesshire, was the original of Elshender, the Black Dwarf, in Scott’s novel so called. See The Life and Anecdotes of the Black Dwarf, or David Ritchie, commonly called Bowed Davie, by William Chambers, Edinburgh, 1820.
207. Note. Sir John Suckling, 1609–42. The two lines quoted are part of The Session of the Poets (20).
So Mr. Gifford dedicated these verses to Mr. Hoppner. Hoppner became R.A. in 1795, and Gifford dedicated the Second Edition of his Baviad and Mæviad to him in 1797.
208. Quite chop-fallen. Hamlet, V. 1.
Such a poor [bare] forked animal. King Lear, III. 4.
They did it for his good. See No. XXXVII. of the Quarterly Review, April 1818, published in September.
209. These are the doctrines, etc.
‘These are the volumes that enrich the shops, These pass with admiration through the world, And bring their author an immortal name.’ Roscommon, Horace’s Art of Poetry, 385–7.
Embalms and spices. Timon of Athens, IV. 3.
The spital and the lazar-house. ‘The spital-house and ulcerous sores would cast the gorge at.’ Timon of Athens, IV. 3.
ESSAY XIX. ON THE LOOK OF A GENTLEMAN
From The London Magazine, vol. III. Jan. 1821, ‘Table Talk VI.,’ signed T.
Causa latet, res ipsa [vis est] notissima. Ovid. Met. IV. 287.
210. Familiarity of regard. ‘Quenching my familiar smile with an austere regard of control.’ Twelfth Night, II. 5.
Nice conduct.
‘Sir Plume, of amber snuff-box justly vain, And the nice conduct of a clouded cane.’ Pope, The Rape of the Lock, IV. 122.
‘The Clandestine Marriage.’ By Colman the Elder and Garrick (1766). This comedy is about to be revived at the Haymarket Theatre (March 17, 1903).
Wound up for the day. The Clandestine Marriage, Act II. Scene 1.
Sir Joseph Banks. The celebrated naturalist (1743–1820). He accompanied Cook in his first circumnavigation of the world.
211. Sir Charles B—nb—ry. See vol. VI. Mr. Northcote’s Conversations, note to p. 454.
Lady Sarah L—nn—x. Ibid.
How tall his person is. Hudibras, Part I. Canto iii., 83–4.
The old one-eyed Duke of Queensberry. William Douglas, 3rd Earl of March and 4th Duke of Queensberry (1724–1810).
The late Admiral Byron. The Hon. John Byron, the poet’s grandfather (1723–1768).
N——. Northcote.
Subdued to the very quality. Othello, I. 3.
212. Dress makes the man. ‘Worth makes the man,’ etc. Pope’s Essay on Man, Ep. IV. 203.
Wycherley. William Wycherley (1640–1715). He was a man of fashion as well as a writer of comedies.
Lord Hinchinbroke. Sir Edward Mont- (or Mount-) agu, first Viscount Hinchinbroke and first Earl of Sandwich (1625–1672).
Note. The Duchess of Cleveland. ‘Her graceless grace’ of the Court of Charles II.
213. Alcibiades threw away a flute. See Plutarch’s Life of Alcibiades.
213. Ferdinand in the Tempest. Act III. 1.
214. Sergeant Atkinson. In Fielding’s Amelia, Book V. chap. 2.
Lord C——. Castlereagh.
Hatching vain empires. Paradise Lost, II. 378.
Voluminous and vast. Paradise Lost, II. 652.
215. Marquis Wellesley. Richard Cowley, Marquis Wellesley (1760–1842). Governor-General of India. He was made a Knight of the Garter and Foreign Minister on his return from Madrid whither he went as Ambassador in 1809.
Stores of ladies. Milton’s L’Allegro, 120.
Lord Erskine. Thomas Erskine (1750–1823), Advocate and Lord Chancellor.
Lord Stanhope. Charles, Earl Stanhope (1753–1816). He was a strenuous supporter of republican ideals and a man of many inventions.
The Orson of debate. The bear-suckled hero of the fifteenth century romance, Valentine and Orson, otherwise the Wild Man of France.
A Satyr that comes staring from the woods. Earl of Roscommon, translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica, 281–2. Cf. Ars Poetica, 244, et seq.
Lord Eldon. See ante, note to p. 158.
216. Gave him good œillades. See ante, note to p. 183.
Foote’s Farce of Taste. 1752.
218. All tranquillity and smiles. Cowper, The Task, IV. 49.
219. Of mimic statesmen. Pope, Moral Essays, iii. 309–10.
God Almighty’s gentleman. Dryden’s Absolom and Achitophel, Part I. 645.
G—— D——. George Dyer (1755–1841), miscellaneous writer. See Lamb’s Amicus Redivivus, Elia, ed. Ainger, p. 281.
ESSAY XX. ON READING OLD BOOKS
From The London Magazine, Feb. 1821, vol. III. p. 128, ‘Table Talk, VII.,’ signed T.
220. Lady Morgan. (1783?–1859) A writer of Irish stories and of other miscellaneous work in the early years of the nineteenth century. Before her marriage in 1811 her works bore her maiden name, Sydney Owenson. Her story, The Wild Irish Girl, a national tale, published in 1806, passed through seven editions in two years.
Anastasius. Thomas Hope’s (1770–1831) Eastern romance published 1819, and warmly praised by the Edinburgh Review.
Delphine. Madame de Staël’s novel was published in 1802.
In their newest gloss. Macbeth, I. 7.
Andrew Millar. Thomson’s and Fielding’s publisher (1707–1768). ‘I respect Millar, sir,’ said Dr. Johnson; ‘he has raised the price of literature’ (Boswell’s Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, I. 287). He was succeeded by his partner, Thomas Cadell the elder.
Thurloe’s State Papers. A Collection of State Papers (seven vols. folio, 1742) by John Thurloe (1616–1668). He was Secretary of State during the Protectorate.
Sir William Temple’s Essays. Published as Miscellanea in 1680 and 1692. He was the first writer, says Dr. Johnson, who gave cadence to English prose.
221. For thoughts and for remembrance. Hamlet, IV. 5.
Bruscambille. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Book III. chap. 35.
The Memoirs of Lady Vane. In Peregrine Pickle.
The adventures at the masquerade. Tom Jones, Book xiii. chap. 7.
221. The disputes between Thwackum and Square. Ibid. Book iii. chap. 3.
The escape of Molly Seagrim. Ibid. Book iv. chap. 8.
The incident of Sophia and her muff. Ibid. Book v. chap. 4.
Her Aunt’s lecture. Ibid. Book vii. chap. 3.
222. The puppets dallying. Hamlet, III. 2.
Ignorance was bliss. Gray On a Distant Prospect of Eton College, 10.
The Minerva press. A publishing house in Leadenhall Street, which issued, in the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, popular highly-coloured romances.
Cooke’s pocket-edition. See vols. I.-IV. of Cooke’s Select Edition of British Novels (1792). Mr. W. C. Hazlitt says Hazlitt became acquainted with this book through his father being an original subscriber to the series.
Mrs. Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest. Ann Radcliffe’s (1764–1823) book was published in 1791.
Sweet in the mouth. Revelation, x. 9.
Gay creatures. Comus, 299.
223. Tom Jones discovers Square behind the blanket. Book V. chap. 5.
Parson Adams ... Mrs. Slip-Slop. Book IV. chap. 14.
Chubb’s Tracts. Thomas Chubb’s (1679–1747) Tracts and Posthumous Works were published in six vols. 8vo., 1754. He was a deist.
Fate, free-will, etc. Paradise Lost, II. 560.
‘In wandering mazes lost.’
224. Note. A friend, who had some lottery puffs. Charles Lamb. See vol. VI. Table Talk, p. 291.
Would I had never seen Wittenberg. Dr. Faustus, Scene 19.
Hartley, Hume, Berkeley. David Hartley (1705–1757) whose Observations on Man were published in 1749; David Hume (1711–1776); George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (1685–1753).
Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding. 1690.
Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) of the Leviathan (1651).
The Social Contract. Published 1762.
I have spoken elsewhere. See vol. I. The Round Table, ‘On the Character of Rousseau.’
Scattered like stray gifts. Wordsworth, Stray Pleasures.
The Emilius. Published 1762.
Sir Fopling Flutter. In Sir George Etherege’s comedy The Man of Mode (1676).
225. Leurre de dupe! An expression of Rousseau’s, Confessions, Liv. IV.
A load to sink a navy. King Henry VIII., III. 2.
Marcian Colonna is a dainty book. Lamb’s Sonnet to the author of poems published under the name of Barry Cornwall.
Mr. Keats’s Eve of Saint Agnes. Published 1820.
Come like shadows. Macbeth, IV. i.
Tiger-moth’s wings. Keats, Eve of Saint Agnes.
Blushes ... with blood of queens and kings. Ibid.
Words, words, words. Hamlet, II. 2.
The great preacher in the Caledonian Chapel. Irving. See ante, p. 129.
226. As the hart that panteth for the water-springs [brooks]. Psalm xlii. 1.
Goëthe’s Sorrows of Werter. Finished in 1774. Cf. vol. V. Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, p. 362.
Schiller’s Robbers. 1781. See Ibid.
Giving my stock [sum] of more. As You Like It, II. 1.
Valentine Tattle or Miss Prue. Characters in Congreve’s Love for Love (1695). Valentine was Betterton’s great part, and F. Reynolds declared that the love scene between Jack Bannister as Tattle and Mrs. Jordan as Miss Prue was ‘probably never surpassed in rich natural comedy.’
226. Know my cue.
‘Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it Without a prompter.’ Othello, I. 2.
Intus et in cute. See ante, note to p. 24.
The celebrated Sir Humphrey Davy. Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829), natural philosopher.
227. The divine Clementina. In Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753).
With every trick and line. ‘line and trick.’ All’s Well that Ends Well, I. 1.
Graven [draw ...] in my heart’s table. Ibid.
Mackenzie. Henry Mackenzie’s (1745–1831) Julia de Roubigné was published in 1777, six years after the Man of Feeling.
Miss ——. Probably the lady of Liber Amoris.
That ligament, fine as it was. Tristram Shandy, Book VI. chap. 10 (The Story of Le Fever).
His story of the Hawk. Boccaccio’s Decameron, 5th day, 9th story. See vol. V. Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, note to p. 347.
Farquhar ... Recruiting Officer. 1706.
At one proud [fell] swoop. Macbeth, IV. 3.
Embalmed with odours. Paradise Lost, II. 843.
His form had not yet lost. Ibid. I. 591.
228. Falls flat upon the grunsel edge. Ibid. I. 460.
He, like an eagle. Coriolanus, V. 6.
An Essay on Marriage. No such essay by Wordsworth is at present known to exist. It would seem either that ‘Marriage’ is a misprint for some other word, or that Hazlitt was mistaken in the subject of the essay referred to by Coleridge. Hazlitt is probably recalling a conversation with Coleridge in Shropshire at the beginning of 1798 (cf. ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’), at which time A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (1793) was the only notable prose work which Wordsworth had published.
Note. Is this the present Earl? James Maitland, eighth Earl of Lauderdale (1759–1839), succeeded his father in August 1789.
229. Worthy of all acceptation. 1 Timothy, i. 15.
Clarendon’s History of the Grand Rebellion. 1704–7.
Hollingshed. Ralph Holinshed’s Chronicles of Englande, Scotlande, and Irelande, 1577, and later issues.
Stowe. John Stow’s (1525?–1605) Englysh Chronicles, 1561, and later issues, and A Survay of London, 1598, and later issues.
Fuller’s Worthies. Thomas Fuller’s (1608–1661) The History of the Worthies of England, 1662.
‘A Wife for a Month.’ 1623.
‘Thierry and Theodoret.’ 1621.
Guicciardini. Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540), author of a History of Italy from 1494 to 1532.
The Loves of Persiles and Sigismunda. Cervantes’ last work, the dedication of which was written four days before his death. A translation from the French was printed in London in 1619, and from the Spanish in 1854.
Galatea. Cervantes’ first work, a pastoral romance, printed at Alcala in 1585.
Another Yarrow. Wordsworth’s Yarrow Unvisited.
ESSAY XXI. ON PERSONAL CHARACTER
From The London Magazine, March 1821, vol. III. p. 291, ‘Table Talk, VII.,’ signed T.
As the flesh and fortune shall serve. Measure for Measure, II. 1.
And feels the ruling passion. Pope’s Moral Essays, Ep. I. 262.
Mr. Nicholson. William Nicholson (1753–1815). He is often referred to in Hazlitt’s Life of Holcroft. See vol. II. p. 91, etc.
Hot, cold, moist, and dry. See ante, note to p. 169.
It is not in our stars. Julius Cæsar, I. 2. ‘That we are underlings.’
231. To beguile the time. Macbeth, I. 5.
The child’s the father of the man. Wordsworth’s ‘My heart leaps up.’
232. Fairfax and the starry Vere. Marvell’s ‘Appleton House.’
He saw the Chief-Justice Jeffries. See Evelyn’s Diary (ed. Bray, 1859), vol. II., p. 199.
233. An old hair-brained uncle. Loftus, brother of Mrs. Hazlitt, wife of the Rev. W. Hazlitt.
Mark or likelihood. 1 King Henry IV., III. 2.
Instinct, Hal, instinct. A misquotation from 1 King Henry IV., II. 4.
Beneath the hills. Wordsworth’s Excursion, Book VI. [‘Amid the groves, under the shadowy hills.’]
234. Like that ensanguined [sanguine] flower. Lycidas, 106.
As the flies of a summer. Cf. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, Ed. Payne, II. 112).
Most women have no character [characters]. Pope’s Moral Essay, Ep. II. 2.
Mary Wolstonecraft. See ante, note to p. 41.
Not to speak it profanely. Hamlet, III. 2.
235. Fideliter didicisse. Ovid, Ex Ponto Epist., Lib. II. Ep. 9, 47.
237. Fiery quality. King Lear, II. 4.
The shot of accident. Othello, IV. 1.
Quip, or crank. Milton’s L’Allegro, 27.
238. Have his nothings monstered. Coriolanus, II. 2.
Teres et rotundus. ‘Fortis, et in se ipso totus, teres atque rotundus.’ Horace, Sat. II. 7, 86.
A friendly man will show himself friendly. Proverbs, xviii. 24. ‘A man that hath friends must show,’ etc.
Richardson. Jonathan Richardson (c. 1665–1745), author and portrait-painter, whose works on painting fired the early enthusiasm of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
239. ‘The Honey-Moon.’ Tobin’s comedy, 1805.
240. Can the Ethiopian change his skin? Jeremiah, xiii. 23.
Villainous low. The Tempest, IV. 1.
Panopticon. See ante, note to p. 129.
241. The author of the year 2500. Louis Sébastien Mercier (1740–1814). See Vol. II. The Life of Thomas Holcroft, p. 107 and note.
Servum pecus imitatorum. ‘O imitatores, servum pecus,’ etc. Horace, Ep. I. 19, 19.
ESSAY XXII. ON PEOPLE OF SENSE
From The London Magazine, April 1821, vol. III. p. 368, ‘Table Talk, IX.,’ signed T.
242. Cabbala. The oral law of the Jews.
The demure, grave-looking. ‘The grave, demure, insidious, spring-nailed, velvet-pawed, green-eyed philosophers.’ Burke, A Letter to a Noble Lord (Works, Bohn, V. 142).
243. Baxter. Richard Baxter, the Nonconformist Divine (1615–1691). See vol VI. Mr. Northcote’s Conversations, p. 364.
244. Torn to tatters, to very rags. Hamlet, III. 2.
The pillar’d firmament. Comus, 598.
Note. The Spanish Inquisition. See vol. III. Political Essays, note to p. 33, and vol. VI. Table Talk, note to p. 156.
246. Mr. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. Published in 1820. Shelley was drowned in 1822 (See footnote).
Gorgons and Hydras. Paradise Lost, II. 628.
With eye severe. As You Like It, II. 7.
When he banished the poets. The Republic, Book X.
Full of wise saws. As You Like It, II. 7.
247. Chrestomathic School. See vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, note to p. 190.
Princes’ palaces. ‘Poor men’s cottages, princes’ palaces.’ Merchant of Venice, I. 2.
The tailors at Laputa. Gulliver’s Travels, A Voyage to Laputa, chapter 2.
249. What can we reason. Pope’s Essay on Man, I. 18.
When [where] thieves break through. S. Matthew, vi. 19.
Dyot-street, Bloomsbury-square. See vol. VI. Table Talk, Note to p. 120.
An aerie of children. Hamlet, II. 2.
A Panopticon. See ante, note to p. 129.
So work the honey-bees. King Henry V., I. 2.
Shedding [casting] a dim, religious light. Il Penseroso, 160.
Their speech bewrayeth them. S. Matthew, xxvi. 73.
250. Mankind act from calculation. Bentham’s Principles of Morals and Legislation, chap. xiv. § 28. See vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, p. 196 and note.
251. So runs [says] the bond. Merchant of Venice, IV. 1.
The author of St. Leon. Godwin’s Tale of the Sixteenth Century appeared in 1799.
The author of the Political Justice. Godwin.
Norma loquendi. Horace, De Arte Poet., 72.
252. Astolpho’s voyage. Orlando Furioso, Book XVIII.
Highest [brightest] Heaven of invention. King Henry V., Prologue.
ESSAY XXIII. ON ANTIQUITY
From The London Magazine, May 1821, Vol. III. p. 527, ‘Table Talk X.,’ signed T.
Auld Robin Gray. Believed at first to be a ‘relique.’ Lady Ann Barnard (1750–1825) acknowledged the authorship to Sir Walter Scott in 1823.
253. Lively, audible and full of vent. ‘Waking, audible and full of vent.’ Coriolanus, IV. 5.
Amadis de Gaul. A prose romance of knightly adventures of Portuguese origin (Vasco de Lobeira, d. 1403).
The seven Champions of Christendom. By Richard Johnson (1573–1659?). Published 1596–97. It was one of the books of Thomas Holcroft’s boyhood.
254. The dark rearward. Cf. ‘In the dark backward and abysm of time.’ The Tempest, I. 2.
The wars of old Assaracus. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II. IX. 56.
Triple bob-majors. A term in church-bell ringing.
Chaos and old night. Paradise Lost, I. 543.
Cimabue, Giotto, and Ghirlandaio. Giovanni Cimabue (1240–c. 1302), the first great artist of the Florentine School; Giotto di Bondone (c. 1266–1336), Cimabue’s pupil, one of the greatest of the early Italian painters; and Domenico Curradi, nicknamed Il Ghirlandajo (the garland-maker) (1449–1494).
255. The Chronicle of Brute. Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book II. Canto X.
The Ghost of one of the old kings of Ormus. Fulke Greville’s Alaham.
The Chiron of Achilles. Iliad, XVI. 143, and XIX. 390.
The priest in Homer. Iliad, I. 8, et seq.
Why proffer’st thou light. Troilus and Criseyde, Book III. 1461–2.
The Travels of Anacharsis. The Scythian who travelled far and wide in quest of knowledge, in the times of Solon.
Coryate’s Crudities. Hastily gobled up in Five Moneths Travells in France, etc. (1611), by Thomas Coryate (? 1577–1617).
256. When we become men. 1 Corinthians, xiii. 11.
The first time of my seeing Mrs. Siddons act. See vol. I. The Round Table, note to p. 156; Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, p. 189 and note; and Hazlitt’s Dramatic Essays.
257. Mr. Burke’s Refections. These were published in 1790, not 1791.
Lord John Russell’s Letter. See The Times, August 5, 1820. It was an appeal to Wilberforce to use his great influence in averting the crisis caused by the appearance of the Queen.
260. Grim-visaged, comfortless despair. Gray’s Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. See also vol. VI. Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, note to p. 296.
261. The glory hereafter to be revealed. Romans, viii. 18.
ESSAY XXIV. ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WRITING AND SPEAKING
From The London Magazine, July 1820, Vol. II. p. 22, ‘Table Talk II.,’ signed T.
262. ‘Some minds,’ etc. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Book II., xxii. 4.
263. F——. Mr. W. C. Hazlitt states this was George Fletcher, who, with his brother Joseph, came up from Nottingham about 1826, and became a contributor to periodical literature.
Wart his caliver. 2 King Henry IV., III. 2.
Hear him but reason in divinity. King Henry V., I. 1. [‘Is still’]
264. Moved the very stones of Rome. Julius Cæsar, III. 2.
Fraught of aspic’s tongues. Othello, III. 3.
Wielded at will the fierce democracy. Paradise Regained, IV. 269.
Roared you in the ears of the groundlings. Cf. ‘to split the ears of the groundlings,’ Hamlet, III. 2; and Midsummer Night’s Dream, I. 2.
264. Create a soul. Milton’s Comus, 561.
265. Bottom! thou art translated! Midsummer Night’s Dream, III. 1.
Windham. William Windham (1750–1810). Secretary of State for War under Pitt, and again after Pitt’s death.
Mr. Coleridge’s Conciones ad Populum. Two addresses against Pitt, 1795, republished in Essays on his Own Times.
Mr. Thelwal’s Tribune. The Tribune ... consisting chiefly of the political lectures of J. Thelwall, taken in shorthand by W. Ramsay, and revised by the lecturer, 3 vols. 1795–6. Thelwall (1764–1834) was a lecturer on elocution as well as a reformer.
The self-same words. Macbeth, I. 3.
Those brave sublunary [translunary] things. Drayton, Elegy to Henry Reynolds, Esq.
Fire and air. Antony and Cleopatra, V. 2; and King Henry V., III. 7.
Sound and fury. Macbeth, V. 5.
266. A Commonplace, etc. Cf. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, II. 103).
With good emphasis and discretion. Cf. ‘with good accent and good discretion,’ Hamlet, II. 2.
By most admired disorder. Macbeth, III. 4.
Lay the flattering unction. Hamlet, III. 4.
Hear a cat mew.
‘I had rather be a kitten and cry mew ... Or a dry wheel grate on the axle-tree.’ 1 King Henry IV. III. 1.
Not harsh and crabbed. Comus, 477.
267. A robusteous, periwig-pated fellow. Hamlet, III. 2.
Gives us pause. Hamlet, III. I.
268. He repeated the famous lines in Milton. Though these words are referred to admiringly by Burke in The Sublime and Beautiful he does not seem to have quoted them in the House of Commons. Is not Hazlitt thinking of the occasion upon which Brougham used the quotation with immense effect at the Queen’s trial, 1820? (See Greville’s Memoirs, 1899 edit., I. 40.)
What seem’d its head. Paradise Lost, II. 672.
Fell still-born. Cf. vol. VI. Table Talk, p. 65 and note.
Lord Liverpool. Robert Banks Jenkinson, Earl of Liverpool (1770–1828), Premier of England 1812–1827.
Mr. William Ward. ? William Ward, financier (1787–1849), who was returned to Parliament as a Tory in 1826 for the city of London.
Native to [‘and endued unto’] that element. Hamlet, IV. 7.
Subdued to the [‘even to the very’] quality. Othello, I. 3.
The late Lord Chatham (1708–1778). He began life as a cornet of dragoons (See p. 269).
That Roan shall be my throne. 1 King Henry IV., II. 3.
269. He spoke [taught] as one having authority. S. Matthew, vii. 29.
270. A few termes coude [hadde] he. The Prologue, 639. But the lines are told of the Somnour not the Monk.
Will halt for it. Hamlet, II. 2.
271. Mr. Place of Charing Cross. Francis Place (1771–1854) the radical tailor.
Trampled under the hoofs. Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution.
Sir Francis Burdett (1770–1844). He was the most popular politician of his day.
271. Dr. Johnson had a wish. See Boswell’s Life, ed. G. B. Hill, (II. 138–9).
Sir William Curtis. The ‘father’ of the corporation of London, for which city he was M.P. for thirty-three years. He made his money in the Greenland fisheries, and then became a member of the banking firm of Robarts, Curtis and Co. (1752–1829).
The Speaker (Onslow). Arthur Onslow (1691–1768) was elected Speaker of the House of Commons in 1728 and re-elected in 1735, 1741, 1747 and 1754. He retired in 1761 with the reputation of being the firmest and most dignified holder of his office and authority.
272. Give his own little Senate laws. Pope’s Prologue to Mr. Addison’s Cato and also Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 209.
They look only at the stop-watch. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Book III. chap. 12.
Hit the house between wind and water. See vol. IV., The Spirit of the Age, 227.
273. Servile ministers. King Lear, III. 2.
Jack Davies. See vol. VI. Table Talk, p. 89.
Note. Making the worse appear the better reason. Paradise Lost, II. 113.
274. An indifferent History of James II. Charles James Fox’s A History of the early Part of the Reign of James the Second was published by Lord Holland in 1808.
A colleague of Lord Grenville. Fox was Foreign Secretary in the ‘Broad-bottomed’ or ‘All the Talents’ ministry, formed by Lord Grenville on the death of Pitt in 1806.
Like proud seas under him. Two Noble Kinsmen, II. 1.
It was in the Louvre. In 1802. See Memoirs of William Hazlitt, I. 91, and vol. III. of the present edition, The Eloquence of the British Senate, p. 421.
Guercino. Gianfrancesco Barbieri or Guercino da Cento, because of his squint (1590–1666), of Bologna.
Domenichino. Domenicho Zampieri (1581–1641), also of Bologna.
275. Does he wind into a subject like a serpent? Boswell’s Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill (II. 260).
Letter to a Noble Lord. Burke died two years after the publication of his Letter, his only important further writing being the Letters on a Regicide Peace, 1796.
Note. Tom Paine. Thomas Paine (1737–1809) the deist.
276. The Leviathan. A Letter to a Noble Lord (Bohn, V. 129).
The Abbé Sieyes’s pigeon-holes. Ibid., p. 142.
The proud keep of Windsor. Ibid., p. 137.
Shut the gates of genius [mercy] on mankind. Gray’s Elegy, 17.
To leave no rubs or botches. Macbeth, III. 1.
277. Learn to write slow. Cf.
‘Take time enough—all other graces Will soon fill up their proper places.’
Byron’s ‘Advice to the Messrs. H—— and H—— to preach slow,’ 8. And also
‘Learn to read slow; all other graces Will follow in their proper places.’ William Walker’s Art of Reading.
The phrase of Ancient Pistol. 2 King Henry IV., and King Henry V.
278. Fancies and good nights. 2 King Henry IV., III. 2.
Dull as the lake that slumbers. Goldsmith, The Traveller, 312.
‘Made fierce with dark keeping.’ Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Book I., iv. 7.
279. Became his glittering bride. Wordsworth, The Excursion, III. 735–6.
Dilettanti Society. An association founded in 1734 to promote the study of antique art in England.
Note. Stentor. Iliad. V. 783.
Note. Political House that Jack Built. A squib of William Hone’s, published in 1819.
Note. Mr. C. Wynne. Charles Watkin Williams Wynne (1775–1850). He was proposed for Speaker June 2, 1817, but Manners-Sutton was preferred to him. Canning said that the only objection to him was that ‘one would be sometimes tempted to say Mr. Squeaker,’ alluding to his voice. See vol. III. Political Essays, note to p. 213.
ESSAY XXV. ON A PORTRAIT OF AN ENGLISH LADY, BY VANDYKE
280. Where all is conscience. Chaucer’s Prologue, 150.
Last recesses of the mind. Dryden, Translation of Second Satire of Persius, line 133.
282. This hand of yours requires. Othello, III. 4. [‘Sweating devil.’]
283. Qualified ... very craftily. Othello, II. 3.
Mind’s eye. Hamlet, I. 2.
284. Trod the primrose path. Hamlet, I. 3.
285. Stupidly good. Paradise Lost, IX. 465.
An eye to threaten and command. Hamlet, III. 4.
287. Leave stings. Cf.
‘Who, for the poor renown of being smart, Would leave a sting within a brother’s heart?’ Young’s Love of Fame, II. 113.
290. While by the power. Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey.
Come then, the colours and the ground prepare. Pope, Moral Essays, Ep. II.
292. The whole gallery at Fonthill. ‘Vathek’ Beckford’s place. See the volume of Hazlitt’s writings on art.
The taste of the great in pictures. The rest of the essay from this point appeared in Hazlitt’s Commonplaces, taken from The Examiner, 1823.
Note. Day’s garish eye. Il Penseroso, 141.
293. Mr. Holwell Carr. William Holwell Carr (1758–1830), art connoisseur. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1797–1820 as an honorary exhibitor.
Sir George Beaumont. Sir George Howard Beaumont, Bart. (1753–1827), amateur painter and patron of artists.
Bosoms and businesses of men. Bacon, Dedication to Essays.
Trifles light as air. Othello, III. 3.
Tintoret. Jacopo Robusti or Tintoretto (from his father’s trade, dyeing), (1518–1594), one of Ruskin’s ‘five supreme painters.’
ESSAY XXVI. ON NOVELTY AND FAMILIARITY
From The New Monthly Magazine, vol. XIII., No. 50, 1825, with additions.
294. Custom hath made it in him. Hamlet, V. 1.
295. Give us pause. Hamlet, III. 1.
297. Send the hearers weeping. King Richard II., V. 1.
298. They best can paint them. Pope’s Eloisa and Abelard.
Talma. François Joseph Talma (1763–1826). See ante, p. 83.
299. ‘The Gamester.’ By Edward Moore (1753).
300. Die of an encore in operatic pain. ‘Die of a rose in aromatic pain.’ Pope’s Essay on Man, Ep. I. 200.
L. ... M. These blanks are filled in ‘Liston’ and ‘Mathews’ by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt.
Lamb’s wool. A beverage of apple juice and spiced ale.
Rosinante and Dapple. Don Quixote’s steed and Sancho Panza’s donkey.
There is no living with them. Martial, Epigrams, Bk. XII. Ep. 70. See Addison’s Spectator, No. 68.
The late Mr. Kemble ... Richard III. Macbeth and King Richard III., an answer to [Whately’s] Remarks on some of the Characters of Shakespeare (1817). See vol. I. Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, note to p. 171. Kemble died in 1823.
301. The silver-voiced Anna. Cf. J. P. Kemble’s Fugitive Pieces, York, 1780, the ‘Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Inchbald’s Husband,’ lines 14, 15,
‘... widow’d Anna’s voice, Sweet as the harps of Heav’n....’
Tamerlane. Rowe’s tragedy (1702). Mrs. Siddons acted in it at Drury Lane, Feb. 3, 1797.
Alexander the Great. The second title of Lee’s tragedy, The Rival Queens (1678).
302. Hope travels through [‘when we die’]. Pope’s Essay on Man, Ep. II. 273.
The dregs of life. Dryden, Aureng-zebe, IV. 1.
Compacted of imagination. Midsummer Night’s Dream, V. 1. ‘Of imagination all compact.’
Reason panders will. Hamlet, III. 4.
303. Dallied with the innocence of love. Twelfth Night, II. 4.
The story of Federigo Alberigi. Boccaccio, Decameron (Fifth Day, Novel IX.).
Those notable discoveries that Pope was a poet. See vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, note to p. 259; vol. V. Lectures on the English Poets, pp. 69–71; and vol. VI. Table Talk, notes to pp. 210 and 223. See also Hazlitt’s Essay ‘On the Question whether Pope was a Poet’ in The New Scots Magazine, February 1818.
Her Simple Story. Elizabeth Inchbald’s (1753–1821) A Simple Story was published in 1791. Cf. a letter of Hazlitt’s to Miss Stoddart, Memoirs of W. Hazlitt, I. 153.
304. Simple movement of her finger. Les Confessions, Partie I. Liv. II.
The letter in the New Eloise. Première Partie, Lettre XXIII.
Glassy essence. Measure for Measure, II. 2.
Love’s golden rigol. 2 King Henry IV., IV. 4.
And bade the lovely scenes. Collins, Ode on the Passions, 32.
305. Mr. Kean stamped himself the first night in Shylock. See vol. I. Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, note to p. 298.
Mrs. Siddons did not succeed the first time. See vol. I. The Round Table, note to p. 156.
306. Old Dr. Chauncey. Charles Chauncey, M.D., F.S.A. (1706–1777).
Goodman’s Fields ... Richard. See vol. I. Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, note to p. 298.
Queen Katherine. In Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII.
Belvidera. In Otway’s Venice Preserved (1682).
306. Jane Shore. In N. Rowe’s tragedy (1713).
Calista. In N. Rowe’s The Fair Penitent (1703).
The Mourning Bride. Congreve’s tragedy (1697).
When I first came from Bath. Mrs. Siddons was a member of the Cheltenham Company when she was recommended to the notice of Garrick, and then obtained an engagement at Drury Lane (1775).
Lord Byron says. See Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron, 1824 (p. 106).
Sir Isaac Newton was not twenty. He seems to have been twenty-four. See Voltaire’s Lettres sur les Anglais.
Harvey ... at eighteen. The first lectures in which he set forth his views were delivered in 1616, in his 38th year.
Berkeley ... Essay on Vision. Bishop Berkeley’s Essay towards a New Theory of Vision was published in 1709. He was born in 1685.
Hartley’s great principle. David Hartley’s (1705–1757) great work, Observations on Man (1749), was begun when he was about twenty-five.
Hume ... Treatise on Human Nature. David Hume’s (1711–1776) Treatise was published in 1739.
Galileo. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was appointed mathematical professor at Pisa when he was twenty-four.
Leibnitz. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646–1716). He was refused a Doctor’s Degree at Leipzig in his twentieth year on the ground of his youth.
Euler. Leonard Euler (1707–1783), of Basel. At the age of nineteen he was second in a competition projected by the Paris Academy for the best treatise on the masting of ships.
307. With heedless haste. ‘With wanton heed and giddy cunning.’ L’Allegro, 141.
308. Like the sweet south. Twelfth Night, I. 1.
Like poppies spread [‘the snow falls’]. Burns, Tam o’ Shanter.
Mandeville. Bernard Mandeville (1670?–1733), author of The Fable of the Bees (1714).
310. Defoe’s romance: i.e., Robinson Crusoe.
Round which, with tendrils. Wordsworth, Personal Talk, III.
ESSAY XXVII. ON OLD ENGLISH WRITERS AND SPEAKERS
From The New Monthly Magazine, vol. XIII., No. 49, 1825, with additions.
311. Marmontel. Jean François Marmontel (1723–1799), author of the Contes Moraux (1761).
Crebillon. Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (1674–1762), dramatic poet.
Marivaux. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688–1763), author of Marianne (1731–1741), a romance and many comedies. Voltaire said he knew all the bye-paths of the human heart, but not the highway.
La Harpe. Jean François de la Harpe (1739–1803), whose works have acted as a standard of literary criticism.
To this obscure and wild. Paradise Lost, XI. 284.
On that fair fountain. Hamlet, III. 4.
Note. A splendid edition of Goldsmith. Washington Irving edited a 4–volume edition of The Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith in 1825 (Paris).
312. The proper study of the French. ‘The proper study of mankind is man,’ Pope’s Essay on Man, Ep. II.
St. Evremont. Charles Marguetel de Saint-Denis Seigneur de Saint-Evremond (1613–1703), one of the most brilliant of French satirists. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.
312. Note. What’s he that wishes for more men from England. King Henry V., IV. 3.
313. Marlowe’s. Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (1604).
Captain Medwin or his Lordship must have made a mistake. See Conversations of Lord Byron, p. 105.
Jonson’s ‘Every Man in his Humour.’ Acted 1596.
Massinger’s ‘A new Way to Pay old Debts.’ (1633.)
Ford’s ... ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.’ Printed 1633.
Grows with our growth. Pope’s Essay on Man, Epistle II. 136.
314. Mr. Shee. Sir Martin Archer Shee (1770–1850), portrait painter from the age of 16 onwards. He was knighted upon being made President of the Royal Academy in 1830.
Burnt the Memoirs. Moore sold the Byron Memoirs to Murray, November 1821, and in May 1824 rebought and burned them.
Note. Tales of the Crusaders, i.e. The Betrothed and the Talisman, published in 1825.
315. Leave all and follow it. Cf. S. Matthew, xix. 21.
De omne scibile et quibusdam aliis. See vol. VI. Table Talk, note to p. 214.
316. Selden’s notes on Drayton’s Poly-Olbion. ‘The learned John Selden’ edited Drayton’s work in the folio of 1613–22.
Stowe. See ante, note to p. 229.
Holinshed. See ante, note to p. 229.
Camden. William Camden (1551–1623), whose Britannia was published in 1586.
Saxo-Grammaticus. The greatest of the early Danish chroniclers (fl. end of 12th century).
Dugdale. Sir William Dugdale (1605–1686), antiquarian, whose Monasticon Anglicanum was published 1655–1673.
Job Orton, (1717–1783). His reputation rests on his Letters rather than on his preaching.
317. Caryl’s ‘Commentaries upon Job.’ Probably the folio edition of 1676–7 of An Exposition with Practical Observations on the Book of Job. By Joseph Caryl, 2 vols.; the 1648–1666 quarto edition was in 12 vols.
The Cabbala. See ante, note to p. 242.
Warton. Thomas Warton (1728–1790), author of The History of English Poetry (1774–1781). The same sonnet is quoted in vol. V. Lectures on the English Poets, p. 120.
318. Della-Cruscan. See vol. V. Lectures on the English Poets, note to p. 148.
Calm pleasures there abide, majestic pains. Wordsworth’s Laodamia.
Earth destroys those raptures. Ibid.
319. Even to the crack of doom. Macbeth, IV. 1.
Poor Peter Peebles. The litigious drunkard in Redgauntlet.
The last and almost worst of them. Redgauntlet was published in 1824.
Nanty Ewart. Captain of the smuggler’s brig in Redgauntlet.
And her whose foot. Redgauntlet, Book II. chap. viii.
Old true-penny. Cf. ‘Art thou there, true-penny?’ etc. Hamlet, I. 5.
The catch that blind Willie and his wife, etc. Redgauntlet, Letter X.
320. Elysian beauty, melancholy grace. Wordsworth’s Laodamia.
At the birth of nature. Paradise Lost, VII. 102.
Pawing to get free. Paradise Lost, VII. 464.
Whose body nature was. Pope’s Essay on Man, Ep. I. 268 [‘and God the soul’]
Pym, Hampden, Sydney. John Pym (b. 1584), one of the ‘five members’; John Hampden (1594–1643), the opponent of ship-money; and Algernon Sidney (1622–1682), executed for his share in the Rye-house Plot.
321. Mr. Southey’s Book of the Church. Published 1824.
Pure well of English undefiled. ‘Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled’ The Faerie Queene, IV. ii. 32.
Baxter. See ante, note to p. 243.
Calamy’s Non-Conformist’s Memorial. See vol. III. Political Essays, note to p. 265.
Note. The author of Virginius. James Sheridan Knowles (1784–1862). Macready produced Virginius, his best play, in 1820, at Covent Garden, after it had appeared in the provinces.
322. Mr. Irvine. Edward Irving.
Prick-eared. Cf. ‘prick-eared cur of Iceland,’ King Henry V., II. 1. The word was commonly applied to Roundheads because of the tight black skull-cap drawn over the head, which left the ears exposed.
Sir J. Suckling. (1609–1641.)
Wycherley, Congreve, Rochester, and Waller. See vol. V. Lectures on the English Poets and Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth.
323. Mr. Tracey’s ‘Ideologie.’ Antoine Louis Claude Comte Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836), whose Élémens d’ Idéologie was published in 1817–1818.
ESSAY XXVIII. MADAME PASTA AND MADEMOISELLE MARS
From the New Monthly Magazine, vol. XIII. No. 49, 1825.
324. Mademoiselle Mars. Anne Françoise Boutet-Monvel (1779–1847), the clever impersonator of Molière’s heroines at the Théâtre Français. Her father, Moutet, was an actor, and her mother, Mars, an actress.
Madame Pasta. Giuditta Pasta, a Jewish opera-singer of Milanese birth (1798–1865). Her greatest triumphs were in Paris and London between 1825 and 1833.
325. Nina. An Italian opera, produced at Naples, May 1787, and played at the King’s Theatre, London, May 26, 1825, with Pasta as ‘Nina.’
326. Shepherdess. The Winter’s Tale, IV. 3.
327. Though that their art be nature. ‘Though that his joy be joy, etc.’ Othello, I. 1.
328. Schiller’s Robbers. 1781.
Klopstock’s Messiah. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s (1724–1803) poem was published in 1748–1773.
329. Those noble outlines ... at Hampton Court. The Cartoons of Raphael.
Chantry. See ante, note to p. 89.
Guiderius and Arviragus. Cymbeline, III. 6, and IV. 2.
330. Note. Valeria. A comedy of Scribe’s, produced in 1822 with Mlle. Mars in the title-rôle.
331. Girodet. Anne Louis Girodet-De-Roussy-Trioson, French historical painter and writer (1767–1824), a pupil of David.
Monsieur Chateaubriand. François René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), of noble Breton extraction, Royalist and writer of perfect prose.
333. Merrimee. J. F. L. Mérimée. See Memoirs of William Hazlitt, I. 87, 89. See also vol. VI. Table Talk, note to p. 319.
334. Foregone conclusion. Othello, III. 3.
ESSAY XXIX. SIR WALTER SCOTT, RACINE, AND SHAKESPEAR
336. The still small voice is wanting. 1 Kings xix. 12.
337. Four lagging winters. King Richard II., I. 3. [‘End in a word.’]
Come home to the bosoms. Bacon, Dedication to Essays.
The perilous stuff. Macbeth, V. 3.
Give sorrow words. Macbeth, IV. 3.
338. Gabble most brutishly. The Tempest, I. 2.
‘But wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish.’
339. Sailing with supreme dominion. Gray, Progress of Poesy, III. 3.
David Ritchie. See ante, note to p. 207.
The Maid and the Magpye. See vol. VIII. A View of the English Stage, p. 244.
Mrs. Inchbald’s ‘Nature and Art.’ Published 1796.
340. O’er informing power. Cf. ‘And o’er-inform’d the tenement of clay.’ Dryden, Absolom and Achitophel, I. 158.
341. Globose. Cf. Paradise Lost, V. 753 and VII. 357.
A Dukedom to a beggarly denier. King Richard III., I. 2.
The little dogs and all. King Lear, III. 6.
Chronicle of the line of Brute. Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book II. canto X.
342. Lay my head to the East. ‘Na, na! Not that way, the feet to the east.’ Guy Mannering, chap. XV.
Nothing but his unkind daughters. King Lear, III. 4.
By making Madge Wildfire ascribe. The Heart of Midlothian, ? vol. II. chap. v. and vi.
They are old like him. Cf. King Lear, II. 4.
The earth hath bubbles. Macbeth, I. 3.
And enjoin’d silence.
[‘You seem to understand me By each at once,’ etc.] Macbeth, I. 3.
And then they melted into thin air.
[‘Whither are they vanished? Into the air.’] Macbeth, I. 3.
But cf. The Tempest, IV. 1.
‘Are melted into air, into thin air.’
343. The geese of Micklestane Muir. The Black Dwarf, chap. ii.
Five editions deep in Captain Medwin’s Conversations. Two editions of Captain Thomas Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, noted during a Residence with his Lordship at Pisa in the years 1821 and 1822, appeared in 1824, and editions followed in Paris, New York and Germany.
There’s magic in the web. Othello, III. 4.
All appliances and means to boot. 2 King Henry IV., III. 1.
Sees Helen’s beauty. Midsummer Night’s Dream, V. 1.
’Tis common. Othello, III. 3.
344. Not a jot. Ibid.
344. By yon marble heaven. Othello, III. 3.
Like the Propontic. Ibid.
The dialogue between Hubert and Arthur. King John, IV. 1.
That between Brutus and Cassius. Julius Cæsar, I. 2.
Bertram. In Guy Mannering.
ESSAY XXX. ON DEPTH AND SUPERFICIALITY
347. A great but useless thinker. ? Coleridge.
Dr. Spurzheim. See ante, note to p. 17.
348. Spin round on its soft axle. ‘Spinning sleeps on her soft axle,’ Paradise Lost, VIII. 165.
350. Compunctious visitings of nature. Macbeth, I. 5.
The ‘wicked’ Lord Lyttleton. Thomas, Lord Lyttelton (1744–1779), renowned for his profligacy. He seems to have died three days after a nocturnal warning. See Chambers’s Book of Days, II. 625.
Mother Brownrigg. Elizabeth Brownrigg, who was executed in 1767 for whipping an apprentice to death. See vol. III. Political Essays, notes to pp. 220 and 238.
351. Credo quia impossibile est. A phrase of Tertullian’s.
353. Sweet oblivious antidote. Macbeth, V. 3.
354. Unquenchable fire. S. Mark, ix. 44.
Note. Search’s ‘Light of Nature Pursued.’ See vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, note to p. 371.
ESSAY XXXI. ON RESPECTABLE PEOPLE
362. Buys golden opinions. Macbeth, I. 7.
The learned pate ducks to the golden fool. Timon of Athens, IV. 3.
Otway was left to starve. Thomas Otway, one of the greatest of English tragedians, was choked by eating too ravenously bread bought after a long fast.
Spenser, kept waiting. See Fuller’s Worthies. The story is that Spenser petitioned Elizabeth thus:—
‘I was promis’d on a time To have reason for my rhyme; From that time unto this season, I receiv’d nor rhyme nor reason.’
363. His favourite poet Butler. Samuel Butler (1612–1680). He was buried in St. Paul’s Churchyard, Covent Garden, at the expense of his friend William Longueville of the Temple.
The time gives evidence of it. See ante, note to p. 136.
Parson Adams drinking his ale. Joseph Andrews, Book I. 2.
Peter Pounce. In Joseph Andrews.
The character of Captain Blifil. Tom Jones, Book II. 9.
Pope somewhere exclaims. [‘Or slaves or cowards’]. Pope’s Essay on Man, Ep. IV. 215.
364. All honourable men. Julius Cæsar, III. 2.
ESSAY XXXII. ON THE JEALOUSY AND THE SPLEEN OF PARTY
365. It is michin-malico. Hamlet, III. 2.
With the Levite, that ‘he is not one of those.’ Cf. the story of the Pharisee, St. Luke, xviii. 2.
The snow-falls in the river. Burns’ Tam o’ Shanter. Cf. ante, note to P. 308.
The mighty dead. Thomson’s Seasons, Winter, 431.
366. So shall their anticipation. Hamlet, II. 2.
The gaze and shew [‘show and gaze’] of the time. Macbeth, V. 7.
Elysian beauty. Wordsworth’s Laodamia.
367. This, this is the unkindest cut of all. Julius Cæsar, III. 2.
Mr. Chantry. See ante, note to p. 89.
It will never do. See vol. III. Political Essays, note to p. 361.
Rash judgments. Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey (Lyrical Ballads, 1798).
368. But ’tis the fall. Pope, Epilogue to Satires, I. 143.
Madame Guyon. Jeanne Marie Bouvières de la Mothe Guyon, the French Quietist (1648–1717).
Canova’s marble. See ante, note to p. 113.
Guido’s canvas. Guido Reni, of the school of Bologna (1575–1642).
Thomas Little. Thomas Moore’s (1779–1852) early erotic verses appeared (1801) as the ‘Poetical Works of the late Thomas Little.’
Now in glimmer. Coleridge’s Christabel, 169.
369. From Paraclete’s white walls. Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard, 348.
Swan-like end. Merchant of Venice, III. 2.
’Tis my vice [‘It is my nature’s plague’] to spy into abuses. Othello, III. 3.
370. Can the Ethiopian change his skin? Jeremiah, xiii. 23.
Married to immortal verse. L’Allegro, 137.
Thoughts that glow [breathe]. Gray, The Progress of Poesy, III. 3.
But his soul is fair. Thomson, Castle of Indolence, II. 30.
371. Give us reason with his rhyme. See ante, note to p. 362.
His dear Charmettes. Where Rousseau’s happiest years were spent with Madame de Warens.
I care not, Fortune. Thomson’s Castle of Indolence, canto II. 3.
Books, dreams [dreams, books]. Wordsworth, Personal Talk, [will grow].
Note. Ah! voila de la pervenche. Rousseau’s Confessions, part I. book VI.
Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Published in 1777.
373. A witchery in the soft blue sky. Wordsworth’s Peter Bell, part I. 15.
Not by the sufferance of supernal power. Paradise Lost, I. 241.
Squeaked and gibbered in our streets. Hamlet, I. 1.
In his Treatise of Government. Published in 1689–1690.
374. Blackstone and De Lolme. Sir William Blackstone (1723–1780), whose Commentaries on the Laws of England were published in 1765–1769, and John Louis Delolme, a Genevan (1740–1806), whose work on The Constitution of England was published in French in 1771, and in English four years later.
The right divine of kings. Pope, The Dunciad, IV. 188.
Age of chivalry. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, II. 89).
Mr. Ricardo. David Ricardo (1772–1823), stockbroker and political economist.
With the laurel wreath. Southey was made poet-laureate in 1813.
374. Carnage as ‘God’s Daughter.’ See vol. I. Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, note to p. 214.
Written the Friend. Coleridge’s Series of Essays (1809–1810), ‘to aid in the formation of fixed principles in politics, morals and religion.’
Like a devilish engine. Paradise Lost, IV. 17.
With looks commercing. Il Penseroso, 39.
375. Doth part the flux. As You Like It, II. 1.
The powers that be. Romans, xiii. 1.
Chop-fallen. Hamlet, V. 1.
For the good of the country. Cf. ‘’Twas for the good of my country that I should be abroad.’ Farquhar, The Beaux’ Stratagem, III. 2.
376. The Bills of Mortality. Weekly burial reports, first supplied by parish clerks in 1592–3.
Mr. Theodore Hook will cry ‘Cockney.’ See vol. VI. Table Talk, note to p. 98.
One-eyed M——. Probably John Murray, who had lost the sight of one eye through an accident.
377. When they censure the age. The Beggar’s Opera, Air XII.
Done the State some service. Othello, V. 2.
378. Like poor Morgan. Roderick Random, chap. xxxiv.
Come betwixt the wind and their nobility. 1 King Henry IV., I. 3.
The Liberal. The quarterly review which lasted for four numbers (1822–3). See vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, the Essay on Lord Byron, and notes to pp. 258 and 359.
The John Bull. Theodore Hook’s Tory paper.
Mr. Jerdan. William Jerdan (1782–1869), editor of the Tory Sun (1813–17), and then identified for thirty-three years with the Literary Gazette.
The Examiner-Officer. ? a misprint for Examiner Office.
379. Mr. Shelley’s father. Hobhouse’s father, Sir Benjamin, was made a baronet in 1812. The Shelley baronets of Castle Goring, Sussex, were created in 1806.
Illustrations of Childe Harold. Historical Illustrations of the fourth canto of Childe Harold; containing Dissertations on the Ruins of Rome, and an Essay on Italian Literature (1818).
The member for Westminster. Hobhouse was elected in 1820 by a large majority.
The Essay on the Spirit of Monarchy. Hazlitt’s essay was published in the second number of The Liberal.
This gentleman wrote off to Lord Byron. See Byron’s Letters and Journals (ed. Prothero), VI. 167. Cf. vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, p. 359 and note.
His Vision of Judgment. Byron’s poem was published in No. 1 of The Liberal.
380. I had spoken against Lalla Rookh. Published in 1817. See vol. V. Lectures on English Poets, p. 152.
‘Fudge Family.’ Published in 1818.
Hulling on the flood. Paradise Lost, XI. 840.
Whistle me down the wind. Othello, III. 3.
Proved haggard. Ibid.
Tricksy. Cf. ‘My tricksy spirit.’ The Tempest, V. 1.
To view with scornful. Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 199–200.
381. The account of the ‘Characters of Shakespear’s Plays.’ See vol. I. Bibliographical Note on p. 166.
381. The Gods ... had made me poetical. As You Like It, III. 3.
Not a true thing. Ibid.
The first thing the Westminster Review did. See ante, note to p. 183. In the very first number (Jan. 1824), the article being written by James Mill, assisted by his son John Stuart Mill. See Sir Leslie Stephen’s The English Utilitarians, vol. III. p. 18.
382. As Mr. Place lost Mr. Hobhouse his first election. Hobhouse unsuccessfully contested Westminster as an advanced Liberal in 1818.
Note. But not till then. For this remark of Porson’s see vol. VII., Lectures on the English Comic Writers, p. 17.
AN ESSAY ON THE PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN ACTION
Hazlitt had made the ‘discovery’ set forth in this essay and had begun to write the essay itself as early as 1798, when he had his memorable meeting with Coleridge. See the essay ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets.’ He did not, however, succeed in making himself understood by the poet, and when the book came to be published, its sale was slow and small, though Mr. W. C. Hazlitt (Memoirs, I. 112) relates that according to a tradition in the family it won the admiration of Mr. Scarlett, afterwards Lord Abinger. Hazlitt himself was proud of the essay, and continually refers to it in his later writings. See especially A Letter to William Gifford, vol. I. pp. 403 et seq., where he explains the nature of the argument. Cf. also the essay on ‘Self-Love’ and the fragments of lectures on English Philosophy first published in Literary Remains. The variations made in the second edition from marginal notes in the author’s copy (see Bibliographical Note) are few and trifling.
395. An airy, notional good. Cf.
‘——fugitive theme Of my pursuing verse, ideal shade, Notional good, by fancy only made.’ Prior, Solomon, or the Vanity of the World, I. 15–7.
398. Note. Usher. James Usher’s (1720–1772) An Introduction to the Theory of the Human Mind, was published in 1771.
409. Note. ‘Eros, thou yet behold’st me,’ etc. Antony and Cleopatra, Act IV. Scene 14.
410. Note. Rousseau ... not a Frenchman. Rousseau was born at Geneva, whither his ancestors had removed from Paris as far back as 1529.
415. Note. Berkeley’s Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, published in 1709.
427. Junius has remarked, etc. In his letter to George III. (Dec. 19, 1769).
429. ‘Short-lived pleasure,’ etc. Cf.
‘——O fleeting joys Of Paradise, dear bought with lasting woes.’ Paradise Lost, X. 741–2.
Note. See Preface to The Lyrical Ballads (2nd edition, 1801), reprinted with variations in the succeeding editions of the poet’s works. (Poetical Works, ed. T. Hutchinson, p. 940.)
430. To add, etc. This sentence, which seems obscure, should perhaps begin ‘I may add that,’ etc.
The Essay on the Inequality of Mankind. Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, 1755.
‘Faithful remembrancer.’ Cowper, On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture, 11.
‘His high endeavour,’ etc. Cowper, The Task, V. 901.
The System of Nature. Hazlitt wrongly attributes to Jean Baptiste de Mirabaud (1675–1760) the Système de la Nature of Baron d’Holbach (1723–1789), published in 1770.
REMARKS ON THE SYSTEMS OF HARTLEY AND HELVETIUS
434. Hartley. David Hartley (1705–1757), whose Observations on Man, containing his famous principle of the Association of Ideas, appeared in 1749.
Helvetius. Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771), whose famous work De L’Esprit appeared in 1758.
Note. Butler in the Preface to his Sermons. The Fifteen Sermons preached at the Rolls Chapel were published in 1726.
441. As has been explained, etc. An imperfect sentence. Probably Hazlitt wrote, ‘This has been explained,’ etc.
443. Note. Sir Kenelm Digby’s (1603–1665) Observations upon Religio Medici were published in 1643, and were afterwards frequently reprinted in editions of that work.
446. Note. Published in 1780.
447. Mr. Mac-Intosh. Sir James Mackintosh’s lectures on ‘The Law of Nature and Nations’ were delivered at Lincoln’s Inn Hall in 1799.
450. ‘In subduing,’ etc. Othello, Act I. Scene 3.
453. ‘Sentir est penser.’ This well-known aphorism of the Sensational School is attributed to Destutt de Tracy. See ante, note to p. 323.
More drossy and divisible. Dryden, The Hind and the Panther, I. 319.
454. Note. Condillac. Etienne de Condillac (1715–1780), whose Traité des Sensations appeared in 1754.
Note. The book De l’Esprit. See ante, note to p. 434.
Note. ‘Me voici,’ etc. Émile, Liv. IV. (Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard).
457. ‘Discourse of reason.’ Hamlet, Act I. Scene II.
464. ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments.’ Published in 1759.
465. Don Quixote. See Part I., Book III., chaps. 25 and 26.
Edinburgh: Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. P. 60, changed "limited, not does" to "limited, nor does". 2. P. 292, changed “outrè” to “outré”. 3. P. 372, changed “ma premiere connaissance” to “ma première connaissance”. 4. Did not correct “it’s” used in the possessive sense. 5. P. 410, changed “affections particuliéres celles” to “affections particulières celles”. 6. P. 416, added footnote number to the footnote on this page. 7. P. 455, changed “sont pas paralleles” to “sont pas parallèles”. 8. Silently corrected typographical errors and also variations in spelling. 9. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed. 10. Enclosed italics font in underscores.