Imatges de pàgina
PDF
EPUB

In support of this view, Berkeley's own words are presently quoted:

I do not argue against the existence of any one thing that we can apprehend either by sensation or reflection. That the things I see with my eyes and touch with my hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least question. The only thing whose existence I deny is that which philosophers call Matter, or corporeal substance. And in doing this there is no damage done to the rest of mankind, who, I dare say, will never miss it.

[ocr errors]

46. Hume, in his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, begins with some valuable definitions, which may be considered to constitute an improvement, so far as they go, on the terminology of Locke, but ends with proposing sceptical doubts,' as applicable to every possible philosophical proposition which the mind can entertain. After Hume, the celebrated Kant in Germany took up the metaphysical debate, and produced his Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, a work which makes an epoch in philosophy. Among ourselves Hume was feebly answered, upon obvious common-sense grounds, by Reid and his followers; but they were rather psychologists than metaphysicians. Coleridge, whose genius pre-eminently fitted him to excel in metaphysics, left much behind him that is of the highest value, but in a discontinuous sketchy condition, and with large desiderata. The Aids to Reflection is the work which contains more of his mind upon the deepest questions than any other. The Friend, and the Literary Remains, while they illustrate to a great extent his metaphysical tenets, belong in form rather to the department of Essays.

Political Science: Filmer, Hobbes, Milton, Burke.

47. Political science, as might have been expected in a country with such an eventful political history, owes much to English thinkers. The conservative and absolutist side has been ably and warmly argued, but on the whole the palm undoubtedly rests with the writers on the liberal and constitutional side. Sir Robert Filmer and the philosopher Hobbes, upon widely different grounds, wrote in support of arbitrary power. In his Patriarcha, published in 1680, but written long before, Filmer maintained, not only against Milton and Grotius, but also against St. Thomas and Bellarmine, that men were not born free, but slaves; and that monarchs reigned with a patriarchal, absolute, and unquestionable right, derived, like that of

1 Critique of Pure Reason.

Adam over his own household, immediately from God. Hobbes was an absolutist on quite other grounds. He believed in no divine right of kings; but he had the lowest possible opinion of subjects, that is, of mankind in general, and thought that to place power in the hands of the masses was the sure way to bring in anarchy. He was therefore in favour of a strong central government, which he would not allow to be thwarted in its task of repression by the licensed meddling of the persons, whether acting directly or by representation, who were subjected to it. Hobbes' political system is unfolded in several of his works, particularly the De Cive (1642), the De Corpore Politico (1650), and the Leviathan (1651).

48. On the other side occur the names of Fortescue in the fifteenth, Milton, Algernon Sidney, Harrington, and Locke in the seventeenth century, and Burke, Godwin, and Payne in the eighteenth; all of whom were in favour of liberal principles of government, however wide the gulf, in spirit and practical aims, which separated the republican Sidney from the constitutionalist Locke, or the author of the Rights of Man from the upholder of the sacredness of prescription. Milton's Areopagitica, or Speech for the Liberty of unlicensed Printing, though in form a mere pamphlet, is so full of weighty thoughts, which have since been adopted by the reason of civilised Europe, that we prefer to consider it as a contribution to political science. It is an argument for the freedom of the press, and is perhaps the most eloquent certainly one of the least rugged-among the prose works of Milton. The following is one of the most important passages. After speaking of the glorious spectacle of a great nation renewing her mighty youth,' and producing in boundless profusion the richest fruits of awakened intelligence, he proceeds :

What should ye do then? Should ye suppress all this flowery crop of knowledge and new light sprung up and yet springing daily in this city? Should ye set an oligarchy of twenty engrossers over it, to bring a famine upon our minds again, when we shall know nothing but what is measured to us by their bushel? Believe it, lords and commons ? they who counsel ye to such a suppression, do as good as bid ye suppress yourselves; and I will soon show how. If it be desired to know the immediate cause of all this free writing and free speaking, there cannot be assigned a truer than your own mild, and free, and humane government; it is the liberty, lords and commons, which your own valorous and happy counsels have purchased us; liberty which is the nurse of all great wits; this is that which hath ratified and enlightened our spirits like the influence of heaven; this is that which hath enfranchised, en

1 The censors of books are compared to those who engross or forestall all the corn in the market, and thus create an artificial scarcity. L L

larged, and lifted up our apprehensions degrees above themselves. Ye cannot make us now less capable, less knowing, less eagerly pursuing of the truth, unless ye first make yourselves, that made us so, less the lovers, less the founders, of our true liberty. We can grow ignorant again, brutish, formal, and slavish, as ye found us; but you then must first become that which ye cannot be, oppressive, arbitrary, and tyrannous, as they were from whom ye have freed us. That our hearts are now more capacious, our thoughts more erected to the research and expectation of greatest and exactest things, is the issue of your own virtue propagated in us: ye cannot suppress that, unless ye reinforce an abrogated and merciless law, that fathers may despatch at will their own children. Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all other liberties.

...

Locke's two Treatises on Government were written as a reply to the Patriarcha, and embody the famous doctrine of an 'original compact' between prince and people. An interesting summary of them may be found in Hallam's Literature of Europe.

49. Among Burke's political writings, those which contain the clearest and fullest statement of his political philosophy are the Reflections on the French Revolution, and the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. His principles were constitutional and progressive, but anti-revolutionary. The Appeal, &c., was occasioned by some slighting notice taken in Parliament of the Reflections, as the work of a renegade Whig. Burke endeavours to show that the new Whigs have changed their principles, and not he; that from constitutionalists they have become revolutionists. The following striking passage occurs near the end of the treatise :

Place, for instance, before your eyes such a man as Montesquieu. Think of a genius not born in every country, or every time; a man gifted by nature with a penetrating aquiline eye; with a judgment prepared with the most extensive erudition; with an herculean robustness of mind, and nerves not to be broken with labour; a man who could spend twenty years in one pursuit. Think of a man like the universal patriarch in Milton (who had drawn up before him in prophetic vision the whole series of the generations which were to issue from his loins), a man capable of placing in review, after having brought together from the east, the west, the north, and the south, from the coarseness of the rudest barbarism to the most refined and subtle civilisation, all the schemes of government which had ever prevailed amongst mankind, weighing, measuring, collating, and comparing them all, joining fact with theory, and calling into council, upon all this infinite assemblage of things, all the speculations which have fatigued the understandings of profound reasoners in all times!-Let us then consider that all these were but so many preparatory steps to qualify a man-and such a man--tinctured with no national prejudice, with no domestic affection, to admire, and to hold out to the admiration of mankind, the constitution of England! And shall we Englishmen revoke to such a suit?

Shall we, when so much more than he has produced remains still to be understood and admired, instead of keeping ourselves in the schools of real science, choose for our teachers men incapable of being taught; whose only claim to know is, that they have never doubted; from whom we can learn nothing but their own indocility; who would teach us to scorn what in the silence of our hearts we ought to adore?

In the Reflections, occurs the famous passage on Marie Antoinette and the age of chivalry' ;—

[ocr errors]

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in.-glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should live to have seen such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

Essays.

50. An essay, as its name implies, is an endeavour, within definite limits of time and subject, to attain to truth. It is the elucidation by thought of some one single topic, of which the mind had previously possessed an indistinct notion. The essay writer stands at the opposite pole of thought to the systemmonger; the first is ever analysing and separating, the second grouping and generalising. This style of writing, speaking generally, was unknown to the middle ages; it arose in the sixteenth century. Nor is the explanation obscure, or far to seek. The general tendency of thought in the middle ages was to totality; to regard philosophy as one whole, truth as one, religion as one, nature as one. One of the typical books of the

middle ages the Liber Sententiarum― is a complete theology, corpus Theologiæ; it traverses the entire field. But the general tendency of thought in modern times has been to separation and subdivision; to break up wholes, to mistrust generalisations; to examine the parts severally, and attain to a perfect knowledge of each individual part, in the hope of ultimately combining the knowledge of particulars into a sound theory of the whole. The same tendency of mind which has in the last three centuries produced and rendered popular so many volumes of essays and detached cogitations in literature, has in the scientific world resulted in the innumerable monographs, reports and papers, by which each enquirer into nature, in his own special department, contributes to the already enormous stock of particular knowledge.

Essays do not include political tracts or pamphlets, from which we may easily distinguish them by considering the difference in the ends proposed. The end of an essay is knowledge; the end of a political tract or pamphlet, action. Logic appertains to the former, rhetoric to the latter. The essay

writer has answered his purpose if he presents to us a new and clearer view of the subject which he handles, and leads us to think upon it. The political writer has answered his purpose if, whatever the view may be which he wishes to enforce, his arguments, whether they be sound or specious, tend to arouse his readers to action in the direction pointed out.

51. The heterogeneous character of the subjects of essays makes it useless, if not impossible, to classify them. An essay may be written about anything whatever which an attentive thinker can place in a new light, or form a plausible theory about; there would, therefore, be no end to the division and subdivision. We shall merely notice some of the most remarkable collections of essays in our literature. Bacon's essays, concerning which some particulars were noted at page 219 are the earliest in the series. As a specimen, we give a passage from the essay Of Plantations, which must have been one of the latest composed, for it is evident from it that the colony of Virginia (founded in 1606) had then been in existence for several years ;—

Plantations are amongst ancient, primitive, and heroical works. When the world was young, it begat more children; but now it is old, it begets fewer; for I may justly account new plantations to be the children of former kingdoms. I like a plantation in a pure soil; that is, where people are not displanted, to the end to plant in others. For else it is rather an extirpation than a plantation. Planting of countries is like planting of woods; for you must make account to lose about

« AnteriorContinua »