CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY. ONE STAGE ONWARD
For some years after this time I wrote very little, and nothing
regularly, for publication: and great were the advantages which I
derived from the intermission. It was of no common importance to me, at
this period, to be able to digest and mature my thoughts for my own mind
only, without any immediate call for giving them out in print. Had I
gone on writing, it would have much disturbed the important
transformation in my opinions and character, which took place during
those years. The origin of this transformation, or at least the process
by which I was prepared for it, can only be explained by turning some
distance back.
From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and especially from
the commencement of the _Westminster Review_, I had what might truly be
called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My conception
of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object. The
personal sympathies I wished for were those of fellow labourers in this
enterprise. I endeavoured to pick up as many flowers as I could by the
way; but as a serious and permanent personal satisfaction to rest upon,
my whole reliance was placed on this; and I was accustomed to felicitate
myself on the certainty of a happy life which I enjoyed, through placing
my happiness in something durable and distant, in which some progress
might be always making, while it could never be exhausted by complete
attainment. This did very well for several years, during which the
general improvement going on in the world and the idea of myself as
engaged with others in struggling to promote it, seemed enough to fill
up an interesting and animated existence. But the time came when I
awakened from this as from a dream. It was in the autumn of 1826. I was
in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to;
unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods
when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent;
the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are,
when smitten by their first "conviction of sin." In this frame of mind
it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that
all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in
institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be
completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and
happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly
answered, "No!" At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on
which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have
been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to
charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I
seemed to have nothing left to live for.
At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away of itself; but it did
not. A night's sleep, the sovereign remedy for the smaller vexations of
life, had no effect on it. I awoke to a renewed consciousness of the
woful fact. I carried it with me into all companies, into all
occupations. Hardly anything had power to cause me even a few minutes'
oblivion of it. For some months the cloud seemed to grow thicker and
thicker. The lines in Coleridge's _Dejection_--I was not then acquainted
with them--exactly describe my case:
"A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief
In word, or sigh, or tear."
In vain I sought relief from my favourite books; those memorials of past
nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength
and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed
feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded, that my love of
mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out. I
sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. If I had loved
anyone sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should
not have been in the condition I was. I felt, too, that mine was not an
interesting, or in any way respectable distress. There was nothing in it
to attract sympathy. Advice, if I had known where to seek it, would have
been most precious. The words of Macbeth to the physician often occurred
to my thoughts. But there was no one on whom I could build the faintest
hope of such assistance. My father, to whom it would have been natural
to me to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the last
person to whom, in such a case as this, I looked for help. Everything
convinced me that he had no knowledge of any such mental state as I was
suffering from, and that even if he could be made to understand it, he
was not the physician who could heal it. My education, which was wholly
his work, had been conducted without any regard to the possibility of
its ending in this result; and I saw no use in giving him the pain of
thinking that his plans had failed, when the failure was probably
irremediable, and, at all events, beyond the power of _his_ remedies. Of
other friends, I had at that time none to whom I had any hope of making
my condition intelligible. It was, however, abundantly intelligible to
myself; and the more I dwelt upon it, the more hopeless it appeared.
My course of study had led me to believe, that all mental and moral
feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the
results of association; that we love one thing, and hate another, take
pleasure in one sort of action or contemplation, and pain in another
sort, through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those
things, from the effect of education or of experience. As a corollary
from this, I had always heard it maintained by my father, and was myself
convinced, that the object of education should be to form the strongest
possible associations of the salutary class; associations of pleasure
with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain with all
things hurtful to it. This doctrine appeared inexpugnable; but it now
seemed to me, on retrospect, that my teachers had occupied themselves
but superficially with the means of forming and keeping up these
salutary associations. They seemed to have trusted altogether to the old
familiar instruments, praise and blame, reward and punishment. Now, I
did not doubt that by these means, begun early, and applied unremittingly,
intense associations of pain and pleasure, especially of pain, might be
created, and might produce desires and aversions capable of lasting
undiminished to the end of life. But there must always be something
artificial and casual in associations thus produced. The pains and
pleasures thus forcibly associated with things, are not connected with
them by any natural tie; and it is therefore, I thought, essential to
the durability of these associations, that they should have become so
intense and inveterate as to be practically indissoluble, before the
habitual exercise of the power of analysis had commenced. For I now saw,
or thought I saw, what I had always before received with incredulity
--that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings:
as indeed it has, when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the
analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and
correctives. The very excellence of analysis (I argued) is that it tends
to weaken and undermine whatever is the result of prejudice; that it
enables us mentally to separate ideas which have only casually clung
together: and no associations whatever could ultimately resist this
dissolving force, were it not that we owe to analysis our clearest
knowledge of the permanent sequences in nature; the real connexions
between Things, not dependent on our will and feelings; natural laws,
by virtue of which, in many cases, one thing is inseparable from another
in fact; which laws, in proportion as they are clearly perceived and
imaginatively realized, cause our ideas of things which are always
joined together in Nature, to cohere more and more closely in our
thoughts. Analytic habits may thus even strengthen the associations
between causes and effects, means and ends, but tend altogether to
weaken those which are, to speak familiarly, a _mere_ matter of feeling.
They are therefore (I thought) favourable to prudence and clear-
sightedness, but a perpetual worm at the root both of the passions and
of the virtues; and, above all, fearfully undermine all desires, and
all pleasures, which are the effects of association, that is, according
to the theory I held, all except the purely physical and organic; of the
entire insufficiency of which to make life desirable, no one had a
stronger conviction than I had. These were the laws of human nature, by
which, as it seemed to me, I had been brought to my present state. All
those to whom I looked up, were of opinion that the pleasure of sympathy
with human beings, and the feelings which made the good of others, and
especially of mankind on a large scale, the object of existence, were
the greatest and surest sources of happiness. Of the truth of this I was
convinced, but to know that a feeling would make me happy if I had it,
did not give me the feeling. My education, I thought, had failed to
create these feelings in sufficient strength to resist the dissolving
influence of analysis, while the whole course of my intellectual
cultivation had made precocious and premature analysis the inveterate
habit of my mind. I was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the
commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but
no sail; without any real desire for the ends which I had been so
carefully fitted out to work for: no delight in virtue, or the general
good, but also just as little in anything else. The fountains of vanity
and ambition seemed to have dried up within me, as completely as those
of benevolence. I had had (as I reflected) some gratification of vanity
at too early an age: I had obtained some distinction and felt myself of
some importance, before the desire of distinction and of importance had
grown into a passion: and little as it was which I had attained, yet
having been attained too early, like all pleasures enjoyed too soon, it
had made me _blasé_ and indifferent to the pursuit. Thus neither selfish
nor unselfish pleasures were pleasures to me. And there seemed no power
in nature sufficient to begin the formation of my character anew, and
create, in a mind now irretrievably analytic, fresh associations of
pleasure with any of the objects of human desire.
These were the thoughts which mingled with the dry, heavy dejection of
the melancholy winter of 1826-7. During this time I was not incapable of
my usual occupations. I went on with them mechanically, by the mere
force of habit. I had been so drilled in a certain sort of mental
exercise, that I could still carry it on when all the spirit had gone
out of it. I even composed and spoke several speeches at the debating
society, how, or with what degree of success, I know not. Of four years'
continual speaking at that society, this is the only year of which I
remember next to nothing. Two lines of Coleridge, in whom alone of all
writers I have found a true description of what I felt, were often in my
thoughts, not at this time (for I had never read them), but in a later
period of the same mental malady:
"Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live."
In all probability my case was by no means so peculiar as I fancied it,
and I doubt not that many others have passed through a similar state;
but the idiosyncrasies of my education had given to the general
phenomenon a special character, which made it seem the natural effect of
causes that it was hardly possible for time to remove. I frequently
asked myself, if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when life
must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself that I did
not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year. When, however, not
more than half that duration of time had elapsed, a small ray of light
broke in upon my gloom. I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel's
_Mémoires_, and came to the passage which relates his father's death,
the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by
which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be
everything to them--would supply the place of all that they had lost. A
vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was
moved to tears. From this moment my burden grew lighter. The oppression
of the thought that all feeling was dead within me was gone. I was no
longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a stone. I had still, it seemed,
some of the material out of which all worth of character, and all
capacity for happiness, are made. Relieved from my ever-present sense of
irremediable wretchedness, I gradually found that the ordinary incidents
of life could again give me some pleasure; that I could again find
enjoyment, not intense, but sufficient for cheerfulness, in sunshine and
sky, in books, in conversation, in public affairs; and that there was,
once more, excitement, though of a moderate, kind, in exerting myself
for my opinions, and for the public good. Thus the cloud gradually drew
off, and I again enjoyed life; and though I had several relapses, some
of which lasted many months, I never again was as miserable as I
had been.
The experiences of this period had two very marked effects on my opinions
and character. In the first place, they led me to adopt a theory of life,
very unlike that on which I had before I acted, and having much in common
with what at that time I certainly had never heard of, the anti-self-
consciousness theory of Carlyle. I never, indeed, wavered in the conviction
that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life.
But I now thought that this end was only to be attained by not making it
the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds
fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of
others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit,
followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at
something else, they find happiness by the way. The enjoyments of life
(such was now my theory) are sufficient to make it a pleasant thing,
when they are taken _en passant_, without being made a principal object.
Once make them so, and they are immediately felt to be insufficient.
They will not bear a scrutinizing examination. Ask yourself whether you
are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not
happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your
self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust
themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will
inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or
thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or
putting it to flight by fatal questioning. This theory now became the
basis of my philosophy of life. And I still hold to it as the best
theory for all those who have but a moderate degree of sensibility and
of capacity I for enjoyment; that is, for the great majority of mankind.
The other important change which my opinions at this time underwent, was
that I, for the first time, gave its proper place, among the prime
necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the
individual. I ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the
ordering of outward circumstances, and the training of the human being
for speculation and for action.
I had now learnt by experience that the passing susceptibilities needed
to be cultivated as well as the active capacities, and required to be
nourished and enriched as well as guided. I did not, for an instant,
lose sight of, or undervalue, that part of the truth which I had seen
before; I never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to
consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition
both of individual and of social improvement But 1 thought that it had
consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other kinds of
cultivation with it. The maintenance of a due balance among the
faculties now seemed to be of primary importance. The cultivation of the
feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical
creed. And my thoughts and inclinations turned in an increasing degree
towards whatever seemed capable of being instrumental to that object.
I now began to find meaning in the things, which I had read or heard
about the importance of poetry and art as instruments of human culture.
But it was some time longer before I began to know this by personal
experience. The only one of the imaginative arts in which I had from
childhood taken great pleasure, was music; the best effect of which (and
in this it surpasses perhaps every other art) consists in exciting
enthusiasm; in winding up to a high pitch those feelings of an elevated
kind which are already in the character, but to which this excitement
gives a glow and a fervour, which, though transitory at its utmost
height, is precious for sustaining them at other times. This effect of
music I had often experienced; but, like all my pleasurable
susceptibilities, it was suspended during the gloomy period. I had
sought relief again and again from this quarter, but found none. After
the tide had turned, and I was in process of recovery, I had been helped
forward by music, but in a much less elevated manner. I at this time
first became acquainted with Weber's _Oberon_, and the extreme pleasure
which I drew from its delicious melodies did me good by showing me a
source of pleasure to which I was as susceptible as ever. The good,
however, was much impaired by the thought that the pleasure of music
(as is quite true of such pleasure as this was, that of mere tune) fades
with familiarity, and requires either to be revived by intermittence, or
fed by continual novelty. And it is very characteristic both of my then
state, and of the general tone of my mind at this period of my life,
that I was seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of
musical combinations. The octave consists only of five tones and two
semi-tones, which can be put together in only a limited number of ways,
of which but a small proportion are beautiful: most of these, it seemed
to me, must have been already discovered, and there could not be room
for a long succession of Mozarts and Webers, to strike out, as these had
done, entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty. This
source of anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that of the
philosophers of Laputa, who feared lest the sun should be burnt out. It
was, however, connected with the best feature in my character, and the
only good point to be found in my very unromantic and in no way
honourable distress. For though my dejection, honestly looked at, could
not be called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I thought,
of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind in general was ever
in my thoughts, and could not be separated from my own. I felt that the
flaw in my life, must be a flaw in life itself; that the question was,
whether, if the reformers of society and government could succeed in
their objects, and every person in the community were free and in a state
of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no longer kept up by
struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures. And I felt that
unless I could see my way to some better hope than this for human
happiness in general, my dejection must continue; but that if I could
see such an outlet, I should then look on the world with pleasure;
content, as far as I was myself concerned, with any fair share of the
general lot.
This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading
Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828), an important
event of my life. I took up the collection of his poems from curiosity,
with no expectation of mental relief from it, though I had before
resorted to poetry with that hope. In the worst period of my depression,
I had read through the whole of Byron (then new to me), to try whether a
poet, whose peculiar department was supposed to be that of the intenser
feelings, could rouse any feeling in me. As might be expected, I got no
good from this reading, but the reverse. The poet's state of mind was
too like my own. His was the lament of a man who had worn out all
pleasures, and who seemed to think that life, to all who possess the
good things of it, must necessarily be the vapid, uninteresting thing
which I found it. His Harold and Manfred had the same burden on them
which I had; and I was not in a frame of mind to desire any comfort from
the vehement sensual passion of his Giaours, or the sullenness of his
Laras. But while Byron was exactly what did not suit my condition,
Wordsworth was exactly what did. I had looked into the _Excursion_ two
or three years before, and found little in it; and I should probably
have found as little, had I read it at this time. But the miscellaneous
poems, in the two-volume edition of 1815 (to which little of value was
added in the latter part of the author's life), proved to be the precise
thing for my mental wants at that particular juncture.
In the first place, these poems addressed themselves powerfully to one
of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural
objects and natural scenery; to which I had been indebted not only for
much of the pleasure of my life, but quite recently for relief from one
of my longest relapses into depression. In this power of rural beauty
over me, there was a foundation laid for taking pleasure in Wordsworth's
poetry; the more so, as his scenery lies mostly among mountains, which,
owing to my early Pyrenean excursion, were my ideal of natural beauty.
But Wordsworth would never have had any great effect on me, if he had
merely placed before me beautiful pictures of natural scenery. Scott
does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape
does it more effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth's poems a
medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward
beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under
the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the
feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a
source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which
could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with
struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement
in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to
learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the
greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once
better and happier as I came under their influence. There have certainly
been, even in our own age, greater poets than Wordsworth; but poetry of
deeper and loftier feeling could not have done for me at that time what
his did. I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent
happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only
without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in, the
common feelings and common destiny of human beings. And the delight
which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there
was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis. At the
conclusion of the Poems came the famous Ode, falsely called Platonic,
"Intimations of Immortality": in which, along with more than his usual
sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along with the two passages of grand
imagery but bad philosophy so often quoted, I found that he too had had
similar experience to mine; that he also had felt that the first
freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting; but that he had
sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now
teaching me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but completely,
emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it.
I long continued to value Wordsworth less according to his intrinsic
merits, than by the measure of what he had done for me. Compared with
the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures,
possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are
precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation
Wordsworth is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically
far more poets than he.
It so fell out that the merits of Wordsworth were the occasion of my
first public declaration of my new way of thinking, and separation from
those of my habitual companions who had not undergone a similar change.
The person with whom at that time I was most in the habit of comparing
notes on such subjects was Roebuck, and I induced him to read
Wordsworth, in whom he also at first seemed to find much to admire: but
I, like most Wordsworthians, threw myself into strong antagonism to
Byron, both as a poet and as to his influence on the character. Roebuck,
all whose instincts were those of action and struggle, had, on the
contrary, a strong relish and great admiration of Byron, whose writings
he regarded as the poetry of human life, while Wordsworth's, according
to him, was that of flowers and butterflies. We agreed to have the fight
out at our Debating Society, where we accordingly discussed for two
evenings the comparative merits of Byron and Wordsworth, propounding and
illustrating by long recitations our respective theories of poetry:
Sterling also, in a brilliant speech, putting forward his particular
theory. This was the first debate on any weighty subject in which
Roebuck and I had been on opposite sides. The schism between us widened
from this time more and more, though we continued for some years longer
to be companions. In the beginning, our chief divergence related to the
cultivation of the feelings. Roebuck was in many respects very different
from the vulgar notion of a Benthamite or Utilitarian. He was a lover of
poetry and of most of the fine arts. He took great pleasure in music, in
dramatic performances, especially in painting, and himself drew and
designed landscapes with great facility and beauty. But he never could
be made to see that these things have any value as aids in the formation
of character. Personally, instead of being, as Benthamites are supposed
to be, void of feeling, he had very quick and strong sensibilities. But,
like most Englishmen who have feelings, he found his feelings stand very
much in his way. He was much more susceptible to the painful sympathies
than to the pleasurable, and, looking for his happiness elsewhere, he
wished that his feelings should be deadened rather than quickened. And,
in truth, the English character, and English social circumstances, make
it so seldom possible to derive happiness from the exercise of the
sympathies, that it is not wonderful if they count for little in an
Englishman's scheme of life. In most other countries the paramount
importance of the sympathies as a constituent of individual happiness is
an axiom, taken for granted rather than needing any formal statement;
but most English thinkers always seem to regard them as necessary evils,
required for keeping men's actions benevolent and compassionate. Roebuck
was, or appeared to be, this kind of Englishman. He saw little good in
any cultivation of the feelings, and none at all in cultivating them
through the imagination, which he thought was only cultivating
illusions. It was in vain I urged on him that the imaginative emotion
which an idea, when vividly conceived, excites in us, is not an illusion
but a fact, as real as any of the other qualities of objects; and, far
from implying anything erroneous and delusive in our mental apprehension
of the object, is quite consistent with the most accurate knowledge and
most perfect practical recognition of all its physical and intellectual
laws and relations. The intensest feeling of the beauty of a cloud
lighted by the setting sun, is no hindrance to my knowing that the cloud
is vapour of water, subject to all the laws of vapours in a state of
suspension; and I am just as likely to allow for, and act on, these
physical laws whenever there is occasion to do so, as if I had been
incapable of perceiving any distinction between beauty and ugliness.
While my intimacy with Roebuck diminished, I fell more and more into
friendly intercourse with our Coleridgian adversaries in the Society,
Frederick Maurice and John Sterling, both subsequently so well known,
the former by his writings, the latter through the biographies by Hare
and Carlyle. Of these two friends, Maurice was the thinker, Sterling the
orator, and impassioned expositor of thoughts which, at this period,
were almost entirely formed for him by Maurice.
With Maurice I had for some time been acquainted through Eyton Tooke,
who had known him at Cambridge, and although my discussions with him
were almost always disputes, I had carried away from them much that
helped to build up my new fabric of thought, in the same way as I was
deriving much from Coleridge, and from the writings of Goethe and other
German authors which I read during these years. I have so deep a respect
for Maurice's character and purposes, as well as for his great mental
gifts, that it is with some unwillingness I say anything which may seem
to place him on a less high eminence than I would gladly be able to
accord to him. But I have always thought that there was more
intellectual power wasted in Maurice than in any other of my
contemporaries. Few of them certainly have had so much to waste. Great
powers of generalization, rare ingenuity and subtlety, and a wide
perception of important and unobvious truths, served him not for putting
something better into the place of the worthless heap of received
opinions on the great subjects of thought, but for proving to his own
mind that the Church of England had known everything from the first, and
that all the truths on the ground of which the Church and orthodoxy have
been attacked (many of which he saw as clearly as anyone) are not only
consistent with the Thirty-nine Articles, but are better understood and
expressed in those Articles than by anyone who rejects them. I have
never been able to find any other explanation of this, than by
attributing it to that timidity of conscience, combined with original
sensitiveness of temperament, which has so often driven highly gifted
men into Romanism, from the need of a firmer support than they can find
in the independent conclusions of their own judgment. Any more vulgar
kind of timidity no one who knew Maurice would ever think of imputing to
him, even if he had not given public proof of his freedom from it, by
his ultimate collision with some of the opinions commonly regarded as
orthodox, and by his noble origination of the Christian Socialist
movement. The nearest parallel to him, in a moral point of view, is
Coleridge, to whom, in merely intellectual power, apart from poetical
genius, I think him decidedly superior. At this time, however, he might
be described as a disciple of Coleridge, and Sterling as a disciple of
Coleridge and of him. The modifications which were taking place in my
old opinions gave me some points of contact with them; and both Maurice
and Sterling were of considerable use to my development. With Sterling I
soon became very intimate, and was more attached to him than I have ever
been to any other man. He was indeed one of the most lovable of men. His
frank, cordial, affectionate, and expansive character; a love of truth
alike conspicuous in the highest things and the humblest; a generous and
ardent nature, which threw itself with impetuosity into the opinions it
adopted, but was as eager to do justice to the doctrines and the men it
was opposed to, as to make war on what it thought their errors; and an
equal devotion to the two cardinal points of Liberty and Duty, formed a
combination of qualities as attractive to me as to all others who knew
him as well as I did. With his open mind and heart, he found no
difficulty in joining hands with me across the gulf which as yet divided
our opinions. He told me how he and others had looked upon me (from
hearsay information), as a "made" or manufactured man, having had a
certain impress of opinion stamped on me which I could only reproduce;
and what a change took place in his feelings when he found, in the
discussion on Wordsworth and Byron, that Wordsworth, and all which that
name implies, "belonged" to me as much as to him and his friends. The
failure of his health soon scattered all his plans of life, and
compelled him to live at a distance from London, so that after the first
year or two of our acquaintance, we only saw each other at distant
intervals. But (as he said himself in one of his letters to Carlyle)
when we did meet it was like brothers. Though he was never, in the full
sense of the word, a profound thinker, his openness of mind, and the
moral courage in which he greatly surpassed Maurice, made him outgrow
the dominion which Maurice and Coleridge had once exercised over his
intellect; though he retained to the last a great but discriminating
admiration of both, and towards Maurice a warm affection. Except in that
short and transitory phasis of his life, during which he made the
mistake of becoming a clergyman, his mind was ever progressive: and the
advance he always seemed to have made when I saw him after an interval,
made me apply to him what Goethe said of Schiller, "er hatte eine
furchtliche Fortschreitung." He and I started from intellectual points
almost as wide apart as the poles, but the distance between us was
always diminishing: if I made steps towards some of his opinions, he,
during his short life, was constantly approximating more and more to
several of mine: and if he had lived, and had health and vigour to
prosecute his ever assiduous self-culture, there is no knowing how much
further this spontaneous assimilation might have proceeded.
After 1829 I withdrew from attendance on the Debating Society. I had had
enough of speech-making, and was glad to carry on my private studies and
meditations without any immediate call for outward assertion of their
results. I found the fabric of my old and taught opinions giving way in
many fresh places, and I never allowed it to fall to pieces, but was
incessantly occupied in weaving it anew. I never, in the course of my
transition, was content to remain, for ever so short a time, confused
and unsettled. When I had taken in any new idea, I could not rest till I
had adjusted its relation to my old opinions, and ascertained exactly
how far its effect ought to extend in modifying or superseding them.
The conflicts which I had so often had to sustain in defending the
theory of government laid down in Bentham's and my father's writings,
and the acquaintance I had obtained with other schools of political
thinking, made me aware of many things which that doctrine, professing
to be a theory of government in general, ought to have made room for,
and did not. But these things, as yet, remained with me rather as
corrections to be made in applying the theory to practice, than as
defects in the theory. I felt that politics could not be a science of
specific experience; and that the accusations against the Benthamic
theory of _being_ a theory, of proceeding _a priori_ by way of general
reasoning, instead of Baconian experiment, showed complete ignorance of
Bacon's principles, and of the necessary conditions of experimental
investigation. At this juncture appeared in the _Edinburgh Review_,
Macaulay's famous attack on my father's _Essay on Government_. This gave
me much to think about. I saw that Macaulay's conception of the logic of
politics was erroneous; that he stood up for the empirical mode of
treating political phenomena, against the philosophical; that even in
physical science his notions of philosophizing might have recognised
Kepler, but would have excluded Newton and Laplace. But I could not help
feeling, that though the tone was unbecoming (an error for which the
writer, at a later period, made the most ample and honourable amends),
there was truth in several of his strictures on my father's treatment of
the subject; that my father's premises were really too narrow, and
included but a small number of the general truths on which, in politics,
the important consequences depend. Identity of interest between the
governing body and the community at large is not, in any practical sense
which can be attached to it, the only thing on which good government
depends; neither can this identity of interest be secured by the mere
conditions of election. I was not at all satisfied with the mode in
which my father met the criticisms of Macaulay. He did not, as I thought
he ought to have done, justify himself by saying, "I was not writing a
scientific treatise on politics, I was writing an argument for
parliamentary reform." He treated Macaulay's argument as simply
irrational; an attack upon the reasoning faculty; an example of the
saying of Hobbes, that When reason is against a man, a man will be
against reason. This made me think that there was really something more
fundamentally erroneous in my father's conception of philosophical
method, as applicable to politics, than I had hitherto supposed there
was. But I did not at first see clearly what the error might be. At last
it flashed upon me all at once in the course of other studies. In the
early part of 1830 I had begun to put on paper the ideas on Logic
(chiefly on the distinctions among Terms, and the import of
Propositions) which had been suggested and in part worked out in the
morning conversations already spoken of. Having secured these thoughts
from being lost, I pushed on into the other parts of the subject, to try
whether I could do anything further towards clearing up the theory of
logic generally. I grappled at once with the problem of Induction,
postponing that of Reasoning, on the ground that it is necessary to
obtain premises before we can reason from them. Now, Induction is mainly
a process for finding the causes of effects: and in attempting to fathom
the mode of tracing causes and effects in physical science, I soon saw
that in the more perfect of the sciences, we ascend, by generalization
from particulars, to the tendencies of causes considered singly, and
then reason downward from those separate tendencies, to the effect of
the same causes when combined. I then asked myself, what is the ultimate
analysis of this deductive process; the common theory of the syllogism
evidently throwing no light upon it. My practice (learnt from Hobbes and
my father) being to study abstract principles by means of the best
concrete instances I could find, the Composition of Forces, in dynamics,
occurred to me as the most complete example of the logical process I was
investigating. On examining, accordingly, what the mind does when it
applies the principle of the Composition of Forces, I found that it
performs a simple act of addition. It adds the separate effect of the
one force to the separate effect of the other, and puts down the sum of
these separate effects as the joint effect. But is this a legitimate
process? In dynamics, and in all the mathematical branches of physics,
it is; but in some other cases, as in chemistry, it is not; and I then
recollected that something not unlike this was pointed out as one of the
distinctions between chemical and mechanical phenomena, in the
introduction to that favourite of my boyhood, Thompson's _System of
Chemistry_. This distinction at once made my mind clear as to what was
perplexing me in respect to the philosophy of politics. I now saw, that
a science is either deductive or experimental, according as, in the
province it deals with, the effects of causes when conjoined, are or are
not the sums of the effects which the same causes produce when separate.
It followed that politics must be a deductive science. It thus appeared,
that both Macaulay and my father were wrong; the one in assimilating the
method of philosophizing in politics to the purely experimental method
of chemistry; while the other, though right in adopting a deductive
method, had made a wrong selection of one, having taken as the type of
deduction, not the appropriate process, that of the deductive branches
of natural philosophy, but the inappropriate one of pure geometry,
which, not being a science of causation at all, does not require or
admit of any summing-up of effects. A foundation was thus laid in my
thoughts for the principal chapters of what I afterwards published on
the Logic of the Moral Sciences; and my new position in respect to my
old political creed, now became perfectly definite.
If I am asked, what system of political philosophy I substituted for
that which, as a philosophy, I had abandoned, I answer, No system: only
a conviction that the true system was something much more complex and
many-sided than I had previously had any idea of, and that its office
was to supply, not a set of model institutions, but principles from
which the institutions suitable to any given circumstances might be
deduced. The influences of European, that is to say, Continental,
thought, and especially those of the reaction of the nineteenth century
against the eighteenth, were now streaming in upon me. They came from
various quarters: from the writings of Coleridge, which I had begun to
read with interest even before the change in my opinions; from the
Coleridgians with whom I was in personal intercourse; from what I had
read of Goethe; from Carlyle's early articles in the _Edinburgh_ and
Foreign Reviews, though for a long time I saw nothing in these (as my
father saw nothing in them to the last) but insane rhapsody. From these
sources, and from the acquaintance I kept up with the French literature
of the time, I derived, among other ideas which the general turning
upside down of the opinions of European thinkers had brought uppermost,
these in particular: That the human mind has a certain order of possible
progress, in which some things must precede others, an order which
governments and public instructors can modify to some, but not to an
unlimited extent: that all questions of political institutions are
relative, not absolute, and that different stages of human progress not
only _will_ have, but _ought_ to have, different institutions: that
government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of
whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is,
does not depend on institutions, but institutions on it: that any
general theory or philosophy of politics supposes a previous theory of
human progress, and that this is the same thing with a philosophy of
history. These opinions, true in the main, were held in an exaggerated
and violent manner by the thinkers with whom I was now most accustomed
to compare notes, and who, as usual with a reaction, ignored that half
of the truth which the thinkers of the eighteenth century saw. But
though, at one period of my progress, I for some time undervalued that
great century, I never joined in the reaction against it, but kept as
firm hold of one side of the truth as I took of the other. The fight
between the nineteenth century and the eighteenth always reminded me of
the battle about the shield, one side of which was white and the other
black. I marvelled at the blind rage with which the combatants rushed
against one another. I applied to them, and to Coleridge himself, many
of Coleridge's sayings about half truths; and Goethe's device,
"many-sidedness," was one which I would most willingly, at this period,
have taken for mine.
The writers by whom, more than by any others, a new mode of political
thinking was brought home to me, were those of the St. Simonian school
in France. In 1829 and 1830 I became acquainted with some of their
writings. They were then only in the earlier stages of their
speculations. They had not yet dressed out their philosophy as a
religion, nor had they organized their scheme of Socialism. They were
just beginning to question the principle of hereditary property. I was
by no means prepared to go with them even this length; but I was greatly
struck with the connected view which they for the first time presented
to me, of the natural order of human progress; and especially with their
division of all history into organic periods and critical periods.
During the organic periods (they said) mankind accept with firm
conviction some positive creed, claiming jurisdiction over all their
actions, and containing more or less of truth and adaptation to the
needs of humanity. Under its influence they make all the progress
compatible with the creed, and finally outgrow it; when a period follows
of criticism and negation, in which mankind lose their old convictions
without acquiring any new ones, of a general or authoritative character,
except the conviction that the old are false. The period of Greek and
Roman polytheism, so long as really believed in by instructed Greeks and
Romans, was an organic period, succeeded by the critical or sceptical
period of the Greek philosophers. Another organic period came in with
Christianity. The corresponding critical period began with the
Reformation, has lasted ever since, still lasts, and cannot altogether
cease until a new organic period has been inaugurated by the triumph of
a yet more advanced creed. These ideas, I knew, were not peculiar to the
St. Simonians; on the contrary, they were the general property of
Europe, or at least of Germany and France, but they had never, to my
knowledge, been so completely systematized as by these writers, nor the
distinguishing characteristics of a critical period so powerfully set
forth; for I was not then acquainted with Fichte's _Lectures on the
Characteristics of the Present Age_. In Carlyle, indeed, I found bitter
denunciations of an "age of unbelief," and of the present age as such,
which I, like most people at that time, supposed to be passionate
protests in favour of the old modes of belief. But all that was true in
these denunciations, I thought that I found more calmly and
philosophically stated by the St. Simonians. Among their publications,
too, there was one which seemed to me far superior to the rest; in which
the general idea was matured into something much more definite and
instructive. This was an early work of Auguste Comte, who then called
himself, and even announced himself in the title-page as, a pupil of
Saint Simon. In this tract M. Comte first put forth the doctrine, which
he afterwards so copiously illustrated, of the natural succession of
three stages in every department of human knowledge: first, the
theological, next the metaphysical, and lastly, the positive stage; and
contended, that social science must be subject to the same law; that the
feudal and Catholic system was the concluding phasis of the theological
state of the social science, Protestantism the commencement, and the
doctrines of the French Revolution the consummation, of the
metaphysical; and that its positive state was yet to come. This doctrine
harmonized well with my existing notions, to which it seemed to give a
scientific shape. I already regarded the methods of physical science as
the proper models for political. But the chief benefit which I derived
at this time from the trains of thought suggested by the St. Simonians
and by Comte, was, that I obtained a clearer conception than ever before
of the peculiarities of an era of transition in opinion, and ceased to
mistake the moral and intellectual characteristics of such an era, for
the normal attributes of humanity. I looked forward, through the present
age of loud disputes but generally weak convictions, to a future which
shall unite the best qualities of the critical with the best qualities
of the organic periods; unchecked liberty of thought, unbounded freedom
of individual action in all modes not hurtful to others; but also,
convictions as to what is right and wrong, useful and pernicious, deeply
engraven on the feelings by early education and general unanimity of
sentiment, and so firmly grounded in reason and in the true exigencies
of life, that they shall not, like all former and present creeds,
religious, ethical, and political, require to be periodically thrown off
and replaced by others.
M. Comte soon left the St. Simonians, and I lost sight of him and his
writings for a number of years. But the St. Simonians I continued to
cultivate. I was kept _au courant_ of their progress by one of their
most enthusiastic disciples, M. Gustave d'Eichthal, who about that time
passed a considerable interval in England. I was introduced to their
chiefs, Bazard and Enfantin, in 1830; and as long as their public
teachings and proselytism continued, I read nearly everything they
wrote. Their criticisms on the common doctrines of Liberalism seemed to
me full of important truth; and it was partly by their writings that my
eyes were opened to the very limited and temporary value of the old
political economy, which assumes private property and inheritance as
indefeasible facts, and freedom of production and exchange as the
_dernier mot_ of social improvement. The scheme gradually unfolded by
the St. Simonians, under which the labour and capital of society would
be managed for the general account of the community, every individual
being required to take a share of labour, either as thinker, teacher,
artist, or producer, all being classed according to their capacity, and
remunerated according to their work, appeared to me a far superior
description of Socialism to Owen's. Their aim seemed to me desirable and
rational, however their means might be inefficacious; and though I
neither believed in the practicability, nor in the beneficial operation
of their social machinery, I felt that the proclamation of such an ideal
of human society could not but tend to give a beneficial direction to
the efforts of others to bring society, as at present constituted,
nearer to some ideal standard. I honoured them most of all for what they
have been most cried down for--the boldness and freedom from prejudice
with which they treated the subject of the family, the most important of
any, and needing more fundamental alterations than remain to be made in
any other great social institution, but on which scarcely any reformer
has the courage to touch. In proclaiming the perfect equality of men and
women, and an entirely new order of things in regard to their relations
with one another, the St. Simonians, in common with Owen and Fourier,
have entitled themselves to the grateful remembrance of future
generations.
In giving an account of this period of my life, I have only specified
such of my new impressions as appeared to me, both at the time and
since, to be a kind of turning points, marking a definite progress in my
mode of thought. But these few selected points give a very insufficient
idea of the quantity of thinking which I carried on respecting a host of
subjects during these years of transition. Much of this, it is true,
consisted in rediscovering things known to all the world, which I had
previously disbelieved or disregarded. But the rediscovery was to me a
discovery, giving me plenary possession of the truths, not as
traditional platitudes, but fresh from their source; and it seldom
failed to place them in some new light, by which they were reconciled
with, and seemed to confirm while they modified, the truths less
generally known which lay in my early opinions, and in no essential part
of which I at any time wavered. All my new thinking only laid the
foundation of these more deeply and strongly, while it often removed
misapprehension and confusion of ideas which had perverted their effect.
For example, during the later returns of my dejection, the doctrine of
what is called Philosophical Necessity weighed on my existence like an
incubus. I felt as if I was scientifically proved to be the helpless
slave of antecedent circumstances; as if my character and that of all
others had been formed for us by agencies beyond our control, and was
wholly out of our own power. I often said to myself, what a relief it
would be if I could disbelieve the doctrine of the formation of
character by circumstances; and remembering the wish of Fox respecting
the doctrine of resistance to governments, that it might never be
forgotten by kings, nor remembered by subjects, I said that it would be
a blessing if the doctrine of necessity could be believed by all _quoad_
the characters of others, and disbelieved in regard to their own. I
pondered painfully on the subject till gradually I saw light through it.
I perceived, that the word Necessity, as a name for the doctrine of
Cause and Effect applied to human action, carried with it a misleading
association; and that this association was the operative force in the
depressing and paralysing influence which I had experienced: I saw that
though our character is formed by circumstances, our own desires can do
much to shape those circumstances; and that what is really inspiriting
and ennobling in the doctrine of freewill is the conviction that we have
real power over the formation of our own character; that our will, by
influencing some of our circumstances, can modify our future habits or
capabilities of willing. All this was entirely consistent with the
doctrine of circumstances, or rather, was that doctrine itself, properly
understood. From that time I drew, in my own mind, a clear distinction
between the doctrine of circumstances and Fatalism; discarding
altogether the misleading word Necessity. The theory, which I now for
the first time rightly apprehended, ceased altogether to be
discouraging; and, besides the relief to my spirits, I no longer
suffered under the burden--so heavy to one who aims at being a reformer
in opinions--of thinking one doctrine true and the contrary doctrine
morally beneficial. The train of thought which had extricated me from
this dilemma seemed to me, in after years, fitted to render a similar
service to others; and it now forms the chapter on Liberty and Necessity
in the concluding Book of my _System of Logic_.
Again, in politics, though I no longer accepted the doctrine of the
_Essay on Government_ as a scientific theory; though I ceased to
consider representative democracy as an absolute principle, and regarded
it as a question of time, place, and circumstance; though I now looked
upon the choice of political institutions as a moral and educational
question more than one of material interests, thinking that it ought to
be decided mainly by the consideration, what great improvement in life
and culture stands next in order for the people concerned, as the
condition of their further progress, and what institutions are most
likely to promote that; nevertheless, this change in the premises of my
political philosophy did not alter my practical political creed as to
the requirements of my own time and country. I was as much as ever a
Radical and Democrat for Europe, and especially for England. I thought
the predominance of the aristocratic classes, the noble and the rich, in
the English constitution, an evil worth any struggle to get rid of; not
on account of taxes, or any such comparatively small inconvenience, but
as the great demoralizing agency in the country. Demoralizing, first,
because it made the conduct of the Government an example of gross public
immorality, through the predominance of private over public interests in
the State, and the abuse of the powers of legislation for the advantage
of classes. Secondly, and in a still greater degree, because the respect
of the multitude always attaching itself principally to that which, in
the existing state of society, is the chief passport to power; and under
English institutions, riches, hereditary or acquired, being the almost
exclusive source of political importance; riches, and the signs of
riches, were almost the only things really respected, and the life of
the people was mainly devoted to the pursuit of them. I thought, that
while the higher and richer classes held the power of government, the
instruction and improvement of the mass of the people were contrary to
the self-interest of those classes, because tending to render the people
more powerful for throwing off the yoke: but if the democracy obtained a
large, and perhaps the principal share, in the governing power, it would
become the interest of the opulent classes to promote their education,
in order to ward off really mischievous errors, and especially those
which would lead to unjust violations of property. On these grounds I
was not only as ardent as ever for democratic institutions, but
earnestly hoped that Owenite, St. Simonian, and all other anti-property
doctrines might spread widely among the poorer classes; not that I
thought those doctrines true, or desired that they should be acted on,
but in order that the higher classes might be made to see that they had
more to fear from the poor when uneducated than when educated.
In this frame of mind the French Revolution of July found me: It roused
my utmost enthusiasm, and gave me, as it were, a new existence. I went
at once to Paris, was introduced to Lafayette, and laid the groundwork
of the intercourse I afterwards kept up with several of the active
chiefs of the extreme popular party. After my return I entered warmly,
as a writer, into the political discussions of the time; which soon
became still more exciting, by the coming in of Lord Grey's Ministry,
and the proposing of the Reform Bill. For the next few years I wrote
copiously in newspapers. It was about this time that Fonblanque, who had
for some time written the political articles in the _Examiner_, became
the proprietor and editor of the paper. It is not forgotten with what
verve and talent, as well as fine wit, he carried it on, during the
whole period of Lord Grey's Ministry, and what importance it assumed as
the principal representative, in the newspaper press, of Radical
opinions. The distinguishing character of the paper was given to it
entirely by his own articles, which formed at least three-fourths of all
the original writing contained in it: but of the remaining fourth I
contributed during those years a much larger share than anyone else. I
wrote nearly all the articles on French subjects, including a weekly
summary of French politics, often extending to considerable length;
together with many leading articles on general politics, commercial and
financial legislation, and any miscellaneous subjects in which I felt
interested, and which were suitable to the paper, including occasional
reviews of books. Mere newspaper articles on the occurrences or
questions of the moment, gave no opportunity for the development of any
general mode of thought; but I attempted, in the beginning of 1831, to
embody in a series of articles, headed "The Spirit of the Age," some of
my new opinions, and especially to point out in the character of the
present age, the anomalies and evils characteristic of the transition
from a system of opinions which had worn out, to another only in process
of being formed. These articles, were, I fancy, lumbering in style, and
not lively or striking enough to be, at any time, acceptable to
newspaper readers; but had they been far more attractive, still, at that
particular moment, when great political changes were impending, and
engrossing all minds, these discussions were ill-timed, and missed fire
altogether. The only effect which I know to have been produced by them,
was that Carlyle, then living in a secluded part of Scotland, read them
in his solitude, and, saying to himself (as he afterwards told me) "Here
is a new Mystic," inquired on coming to London that autumn respecting
their authorship; an inquiry which was the immediate cause of our
becoming personally acquainted.
I have already mentioned Carlyle's earlier writings as one of the
channels through which I received the influences which enlarged my early
narrow creed; but I do not think that those writings, by themselves,
would ever have had any effect on my opinions. What truths they
contained, though of the very kind which I was already receiving from
other quarters, were presented in a form and vesture less suited than
any other to give them access to a mind trained as mine had been. They
seemed a haze of poetry and German metaphysics, in which almost the only
clear thing was a strong animosity to most of the opinions which were
the basis of my mode of thought; religious scepticism, utilitarianism,
the doctrine of circumstances, and the attaching any importance to
democracy, logic, or political economy. Instead of my having been taught
anything, in the first instance, by Carlyle, it was only in proportion
as I came to see the same truths through media more suited to my mental
constitution, that I recognised them in his writings. Then, indeed, the
wonderful power with which he put them forth made a deep impression upon
me, and I was during a long period one of his most fervent admirers; but
the good his writings did me, was not as philosophy to instruct, but as
poetry to animate. Even at the time when our acquaintance commenced, I
was not sufficiently advanced in my new modes of thought to appreciate
him fully; a proof of which is, that on his showing me the manuscript of
_Sartor Resartus_, his best and greatest work, which he just then
finished, I made little of it; though when it came out about two years
afterwards in _Fraser's Magazine_ I read it with enthusiastic admiration
and the keenest delight. I did not seek and cultivate Carlyle less on
account of the fundamental differences in our philosophy. He soon found
out that I was not "another mystic," and when for the sake of my own
integrity I wrote to him a distinct profession of all those of my
opinions which I knew he most disliked, he replied that the chief
difference between us was that I "was as yet consciously nothing of a
mystic." I do not know at what period he gave up the expectation that I
was destined to become one; but though both his and my opinions
underwent in subsequent years considerable changes, we never approached
much nearer to each other's modes of thought than we were in the first
years of our acquaintance. I did not, however, deem myself a competent
judge of Carlyle. I felt that he was a poet, and that I was not; that he
was a man of intuition, which I was not; and that as such, he not only
saw many things long before me, which I could only, when they were
pointed out to me, hobble after and prove, but that it was highly
probable he could see many things which were not visible to me even
after they were pointed out. I knew that I could not see round him, and
could never be certain that I saw over him; and I never presumed to
judge him with any definiteness, until he was interpreted to me by one
greatly the superior of us both--who was more a poet than he, and more a
thinker than I--whose own mind and nature included his, and
infinitely more.
Among the persons of intellect whom I had known of old, the one with
whom I had now most points of agreement was the elder Austin. I have
mentioned that he always set himself in opposition to our early
sectarianism; and latterly he had, like myself, come under new
influences. Having been appointed Professor of Jurisprudence in the
London University (now University College), he had lived for some time
at Bonn to study for his Lectures; and the influences of German
literature and of the German character and state of society had made a
very perceptible change in his views of life. His personal disposition
was much softened; he was less militant and polemic; his tastes had
begun to turn themselves towards the poetic and contemplative. He
attached much less importance than formerly to outward changes; unless
accompanied by a better cultivation of the inward nature. He had a
strong distaste for the general meanness of English life, the absence of
enlarged thoughts and unselfish desires, the low objects on which the
faculties of all classes of the English are intent. Even the kind of
public interests which Englishmen care for, he held in very little
esteem. He thought that there was more practical good government, and
(which is true enough) infinitely more care for the education and mental
improvement of all ranks of the people, under the Prussian monarchy,
than under the English representative government: and he held, with the
French _Economistes_, that the real security for good government is un
_peuple éclairé_, which is not always the fruit of popular institutions,
and which, if it could be had without them, would do their work better
than they. Though he approved of the Reform Bill, he predicted, what in
fact occurred, that it would not produce the great immediate
improvements in government which many expected from it. The men, he
said, who could do these great things did not exist in the country.
There were many points of sympathy between him and me, both in the new
opinions he had adopted and in the old ones which he retained. Like me,
he never ceased to be a utilitarian, and, with all his love for the
Germans and enjoyment of their literature, never became in the smallest
degree reconciled to the innate-principle metaphysics. He cultivated
more and more a kind of German religion, a religion of poetry and
feeling with little, if anything, of positive dogma; while in politics
(and here it was that I most differed with him) he acquired an
indifference, bordering on contempt, for the progress of popular
institutions: though he rejoiced in that of Socialism, as the most
effectual means of compelling the powerful classes to educate the
people, and to impress on them the only real means of permanently
improving their material condition, a limitation of their numbers.
Neither was he, at this time, fundamentally opposed to Socialism in
itself as an ultimate result of improvement. He professed great
disrespect for what he called "the universal principles of human nature
of the political economists," and insisted on the evidence which history
and daily experience afford of the "extraordinary pliability of human
nature" (a phrase which I have somewhere borrowed from him); nor did he
think it possible to set any positive bounds to the moral capabilities
which might unfold themselves in mankind, under an enlightened direction
of social and educational influences. Whether he retained all these
opinions to the end of life I know not. Certainly the modes of thinking
of his later years, and especially of his last publication, were much
more Tory in their general character than those which he held at
this time.
My father's tone of thought and feeling, I now felt myself at a great
distance from: greater, indeed, than a full and calm explanation and
reconsideration on both sides, might have shown to exist in reality. But
my father was not one with whom calm and full explanations on
fundamental points of doctrine could be expected, at least with one whom
he might consider as, in some sort, a deserter from his standard.
Fortunately we were almost always in strong agreement on the political
questions of the day, which engrossed a large part of his interest and
of his conversation. On those matters of opinion on which we differed,
we talked little. He knew that the habit of thinking for myself, which
his mode of education had fostered, sometimes led me to opinions
different from his, and he perceived from time to time that I did not
always tell him _how_ different. I expected no good, but only pain to
both of us, from discussing our differences: and I never expressed them
but when he gave utterance to some opinion or feeling repugnant to mine,
in a manner which would have made it disingenuousness on my part to
remain silent.
It remains to speak of what I wrote during these years, which,
independently of my contributions to newspapers, was considerable. In
1830 and 1831 I wrote the five Essays since published under the title of
_Essays on some Unsettled Questions of political Economy_, almost as
they now stand, except that in 1833 I partially rewrote the fifth Essay.
They were written with no immediate purpose of publication; and when,
some years later, I offered them to a publisher, he declined them. They
were only printed in 1844, after the success of the _System of Logic_. I
also resumed my speculations on this last subject, and puzzled myself,
like others before me, with the great paradox of the discovery of new
truths by general reasoning. As to the fact, there could be no doubt. As
little could it be doubted, that all reasoning is resolvable into
syllogisms, and that in every syllogism the conclusion is actually
contained and implied in the premises. How, being so contained and
implied, it could be new truth, and how the theorems of geometry, so
different in appearance from the definitions and axioms, could be all
contained in these, was a difficulty which no, one, I thought, had
sufficiently felt, and which, at all events, no one had succeeded in
clearing up. The explanations offered by Whately and others, though they
might give a temporary satisfaction, always, in my mind, left a mist
still hanging over the subject. At last, when reading a second or third
time the chapters on Reasoning in the second volume of Dugald Stewart,
interrogating myself on every point, and following out, as far as I knew
how, every topic of thought which the book suggested, I came upon an
idea of his respecting the use of axioms in ratiocination, which I did
not remember to have before noticed, but which now, in meditating on it,
seemed to me not only true of axioms, but of all general propositions
whatever, and to be the key of the whole perplexity. From this germ grew
the theory of the Syllogism propounded in the Second Book of the
_Logic_; which I immediately fixed by writing it out. And now, with
greatly increased hope of being able to produce a work on Logic, of some
originality and value, I proceeded to write the First Book, from the
rough and imperfect draft I had already made. What I now wrote became
the basis of that part of the subsequent Treatise; except that it did
not contain the Theory of Kinds, which was a later addition, suggested
by otherwise inextricable difficulties which met me in my first attempt
to work out the subject of some of the concluding chapters of the Third
Book. At the point which I had now reached I made a halt, which lasted
five years. I had come to the end of my tether; I could make nothing
satisfactory of Induction, at this time. I continued to read any book
which seemed to promise light on the subject, and appropriated, as well
as I could, the results; but for a long time I found nothing which
seemed to open to me any very important vein of meditation.
In 1832 I wrote several papers for the first series of _Tait's
Magazine_, and one for a quarterly periodical called the _Jurist_, which
had been founded, and for a short time carried on, by a set of friends,
all lawyers and law reformers, with several of whom I was acquainted.
The paper in question is the one on the rights and duties of the State
respecting Corporation and Church Property, now standing first among the
collected _Dissertations and Discussions_; where one of my articles in
_Tait_, "The Currency Juggle," also appears. In the whole mass of what
I wrote previous to these, there is nothing of sufficient permanent
value to justify reprinting. The paper in the _Jurist_, which I still
think a very complete discussion of the rights of the State over
Foundations, showed both sides of my opinions, asserting as firmly as I
should have done at any time, the doctrine that all endowments are
national property, which the government may and ought to control; but
not, as I should once have done, condemning endowments in themselves,
and proposing that they should be taken to pay off the national debt. On
the contrary, I urged strenuously the importance of a provision for
education, not dependent on the mere demand of the market, that is, on
the knowledge and discernment of average parents, but calculated to
establish and keep up a higher standard of instruction than is likely to
be spontaneously demanded by the buyers of the article. All these
opinions have been confirmed and strengthened by the whole of my
subsequent reflections.