These philosophers are fanatics; independent of any interest, which if
it operated alone would make them much more tractable, they are carried
with such a headlong rage towards every desperate trial, that they would
sacrifice the whole human race to the slightest of their experiments.
I am better able to enter into the character of this description of
men than the noble duke can be. I have lived long and variously in the
world. Without any considerable pretensions to literature in myself, I
have aspired to the love of letters. I have lived for a great many
years in habitudes with those who professed them. I can form a tolerable
estimate of what is likely to happen from a character chiefly dependent
for fame and fortune on knowledge and talent, as well in its morbid and
perverted state as in that which is sound and natural. Naturally, men so
formed and finished are the first gifts of Providence to the world. But
when they have once thrown off the fear of God, which was in all ages
too often the case, and the fear of men, which is now the case, and when
in that state they come to understand one another, and to act in corps,
a more dreadful calamity cannot arise out of hell to scourge mankind.
Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thorough-bred
metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked
spirit than to the frailty and passion of a man. It is like that of the
principle of evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated,
defecated evil. It is no easy operation to eradicate humanity from the
human breast. What Shakespeare calls "the compunctious visitings of
nature," will sometimes knock at their hearts, and protest against their
murderous speculations. But they have a means of compounding with
their nature. Their humanity is not dissolved. They only give it a
long prorogation. They are ready to declare, that they do not think two
thousand years too long a period for the good that they pursue. It is
remarkable, that they never see any way to their projected good but
by the road of some evil. Their imagination is not fatigued with the
contemplation of human suffering through the wild waste of centuries
added to centuries of misery and desolation. Their humanity is at
their horizon--and, like the horizon, it always flies before them. The
geometricians and the chemists bring the one from the dry bones of their
diagrams, and the other from the soot of their furnaces, dispositions
that make them worse than indifferent about those feelings and habitudes
which are the supports of the moral world. Ambition is come upon
them suddenly; they are intoxicated with it, and it has rendered them
fearless of the danger which may from thence arise to others or to
themselves. These philosophers consider men in their experiments no more
than they do mice in an air-pump, or in a recipient of mephitic gas.
Whatever his grace may think of himself, they look upon him, and
everything that belongs to him, with no more regard than they do upon
the whiskers of that little long-tailed animal, that has been long
the game of the grave, demure, insidious, spring-nailed, velvet-pawed,
green-eyed philosophers, whether going upon two legs or upon four.