A distinguished general-officer being appointed to a command in which
he would be called on to discharge judicial as well as military
duties, expressed to Lord Mansfield his apprehensions, that he would
execute his office but ill in the former respect, and that his
inexperience and ignorance of technical jurisprudence would prove a
serious impediment to his efficient administration of justice. 'Make
your mind perfectly easy,' said the great judge; 'trust to your native
good sense in forming your opinions, but beware of attempting to state
the grounds of your judgments. The judgment will probably be
right--the argument infallibly wrong.'
This is a common case, especially with practical men, who rarely have
either leisure or inclination to recall the workings of their own
minds, or observe the intellectual process by which they have been
conducted to any conclusion. By what they are prone to consider as a
kind of instinct--if by chance they are philosophers, and delight in
what old Wilson, the essayist, calls 'inkhorn terms,' they designate
it 'intuition'--they arrive at a truth, but have no recollection
whatever of the road they travelled to reach it, and are able neither
to retrace their own steps nor indicate to another the way they came.
The poet, in describing and contrasting the intellectual
characteristics of the two sexes, attributes to the softer something
of this instinct as a distinguishing mental peculiarity, and seems to
consider it as somewhat analogous in its constitution to those animal
senses by means of which the mind becomes cognisant of external
objects, of their existence, their qualities, and their relations. In
his view, the reasoning process is vitally and essentially distinct,
as it is exercised by men and by women--
'Her rapid mind decides while his debates;
She _feels_ a truth which he but calculates.'
And certainly this is a very pretty, very poetical, and very
convenient way of accounting for a phenomenon that, if examined with
common care, suggests a solution more accurate and complete, if not
exactly so complimentary. In sober truth, a positive incapacity
clearly to point out the precise manner in which a conviction has been
formed, is one of the commonest of logical deficiencies, and no more
to be ascribed exclusively to the softer sex, than it is an attribute
of intellectual excellency in either.
When, in Euripides's beautiful play, the untranslatable _Hippolylus_,
Phædra's nurse is made to conclude that certain men she refers to
cannot be otherwise than lax in their morals, _because_ they have
finished the roofs of their houses in a very imperfect manner, her
reasoning is inconsequential enough; but not more so than that of the
renowned French chancellor, Michael L'Hôpital, who, when employed in
negotiating a treaty between Charles IX. and our Elizabeth, insisted
on the well-known line of the Latin poet--
'Et penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos,'
as a _reason_ that Calais should not be returned to the English. The
connection between the premises and the conclusion was not more real
in one case than in the other. A learned member of the medical
profession, in an elaborate work on the climate and the people of
Malta, enjoins on the invalid a participation in the amusements of
cheerful society; and the propriety of his injunction few will be
disposed to dispute: they may well, however, marvel at the _reason_ he
assigns for such sensible advice--that, so far as invalids are
concerned, society has a direct tendency to promote cutaneous
perspiration!
Cardinal de Retz severely reprehends the historians of his time for
their pedantic affectation of explaining and accounting for every
event they record--the motives that actuated this statesman, the
reasons which prompted that policy, the wherefore it was this
enterprise miscarried, or that undertaking brought to a successful
issue. It would not be difficult to furnish a lengthy catalogue of the
blunders historical writers have perpetrated through their overweening
addiction to this folly. Let two instances here suffice: When the
Roman Church, about the middle of the eleventh century, was
endeavouring to insure the celibacy of its priesthood, the married
clergy, who braved its censures and contemned its authority, became
known as _Nicolaites_; which name, grave writers assure us, was given
them in consequence of the active share Pope Nicholas II. had taken in
punishing their contumacy and effecting their suppression. The notion
that any sect or class of religionists should have borrowed its name
from that of its most zealous opponent and indefatigable persecutor,
is worthy only of those critics, so severely reprehended by
Quintilian, who professed to discover the etymon of the Latin word
_lucus_, a grove, in the substantive _lux_, light; and vindicated the
derivation on the ground, that in groves darkness usually prevailed.
The familiar expression of _lucus à non lucendo_, owes its birth to
this striking manifestation of critical sagacity.
Again: a certain portion of the eastern and southern coast of England
was, in early times, denominated 'the Saxon Shore'--Littus
Saxonicum--and was, during the days of Roman supremacy, under the
government of a military court enjoying the appellative of _Comes
Littoris Saxonici_. Acute historical critics inform us, that this
tract was so denominated in consequence of its being open to the
aggressions of the Saxons; that, in short, it received its name from
its occasional invaders, and not from its permanent inhabitants. The
absurdity of this explanation is the greater, inasmuch as, on the
other side of the Channel, there was a large district bearing
precisely the same name, and settled entirely by adventurers, Saxon in
birth or by descent. This, one would have thought, would have
suggested to our English antiquaries a more probable explanation of
the name than that they adopted. The people of Genoa have, or had, in
speaking, a peculiar way of clipping or cutting short their syllables.
Their Italian has never been considered pure. You must not go to
maritime towns for purity of language, especially to such as have been
long and extensively engaged in commercial pursuits. Labat, however,
gives a special and peculiar reason for the fashion of mutilated
speech in which, he declares, the Genoese indulge, telling us they
call their superb city _Gena_, and not _Genoa_. He refers their
'chopping' pronunciation to their habitual economy--an economy
distinctly traceable to their mercantile habits. 'Telle est leur
économie,' he says, 'ils rognent tout jusqu'aux paroles.'
The old English law-writer, Bracton, desiring to account for the
ancient doctrine of English law, that inheritances shall lineally
descend, and never lineally ascend, finds a reason in the fact, that a
bowl being trundled, runs down a hill and never up a hill; and
Littleton, the first great writer on English real property-law, traces
the origin of the phrase 'hotchpot'--a familiar legal term--to the
archaic denomination of a pudding, in our English tongue. 'It
seemeth,'he says, 'that this word, hotchpot, is in English a pudding;
for in this pudding is not commonly put one thing alone, and
_therefore_ it behoveth, in this case, to put the lands given in
frank-marriage,' &c. Erasmus used to say of lawyers, that of ignorant
people, they were the most learned. Questionless they are not always
sound logicians. When the clown in Hamlet disserts so learnedly on
'crowner's quest-law,' he is only parodying, and that closely, a
scarcely less ludicrous judgment which had actually been pronounced,
not long before, in the Court of Queen's Bench. Dr Clarke, the
traveller, tells an amusing story to the purpose. According to him,
the Turkish lawyers recognise as an offence what they style 'homicide
by an intermediate cause'--an instance of which offence our traveller
details in these words: 'A young man, desperately in love with a girl
of Stanchio--the ancient Cos, the birthplace of Hippocrates
and Apelles, the lovely isle renowned for its lettuces and
turpentine--eagerly sought to marry her. But his proposals were
rejected. In consequence, he destroyed himself by poison. The Turkish
police arrested the father of the obdurate fairy, and tried him for
culpable homicide. "If the accused," they argued, with becoming
gravity, "had not had a daughter, the deceased would not have fallen
in love; consequently, he would not have been disappointed;
consequently, he would not have died: but he (the accused) had a
daughter, and the deceased had fallen in love," &c. &c. Upon all these
counts he was called upon to pay the price of the young man's life;
and this, being eighty piastres, was accordingly exacted.' When the
amiable and gentle John Evelyn was in the Netherlands, a woman was
pointed out to him who had had twenty-five husbands, and was then a
widow; 'yet it could not be proved,' he says, that 'she had made any
of her husbands away, though the suspicion had brought her several
times to trouble.' However, the Dutch logicians made no difficulty of
the matter; and arguing, from the number of the woman's husbands, that
she could not be wholly innocent of their death, prohibited her from
marrying again--which, her addiction to matrimony being considered,
was perhaps, of all the 'troubles' she had undergone, by no means the
least.
The logical faculty, which not only consists with the poetical, but is
invariably and necessarily associated with it, whenever the latter
exists in an advanced stage of development, is in no writer more
conspicuous as an intellectual characteristic than in Schiller. In
this respect he is not excelled even by Wordsworth himself; but Homer
sometimes snoozes, and Schiller's reasoning is not always
consequential: as, for instance, when he denies two compositions of
Ovid--the _Tristia_ and _Ex Ponto_--to be genuine poetry, on the
ground that they were the results not of inspiration, but of
necessity; just as if poetry were not a thing to be judged of by
itself; and as if one could not determine whether it were present or
absent in a composition, without knowing to what influences the author
was subjected at the time the composition was produced!
Rousseau, in one of his moods of bilious cynicism, falls foul of human
reason altogether. No man despised it more in action; no one could
more consistently decry it in speculation. In his opinion, the
exercise of the reasoning powers is absolutely sinful--_l'homme qui
raisonne est l'homme qui péche_. Franklin, on the other hand, in a
familiar tone of playful banter, vindicates its utility, alleging that
it is mightily 'convenient to be a rational animal, who knows how to
find or invent a plausible pretext for whatever it has an inclination
to do.' Examples of this convenience abound. The Barbary Jews were
rich and industrious, and, accordingly, their wealth provoke the
cupidity of the indolent and avaricious Mussulmans. These latter,
whenever a long drought had destroyed vegetation, and the strenuous
prayers offered up in the mosques had proved unavailing for its
removal, were accustomed to argue--and a mighty convenient argument it
was--that it was the foul breath of the Jews that had offended Heaven,
and rendered the pious petitions of the faithful of none effect. The
remedy for the drought, then, who could doubt? The true believers
drove the Jews out of their cities, and quietly confiscated their
goods. Dryden, anxious to congratulate Charles II. on his 'happy
restoration,' amidst a thousand fulsome compliments--all tending to
shew that that prince was the author of blessings, not only to his own
kingdoms, but to universal humanity--declares, that it was to Charles,
and to him only, Spain was indebted for her magnificent colonial
possessions in either hemisphere. Addressing the sovereign, his words
are--
'Spain to your gift _alone_ her Indies owes,
_For what the powerful takes not, he bestows_.'
A convenient fashion of reasoning truly: as convenient every whit as
that of Daniel Burgess, a witty Presbyterian minister, devoted to the
House of Brunswick and the principles of the Revolution, who was wont
to affirm, as the reason the descendants of Jacob were called
Israelites, and did not receive the original name of their progenitor,
that Heaven was unwilling they should bear a name in every way so
odious as that of Jacobites.
Once more: it appears from Dr Tschudi's valuable and interesting work
on South America, that in Peru rice is cheap, and servants both lazy
and dirty. Now, the servants in Lima have a theory about rice. They
consider it possesses certain qualities antagonistic to water, so
that, after eating, to touch water would be seriously injurious to
health; and thus does their frequent consumption of rice supply them
with a most convenient reason or excuse for their habitual abstinence
from an operation they detest--that of washing their hands.
Verily, they are mighty fine and convenient words, THEREFORE and
BECAUSE.