Thoughts on Man

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But the topic which, most of all, I was desirous to bring forward
in this Essay, is that of the language so customarily employed by
the impatient and irritated preceptor, "Hereafter, in a state of
mature and ripened judgment, you will thank me for the severity I
now exercise towards you."

No; it may safely be answered: that time will never arrive.

As, in one of my earlier Essays[33], I undertook to shew that
there is not so much difference between the talents of one man
and another as has often been apprehended, so we are guilty of a
gross error in the way in which we divide the child from the man,
and consider him as if he belonged to a distinct species of
beings.

[33] Essay II.

I go back to the recollections of my youth, and can scarcely find
where to draw the line between ineptness and maturity. The
thoughts that occurred to me, as far back as I can recollect
them, were often shrewd; the suggestions ingenious; the judgments
not seldom acute. I feel myself the same individual all through.

Sometimes I was unreasonably presumptuous, and sometimes
unnecessarily distrustful. Experience has taught me in various
instances a sober confidence in my decisions; but that is all the
difference. So to express it, I had then the same tools to work
with as now; but the magazine of materials upon which I had to
operate was scantily supplied. Like the apothecary in Romeo and
Juliet, the faculty, such as it was, was within me; but my
shelves contained but a small amount of furniture:

A beggarly account of empty boxes,
Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses,
Which, thinly scattered, served to make a shew.

In speaking thus of the intellectual powers of my youth, I am
however conceding too much. It is true, "Practice maketh
perfect." But it is surprising, in apt and towardly youth, how
much there is to commend in the first essays. The novice, who
has his faculties lively and on the alert, will strike with his
hammer almost exactly where the blow ought to be placed, and give
nearly the precisely right force to the act. He will seize the
thread it was fitting to seize; and, though he fail again and
again, will shew an adroitness upon the whole that we scarcely
know how to account for. The man whose career shall ultimately
be crowned with success, will demonstrate in the beginning that
he was destined to succeed.

There is therefore no radical difference between the child and
the man. His flesh becomes more firm and sinewy; his bones grow
more solid and powerful; his joints are more completely strung.
But he is still essentially the same being that he was. When a
genuine philosopher holds a new-born child in his arms, and
carefully examines it, he perceives in it various indications of
temper and seeds of character. It was all there, though folded
up and confused, and not obtruding itself upon the remark of
every careless spectator. It continues with the child through
life, grows with his growth, and never leaves him till he is at
last consigned to the tomb. How absurd then by artful rules and
positive institutions to undertake to separate what can never be
divided! The child is occasionally grave and reflecting, and
deduces well-founded inferences; he draws on the past, and
plunges into the wide ocean of the future. In proportion as the
child advances into the youth, his intervals of gravity increase,
and he builds up theories and judgments, some of which no future
time shall suffice to overturn. It is idle to suppose that the
first activity of our faculties, when every thing is new and
produces an unbated impression, when the mind is uncumbered, and
every interest and every feeling bid us be observing and awake,
should pass for nothing. We lay up stores then, which shall
never be exhausted. Our minds are the reverse of worn and
obtuse. We bring faculties into the world with us fresh from the
hands of the all-bounteous giver; they are not yet moulded to a
senseless routine; they are not yet corrupted by the ill lessons
of effrontery, impudence and vice. Childhood is beautiful; youth
is ingenuous; and it can be nothing but a principle which is
hostile to all that most adorns this sublunary scene, that would
with violence and despotic rule mar the fairest flower that
creation has to boast.

It happens therefore almost unavoidably that, when the man mature
looks back upon the little incidents of his youth, he sees them
to a surprising degree in the same light, and forms the same
conclusions respecting them, as he did when they were actually
passing. "The forgeries of opinion," says Cicero, "speedily pass
away; but the rules and decisions of nature are strengthened."
Bitter reproaches and acts of violence are the offspring of
perturbation engendered upon imbecility, and therefore can never
be approved upon a sober and impartial revision. And, if they
are to be impeached in the judgment of an equal and indifferent
observer, we may be sure they will be emphatically condemned by
the grave and enlightened censor who looks back upon the years of
his own nonage, and recollects that he was himself the victim of
the intemperance to be pronounced upon. The interest that he
must necessarily take in the scenes in which he once had an
engrossing concern, will supply peculiar luminousness to his
views. He taxes himself to be just. The transaction is over
now, and is passed to the events that preceded the universal
deluge. He holds the balance with a steadiness, which sets at
defiance all attempts to give it a false direction one way or the
other. But the judgment he made on the case at the time, and
immediately after the humiliation he suffered, remains with him.
It was the sentiment of his ripening youth; it was the opinion of
his opening manhood; and it still attends him, when he is already
fast yielding to the incroachments and irresistible assaults of
declining years.

ESSAY XV.
OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP.

Who is it that says, "There is no love but among equals?" Be it
who it may, it is a saying universally known, and that is in
every one's mouth. The contrary is precisely the truth, and is
the great secret of every thing that is admirable in our moral
nature.

By love it is my intention here to understand, not a calm,
tranquil, and, as it were, half-pronounced feeling, but a passion
of the mind. We may doubtless entertain an approbation of other
men, without adverting to the question how they stand in relation
to ourselves, as equals or otherwise. But the sentiment I am
here considering, is that where the person in whom it resides
most strongly sympathises with the joys and sorrows of another,
desires his gratification, hopes for his welfare, and shrinks
from the anticipation of his being injured; in a word, is the
sentiment which has most the spirit of sacrifice in it, and
prepares the person in whom it dwells, to postpone his own
advantage to the advantage of him who is the object of it.

Having placed love among the passions, which is no vehement
assumption, I then say, there can be no passion, and by
consequence no love, where there is not imagination. In cases
where every thing is understood, and measured, and reduced to
rule, love is out of the question. Whenever this sentiment
prevails, I must have my attention fixed more on the absent than
the present, more upon what I do not see than on what I do see.
My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with
what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is
necessarily no image. Sentiment is nothing, till you have
arrived at a mystery and a veil, something that is seen
obscurely, that is just hinted at in the distance, that has
neither certain outline nor colour, but that is left for the mind
to fill up according to its pleasure and in the best manner it is
able.

The great model of the affection of love in human beings, is the
sentiment which subsists between parents and children.

Let not this appear a paradox. There is another relation in
human society to which this epithet has more emphatically been
given: but, if we analyse the matter strictly, we shall find
that all that is most sacred and beautiful in the passion between
the sexes, has relation to offspring. What Milton calls, "The
rites mysterious of connubial love," would have little charm in
them in reflection, to a mind one degree above the brutes, were
it not for the mystery they include, of their tendency to give
existence to a new human creature like ourselves. Were it not
for this circumstance, a man and a woman would hardly ever have
learned to live together; there scarcely could have been such a
thing as domestic society; but every intercourse of this sort
would have been "casual, joyless, unendeared;" and the propensity
would have brought along with it nothing more of beauty, lustre
and grace, than the pure animal appetites of hunger and thirst.
Bearing in mind these considerations, I do not therefore hesitate
to say, that the great model of the affection of love in human
beings, is the sentiment which subsists between parents and
children.

The original feature in this sentiment is the conscious feeling
of the protector and the protected. Our passions cannot subsist
in lazy indolence; passion and action must operate on each other;
passion must produce action, and action give strength to the tide
of passion. We do not vehemently desire, where we can do
nothing. It is in a very faint way that I entertain a wish to
possess the faculty of flying; and an ordinary man can scarcely
be said to desire to be a king or an emperor. None but a madman,
of plebeian rank, falls in love with a princess. But shew me a
good thing within my reach; convince me that it is in my power to
attain it; demonstrate to me that it is fit for me, and I am fit
for it; then begins the career of passion. In the same manner, I
cannot love a person vehemently, and strongly interest myself in
his miscarriages or success, till I feel that I can be something
to him. Love cannot dwell in a state of impotence. To affect
and be affected, this is the common nature I require; this is the
being that is like unto myself; all other likeness resides in the
logic and the definition, but has nothing to do with feeling or
with practice.

What can be more clear and sound in explanation, than the love of
a parent to his child? The affection he bears and its
counterpart are the ornaments of the world, and the spring of
every thing that makes life worth having. Whatever besides has a
tendency to illustrate and honour our nature, descends from
these, or is copied from these, grows out of them as the branches
of a tree from the trunk, or is formed upon them as a model, and
derives from them its shape, its character, and its soul. Yet
there are men so industrious and expert to strip the world we
live in of all that adorns it, that they can see nothing glorious
in these affections, but find the one to be all selfishness, and
the other all prejudice and superstition.

The love of the parent to his child is nursed and fostered by two
plain considerations; first, that the subject is capable of
receiving much, and secondly, that my power concerning it is
great and extensive.

When an infant is presented to my observation, what a wide field
of sentiment and reflection is opened to me! Few minds are
industrious and ductile enough completely to compass this field,
if the infant is only accidentally brought under their view.
But, if it is an infant with which I begin to be acquainted
to-day, and my acquaintance with which shall not end perhaps till
one of us ceases to exist, how is it possible that the view of
its little figure should not lead me to the meditation of its
future history, the successive stages of human life, and the
various scenes and mutations and vicissitudes and fortunes
through which it is destined to pass? The Book of Fate lies open
before me. This infant, powerless and almost impassive now, is
reserved for many sorrows and many joys, and will one day possess
a power, formidable and fearful to afflict those within its
reach, or calculated to diffuse blessings, wisdom, virtue,
happiness, to all around. I conceive all the various
destinations of which man is susceptible; my fancy at least is
free to select that which pleases me best; I unfold and pursue it
in all its directions, observe the thorns and difficulties with
which it is beset, and conjure up to my thoughts all that it can
boast of inviting, delightful and honourable.

But if the infant that is near to me lays hold of my imagination
and affections at the moment in which he falls under my
observation, how much more do I become interested in him, as he
advances from year to year! At first, I have the blessing of the
gospel upon me, in that, "having not seen, yet I believe." But,
as his powers expand, I understand him better. His little eye
begins to sparkle with meaning; his tongue tells a tale that may
be understood; his very tones, and gestures, and attitudes, all
inform me concerning what he shall be. I am like a florist, who
has received a strange plant from a distant country. At first he
sees only the stalk, and the leaves, and the bud having yet no
other colour than that of the leaves. But as he watches his
plant from day to day, and from hour to hour, the case which
contains the flower divides, and betrays first one colour and
then another, till the shell gradually subsides more and more
towards the stalk, and the figure of the flower begins now to be
seen, and its radiance and its pride to expand itself to the
ravished observer.--Every lesson that the child leans, every
comment that he makes upon it, every sport that he pursues, every
choice that he exerts, the demeanour that he adopts to his
playfellows, the modifications and character of his little fits
of authority or submission, all make him more and more an
individual to me, and open a wider field for my sagacity or my
prophecy, as to what he promises to be, and what he may be made.

But what gives, as has already been observed, the point and the
finish to all the interest I take respecting him, lies in the
vast power I possess to influence and direct his character and
his fortune. At first it is abstract power, but, when it has
already been exerted (as the writers on politics as a science
have observed of property), the sweat of my brow becomes mingled
with the apple I have gathered, and my interest is greater. No
one understands my views and projects entirely but myself, and
the scheme I have conceived will suffer, if I do not complete it
as I began.

And there are men that say, that all this mystery, the most
beautiful attitude of human nature, and the crown of its glory,
is pure selfishness!

Let us now turn from the view of the parental, to that of the
filial affection.

The great mistake that has been made on this subject, arises from
the taking it nakedly and as a mere abstraction. It has been
sagely remarked, that when my father did that which occasioned me
to come into existence, he intended me no benefit, and therefore
I owe him no thanks. And the inference which has been made from
this wise position is, that the duty of children to parents is a
mere imposture, a trick, employed by the old to defraud the young
out of their services.

I grant most readily, that the mere material ligament that binds
together the father and the child, by itself is worthless, and
that he who owes nothing more than this to his father, owes him
nothing. The natural, unanimated relationship is like the grain
of mustard-seed in the discourses of Jesus Christ, "which indeed
is the least of all seeds; but, when it is unfolded and grows up,
it becomes a mighty tree, so that the birds of the air may come
and lodge in its branches."

The hard and insensible man may know little of the debt he owes
to his father; but he that is capable of calling up the past, and
beholding the things that are not as if they now were, will see
the matter in a very different light. Incalculable are the
privations (in a great majority of instances), the toils, the
pains, the anxieties, that every child imposes on his father from
the first hour of his existence. If he could know the ceaseless
cares, the tender and ardent feelings, the almost incredible
efforts and exertions, that have accompanied him in his father's
breast through the whole period of his growth, instead of
thinking that he owed his parent nothing, he would stand still
and wonder that one human creature could do so much for another.

I grant that all this may be done for a child by a stranger, and
that then in one sense the obligation would be greater. It is
however barely possible that all this should be done. The
stranger wants the first exciting cause, the consideration, "This
creature by the great scheme of nature belongs to me, and is cast
upon my care." And, as the tie in the case of the stranger was
not complete in the beginning, so neither can it be made so in
the sequel. The little straggler is like the duckling hatched in
the nest of a hen; there is danger every day, that as the
nursling begins to be acquainted with its own qualities, it may
plunge itself into another element, and swim away from its
benefactor.

Even if we put all these considerations out of the question,
still the affection of the child to its parent of adoption, wants
the kernel, and, if I may so speak, the soul, of the connection
which has been formed and modelled by the great hand of nature.
If the mere circumstance of filiation and descent creates no
debt, it however is the principle of a very close connection.
One of the most memorable mysteries of nature, is how, out of the
slightest of all connections (for such, literally speaking, is
that between father and child), so many coincidences should
arise. The child resembles his parent in feature, in
temperament, in turn of mind, and in class of disposition, while
at the same time in many particulars, in these same respects, he
is a new and individual creature. In one view therefore the
child is merely the father multiplied and repeated. Now one of
the indefeasible principles of affection is the partaking of a
common nature; and as man is a species by himself, so to a
certain degree is every nation and every family; and this
consideration, when added to the moral and spiritual ties already
treated of, undoubtedly has a tendency to give them their zest
and perfection.

But even this is not the most agreeable point of view in which we
may consider the filial affection. I come back to my first
position, that where there is no imagination, there can be no
passion, and by consequence no love. No parent ever understood
his child, and no child ever understood his parent. We have seen
that the affectionate parent considers his child like a flower in
the bud, as a mine of power that is to be unfolded, as a creature
that is to act and to pass through he knows not what, as a canvas
that "gives ample room and verge enough," for his prophetic soul
to hang over in endless visions, and his intellectual pencil to
fill up with various scenes and fortunes. And, if the parent
does not understand his child, certainly as little does the child
understand his parent. Wherever this relation subsists in its
fairest form, the parent is as a God, a being qualified with
supernatural powers, to his offspring. The child consults his
father as an oracle; to him he proposes all his little questions;
from him he learns his natural philosophy, his morals, his rules
of conduct, his religion, and his creed. The boy is uninformed
on every point; and the father is a vast Encyclopedia, not merely
of sciences, but of feelings, of sagacity, of practical wisdom,
and of justice, which the son consults on all occasions, and
never consults in vain. Senseless and inexpert is that parent,
who endeavours to govern the mind by authority, and to lay down
rugged and peremptory dogmas to his child; the child is fully and
unavoidably prepared to receive every thing with unbounded
deference, and to place total reliance in the oracle which nature
has assigned him. Habits, how beautiful! Inestimable benefit of
nature, that has given me a prop against which to sustain my
unripened strength, and has not turned me loose to wander with
tottering steps amidst the vast desert of society!

But it is not merely for contemplative wisdom that the child
honours his parent; he sees in him a vast fund of love,
attachment and sympathy. That he cannot mistake; and it is all a
mystery to him. He says, What am I, that I should be the object
of this? and whence comes it? He sees neither the fountain from
which it springs, nor the banks that confine it. To him it is an
ocean, unfathomable, and without a shore.

To the bounty of its operations he trusts implicitly. The stores
of judgment and knowledge he finds in his father, prompt him to
trust it. In many instances where it appeared at first obscure
and enigmatical, the event has taught him to acknowledge its
soundness. The mutinousness of passion will sometimes excite a
child to question the decrees of his parent; it is very long
before his understanding, as such, comes to set up a separate
system, and teaches him to controvert the decisions of his
father.

Perhaps I ought earlier to have stated, that the filial
connection we have here to consider, does not include those
melancholy instances where some woful defect or utter
worthlessness in the parent counteracts the natural course of the
affections, but refers only to cases, where the character of
father is on the whole sustained with honour, and the principle
of the connection is left to its true operation. In such cases
the child not only observes for himself the manifestations of
wisdom and goodness in his parent, but is also accustomed to hear
well of him from all around. There is a generous conspiracy in
human nature, not to counteract the honour borne by the offspring
to him from whom he sprung, and the wholsome principle of
superiority and dependence which is almost indispensible between
persons of different ages dwelling under the same roof. And,
exclusively of this consideration, the men who are chiefly seen
by the son are his father's friends and associates; and it is the
very bent, and, as it were, law of our nature, that we do not
associate much, but with persons whom we favour, and who are
prepared to mention us with kindness and honour.

Thus every way the child is deeply imbued with veneration for his
parent, and forms the habit of regarding him as his book of
wisdom, his philosopher and guide. He is accustomed to hear him
spoken of as a true friend, an active ally, and a pattern of
justice and honour; and he finds him so. Now these are the true
objects of affection,--wisdom and beneficence; and the human
heart loves this beneficence better when it is exercised towards
him who loves, first, because inevitably in almost all instances
we are best pleased with the good that is done to ourselves, and
secondly, because it can scarcely happen but that we in that case
understand it best, both in its operation and its effects.

The active principles of religion are all moulded upon this
familiar and sensible relation of father and child: and to
understand whet the human heart is capable to conceive on this
subject, we have only to refer to the many eloquent and glowing
treatises that have been written upon the love of God to his
creatures, and the love that the creature in return owes to his
God. I am not now considering religion in a speculative point of
view, or enquiring among the different sects and systems of
religion what it is that is true; but merely producing religion
as an example of what have been the conceptions of the human mind
in successive ages of the world on the subject of love.

This All that we behold, the immensity of the universe, the
admirable harmony and subtlety of its structure, as they appear
in the vastest and the minutest bodies, is considered by
religion, as the emanation of pure love, a mighty impulse and
ardour in its great author to realise the idea existing in his
mind, and to produce happiness. The Providence that watches over
us, so that not a sparrow dies unmarked, and that "the great
Sensorium of the world vibrates, if a hair of our head but falls
to the ground in the remotest desert of his creation," is still
unremitted, never-satiated love. And, to go from this to the
peculiarities of the Christian doctrine, "Greater love hath no
man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends: God
so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son to suffer,
to be treated contumeliously, and to die with ignominy, that we
might live."

If on the other hand we consider the love which the creature must
naturally pay to his creator, we shall find that the affection we
can suppose the most ingenuous child to bear to the worthiest
parent, is a very faint image of the passion which may be
expected to grow out of this relation. In God, as he is
represented to us in the books of the worthiest divines, is every
thing that can command love; wisdom to conceive, power to
execute, and beneficence actually to carry into effect, whatever
is excellent and admirable. We are lost in contemplating the
depth and immensity of his perfections. "Every good and every
perfect gift is from the universal Father, with whom is no
variableness, neither shadow of turning." The most soothing and
gratifying of all sentiments, is that of entire confidence in the
divine goodness, a reliance which no adversity can shake, and
which supports him that entertains it under every calamity, that
sees the finger of God in every thing that comes to pass, that
says, "It is good for me to be afflicted," believes, that "all
things work together for blessings" to the pious and the just,
and is intimately persuaded that "our light affliction, which is
but for a moment, is the means and the earnest of a far more
exceeding and eternal weight of glory."

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