_Montesinos_.--Here Sir Thomas is the opinion which I have attempted to
maintain concerning the progress and tendency of society, placed in a
proper position, and inexpugnably entrenched here according to the rules
of art, by the ablest of all moral engineers.
_Sir Thomas More_.--Who may this political Achilles be whom you have
called in to your assistance?
_Montesinos_.--Whom Fortune rather has sent to my aid, for my reading has
never been in such authors. I have endeavoured always to drink from the
spring-head, but never ventured out to fish in deep waters. Thor,
himself, when he had hooked the Great Serpent, was unable to draw him up
from the abyss.
_Sir Thomas More_.--The waters in which you have now been angling have
been shallow enough, if the pamphlet in your hand is, as it appears to
be, a magazine.
_Montesinos_.--"_Ego sum is_," said Scaliger, "_qui ab omnibus discere
volo_; _neque tam malum librum esse puto_, _ex quo non aliquem fructum
colligere possum_." I think myself repaid, in a monkish legend, for
examining a mass of inane fiction, if I discover a single passage which
elucidates the real history or manners of its age. In old poets of the
third and fourth order we are contented with a little ore, and a great
deal of dross. And so in publications of this kind, prejudicial as they
are to taste and public feeling, and the public before deeply injurious
to the real interests of literature, something may sometimes be found to
compensate for the trash and tinsel and insolent flippancy, which are now
become the staple commodities of such journals. This number contains
Kant's idea of a Universal History on a Cosmo-Political plan; and that
Kant is as profound a philosopher as his disciples have proclaimed him to
be, this little treatise would fully convince me, if I had not already
believed it, in reliance upon one of the very few men who are capable of
forming a judgment upon such a writer.
The sum of his argument is this: that as deaths, births, and marriages,
and the oscillations of the weather, irregular as they seem to be in
themselves, are nevertheless reduceable upon the great scale to certain
rules; so there may be discovered in the course of human history a steady
and continuous, though slow development of certain great predispositions
in human nature, and that although men neither act under the law of
instinct, like brute animals, nor under the law of a preconcerted plan,
like rational cosmopolites, the great current of human actions flows in a
regular stream of tendency toward this development; individuals and
nations, while pursuing their own peculiar and often contradictory
purposes, following the guidance of a great natural purpose, and thus
promoting a process which, even if they perceived it, they would little
regard. What that process is he states in the following series of
propositions:--
1st. All tendencies of any creature, to which it is predisposed by
nature, are destined in the end to develop themselves perfectly and
agreeably to their final purpose.
2nd. In man, as the sole rational creature upon earth, those tendencies
which have the use of his reason for their object are destined to obtain
their perfect development in the species only, and not in the individual.
3rd. It is the will of nature that man should owe to himself alone
everything which transcends the mere mechanic constitution of his animal
existence, and that he should be susceptible of no other happiness or
perfection than what he has created for himself, instinct apart, through
his own reason.
4th. The means which nature employs to bring about the development of
all the tendencies she has laid in man, is the antagonism of those
tendencies in the social state, no farther, however, than to that point
at which this antagonism becomes the cause of social arrangements founded
in law.
5th. The highest problem for the human species, to the solution of which
it is irresistibly urged by natural impulses, is the establishment of a
universal civil society, founded on the empire of political justice.
6th. This problem is, at the same time, the most difficult of all, and
the one which is latest solved by man.
7th. The problem of the establishment of a perfect constitution of
society depends upon the problem of a system of international relations,
adjusted to law, and apart from this latter problem cannot be solved.
8th. The history of the human race, as a whole, may be regarded as the
unravelling of a hidden plan of nature for accomplishing a perfect state
of civil constitution for society in its internal relations (and as the
condition of that, by the last proposition, in its external relations
also), as the sole state of society in which the tendencies of human
nature can be all and fully developed.
_Sir Thomas More_.--This is indeed a master of the sentences, upon whose
text it may be profitable to dwell. Let us look to his propositions.
From the first this conclusion must follow, that as nature has given men
all his faculties for use, any system of society in which the moral and
intellectual powers of any portion of the people are left undeveloped for
want of cultivation, or receive a perverse direction, is plainly opposed
to the system of nature, in other words, to the will of God. Is there
any government upon earth that will bear this test?
_Montesinos_.--I should rather ask of you, will there ever be one?
_Sir Thomas More_.--Not till there be a system of government conducted in
strict conformity to the precepts of the Gospel.
_Montesinos_.
"Offer these truths to Power, will she obey?
It prunes her pomp, perchance ploughs up the root."