INTELLECTUAL RESPONSIBILITY AND THE POLITICAL SPIRIT.
We have been considering the position of those who would fain divide the
community into two great castes; the one of thoughtful and instructed
persons using their minds freely, but guarding their conclusions in
strict reserve; the other of the illiterate or unreflecting, who should
have certain opinions and practices taught them, not because they are
true or are really what their votaries are made to believe them to be,
but because the intellectual superiors of the community think the
inculcation of such a belief useful in all cases save their own. Nor is
this a mere theory. On the contrary, it is a fair description of an
existing state of things. We have the old _disciplina arcani_ among us
in as full force as in the primitive church, but with an all-important
difference. The Christian fathers practised reserve for the sake of
leading the acolyte the more surely to the fulness of truth. The modern
economiser keeps back his opinions, or dissembles the grounds of them,
for the sake of leaving his neighbours the more at their ease in the
peaceful sloughs of prejudice and superstition and low ideals. We quote
Saint Paul when he talked of making himself all things to all men, and
of becoming to the Jews a Jew, and as without the Law to the heathen.
But then we do so with a view to justifying ourselves for leaving the
Jew to remain a Jew, and the heathen to remain heathen. We imitate the
same apostle in accepting old time-worn altars dedicated to the Unknown
God. We forget that he made the ancient symbol the starting-point of a
revolutionised doctrine. There is, as anybody can see, a whole world of
difference between the reserve of sagacious apostleship, on the one
hand, dealing tenderly with scruple and tearfulness and fine sensibility
of conscience, and the reserve of intellectual cowardice on the other
hand, dealing hypocritically with narrow minds in the supposed interests
of social peace and quietness. The old _disciplina arcani_ signified
the disclosure of a little light with a view to the disclosure of more.
The new means the dissimulation of truth with a view to the perpetuation
of error. Consider the difference between these two fashions of
compromise, in their effects upon the mind and character of the person
compromising. The one is fully compatible with fervour and hopefulness
and devotion to great causes. The other stamps a man with artifice, and
hinders the free eagerness of his vision, and wraps him about with
mediocrity,--not always of understanding, but that still worse thing,
mediocrity of aspiration and purpose.
The coarsest and most revolting shape which the doctrine of conformity
can assume, and its degrading consequences to the character of the
conformer, may be conveniently illustrated by a passage in the life of
Hume. He looked at things in a more practical manner than would find
favour with the sentimental champions of compromise in nearer times.
There is a well-known letter of Hume's, in which he recommends a young
man to become a clergyman, on the ground that it was very hard to got
any tolerable civil employment, and that as Lord Bute was then all
powerful, his friend would be certain of preferment. In answer to the
young man's scruples as to the Articles and the rest, Hume says:--
'It is putting too great a respect on the vulgar and their superstitions
to pique one's self on sincerity with regard to them. If the thing were
worthy of being treated gravely, I should tell him [the young man] that
the Pythian oracle with the approbation of Xenophon advised every one to
worship the gods--[Greek: nhomô pholeôs]. I wish it were still in my
power to be a hypocrite in this particular. The common duties of society
usually require it; and the ecclesiastical profession only adds a little
more to an innocent dissimulation, or rather simulation, without which
it is impossible to pass through the world.'[13]
This is a singularly straightforward way of stating a view which
silently influences a much greater number of men than it is pleasant to
think of. They would shrink from throwing their conduct into so gross a
formula. They will lift up their hands at this quotation, so strangely
blind are we to the hiding-places of our own hearts, even when others
flash upon them the terrible illumination that comes of calling conduct
and motives by plain names. Now it is not merely the moral improbity of
these cases which revolts us--the improbity of making in solemn form a
number of false statements for the sake of earning a livelihood; of
saying in order to get money or social position that you accept a number
of propositions which in fact you utterly reject; of declaring expressly
that you trust you are inwardly moved to take upon you this office and
ministration by the Holy Ghost, when the real motive is a desire not to
miss the chance of making something out of the Earl of Bute. This side
of such dissimulation is shocking enough. And it is not any more
shocking to the most devout believer than it is to people who doubt
whether there be any Holy Ghost or not. Those who no longer place their
highest faith in powers above and beyond men, are for that very reason
more deeply interested than others in cherishing the integrity and
worthiness of man himself. Apart, however, from the immorality of such
reasoned hypocrisy, which no man with a particle of honesty will
attempt to blink, there is the intellectual improbity which it brings in
its train, the infidelity to truth, the disloyalty to one's own
intelligence. Gifts of understanding are numbed and enfeebled in a man,
who has once played such a trick with his own conscience as to persuade
himself that, because the vulgar are superstitious, it is right for the
learned to earn money by turning themselves into the ministers and
accomplices of superstition. If he is clever enough to see through the
vulgar and their beliefs, he is tolerably sure to be clever enough from
time to time and in his better moments to see through himself. He begins
to suspect himself of being an impostor. That suspicion gradually unmans
him when he comes to use his mind in the sphere of his own
enlightenment. One of really superior power cannot escape these better
moments and the remorse that they bring. As he advances in life, as his
powers ought to be coming to fuller maturity and his intellectual
productiveness to its prime, just in the same degree the increasing
seriousness of life multiplies such moments and deepens their remorse,
and so the light of intellectual promise slowly goes out in impotent
endeavour, or else in taking comfort that much goods are laid up, or,
what is deadliest of all, in a soulless cynicism.
We do not find out until it is too late that the intellect too, at least
where it is capable of being exercised on the higher objects, has its
sensitiveness. It loses its colour and potency and finer fragrance in an
atmosphere of mean purpose and low conception of the sacredness of fact
and reality. Who has not observed inferior original power achieving
greater results even in the intellectual field itself, where the
superior understanding happens to have been unequally yoked with a
self-seeking character, over scenting the expedient? If Hume had been in
the early productive part of his life the hypocrite which he wished it
were in his power to show himself in its latter part, we may be
tolerably sure that European philosophy would have missed one of its
foremost figures. It has been often said that he who begins life by
stifling his convictions is in a fair way for ending it without any
convictions to stifle. We may, perhaps, add that he who sets out with
the notion that the difference between truth and falsehood is a thing of
no concern to the vulgar, is very likely sooner or later to come to the
kindred notion that it is not a thing of any supreme concern to himself.
Let thus much have been said as to those who deliberately and knowingly
sell their intellectual birthright for a mess of pottage, making a
brazen compromise with what they hold despicable, lest they should have
to win their bread honourably. Men need to expend no declamatory
indignation upon them. They have a hell of their own; words can add no
bitterness to it. It is no light thing to have secured a livelihood on
condition of going through life masked and gagged. To be compelled, week
after week, and year after year, to recite the symbols of ancient faith
and lift up his voice in the echoes of old hopes, with the blighting
thought in his soul that the faith is a lie, and the hope no more than
the folly of the crowd; to read hundreds of times in a twelvemonth with
solemn unction as the inspired word of the Supreme what to him are
meaningless as the Abracadabras of the conjuror in a booth; to go on to
the end of his days administering to simple folk holy rites of
commemoration and solace, when he has in his mind at each phrase what
dupes are those simple folk and how wearisomely counterfeit their rites:
and to know through all that this is really to be the one business of
his prostituted life, that so dreary and hateful a piece of play-acting
will make the desperate retrospect of his last hours--of a truth here is
the very [Greek: bdhelygma tês erêmhôseôs], the abomination of
desolation of the human spirit indeed.
No one will suppose that this is designed for the normal type of priest.
But it is well to study tendencies in their extreme catastrophe. This is
only the catastrophe, in one of its many shapes, of the fatal doctrine
that money, position, power, philanthropy, or any of the thousand
seductive masks of the pseudo-expedient, may carry a man away from love
of truth and yet leave him internally unharmed. The depravation that
follows the trucking for money of intellectual freedom and self-respect,
attends in its degree each other departure from disinterested following
of truth, and each other substitution of convenience, whether public or
private, in its place. And both parties to such a compromise are losers.
The world which offers gifts and tacitly undertakes to ask no questions
as to the real state of the timeserver's inner mind, loses no less than
the timeserver himself who receives the gifts and promises to hold his
peace. It is as though a society placed penalties on mechanical
inventions and the exploration of new material resources, and offered
bounties for the steadiest adherence to all ancient processes in culture
and production. The injury to wealth in the one case would not be any
deeper than the injury to morality is in the other.
To pass on to less sinister forms of this abnegation of intellectual
responsibility. In the opening sentences of the first chapter we spoke
of a wise suspense in forming opinions, a wise reserve in expressing
them, and a wise tardiness in trying to realise them. Thus we meant to
mark out the three independent provinces of compromise, each of them
being the subject of considerations that either do not apply at all to
the other two, or else apply in a different degree. Disingenuousness or
self-illusion, arising from a depressing deference to the existing state
of things, or to what is immediately practicable, or to what other
people would think of us if they knew our thoughts, is the result of
compromising truth in the matter of forming and holding opinions.
Secondly, positive simulation is what comes of an unlawful willingness
to compromise in the matter of avowing and publishing them. Finally,
pusillanimity or want of faith is the vice that belongs to unlawful
compromise in the department of action and realisation. This is not
merely a division arranged for convenience of discussion. It goes to the
root of conduct and character, and is the key to the present mood of our
society. It is always a hardy thing to attempt to throw a complex matter
into very simple form, but we should say that the want of energy and
definiteness in contemporary opinions, of which we first complained, is
due mainly to the following notion; that if a subject is not ripe for
practical treatment, you and I are therefore entirely relieved from the
duty of having clear ideas about it. If the majority cling to an
opinion, why should we ask whether that is the sound and right opinion
or the reverse? Now this notion, which springs from a confusion of the
three fields of compromise with one another, quietly reigns almost
without dispute. The devotion to the practical aspect of truth is in
such excess, as to make people habitually deny that it can be worth
while to form an opinion, when it happens at the moment to be incapable
of realisation, for the reason that there is no direct prospect of
inducing a sufficient number of persons to share it. 'We are quite
willing to think that your view is the right one, and would produce all
the improvements for which you hope; but then there is not the smallest
chance of persuading the only persons able to carry out such a view; why
therefore discuss it?' No talk is more familiar to us than this. As if
the mere possibility of the view being a right one did not obviously
entitle it to discussion; discussion being the only process by which
people are likely to be induced to accept it, or else to find good
grounds for finally dismissing it.
It is precisely because we believe that opinion, and nothing but
opinion, can effect great permanent changes, that we ought to be
careful to keep this most potent force honest, wholesome, fearless, and
independent. Take the political field. Politicians and newspapers almost
systematically refuse to talk about a new idea, which is not capable of
being at once embodied in a bill, and receiving the royal assent before
the following August. There is something rather contemptible, seen from
the ordinary standards of intellectual integrity, in the position of a
minister who waits to make up his mind whether a given measure, say the
disestablishment of the Irish Church, is in itself and on the merits
desirable, until the official who runs diligently up and down the
backstairs of the party, tells him that the measure is practicable and
required in the interests of the band. On the one hand, a leader is
lavishly panegyrised for his highmindedness, in suffering himself to be
driven into his convictions by his party. On the other, a party is
extolled for its political tact, in suffering itself to be forced out of
its convictions by its leader. It is hard to decide which is the more
discreditable and demoralising sight. The education of chiefs by
followers, and of followers by chiefs, into the abandonment in a month
of the traditions of centuries or the principles of a lifetime may
conduce to the rapid and easy working of the machine. It certainly marks
a triumph of the political spirit which the author of _The Prince_ might
have admired. It is assuredly mortal to habits of intellectual
self-respect in the society which allows itself to be amused by the
cajolery and legerdemain and self-sophistication of its rulers.
Of course there are excellent reasons why a statesman immersed in the
actual conduct of affairs, should confine his attention to the work
which his hands find to do. But the fact that leading statesmen are of
necessity so absorbed in the tasks of the hour furnishes all the better
reason why as many other people as possible should busy themselves in
helping to prepare opinion for the practical application of unfamiliar
but weighty and promising suggestions, by constant and ready discussion
of them upon their merits. As a matter of fact it is not the men most
occupied who are usually most deaf to new ideas. It is the loungers of
politics, the quidnuncs, gossips, bustling idlers, who are most
industrious in stifling discussion by protests against the waste of
time and the loss of force involved in talking about proposals which are
not exactly ready to be voted on. As it is, everybody knows that
questions are inadequately discussed, or often not discussed at all, on
the ground that the time is not yet come for their solution. Then when
some unforeseen perturbation, or the natural course of things, forces on
the time for their resolution, they are settled in a slovenly,
imperfect, and often downright vicious manner, from the fact that
opinion has not been prepared for solving them in an efficient and
perfect manner. The so-called settlement of the question of national
education is the most recent and most deplorable illustration of what
comes of refusing to examine ideas alleged to be impracticable. Perhaps
we may venture to prophesy that the disendowment of the national church
will supply the next illustration on an imposing scale. Gratuitous
primary instruction, and the redistribution of electoral power, are
other matters of signal importance, which comparatively few men will
consent to discuss seriously and patiently, and for our indifference to
which we shall one day surely smart. A judicious and cool writer has
said that 'an opinion gravely professed by a man of sense and education
demands always respectful consideration--demands and actually receives
it from those whose own sense and education give them a correlative
right; and whoever offends against this sort of courtesy may fairly be
deemed to have forfeited the privileges it secures.'[14] That is the
least part of the matter. The serious mischief is the eventual
miscarriage and loss and prodigal waste of good ideas.
The evil of which we have been speaking comes of not seeing the great
truth, that it is worth while to take pains to find out the best way of
doing a given task, even if you have strong grounds for suspecting that
it will ultimately be done in a worse way. And so also in spheres of
thought away from the political sphere, it is worth while 'to scorn
delights and live laborious days' in order to make as sure as we can of
having the best opinion, even if we know that this opinion has an
infinitely small chance of being speedily or ever accepted by the
majority, or by anybody but ourselves. Truth and wisdom have to bide
their time, and then take their chance after all. The most that the
individual can do is to seek them for himself, even if he seek alone.
And if it is the most, it is also the least. Yet in our present mood we
seem not to feel this. We misunderstand the considerations which should
rightly lead us in practice to surrender some of what we desire, in
order to secure the rest; and rightly make us acquiesce in a second-best
course of action, in order to avoid stagnation or retrogression. We
misunderstand all this, and go on to suppose that there are the same
grounds why we should in our own minds acquiesce in second-best
opinions; why we should mix a little alloy of conventional expression
with the too fine ore of conviction; why we should adopt beliefs that we
suspect in our hearts to be of more than equivocal authenticity, but
into whose antecedents we do not greatly care to inquire, because they
stand so well with the general public. This is compromise or economy or
management of the first of the three kinds of which we are talking. It
is economy applied to the formation of opinion; compromise or management
in making up one's mind.
The lawfulness or expediency of it turns mainly, as with the other two
kinds of compromise, upon the relative rights of the majority and the
minority, and upon the respect which is owing from the latter to the
former. It is a very easy thing for people endowed with the fanatical
temperament, or demoralised by the habit of looking at society
exclusively from the juridical point of view, to insist that no respect
at all, except the respect that arises from being too weak to have your
own way, is due from either to the other. This shallow and mischievous
notion rests either on a misinterpretation of the experience of
civilised societies, or else on nothing more creditable than an
arbitrary and unreflecting temper. Those who have thought most carefully
and disinterestedly about the matter, are agreed that in advanced
societies the expedient course is that no portion of the community
should insist on imposing its own will upon any other portion, except in
matters which are vitally connected with the maintenance of the social
union. The question where this vital connection begins is open to much
discussion. The line defining the sphere of legitimate interference may
be drawn variously, whether at self-regarding acts, or in some other
condition and element of conduct. Wherever this line may be best taken,
not only abstract speculation, but the practical and spontaneous tact of
the world, has decided that there are limits, alike in the interest of
majority and minority, to the rights of either to disturb the other. In
other words, it is expedient in certain affairs that the will of the
majority should be absolutely binding, while in affairs of a different
order it should count for nothing, or as nearly nothing, as the sociable
dependence of a man on his fellows will permit.
Our thesis is this. In the positive endeavour to realise an opinion, to
convert a theory into practice, it may be, and very often is, highly
expedient to defer to the prejudices of the majority, to move very
slowly, to bow to the conditions of the _status quo_, to practise the
very utmost sobriety, self-restraint, and conciliatoriness. The mere
expression of opinion, in the next place, the avowal of dissent from
received notions, the refusal to conform to language which implies the
acceptance of such notions,--this rests on a different footing. Here
the reasons for respecting the wishes and sentiments of the majority are
far less strong, though, as we shall presently see, such reasons
certainly exist, and will weigh with all well-considering men. Finally,
in the formation of an opinion as to the abstract preferableness of one
course of action over another, or as to the truth or falsehood or right
significance of a proposition, the fact that the majority of one's
contemporaries lean in the other direction is naught, and no more than
dust in the balance. In making up our minds as to what would be the
wisest line of policy if it were practicable, we have nothing to do with
the circumstance that it is not practicable. And in settling with
ourselves whether propositions purporting to state matters of fact are
trim or not, we have to consider how far they are conformable to the
evidence. We have nothing to do with the comfort and solace which they
would be likely to bring to others or ourselves, if they were taken as
true.
A nominal assent to this truth will be instantly given even by those who
in practice systematically disregard it. The difficulty of transforming
that nominal assent into a reality is enormous in such a community as
ours. Of all societies since the Roman Republic, and not even excepting
the Roman Republic, England has been the most emphatically and
essentially political. She has passed through military phases and
through religious phases, but they have been transitory, and the great
central stream of national life has flowed in political channels. The
political life has been stronger than any other, deeper, wider, more
persistent, more successful. The wars which built up our far-spreading
empire were not waged with designs of military conquest; they were
mostly wars for a market. The great spiritual emancipation of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries figures in our history partly as an
accident, partly as an intrigue, partly as a raid of nobles in search of
spoil. It was hardly until the reformed doctrine became associated with
analogous ideas and corresponding precepts in government, that people
felt at home with it, and became really interested in it.
One great tap-root of our national increase has been the growth of
self-government, or government by deliberative bodies, representing
opposed principles and conflicting interests. With the system of
self-government has grown the habit--not of tolerance precisely, for
Englishmen when in earnest are as little in love with tolerance as
Frenchmen or any other people, but--of giving way to the will of the
majority, so long as they remain a majority. This has come to pass for
the simple reason that, on any other terms, the participation of large
numbers of people in the control and arrangement of public affairs
immediately becomes unworkable. The gradual concentration of power in
the hands of a supreme deliberative body, the active share of so many
thousands of persons in choosing and controlling its members, the close
attention with which the proceedings of parliament are followed and
watched, the kind of dignity that has been lent to parliamentary methods
by the great importance of the transactions, have all tended in the same
direction. They have all helped both to fix our strongest and most
constant interests upon politics, and to ingrain the mental habits
proper to politics, far more deeply than any other, into our general
constitution and inmost character.
Thus the political spirit has grown to be the strongest element in our
national life; the dominant force, extending its influence over all our
ways of thinking in matters that have least to do with politics, or even
nothing at all to do with them. There has thus been engendered among us
the real sense of political responsibility. In a corresponding degree
has been discouraged, what it is the object of the present chapter to
urge, the sense of intellectual responsibility. If it were inevitable
that one of these two should always enfeeble or exclude the other, if
the price of the mental alacrity and open-mindedness of the age of
Pericles must always be paid in the political incompetence of the age of
Demosthenes, it would be hard to settle which quality ought to be most
eagerly encouraged by those who have most to do with the spiritual
direction of a community. No doubt the tone of a long-enduring and
imperial society, such as Rome was, must be conservative, drastic,
positive, hostile to the death to every speculative novelty. But then,
after all, the permanence of Roman power was only valuable to mankind
because it ensured the spread of certain civilising ideas. And these
ideas had originated among people so characteristically devoid of the
sovereign faculty of political coherency as were the Greeks and the
Jews. In the Greeks, it is true, we find not only ideas of the highest
speculative fertility, but actual political institutions. Still we
should hardly point to Greek history for the most favourable examples of
their stable working. Practically and as a matter of history, a society
is seldom at the same time successfully energetic both in temporals and
spirituals; seldom prosperous alike in seeking abstract truth and
nursing the political spirit. There is a decisive preponderance in one
direction or the other, and the equal balance between free and active
thinking, and coherent practical energy in a community, seems too hard
to sustain. The vast military and political strength of Germany, for
instance, did not exist, and was scarcely anticipated in men's minds,
during the time of her most strenuous passion for abstract truth and
deeper learning and new criticism. In France never was political and
national interest so debilitated, so extinct, as it was during the reign
of Lewis the Fifteenth: her intellectual interest was never so vivid,
so fruitful, or so widely felt.
Yet it is at least well, and more than that, it is an indispensable
condition of social wellbeing, that the divorce between political
responsibility and intellectual responsibility, between respect for what
is instantly practicable and search after what is only important in
thought, should not be too complete and universal. Even if there were no
other objection, the undisputed predominance of the political spirit has
a plain tendency to limit the subjects in which the men animated by it
can take a real interest. All matters fall out of sight, or at least
fall into a secondary place, which do not bear more or less directly and
patently upon the material and structural welfare of the community. In
this way the members of the community miss the most bracing, widening,
and elevated of the whole range of influences that create great
characters. First, they lose sincere concern about the larger questions
which the human mind has raised up for itself. Second, they lose a
fearless desire to reach the true answers to them, or if no certain
answers should prove to be within reach, then at any rate to be
satisfied on good grounds that this is so. Such questions are not
immediately discerned by commonplace minds to be of social import.
Consequently they, and all else that is not obviously connected with the
machinery of society, give way in the public consideration to what is so
connected with it, in a manner that cannot be mistaken.
Again, even minds that are not commonplace are affected for the worse by
the same spirit. They are aware of the existence of the great
speculative subjects and of their importance, but the pressure of the
political spirit on such men makes them afraid of the conclusions to
which free inquiry might bring them. Accordingly they abstain from
inquiry, and dread nothing so much as making up their minds. They see
reasons for thinking that, if they applied themselves seriously to the
formation of true opinions in this or that department, they would come
to conclusions which, though likely to make their way in the course of
some centuries, are wholly unpopular now, and which might ruin the
influence of anybody suspected of accepting, or even of so much as
leaning towards, them. Life, they reflect, is short; missionaries do
not pass for a very agreeable class, nor martyrs for a very sensible
class; one can only do a trifling amount of good in the world, at best;
it is moral suicide to throw away any chance of achieving even that
trifle; and therefore it is best not only not to express, but not to
take the trouble to acquire, right views in this quarter or that, and to
draw clear away from such or such a region of thought, for the sake of
keeping peace on earth and superficial good will among men.
It would be too harsh to stigmatise such a train of thought as
self-seeking and hypocritical. It is the natural product of the
political spirit, which is incessantly thinking of present consequences
and the immediately feasible. There is nothing in the mere dread of
losing it, to hinder influence from being well employed, so far as it
goes. But one can hardly overrate the ill consequences of this
particular kind of management, this unspoken bargaining with the little
circle of his fellows which constitutes the world of a man. If he may
retain his place among them as preacher or teacher, he is willing to
forego his birthright of free explanation; he consents to be blind to
the duty which attaches to every intelligent man of having some clear
ideas, even though only provisional ones, upon the greatest subjects of
human interest, and of deliberately preferring these, whatever they may
be, to their opposites. Either an individual or a community is fatally
dwarfed by any such limitation of the field in which one is free to use
his mind. For it is a limitation, not prescribed by absorption in one
set of subjects rather than another, nor by insufficient preparation for
the discussion of certain subjects, nor by indolence nor incuriousness,
but solely by apprehension of the conclusions to which such use of the
mind might bring the too courageous seeker. If there were no other ill
effect, this kind of limitation would at least have the radical
disadvantage of dulling the edge of responsibility, of deadening the
sharp sense of personal answerableness either to a God, or to society,
or to a man's own conscience and intellectual self-respect.
How momentous a disadvantage this is, we can best know by contemplating
the characters which have sometimes lighted up the old times. Men were
then devoutly persuaded that their eternal salvation depended on their
having true beliefs. Any slackness in finding out which beliefs are the
true ones would have to be answered for before the throne of Almighty
God, at the sure risk and peril of everlasting damnation. To what
quarter in the large historic firmament can we turn our eyes with such
certainty of being stirred and elevated, of thinking better of human
life and the worth of those who have been most deeply penetrated by its
seriousness, as to the annals of the intrepid spirits whom the
protestant doctrine of indefeasible personal responsibility brought to
the front in Germany in the sixteenth century, and in England and
Scotland in the seventeenth? It is not their fanaticism, still less is
it their theology, which makes the great Puritan chiefs of England and
the stern Covenanters of Scotland so heroic in our sight. It is the fact
that they sought truth and ensued it, not thinking of the practicable
nor cautiously counting majorities and minorities, but each man
pondering and searching so 'as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye.'
It is no adequate answer to urge that this awful consciousness of a
divine presence and supervision has ceased to be the living fact it once
was. That partly explains, but it certainly does not justify, our
present lassitude. For the ever-wakeful eye of celestial power is not
the only conceivable stimulus to responsibility. To pass from those grim
heroes of protestantism to the French philosophers of the last century
is a wide leap in a hundred respects, yet they too were pricked by the
oestrus of intellectual responsibility. Their doctrine was dismally
insufficient, and sometimes, as the present writer has often pointed
out, it was directly vicious. Their daily lives were surrounded by much
shabbiness and many meannesses. But, after all, no temptation and no
menace, no pains or penalties for thinking about certain subjects, and
no rewards for turning to think about something else, could divert such
men as Voltaire and Diderot from their alert and strenuous search after
such truth as could be vouchsafed to their imperfect lights. A
catastrophe followed, it is true, but the misfortunes which attended it
were due more to the champions of tradition and authority than to the
soldiers of emancipation. Even in the case of the latter, they were due
to an inadequate doctrine, and not at all either to their sense of the
necessity of free speculation and inquiry, or to the intrepidity with
which they obeyed the promptings of that ennobling sense.
Perhaps the latest attempt of a considerable kind to suppress the
political spirit in non-political concerns was the famous movement which
had its birth a generation ago among the gray quadrangles and ancient
gardens of Oxford, 'the sweet city with her dreaming spires,' where
there has ever been so much detachment from the world, alongside of the
coarsest and fiercest hunt after the grosser prizes of the world. No one
has much less sympathy with the direction of the tractarian revival than
the present writer, in whose Oxford days the star of Newman had set, and
the sun of Mill had risen in its stead. And it is needful to distinguish
the fervid and strong spirits with whom the revival began from the
mimics of our later day. No doubt the mere occasion of tractarianism was
political. Its leaders were alarmed at the designs imputed to the newly
reformed parliament of disestablishing the Anglican Church. They asked
themselves the question, which I will put in their own words (_Tract_
i.)--'Should the government of the country so far forget their God as to
cut off the Church, to deprive it of its temporal honours and substance,
on what will you rest the claims to respect and attention which you make
upon your flock? In answering this question they speedily found
themselves, as might have been expected, at the opposite pole of thought
from things political. The whole strength of their appeal to members of
the Church lay in men's weariness of the high and dry optimism, which
presents the existing order of things as the noblest possible, and the
undisturbed way of the majority as the way of salvation. Apostolical
succession and Sacramentalism may not have been in themselves
progressive ideas. The spirit which welcomed them had at least the
virtue of taking away from Caesar the things that are not Caesar's.
Glaring as were the intellectual faults of the Oxford movement, it was
at any rate a recognition in a very forcible way of the doctrine that
spiritual matters are not to be settled by the dicta of a political
council. It acknowledged that a man is answerable at his own peril for
having found or lost the truth. It was a warning that he must reckon
with a judge who will not account the _status quo_, nor the convenience
of a cabinet, a good plea for indolent acquiescence in theological
error. It ended, in the case of its most vigorous champions, in a final
and deliberate putting out of the eyes of the understanding. The last
act of assertion of personal responsibility was a headlong acceptance of
the responsibility of tradition and the Church. This was deplorable
enough. But apart from other advantages incidental to the tractarian
movement, such as the attention which it was the means of drawing to
history and the organic connection between present and past, it had, we
repeat, the merit of being an effective protest against what may be
called the House of Commons' view of human life--a view excellent in its
place, but most blighting and dwarfing out of it. It was, what every
sincere uprising of the better spirit in men and women must always be,
an effective protest against the leaden tyranny of the man of the world
and the so-called practical person. The man of the world despises
catholics for taking their religious opinions on trust and being the
slaves of tradition. As if he had himself formed his own most important
opinions either in religion or anything else. He laughs at them for
their superstitious awe of the Church. As if his own inward awe of the
Greater Number were one whit less of a superstition. He mocks their
deference for the past. As if his own absorbing deference to the present
were one tittle better bottomed or a jot more respectable. The modern
emancipation will profit us very little if the _status quo_ is to be
fastened round our necks with the despotic authority of a heavenly
dispensation, and if in the stead of ancient Scriptures we are to accept
the plenary inspiration of Majorities.
It may be urged that if, as it is the object of the present chapter to
state, there are opinions which a man should form for himself, and which
it may yet be expedient that he should not only be slow to attempt to
realise in practical life, but sometimes even slow to express,--then we
are demanding from him the performance of a troublesome duty, while we
are taking from him the only motives which could really induce him to
perform it. If, it may be asked, I am not to carry my notions into
practice, nor try to induce others to accept them, nor even boldly
publish them, why in the name of all economy of force should I take so
much pains in forming opinions which are, after all, on these conditions
so very likely to come to naught? The answer to this is that opinions do
not come to naught, even if the man who holds them should never think
fit to publish them. For one thing, as we shall see in our next
division, the conditions which make against frank declaration of our
convictions are of rare occurrence. And, apart from this, convictions
may well exert a most decisive influence over our conduct, even if
reasons exist, or seem to exist, for not pressing them on others. Though
themselves invisible to the outer world, they may yet operate with
magnetic force both upon other parts of our belief which the outer world
does see, and upon the whole of our dealings with it. Whether we are
good or bad, it is only a broken and incoherent fragment of our whole
personality that even those who are intimate with us, much less the
common world, can ever come into contact with. The important thing is
that the personality itself should be as little as possible broken,
incoherent, and fragmentary; that reasoned and consistent opinions
should back a firm will, and independent convictions inspire the
intellectual self-respect and strenuous self-possession which the
clamour of majorities and the silent yet ever-pressing force of the
_status quo_ are equally powerless to shake.
Character is doubtless of far more importance than mere intellectual
opinion. We only too often see highly rationalised convictions in
persons of weak purpose or low motives. But while fully recognising
this, and the sort of possible reality which lies at the root of such a
phrase as 'godless intellect' or 'intellectual devils'--though the
phrase has no reality when it is used by self-seeking politicians or
prelates--yet it is well to remember the very obvious truth that
opinions are at least an extremely important part of character. As it is
sometimes put, what we think has a prodigiously close connection with
what we are. The consciousness of having reflected seriously and
conclusively on important questions, whether social or spiritual,
augments dignity while it does not lessen humility. In this sense,
taking thought can and does add a cubit to our stature. Opinions which
we may not feel bound or even permitted to press on other people, are
not the less forces for being latent. They shape ideals, and it is
ideals that inspire conduct. They do this, though from afar, and though
he who possesses them may not presume to take the world into his
confidence. Finally, unless a man follows out ideas to their full
conclusion without fear what the conclusion may be, whether he thinks it
expedient to make his thought and its goal fully known or not, it is
impossible that he should acquire a commanding grasp of principles. And
a commanding grasp of principles, whether they are public or not, is at
the very root of coherency of character. It raises mediocrity near to a
level with the highest talents, if those talents are in company with a
disposition that allows the little prudences of the hour incessantly to
obscure the persistent laws of things. These persistencies, if a man
has once satisfied himself of their direction and mastered their
bearings and application, are just as cogent and valuable a guide to
conduct, whether he publishes them _ad urbem et orbem_, or esteems them
too strong meat for people who have, through indurated use and wont,
lost the courage of facing unexpected truths.
One conspicuous result of the failure to see that our opinions have
roots to them, independently of the feelings which either majorities or
other portions of the people around us may entertain about them, is that
neither political matters nor any other serious branches of opinion,
engage us in their loftiest or most deep-reaching forms. The advocate of
a given theory of government or society is so misled by a wrong
understanding of the practice of just and wise compromise in applying
it, as to forget the noblest and most inspiring shape which his theory
can be made to assume. It is the worst of political blunders to insist
on carrying an ideal set of principles into execution, where others have
rights of dissent, and those others persons whose assent is as
indispensable to success, as it is impossible to attain. But to be
afraid or ashamed of holding such an ideal set of principles in one's
mind in their highest and most abstract expression, does more than any
one other cause to stunt or petrify those elements in character to which
life should owe most of its savour.
If a man happens to be a Conservative, for instance, it is pitiful that
he should think so much more of what other people on his side or the
other think, than of the widest and highest of the ideas on which a
conservative philosophy of life and human society reposes. Such ideas
are these,--that the social union is the express creation and ordering
of the Deity: that its movements follow his mysterious and fixed
dispensation: that the church and the state are convertible terms, and
each citizen of the latter is an incorporated member of the former: that
conscience, if perversely and misguidedly self-asserting, has no rights
against the decrees of the conscience of the nation: that it is the most
detestable of crimes to perturb the pacific order of society either by
active agitation or speculative restlessness; that descent from a long
line of ancestors in great station adds an element of dignity to life,
and imposes many high obligations. We do not say that these and the
rest of the propositions which make up the true theoretic basis of a
conservative creed, are proper for the hustings, or expedient in an
election address or a speech in parliament. We do say that if these high
and not unintelligible principles, which alone can give to reactionary
professions any worth or significance, were present in the minds of men
who speak reactionary language, the country would be spared the ignominy
of seeing certain real truths of society degraded at the hands of
aristocratic adventurers and plutocratic parasites into some miserable
process of 'dishing Whigs.'
This impoverishment of aims and depravation of principles by the triumph
of the political spirit outside of its proper sphere, cannot
unfortunately be restricted to any one set of people in the state. It is
something in the very atmosphere, which no sanitary cordon can limit.
Liberalism, too, would be something more generous, more attractive--yes,
and more practically effective, if its professors and champions could
allow their sense of what is feasible to be refreshed and widened by a
more free recognition, however private and undemonstrative, of the
theoretic ideas which give their social creed whatever life and
consistency it may have. Such ideas are these: That the conditions of
the social union are not a mystery, only to be touched by miracle, but
the results of explicable causes, and susceptible of constant
modification: that the thoughts of wise and patriotic men should be
perpetually turned towards the improvement of these conditions in every
direction: that contented acquiescence in the ordering that has come
down to us from the past is selfish and anti-social, because amid the
ceaseless change that is inevitable in a growing organism, the
institutions of the past demand progressive re-adaptations: that such
improvements are most likely to be secured in the greatest abundance by
limiting the sphere of authority, extending that of free individuality,
and steadily striving after the bestowal, so far as the nature of things
will ever permit it, of equality of opportunity: that while there is
dignity in ancestry, a modern society is only safe in proportion as it
summons capacity to its public counsels and enterprises; that such a
society to endure must progress: that progress on its political side
means more than anything else the substitution of Justice as a governing
idea, instead of Privilege, and that the best guarantee for justice in
public dealings is the participation in their own government of the
people most likely to suffer from injustice. This is not an exhaustive
account of the progressive doctrine, and we have here nothing to say as
to its soundness. We only submit that if those who use the watchwords of
Liberalism were to return upon its principles, instead of dwelling
exclusively on practical compromises, the tone of public life would be
immeasurably raised. The cause of social improvement would be less
systematically balked of the victories that are best worth gaining.
Progress would mean something more than mere entrances and exits on the
theatre of office. We should not see in the mass of parliamentary
candidates--and they are important people, because nearly every
Englishman with any ambition is a parliamentary candidate, actual or
potential--that grave anxiety, that sober rigour, that immense caution,
which are all so really laughable, because so many of those men are only
anxious lest they should make a mistake in finding out what the
majority of their constituents would like them to think; only rigorous
against those who are indiscreet enough to press a principle against the
beck of a whip or a wire-puller; and only very cautious not so much lest
their opinion should be wrong, as lest it should not pay.
Indolence and timidity have united to popularise among us a flaccid
latitudinarianism, which thinks itself a benign tolerance for the
opinions of others. It is in truth only a pretentious form of being
without settled opinions of our own, and without any desire to settle
them. No one can complain of the want of speculative activity at the
present time in a certain way. The air, at a certain social elevation,
is as full as it has ever been of ideas, theories, problems, possible
solutions, suggested questions, and proffered answers. But then they are
at large, without cohesion, and very apt to be the objects even in the
more instructed minds of not much more than dilettante interest. We see
in solution an immense number of notions, which people think it quite
unnecessary to precipitate in the form of convictions. We constantly
hear the age lauded for its tolerance, for its candour, for its openness
of mind, for the readiness with which a hearing is given to ideas that
forty years ago, or even less than that, would have excluded persons
suspected of holding them from decent society, and in fact did so
exclude them. Before, however, we congratulate ourselves too warmly on
this, let us be quite sure that we are not mistaking for tolerance what
is really nothing more creditable than indifference. These two attitudes
of mind, which are so vitally unlike in their real quality, are so hard
to distinguish in their outer seeming.
One is led to suspect that carelessness is the right name for what looks
like reasoned toleration, by such a line of consideration as the
following. It is justly said that at the bottom of all the great
discussions of modern society lie the two momentous questions, first
whether there is a God, and second whether the soul is immortal. In
other words, whether our fellow-creatures are the highest beings who
take an interest in us, or in whom we need take an interest; and, then,
whether life in this world is the only life of which we shall ever be
conscious. It is true of most people that when they are talking of
evolution, and the origin of species, and the experiential or
intuitional source of ideas, and the utilitarian or transcendental basis
of moral obligation, these are the questions which they really have in
their minds. Now, in spite of the scientific activity of the day, nobody
is likely to contend that men are pressed keenly in their souls by any
poignant stress of spiritual tribulation in the face of the two supreme
enigmas. Nobody will say that there is much of that striving and
wrestling and bitter agonising, which whole societies of men have felt
before now on questions of far less tremendous import. Ours, as has been
truly said, is 'a time of loud disputes and weak convictions,' In a
generation deeply impressed by a sense of intellectual responsibility
this could not be. As it is, even superior men are better pleased to
play about the height of these great arguments, to fly in busy
intellectual sport from side to side, from aspect to aspect, than they
are intent on resolving what it is, after all, that the discussion comes
to and to which solution, when everything has been said and heard, the
balance of truth really to incline. There are too many giggling
epigrams; people are too willing to look on collections of mutually
hostile opinions with the same kind of curiosity which they bestow on a
collection of mutually hostile beasts in a menagerie. They have very
faint predilections for one rather than another. If they were truly
alive to the duty of conclusiveness, or to the inexpressible magnitude
of the subjects which nominally occupy their minds, but really only
exercise their tongues, this elegant Pyrrhonism would be impossible, and
this light-hearted neutrality most unendurable.
Well has the illustrious Pascal said with reference to one of the two
great issues of the modern controversy:--'The immortality of the soul is
a thing that concerns us so closely and touches us so profoundly, that
one must have lost all feeling to be indifferent as to knowing how the
matter is. All our actions and all our thoughts must follow such
different paths, according as there are eternal goods to hope for or are
not, that it is impossible to take a step with sense and judgment,
without regulating it in view of this point, which ought to be our first
object.... I can have nothing but compassion for those who groan and
travail in this doubt with all sincerity, who look on it as the worst of
misfortunes, and who, sparing no pains to escape from it, make of this
search their chief and most serious employment.... But he who doubts and
searches not is at the same time a grievous wrongdoer, and a grievously
unfortunate man. If along with this he is tranquil and self-satisfied,
if he publishes his contentment to the world and plumes himself upon it,
and if it is this very state of doubt which he makes the subject of his
joy and vanity--I have no terms in which to describe so extravagant a
creature.'[15] Who, except a member of the school of extravagant
creatures themselves, would deny that Pascal's irritation is most
wholesome and righteous?
Perhaps in reply to this, we may be confronted by our own doctrine of
intellectual responsibility interpreted in a directly opposite sense. We
may be reminded of the long array of difficulties that interfere between
us and knowledge in that tremendous matter, and of objections that rise
in such perplexing force to an answer either one way or the other. And
finally we may be despatched with a eulogy of caution and a censure of
too great heat after certainty. The answer is that there is a kind of
Doubt not without search, but after and at the end of search, which is
not open to Pascal's just reproaches against the more ignoble and
frivolous kind. And this too has been described for us by a subtle
doctor of Pascal's communion. 'Are there pleasures of Doubt, as well as
of Inference and Assent? In one sense there are. Not indeed if doubt
means ignorance, uncertainty, or hopeless suspense; but there is a
certain grave acquiescence in ignorance, a recognition of our impotence
to solve momentous and urgent questions, which has a satisfaction of its
own. After high aspirations, after renewed endeavours, after bootless
toil, after long wanderings, after hope, effort, weariness, failure,
painfully alternating and recurring, it is an immense relief to the
exhausted mind to be able to say, "At length I know that I can know
nothing about anything." ... Ignorance remains the evil which it ever
was, but something of the peace of certitude is gained in knowing the
worst, and in having reconciled the mind to the endurance of it.'[16]
Precisely, and what one would say of our own age is that it will not
deliberately face this knowledge of the worst. So it misses the peace of
certitude, and not only its peace, but the strength and coherency that
follow strict acceptance of the worst, when the worst is after all the
best within reach.
Those who are in earnest when they blame too great haste after
certainty, do in reality mean us to embrace certainty, but in favour of
the vulgar opinions. They only see the prodigious difficulties of the
controversy when you do not incline to their own side in it. They only
panegyrise caution and the strictly provisional when they suspect that
intrepidity and love of the conclusive would lead them to unwelcome
shores. These persons, however, whether fortunately or unfortunately,
have no longer much influence over the most active part of the national
intelligence. Whether permanently or not, resolute orthodoxy, however
prosperous it may seem among many of the uncultivated rich, has lost its
hold upon thought. For thought has become dispersive, and the
centrifugal forces of the human mind, among those who think seriously,
have for the time become dominant and supreme. No one, I suppose,
imagines that the singular ecclesiastical revival which is now going on,
is accompanied by any revival of real and reasoned belief; or that the
opulent manufacturers who subscribe so generously for restored cathedral
fabrics and the like, have been moved by the apologetics of _Aids to
Faith_ and the Christian Evidence Society.
Obviously only three ways of dealing with the great problems of which we
have spoken are compatible with a strong and well-bottomed character. We
may affirm that there is a deity with definable attributes; and that
there is a conscious state and continued personality after the
dissolution of the body. Or we may deny. Or we may assure ourselves that
we have no faculties enabling us on good evidence either to deny or
affirm. Intellectual self-respect and all the qualities that are derived
from that, may well go with any one of these three courses, decisively
followed and consistently applied in framing a rule of life and a
settled scheme of its aims and motives. Why do we say that intellectual
self-respect is not vigorous, nor the sense of intellectual
responsibility and truthfulness and coherency quick and wakeful among
us? Because so many people, even among those who might be expected to
know better, insist on the futile attempt to reconcile all those
courses, instead of fixing on one and steadily abiding in it. They speak
as if they affirmed, and they act as if they denied, and in their hearts
they cherish a slovenly sort of suspicion that we can neither deny nor
affirm. It may be said that this comes to much the same thing as if they
had formally decided in the last or neutral sense. It is not so. This
illegitimate union of three contradictories fritters character away,
breaks it up into discordant parts, and dissolves into mercurial
fluidity that leavening sincerity and free and cheerful boldness, which
come of harmonious principles of faith and action, and without which men
can never walk as confident lovers of justice and truth.
Ambrose's famous saying, that 'it hath not pleased the Lord to give his
people salvation in dialectic,' has a profound meaning far beyond its
application to theology. It is deeply true that our ruling convictions
are less the product of ratiocination than of sympathy, imagination,
usage, tradition. But from this it does not follow that the reasoning
faculties are to be further discouraged. On the contrary, just because
the other elements are so strong that they can be trusted to take care
of themselves, it is expedient to give special countenance to the
intellectual habits, which alone can check and rectify the constantly
aberrating tendencies of sentiment on the one side, and custom on the
other. This remark brings us to another type, of whom it is not
irrelevant to speak shortly in this place. The consequences of the
strength of the political spirit are not all direct, nor does its
strength by any means spring solely from its indulgence to the less
respectable elements of character, such as languor, extreme pliableness,
superficiality. On the contrary, it has an indirect influence in
removing the only effective restraint on the excesses of some qualities
which, when duly directed and limited, are among the most precious parts
of our mental constitution. The political spirit is the great force in
throwing love of truth and accurate reasoning into a secondary place.
The evil does not stop here. This achievement has indirectly
countenanced the postponement of intellectual methods, and the
diminution of the sense of intellectual responsibility, by a school that
is anything rather than political.
Theology has borrowed, and coloured for her own use, the principles
which were first brought into vogue in politics. If in the one field it
is the fashion to consider convenience first and truth second, in the
other there is a corresponding fashion of placing truth second and
emotional comfort first. If there are some who compromise their real
opinions, or the chance of reaching truth, for the sake of gain, there
are far more who shrink from giving their intelligence free play, for
the sake of keeping undisturbed certain luxurious spiritual
sensibilities. This choice of emotional gratification before truth and
upright dealing with one's own understanding, creates a character that
is certainly far less unlovely than those who sacrifice their
intellectual integrity to more material convenience. The moral flaw is
less palpable and less gross. Yet here too there is the stain of
intellectual improbity, and it is perhaps all the more mischievous for
being partly hidden under the mien of spiritual exaltation.
There is in literature no more seductive illustration of this seductive
type than Rousseau's renowned character of the Savoyard
Vicar--penetrated with scepticism as to the attributes of the deity, the
meaning of the holy rites, the authenticity of the sacred documents; yet
full of reverence, and ever respecting in silence what he could neither
reject nor understand. 'The essential worship,' he says, 'is the worship
of the heart. God never rejects this homage, under whatever form it be
offered to him. In old days I used to say mass with the levity which in
time infects even the gravest things when we do them too often. Since
acquiring my new principles [of reverential scepticism] I celebrate it
with more veneration: I am overcome by the majesty of the Supreme Being,
by his presence, by the insufficiency of the human mind, which conceives
so ill what pertains to its author. When I approach the moment of
consecration, I collect myself for performing the act with all the
feelings required by the church and the majesty of the sacrament. I
strive to annihilate my reason before the Supreme Intelligence, saying,
Who art thou that thou shouldst measure infinite power?'[17]
The Savoyard Vicar is not imaginary. The acquiescence in indefinite
ideas for the sake of comforted emotions, and the abnegation of strong
convictions in order to make room for free and plenteous effusion, have
for us all the marks of a too familiar reality. Such a doctrine is an
everyday plea for self-deception, and a current justification for
illusion even among some of the finer spirits. They have persuaded
themselves not only that the life of the religious emotions is the
highest life, but that it is independent of the intellectual forms with
which history happens to have associated it. And so they refine and
sophisticate and make havoc with plain and honest interpretation, in
order to preserve a soft serenity of soul unperturbed.
Now, we are not at all concerned to dispute such positions as that
Feeling is the right starting-point of moral education; that in forming
character appeal should be to the heart rather than to the
understanding; that the only basis on which our faculties can be
harmoniously ordered is the preponderance of affection over reason.
These propositions open much grave and complex discussion, and they are
not to our present purpose. We only desire to state the evil of the
notion that a man is warranted in comforting himself with dogmas and
formularies, which he has first to empty of all definite, precise, and
clearly determinable significance, before he can get them out of the way
of his religious sensibilities. Whether Reason or Affection is to have
the empire in the society of the future, when Reason may possibly have
no more to discover for us in the region of morals and religion, and so
will have become _emeritus_ and taken a lower place, as of a tutor whose
services the human family, being now grown up, no longer
requires,--however this may be, it is at least certain that in the
meantime the spiritual life of man needs direction quite as much as it
needs impulse, and light quite as much as force. This direction and
light can only be safely procured by the free and vigorous use of the
intelligence. But the intelligence is not free in the presence of a
mortal fear lest its conclusions should trouble soft tranquillity of
spirit. There is always hope of a man so long as he dwells in the region
of the direct categorical proposition and the unambiguous term; so long
as he does not deny the rightly drawn conclusion after accepting the
major and minor premisses. This may seem a scanty virtue and very easy
grace. Yet experience shows it to be too hard of attainment for those
who tamper with disinterestedness of conviction, for the sake of
luxuriating in the softness of spiritual transport without interruption
from a syllogism. It is true that there are now and then in life as in
history noble and fair natures, that by the silent teaching and
unconscious example of their inborn purity, star-like constancy, and
great devotion, do carry the world about them to further heights of
living than can be attained by ratiocination. But these, the blameless
and loved saints of the earth, rise too rarely on our dull horizons to
make a rule for the world. The law of things is that they who tamper
with veracity, from whatever motive, are tampering with the vital force
of human progress. Our comfort and the delight of the religious
imagination are no better than forms of self-indulgence, when they are
secured at the cost of that love of truth on which, more than on
anything else, the increase of light and happiness among men must
depend. We have to fight and do lifelong battle against the forces of
darkness, and anything that turns the edge of reason blunts the surest
and most potent of our weapons.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 13: Burton's _Lift of Hume,_ ii. 186-188]
[Footnote 14: Isaac Taylor's _Natural History of Enthusiasm_, p. 226.]
[Footnote 15: _Pensées_, II. Art ii.]
[Footnote 16: Dr. Newman's _Grammar of Assent_, p. 201.]
[Footnote 17: _Emile_, bk. iv.]