I have that esteem of your Lordship’s kind opinion, as to be very
unwilling to forfeit any share of it. Yet what I have now to advance
will, I readily foresee, expose me to some risk, in that particular.
For now your Lordship has expressed your regard for _a superior
knowledge of human nature_, it emboldens me to add that such knowledge
(which I have small right to claim to myself) is not to be acquired but
by the largest and most extensive observation of the human species:
so that I may be found at last even a warmer advocate for the uses of
foreign travel, than your Lordship.
I hold then that the knowledge of human nature (the only knowledge, in
the largest sense of the expression, deserving a wise man’s regard)
can never be well attained but by seeing it under all its appearances;
I mean, not merely, or chiefly, in that fair and well-dressed form
it wears amid the arts and embellishments of our western world;
but in its naked simplicity, and even deformities; nay, under all
its disguises and distortions, arising from absurd governments and
monstrous religions, in every distant region and quarter of the globe.
The subject appears to me of that importance, that it almost warms me,
an old philosopher as I am, into some emulation of your Lordship’s
enthusiasm.
I would say then, “that, to study HUMAN NATURE to purpose, a traveller
must enlarge his circuit beyond the bounds of _Europe_. He must go,
and catch her undressed, nay quite naked, in _North-America_, and at
the Cape of _Good Hope_. He may then examine how she appears crampt,
contracted, and buttoned up close in the strait tunic of law and
custom, as in _China_ and _Japan_: or, spread out and enlarged above
her common size, in the loose and flowing robe of enthusiasm, among
the Arabs and Saracens: or, lastly, as she flutters in the old rags
of worn-out policy and civil government, and almost ready to run back
naked to the deserts, as on the _Mediterranean_ coast of _Africa_.”
These, my Lord, are the proper scenes for the philosopher, for the
citizen of the world, to expatiate in. The tour of _Europe_ is a paltry
thing: a tame, uniform, unvaried prospect: which affords nothing but
the same polished manners and artificial policies, scarcely diversified
enough to take, or merit, our attention.
It is from a wider and more extensive view of mankind that a just
estimate is to be made of the powers of human nature. Hence we collect
what its genuine faculties are: what ideas and principles, or if any,
are truly innate and essential to it; and what changes and modification
it is susceptible of from law and custom.
If you think I impose too great a task on our inquisitive traveller,
my next advice is, That he stay at home: read _Europe_ in the mirror
of his own country, which but too eagerly reflects and flatters every
state that dances before its surface; and, for the rest, take up with
the best information he can get from the books and narratives of the
best voyagers.