military and naval architecture in the department of pure mathematics.
Military architecture embraces fortification and field works, which,
with their bastions, curtains, hornworks, redoubts, &c. are based on a
technical combination of lines and angles. These are adapted to offence
and defence, with and against the effects of bombs, balls, escalades,
he. But lines and angles make the sum of elementary geometry, a branch
of pure mathematics: and the direction of the bombs, balls, and other
projectiles, the necessary appendages of military works, although no
part of their architecture, belong to the conic sections, a branch of
transcendental geometry. Diderot and D’Alembert, therefore, in their
_Arbor scienciæ_, have placed military architecture in the department
of elementary geometry. Naval architecture teaches the best form and
construction of vessels; for which best form it has recourse to the
question of the solid of least resistance; a problem of transcendental
geometry. And its appurtenant projectiles belong to the same branch as
in the preceding case. It is true, that so far as respects the action of
the water on the rudder and oars, and of the wind on the sails, it may
be placed in the department of mechanics, as Diderot and D’Alembert
have done; but belonging quite as much to geometry, and allied in its
military character to military architecture, it simplified our plan to
place both under the same head. These views are so obvious, that I am
sure they would have required but a second thought to reconcile the
reviewer to their location under the head of pure mathematics. For
this word location, see Bailey, Johnson, Sheridan, Walker, &c. But if
dictionaries are to be the arbiters of language, in which of them shall
we find neologism? No matter. It is a good word, well sounding, obvious,
and expresses an idea, which would otherwise require circumlocution. The
reviewer was justifiable, therefore, in using it; although he noted
at the same time, as unauthoritative, _centrality, grade, sparse_; all
which have been long used in common speech and writing. I am a friend
to neology. It is the only way to give to a language copiousness and
euphony. Without it we should still be held to the vocabulary of Alfred
or of Ulphilas; and held to their state of science also: for I am
sure they had no words which could have conveyed the ideas of oxygen,
cotyledons, zoophytes, magnetism, electricity, hyaline, and thousands of
others expressing ideas not then existing, nor of possible communication
in the state of their language. What a language has the French become
since the date of their revolution, by the free introduction of new
words! The most copious and eloquent in the living world; and equal to
the Greek, had not that been regularly modifiable almost _ad infinitum_.
Their rule was, that whenever their language furnished or adopted a
root, all its branches in every part of speech, were legitimated by
giving them their appropriate terminations:
[Illustration: page331]
And this should be the law of every language. Thus, having adopted the
adjective fraternal, it is a root which should legitimate fraternity,
fraternation, fraternization, fraternism, to fratenate, fraternize,
fraternally. And give the word neologism to our language, as a root,
and it should give us its fellow substantives, neology, neologist,
neologization; its adjectives, neologous, neological, neologistical;
its verb, neologize; and adverb neologically. Dictionaries are but
the depositories of words already legitimated by usage. Society is the
work-shop in which new ones are elaborated. When an individual uses
a new word, if ill formed, it is rejected in society, if well formed,
adopted, and after due time, laid up in the depository of dictionaries.
And if, in this process of sound neologization, our trans-Atlantic
brethren shall not choose to accompany us, we may furnish, after
the Ionians, a second example of a colonial dialect improving on its
primitive.
But enough of criticism: let me turn to your puzzling letter of May the
12th, on matter, spirit, motion, &c. Its crowd of scepticisms kept me
from sleep. I read it, and laid it down: read it, and laid it down,
again and again: and to give rest to my mind, I was obliged to recur
ultimately to my habitual anodyne, ‘I feel, therefore I exist.’ I feel
bodies which are not myself: there are other existences then. I call
them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where
there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial
space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect
the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need. I can conceive
thought to be an action of a particular organization of matter, formed
for that purpose by its creator, as well as that attraction is an action
of matter, or magnetism of loadstone. When he who denies to the Creator
the power of endowing matter with the mode of action called thinking,
shall show how he could endow the sun with the mode of action called
attraction, which reins the planets in the track of their orbits, or how
an absence of matter can have a will, and by that will put matter into
motion, then the Materialist may be lawfully required to explain the
process by which matter exercises the faculty of thinking. When once we
quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial
existences, is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels,
God, are immaterial, is to say, they are nothings, or that there is no
God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am
supported in my creed of materialism by the Lockes, the Tracys, and
the Stewarts. At what age* of the Christian church this heresy of
immaterialism, or masked atheism, crept in, I do not exactly know. But a
heresy it certainly is. Jesus taught nothing of it. He told us, indeed,
that ‘God is a spirit,’ but he has not defined what a spirit is, nor
said that it is not matter. And the ancient fathers generally, of the
three first centuries, held it to be matter, light and thin indeed, an
ethereal gas; but still matter. Origen says. ‘_Deus reapse corporalis
est; sed graviorum tantum ratione corporum incorporeus_.’ Tertullian,’
_Quid enim Deus nisi corpus?_’ And again, ‘_Quis negabit Deum esse
corpus? Etsi Deus spiritus, spiritus etiam corpus est, sui generis in
sua effigie_. St. Justin Martyr,
[Illustration: 332]
And St. Macarius, speaking of angels, says, ‘_Quamvis enim subtilia
sint, tamen in substantia, forma, et figura, secundum tenuitatem naturas
eorum, corpora sunt tenuia_.’ And St. Austin, St. Basil, Lactantius,
Tatian, Athenagoras, and others, with whose writings I pretend not a
familiarity, are said by those who are better acquainted with them,
to deliver the same doctrine. (Enfield x. 3. 1.) Turn to your Ocellus
d’Argens, 97, 105. and to his Timseus 17. for these quotations. In
England, these Immaterialists might have been burnt until the 29 Car. 2.
when the writ _de hæretico comburendo_ was abolished; and here until the
Revolution, that statute not having extended to us. All heresies being
now done away with us, these schismatists are merely atheists, differing
from the material atheist only in their belief, that ‘nothing made
something,’ and from the material deist, who believes that matter alone
can operate on matter.
[* That of Athanasius and the Council of Nicasa, anno 324]
Rejecting all organs of information, therefore, but my senses, I rid
myself of the pyrrhonisms with which an indulgence in speculations
hyperphysical and antiphysical, so uselessly occupy and disquiet the
mind. A single sense may indeed be sometimes deceived, but rarely; and
never all our senses together, with their faculty of reasoning. They
evidence realities, and there are enough of these for all the purposes
of life, without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and
phantasms. I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things
which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may
indeed be, but of which I have no evidence. I am sure that I really know
many, many things, and none more surely than that I love you with all
my heart, and pray for the continuance of your life until you shall be
tired of it yourself.
Th: Jefferson.
LETTER CLV.--TO JOSEPH C. CABELL, November 28, 1820
TO JOSEPH C. CABELL.
Poplar Forest, November 28, 1820.
Dear Sir,
I sent in due time the Report of the Visitors to the Governor, with a
request that he would endeavor to convene the Literary Board in time to
lay it before the legislature on the second day of their session. It
was enclosed in a letter which will explain itself to you. If delivered
before the crowd of other business presses on them, they may act on
it immediately, and before there will have been time for unfriendly
combinations and manoeuvres by the enemies of the institution. I enclose
you now a paper presenting some views which may be useful to you in
conversations, to rebut exaggerated estimates of what our institution
is to cost, and reproaches of deceptive estimates. One hundred and
sixty-two thousand three hundred and sixty-four dollars will be about
the cost of the whole establishment, when completed. Not an office
at Washington has cost less. The single building of the courthouse of
Henrico has cost nearly that: and the massive walls of the millions of
bricks of William and Mary could not now be built for a less sum.
Surely Governor Clinton’s display of the gigantic efforts of New York
towards the education of her citizens, will stimulate the pride as well
as the patriotism of our legislature, to look to the reputation and
safety of their own country, to rescue it from the degradation of
becoming the Barbary of the Union, and of falling into the ranks of our
own negroes. To that condition it is fast sinking. We shall be in the
hands of the other States, what our indigenous predecessors were when
invaded by the science and arts of Europe. The mass of education in
Virginia, before the Revolution, placed her with the foremost of her
sister colonies. What is her education now? Where is it? The little
we have, we import, like beggars, from other States; or import their
beggars to bestow on us their miserable crumbs. And what is wanting to
restore us to our station among our confederates? Not more money from
the people. Enough has been raised by them, and appropriated to this
very object. It is that it should be employed understandingly, and for
their greatest good. That good requires, that while they are instructed
in general, competently to the common business of life, others should
employ their genius with necessary information to the useful arts, to
inventions for saving labor and increasing our comforts, to nourishing
our health, to civil government, military science, &c.
Would it not have a good effect for the friends of the University
to take the lead in proposing and effecting a practical scheme of
elementary schools? to assume the character of the friends, rather than
the opponents of that object? The present plan has appropriated to the
primary schools forty-five thousand dollars for three years, making one
hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars. I should be glad to know if
this sum has educated one hundred and thirty-five poor children? I doubt
it much. And if it has, they have cost us one thousand dollars a
piece for what might have been done with thirty dollars. Supposing the
literary revenue to be sixty thousand dollars, I think it demonstrable,
that this sum, equally divided between the two objects, would amply
suffice for both. One hundred counties, divided into about twelve wards
each, on an average, and a school in each ward of perhaps ten
children, would be one thousand and two hundred schools, distributed
proportionably over the surface of the State. The inhabitants of each
ward, meeting together (as when they work on the roads), building
good log-houses for their school and teacher, and contributing for his
provisions, rations of pork, beef, and corn, in the proportion, each of
his other taxes, would thus lodge and feed him without feeling it;
and those of them who are able, paying for the tuition of their own
children, would leave no call on the public fund but for the tuition
fee of, here and there, an accidental pauper, who would still be fed and
lodged with his parents. Suppose this fee ten dollars, and three
hundred dollars apportioned to a county on an average (more or less duly
proportioned), would there be thirty such paupers for every county? I
think not. The truth is, that the want of common education with us is
not from our poverty, but from want of an orderly system. More money is
now paid for the education of a part, than would be paid for that of the
whole, if systematically arranged. Six thousand common schools in New
York, fifty pupils in each, three hundred thousand in all; one
hundred and sixty thousand dollars annually paid to the masters; forty
established academies, with two thousand two hundred and eighteen
pupils; and five colleges, with seven hundred and eighteen students;
to which last classes of institutions seven hundred and twenty thousand
dollars have been given; and the whole appropriations for education
estimated at two and a half millions of dollars! What a pigmy to this is
Virginia become, with a population almost equal to that of New York!
And whence this difference? From the difference their rulers set on
the value of knowledge, and the prosperity it produces. But still, if a
pigmy, let her do what a pigmy may do. If among fifty children in each
of the six thousand schools of New York, there are only paupers enough
to employ twenty-five dollars of public money to each school, surely
among the ten children of each of our one thousand and two hundred
schools, the same sum of twenty-five dollars to each school will teach
its paupers (five times as much as to the same number in New York), and
will amount for the whole to thirty thousand dollars a year, the one
half only of our literary revenue.
Do then, Dear Sir, think of this, and engage our friends to take in
hand the whole subject. It will reconcile the friends of the elementary
schools, and none are more warmly so than myself, lighten the
difficulties of the University, and promote in every order of men the
degree of instruction proportioned to their condition, and to their
views in life. It will combine with the mass of our force, a wise
direction of it, which will insure to our country its future prosperity
and safety. I had formerly thought that visitors of the schools might
be chosen by the county, and charged to provide teachers for every ward,
and to superintend them. I now think it would be better for every ward
to choose its own resident visitor, whose business it would be to keep a
teacher in the ward, to superintend the school, and to call meetings of
the ward for all purposes relating to it: their accounts to be settled,
and wards laid off by the courts. I think ward elections better for
many reasons, one of which is sufficient, that it will keep elementary
education out of the hands of fanaticizing preachers, who, in county
elections, would be universally chosen, and the predominant sect of the
county would possess itself of all its schools.
A wrist stiffened by an ancient accident, now more so by the effect of
age, renders writing a slow and irksome operation with me. I cannot,
therefore, present these views by separate letters to each of our
colleagues in the legislature, but must pray you to communicate them to
Mr. Johnson and General Breckenridge, and to request them to
consider this as equally meant for them. Mr. Gordon, being the local
representative of the University and among its most zealous friends,
would be a more useful second to General Breckenridge in the House of
Delegates, by a free communication of what concerns the University, with
which he has had little opportunity of becoming acquainted. So also,
would it be as to Mr. Rives, who would be a friendly advocate.
Accept the assurances of my constant and affectionate esteem and
respect.
Th: Jefferson.
LETTER CLVI.--TO THOMAS RITCHIE, December, 25, 1820
TO THOMAS RITCHIE.
Monticello, December, 25, 1820.
Dear Sir,
On my return home after a long absence, I find here your favor of
November the 23rd, with Colonel Taylor’s ‘Construction Construed,’ which
you have been so kind as to send me, in the name of the author as well
as yourself. Permit me, if you please, to use the same channel
for conveying to him the thanks I render you also for this mark of
attention. I shall read it, I know, with edification, as I did his
Enquiry, to which I acknowledge myself indebted for many valuable ideas,
and for the correction of some errors of early opinion, never seen in
a correct light until presented to me in that work. That the present
volume is equally orthodox I know before reading it, because I know
that Colonel Taylor and myself have rarely, if ever, differed in any
political principle of importance. Every act of his life, and every word
he ever wrote, satisfies me of this. So, also, as to the two Presidents,
late and now in office, I know them both to be of principles as truly
republican as any men living. If there be any thing amiss, therefore,
in the present state of our affairs, as the formidable deficit lately
unfolded to us indicates, I ascribe it to the inattention of Congress
to their duties, to their unwise dissipation and waste of the public
contributions. They seemed, some little while ago, to be at a loss
for objects whereon to throw away the supposed fathomless funds of the
treasury. I had feared the result, because I saw among them some of my
old fellow-laborers, of tried and known principles, yet often in their
minorities. I am aware that in one of their most ruinous vagaries,
the people were themselves betrayed into the same phrenzy with their
Representatives. The deficit produced, and a heavy tax to supply it,
will, I trust, bring both to their sober senses.
But it is not from this branch of government we have most to fear. Taxes
and short elections will keep them right. The judiciary of the United
States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working
under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric.
They are construing our constitution from a co-ordination of a general
and special government to a general and supreme one alone. This will lay
all things at their feet, and they are too well versed in English law to
forget the maxim, ‘_Boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem._’ We shall
see if they are bold enough to take the daring stride their five lawyers
have lately taken. If they do, then, with the editor of our book in his
address to the public, I will say, that against this every man should
raise his voice, and more, should uplift his arm. Who wrote this
admirable address? Sound, luminous, strong, not a word too much, nor one
which can be changed but for the worse. That pen should go on, lay bare
these wounds of our constitution, expose these _decisions seriatim_,
and arouse, as it is able, the attention of the nation to these bold
speculators on its patience. Having found, from experience, that
impeachment is an impracticable thing, a mere scare-crow, they consider
themselves secure for life; they skulk from responsibility to public
opinion, the only remaining hold on them, under a practice first
introduced into England by Lord Mansfield. An opinion is huddled up in
conclave, perhaps by a majority of one, delivered as if unanimous and
with the silent acquiescence of lazy or timid associates, by a crafty
chief judge, who sophisticates the law to his mind, by the turn of his
own reasoning. A judiciary law was once reported by the Attorney General
to Congress, requiring each judge to deliver his opinion _seriatim_ and
openly, and then to give it in writing to the clerk to be entered in the
record. A judiciary independent of a King or executive alone, is a good
thing; but independence of the will of the nation is a solecism, at
least in a republican government.
But to return to your letter; you ask for my opinion of the work you
send me, and to let it go out to the public. This I have ever made a
point of declining (one or two instances only excepted). Complimentary
thanks to writers who have sent me their works, have betrayed me
sometimes before the public, without my consent having been asked. But
I am far from presuming to direct the reading of my fellow-citizens, who
are good enough judges themselves of what is worthy their reading. I am,
also, too desirous of quiet to place myself in the way of contention.
Against this I am admonished by bodily decay, which cannot be
unaccompanied by corresponding wane of the mind. Of this I am as yet
sensible sufficiently to be unwilling to trust myself before the public,
and when I cease to be so, I hope that my friends will be too careful
of me to draw me forth and present me, like a Priam in armor, as a
spectacle for public compassion. I hope our political bark will ride
through all its dangers; but I can in future be but an inert passenger.
I salute you with sentiments of great friendship and respect.
Th: Jefferson.
LETTER CLVII.--TO JOHN ADAMS, January 22, 1821
TO JOHN ADAMS.
Monticello, January 22, 1821.
I was quite rejoiced, dear Sir, to see that you had health and spirits
enough to take part in the late convention of your State, for revising
its constitution, and to bear your share in its debates and labors.
The amendments of which we have as yet heard, prove the advance of
liberalism in the intervening period; and encourage a hope that the
human mind will some day get back to the freedom it enjoyed two thousand
years ago. This country, which has given to the world the example of
physical liberty, owes to it that of moral emancipation also, for as yet
it is but nominal with us. The inquisition of public opinion overwhelms,
in practice, the freedom asserted by the laws in theory.