or foes to one another according as the motives of ambition drive them.
These are the first principles of union and division amongst them. The
Protestant Powers of Europe have joined, in our days, to support and
aggrandise the House of Austria, as they did in the days of our
forefathers to defeat her designs and to reduce her power; and the most
Christian King of France has more than once joined his councils, and his
arms too, with the councils and arms of the most Mahometan Emperor of
Constantinople. But still there is, and there must continue, as long as
the influence of the Papal authority subsists in Europe, another general,
permanent, and invariable division of interests. The powers of earth,
like those of heaven, have two distinct motions. Each of them rolls in
his own political orb, but each of them is hurried at the same time round
the great vortex of his religion. If this general notion be just, apply
it to the present case. Whilst a Roman Catholic holds the rudder, how
can we expect to be steered in our proper course? His political interest
will certainly incline him to direct our first motion right, but his
mistaken religious interest will render him incapable of doing it
steadily.
As to the last, our domestic quiet; even whilst the Chevalier and those
of his race concealed their game, we should remain in the most unhappy
state which human nature is subject to, a state of doubt and suspense.
Our preservation would depend on making him the object of our eternal
jealousy, who, to render himself and his people happy, ought to be that
of our entire confidence.
Whilst the Pretender and his successors forbore to attack the religion
and liberty of the nation, we should remain in the condition of those
people who labour under a broken constitution, or who carry about them
some chronical distemper. They feel a little pain at every moment; or a
certain uneasiness, which is sometimes less tolerable than pain, hangs
continually on them, and they languish in the constant expectation of
dying perhaps in the severest torture.
But if the fear of hell should dissipate all other fears in the
Pretender’s mind, and carry him, which is frequently the effect of that
passion, to the most desperate undertakings; if among his successors a
man bold enough to make the attempt should arise, the condition of the
British nation would be still more deplorable. The attempt succeeding,
we should fall into tyranny; for a change of religion could never be
brought about by consent; and the same force that would be sufficient to
enslave our consciences, would be sufficient for all the other purposes
of arbitrary power. The attempt failing, we should fall into anarchy;
for there is no medium when disputes between a prince and his people are
arrived at a certain point; he must either be submitted to or deposed.
I have now laid before you even more than I intended to have said when I
took my pen, and I am persuaded that if these papers ever come to your
hands, they will enable you to cast up the account between party and me.
Till the time of the Queen’s death it stands, I believe, even between us.
The Tories distinguished me by their approbation and by the credit which
I had amongst them, and I endeavoured to distinguish myself in their
service, under the immediate weight of great discouragement and with the
not very distant prospect of great danger. Since that time the account
is not so even, and I dare appeal to any impartial person whether my side
in it be that of the debtor. As to the opinion of mankind in general,
and the judgment which posterity will pass on these matters, I am under
no great concern. “Suum cuique decus posteritas rependit.”
A LETTER TO ALEXANDER POPE.
DEAR SIR,—Since you have begun, at my request, the work which I have
wished long that you would undertake, it is but reasonable that I submit
to the task you impose upon me. The mere compliance with anything you
desire, is a pleasure to me. On the present occasion, however, this
compliance is a little interested; and that I may not assume more merit
with you than I really have, I will own that in performing this act of
friendship—for such you are willing to esteem it—the purity of my motive
is corrupted by some regard to my private utility. In short, I suspect
you to be guilty of a very friendly fraud, and to mean my service whilst
you seem to mean your own.
In leading me to discourse, as you have done often, and in pressing me to
write, as you do now, on certain subjects, you may propose to draw me
back to those trains of thought which are, above all others, worthy to
employ the human mind: and I thank you for it. They have been often
interrupted by the business and dissipations of the world, but they were
never so more grievously to me, nor less usefully to the public, than
since royal seduction prevailed on me to abandon the quiet and leisure of
the retreat I had chosen abroad, and to neglect the example of Rutilius,
for I might have imitated him in this at least, who fled further from his
country when he was invited home.
You have begun your ethic epistles in a masterly manner. You have copied
no other writer, nor will you, I think, be copied by any one. It is with
genius as it is with beauty; there are a thousand pretty things that
charm alike; but superior genius, like superior beauty, has always
something particular, something that belongs to itself alone. It is
always distinguishable, not only from those who have no claim to
excellence, but even from those who excel, when any such there are.
I am pleased, you may be sure, to find your satire turn, in the very
beginning of these epistles, against the principal cause—for such you
know that I think it—of all the errors, all the contradictions, and all
the disputes which have arisen among those who impose themselves on their
fellow-creatures for great masters, and almost sole proprietors of a gift
of God which is common to the whole species. This gift is reason; a
faculty, or rather an aggregate of faculties, that is bestowed in
different degrees; and not in the highest, certainly, on those who make
the highest pretensions to it. Let your satire chastise, and, if it be
possible, humble that pride, which is the fruitful parent of their vain
curiosity and bold presumption; which renders them dogmatical in the
midst of ignorance, and often sceptical in the midst of knowledge. The
man who is puffed up with this philosophical pride, whether divine or
theist, or atheist, deserves no more to be respected than one of those
trifling creatures who are conscious of little else than their animality,
and who stop as far short of the attainable perfections of their nature
as the other attempts to go beyond them. You will discover as many silly
affections, as much foppery and futility, as much inconsistency and low
artifice in one as in the other. I never met the mad woman at Brentford
decked out in old and new rags, and nice and fantastical in the manner of
wearing them, without reflecting on many of the profound scholars and
sublime philosophers of our own and of former ages.
You may expect some contradiction and some obloquy on the part of these
men, though you will have less to apprehend from their malice and
resentment than a writer in prose on the same subjects would have. You
will be safer in the generalities of poetry; and I know your precaution
enough to know that you will screen yourself in them against any direct
charge of heterodoxy. But the great clamour of all will be raised when
you descend lower, and let your Muse loose among the herd of mankind.
Then will those powers of dulness whom you have ridiculed into
immortality be called forth in one united phalanx against you. But why
do I talk of what may happen? You have experienced lately something more
than I prognosticate. Fools and knaves should be modest at least; they
should ask quarter of men of sense and virtue: and so they do till they
grow up to a majority, till a similitude of character assures them of the
protection of the great. But then vice and folly such as prevail in our
country, corrupt our manners, deform even social life, and contribute to
make us ridiculous as well as miserable, will claim respect for the sake
of the vicious and the foolish. It will be then no longer sufficient to
spare persons; for to draw even characters of imagination must become
criminal when the application of them to those of highest rank and
greatest power cannot fail to be made. You began to laugh at the
ridiculous taste or the no taste in gardening and building of some men
who are at great expense in both. What a clamour was raised instantly!
The name of Timon was applied to a noble person with double malice, to
make him ridiculous, and you, who lived in friendship with him, odious.
By the authority that employed itself to encourage this clamour, and by
the industry used to spread and support it, one would have thought that
you had directed your satire in that epistle to political subjects, and
had inveighed against those who impoverish, dishonour, and sell their
country, instead of making yourself inoffensively merry at the expense of
men who ruin none but themselves, and render none but themselves
ridiculous. What will the clamour be, and how will the same authority
foment it, when you proceed to lash, in other instances, our want of
elegance even in luxury, and our wild profusion, the source of insatiable
rapacity, and almost universal venality? My mind forebodes that the time
will come—and who knows how near it may be?—when other powers than those
of Grub Street may be drawn forth against you, and when vice and folly
may be avowedly sheltered behind a power instituted for better and
contrary purposes—for the punishment of one, and for the reformation of
both.
But, however this may be, pursue your task undauntedly, and whilst so
many others convert the noblest employments of human society into sordid
trades, let the generous Muse resume her ancient dignity, re-assert her
ancient prerogative, and instruct and reform, as well as amuse the world.
Let her give a new turn to the thoughts of men, raise new affections in
their minds, and determine in another and better manner the passions of
their hearts. Poets, they say, were the first philosophers and divines
in every country, and in ours, perhaps, the first institutions of
religion and civil policy were owing to our bards. Their task might be
hard, their merit was certainly great. But if they were to rise now from
the dead they would find the second task, if I mistake not, much harder
than the first, and confess it more easy to deal with ignorance than with
error. When societies are once established and Governments formed, men
flatter themselves that they proceed in cultivating the first rudiments
of civility, policy, religion, and learning. But they do not observe
that the private interests of many, the prejudices, affections, and
passions of all, have a large share in the work, and often the largest.
These put a sort of bias on the mind, which makes it decline from the
straight course; and the further these supposed improvements are carried,
the greater this declination grows, till men lose sight of primitive and
real nature, and have no other guide but custom, a second and a false
nature. The author of one is divine wisdom; of the other, human
imagination; and yet whenever the second stands in opposition to the
first, as it does most frequently, the second prevails. From hence it
happens that the most civilised nations are often guilty of injustice and
cruelty which the least civilised would abhor, and that many of the most
absurd opinions and doctrines which have been imposed in the Dark Ages of
ignorance continue to be the opinions and doctrines of ages enlightened
by philosophy and learning. “If I was a philosopher,” says Montaigne, “I
would naturalise art instead of artilising Nature.” The expression is
odd, but the sense is good, and what he recommends would be done if the
reasons that have been given did not stand in the way; if the
self-interest of some men, the madness of others, and the universal pride
of the human heart did not determine them to prefer error to truth and
authority to reason.
Whilst your Muse is employed to lash the vicious into repentance, or to
laugh the fools of the age into shame, and whilst she rises sometimes to
the noblest subjects of philosophical meditation, I shall throw upon
paper, for your satisfaction and for my own, some part at least of what I
have thought and said formerly on the last of these subjects, as well as
the reflections that they may suggest to me further in writing on them.
The strange situation I am in, and the melancholy state of public
affairs, take up much of my time; divide, or even dissipate, my thoughts;
and, which is worse, drag the mind down by perpetual interruptions from a
philosophical tone or temper to the drudgery of private and public
business. The last lies nearest my heart; and since I am once more
engaged in the service of my country, disarmed, gagged, and almost bound
as I am, I will not abandon it as long as the integrity and perseverance
of those who are under none of these disadvantages, and with whom I now
co-operate, make it reasonable for me to act the same part. Further than
this no shadow of duty obliges me to go. Plato ceased to act for the
Commonwealth when he ceased to persuade, and Solon laid down his arms
before the public magazine when Pisistratus grew too strong to be opposed
any longer with hopes of success.
Though my situation and my engagements are sufficiently known to you, I
choose to mention them on this occasion lest you should expect from me
anything more than I find myself able to perform whilst I am in them. It
has been said by many that they wanted time to make their discourses
shorter; and if this be a good excuse, as I think it may be often, I lay
in my claim to it. You must neither expect in what I am about to write
to you that brevity which might be expected in letters or essays, nor
that exactness of method, nor that fulness of the several parts which
they affect to observe who presume to write philosophical treatises. The
merit of brevity is relative to the manner and style in which any subject
is treated, as well as to the nature of it; for the same subject may be
sometimes treated very differently, and yet very properly, in both these
respects. Should the poet make syllogisms in verse, or pursue a long
process of reasoning in the didactic style, he would be sure to tire his
reader on the whole, like Lucretius, though he reasoned better than the
Roman, and put into some parts of his work the same poetical fire. He
may write, as you have begun to do, on philosophical subjects, but he
must write in his own character. He must contract, he may shadow, he has
a right to omit whatever will not be cast in the poetic mould; and when
he cannot instruct, he may hope to please. But the philosopher has no
such privileges. He may contract sometimes, he must never shadow. He
must be limited by his matter, lest he should grow whimsical, and by the
parts of it which he understands best, lest he should grow obscure. But
these parts he must develop fully, and he has no right to omit anything
that may serve the purpose of truth, whether it please or not. As it
would be disingenuous to sacrifice truth to popularity, so it is trifling
to appeal to the reason and experience of mankind, as every philosophical
writer does, or must be understood to do, and then to talk, like Plato
and his ancient and modern disciples, to the imagination only. There is
no need, however, to banish eloquence out of philosophy, and truth and
reason are no enemies to the purity nor to the ornaments of language.
But as the want of an exact determination of ideas and of an exact
precision in the use of words is inexcusable in a philosopher, he must
preserve them, even at the expense of style. In short, it seems to me
that the business of the philosopher is to dilate, if I may borrow this
word from Tully, to press, to prove, to convince; and that of the poet to
hint, to touch his subject with short and spirited strokes, to warm the
affections, and to speak to the heart.
Though I seem to prepare an apology for prolixity even in writing essays,
I will endeavour not to be tedious, and this endeavour may succeed the
better perhaps by declining any over-strict observation of method. There
are certain points of that which I esteem the first philosophy whereof I
shall never lose sight, but this will be very consistent with a sort of
epistolary licence. To digress and to ramble are different things, and
he who knows the country through which he travels may venture out of the
highroad, because he is sure of finding his way back to it again. Thus
the several matters that may arise even accidentally before me will have
some share in guiding my pen.
I dare not promise that the sections or members of these essays will bear
that nice proportion to one another and to the whole which a severe
critic would require. All I dare promise you is that my thoughts, in
what order soever they flow, shall be communicated to you just as they
pass through my mind, just as they use to be when we converse together on
these or any other subjects when we saunter alone, or, as we have often
done with good Arbuthnot and the jocose Dean of St. Patrick’s, among the
multiplied scenes of your little garden. That theatre is large enough
for my ambition. I dare not pretend to instruct mankind, and I am not
humble enough to write to the public for any other purpose. I mean by
writing on such subjects as I intend here, to make some trial of my
progress in search of the most important truths, and to make this trial
before a friend in whom I think I may confide. These epistolary essays,
therefore, will be written with as little regard to form and with as
little reserve as I used to show in the conversations which have given
occasion to them, when I maintained the same opinions and insisted on the
same reasons in defence of them.
It might seem strange to a man not well acquainted with the world, and in
particular with the philosophical and theological tribe, that so much
precaution should be necessary in the communication of our thoughts on
any subject of the first philosophy, which is of common concern to the
whole race of mankind, and wherein no one can have, according to nature
and truth, any separate interest. Yet so it is. The separate interests
we cannot have by God’s institutions, are created by those of man; and
there is no subject on which men deal more unfairly with one another than
this. There are separate interests, to mention them in general only, of
prejudice and of profession. By the first, men set out in the search of
truth under the conduct of error, and work up their heated imaginations
often to such a delirium that the more genius, and the more learning they
have, the madder they grow. By the second, they are sworn, as it were,
to follow all their lives the authority of some particular school, to
which “tanquam scopulo, adhærescunt;” for the condition of their
engagement is to defend certain doctrines, and even mere forms of speech,
without examination, or to examine only in order to defend them. By
both, they become philosophers as men became Christians in the primitive
Church, or as they determined themselves about disputed doctrines; for
says Hilarius, writing to St. Austin, “Your holiness knows that the
greatest part of the faithful embrace, or refuse to embrace, a doctrine
for no reason but the impression which the name and authority of some
body or other makes on them.” What now can a man who seeks truth for the
sake of truth, and is indifferent where he finds it, expect from any
communication of his thoughts to such men as these? He will be much
deceived if he expects anything better than imposition or altercation.
Few men have, I believe, consulted others, both the living and the dead,
with less presumption, and in a greater spirit of docility, than I have
done: and the more I have consulted, the less have I found of that inward
conviction on which a mind that is not absolutely implicit can rest. I
thought for a time that this must be my fault. I distrusted myself, not
my teachers—men of the greatest name, ancient and modern. But I found at
last that it was safer to trust myself than them, and to proceed by the
light of my own understanding than to wander after these _ignes fatui_ of
philosophy. If I am able therefore to tell you easily, and at the same
time so clearly and distinctly as to be easily understood, and so
strongly as not to be easily refuted, how I have thought for myself, I
shall be persuaded that I have thought enough on these subjects. If I am
not able to do this, it will be evident that I have not thought on them
enough. I must review my opinions, discover and correct my errors.
I have said that the subjects I mean, and which will be the principal
objects of these essays, are those of the first philosophy; and it is
fit, therefore, that I should explain what I understand by the first
philosophy. Do not imagine that I understand what has passed commonly
under that name—metaphysical pneumatics, for instance, or ontology. The
first are conversant about imaginary substances, such as may and may not
exist. That there is a God we can demonstrate; and although we know
nothing of His manner of being, yet we acknowledge Him to be immaterial,
because a thousand absurdities, and such as imply the strongest
contradiction, result from the supposition that the Supreme Being is a
system of matter. But of any other spirits we neither have nor can have
any knowledge: and no man will be inquisitive about spiritual
physiognomy, nor go about to inquire, I believe, at this time, as Evodius
inquired of St. Austin, whether our immaterial part, the soul, does not
remain united, when it forsakes this gross terrestrial body, to some
ethereal body more subtile and more fine; which was one of the
Pythagorean and Platonic whimsies: nor be under any concern to know, if
this be not the case of the dead, how souls can be distinguished after
their separation—that of Dives, for example, from that of Lazarus. The
second—that is, ontology—treats most scientifically of being abstracted
from all being (“de ente quatenus ens”). It came in fashion whilst
Aristotle was in fashion, and has been spun into an immense web out of
scholastic brains. But it should be, and I think it is already, left to
the acute disciples of Leibnitz, who dug for gold in the ordure of the
schools, and to other German wits. Let them darken by tedious
definitions what is too plain to need any; or let them employ their
vocabulary of barbarous terms to propagate an unintelligible jargon,
which is supposed to express such abstractions as they cannot make, and
according to which, however, they presume often to control the particular
and most evident truths of experimental knowledge. Such reputed science
deserves no rank in philosophy, not the last, and much less the first.