Thoughts on Man

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The diffident man, in some cases seldomer, and in some oftener
and in a more glaring manner, deserts the cause of truth, and by
that means is the cause of misrepresentation, and indirectly the
propagator of falshood. But he is constant and sincere as far as
he goes; he never lends his voice to falshood, or intentionally
to sophistry; he never for an instant goes over to the enemy's
standard, or disgraces his honest front by strewing it in the
ranks of tyranny or imposture. He may undoubtedly be accused, to
a certain degree, of dissimulation, or throwing into shade the
thing that is, but never of simulation, or the pretending the
thing to be that is not. He is plain and uniform in every thing
that he professes, or to which he gives utterance; but, from
timidity or irresolution, he keeps back in part the offering
which he owes at the shrine where it is most honourable and
glorious for man to worship.

And this brings me back again to the subject of the immediately
preceding Essay, the propriety of voting by ballot.

The very essence of this scheme is silence. And this silence is
not merely like that which is prompted by a diffident temper,
which by fits is practiced by the modest and irresolute man, and
by fits disappears before the sun of truth and through the
energies of a temporary fortitude. It is uniform. It is not
brought into act only, when the individual unhappily does not
find in himself the firmness to play the adventurer. It becomes
matter of system, and is felt as being recommended to us for a
duty

Nor does the evil stop there. In the course of my ordinary
communications with my fellow-men, I speak when I please, and I
am silent when I please, and there is nothing specially to be
remarked either way. If I speak, I am perhaps listened to; and,
if I am silent, it is likely enough concluded that it is because
I have nothing of importance to say. But in the question of
ballot the case is far otherwise. There it is known that the
voter has his secret. When I am silent upon a matter occurring
in the usual intercourses of life where I might speak, nay, where
we will suppose I ought to speak, I am at least guilty of
dissimulation only. But the voter by ballot is strongly impelled
to the practice of the more enormous sin of simulation. It is
known, as I have said, that he has his secret. And he will often
be driven to have recourse to various stratagems, that he may
elude the enquirer, or that he may set at fault the sagacity of
the silent observer. He has something that he might tell if he
would, and he distorts himself in a thousand ways, that he may
not betray the hoard which he is known to have in his custody.
The institution of ballot is the fruitful parent of ambiguities,
equivocations and lies without number.

ESSAY XIX.
OF SELF-COMPLACENCY.

The subject of this Essay is intimately connected with those of
Essays XI and XII, perhaps the most important of the series.

It has been established in the latter, that human creatures are
constantly accompanied in their voluntary actions with the
delusive sense of liberty, and that our character, our energies,
and our conscience of moral right and wrong, are mainly dependent
upon this feature in our constitution.

The subject of my present disquisition relates to the feeling of
self-approbation or self-complacency, which will be found
inseparable from the most honourable efforts and exertions in
which mortal men can be engaged.

One of the most striking of the precepts contained in what are
called the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, is couched in the words,
"Reverence thyself."

The duties which are incumbent on man are of two sorts, negative
and positive. We are bound to set right our mistakes, and to
correct the evil habits to which we are prone; and we are bound
also to be generously ambitious, to aspire after excellence, and
to undertake such things as may reflect honour on ourselves, and
be useful to others.

To the practice of the former of these classes of duties we may
be instigated by prohibitions, menaces and fear, the fear of
mischiefs that may fall upon us conformably to the known series
of antecedents and consequents in the course of nature, or of
mischiefs that may be inflicted on us by the laws of the country
in which we live, or as results of the ill will and
disapprobation felt towards us by individuals. There is nothing
that is necessarily generous or invigorating in the practice of
our negative duties. They amount merely to a scheme for keeping
us within bounds, and restraining us from those sallies and
escapes, which human nature, undisciplined and left to itself,
might betray us into. But positive enterprise, and great actual
improvement cannot be expected by us in this way. All this is
what the apostle refers to, when he speaks of "the law as a
schoolmaster to bring us to liberty," after which he advises us
"not to be again entangled with the yoke of bondage."

On the other hand, if we would enter ourselves in the race of
positive improvement, if we would become familiar with generous
sentiments, and the train of conduct which such sentiments
inspire, we must provide ourselves with the soil in which such
things grow, and engage in the species of husbandry by which they
are matured; in other words, we must be no strangers to
self-esteem and self-complacency.

The truth of this statement may perhaps be most strikingly
illustrated, if we take for our example the progress of
schoolboys under a preceptor. A considerable proportion of these
are apt, diligent, and desirous to perform the tasks in which
they are engaged, so as to satisfy the demands of their masters
and parents, and to advance honourably in the path that is
recommended to them. And a considerable proportion put
themselves on the defensive, and propose to their own minds to
perform exactly as much as shall exempt them from censure and
punishment, and no more.

Now I say of the former, that they cannot accomplish the purpose
they have conceived, unless so far as they are aided by a
sentiment of self-reverence.

The difference of the two parties is, that the latter proceed, so
far as their studies are concerned, as feeling themselves under
the law of necessity, and as if they were machines merely, and
the former as if they were under what the apostle calls "the law
of liberty."

We cannot perform our tasks to the best of our power, unless we
think well of our own capacity.

But this is the smallest part of what is necessary. We must also
be in good humour with ourselves. We must say, I can do that
which I shall have just occasion to look back upon with
satisfaction. It is the anticipation of this result, that
stimulates our efforts, and carries us forward. Perseverance is
an active principle, and cannot continue to operate but under the
influence of desire. It is incompatible with languor and
neutrality. It implies the love of glory, perhaps of that glory
which shall be attributed to us by others, or perhaps only of
that glory which shall be reaped by us in the silent chambers of
the mind. The diligent scholar is he that loves himself, and
desires to have reason to applaud and love himself. He sits down
to his task with resolution, he approves of what he does in each
step of the process, and in each enquires, Is this the thing I
purposed to effect?

And, as it is with the unfledged schoolboy, after the same manner
it is with the man mature. He must have to a certain extent a
good opinion of himself, he must feel a kind of internal harmony,
giving to the circulations of his frame animation and
cheerfulness, or he can never undertake and execute considerable
things.

The execution of any thing considerable implies in the first
place previous persevering meditation. He that undertakes any
great achievement will, according to the vulgar phrase, "think
twice," before he buckles up his resolution, and plunges into the
ocean, which he has already surveyed with anxious glance while he
remained on shore. Let our illustration be the case of Columbus,
who, from the figure of the earth, inferred that there must be a
way of arriving at the Indies by a voyage directly west, in
distinction from the very complicated way hitherto practiced, by
sailing up the Mediterranean, crossing the isthmus of Suez, and
so falling down the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean. He weighed
all the circumstances attendant on such an undertaking in his
mind. He enquired into his own powers and resources, imaged to
himself the various obstacles that might thwart his undertaking,
and finally resolved to engage in it. If Columbus had not
entertained a very good opinion of himself, it is impossible that
he should have announced such a project, or should have achieved
it.

Again. Let our illustration be, of Homer undertaking to compose
the Iliad. If he had not believed himself to be a man of very
superior powers to the majority of the persons around him, he
would most assuredly never have attempted it. What an
enterprise! To describe in twenty-four books, and sixteen
thousand verses, the perpetual warfare and contention of two
great nations, all Greece being armed for the attack, and all the
western division of Asia Minor for the defence: the war carried
on by two vast confederacies, under numerous chiefs, all
sovereign and essentially independent of each other. To conceive
the various characters of the different leaders, and their mutual
rivalship. To engage all heaven, such as it was then understood,
as well as what was most respectable on earth, in the struggle.
To form the idea, through twenty-four books, of varying the
incidents perpetually, and keeping alive the attention of the
reader or hearer without satiety or weariness. For this purpose,
and to answer to his conception of a great poem, Homer appears to
have thought it necessary that the action should be one; and he
therefore took the incidental quarrel of Achilles and the
commander in chief, the resentment of Achilles, and his
consequent defection from the cause, till, by the death of
Patroclus, and then of Hector, all traces of the misunderstanding
first, and then of its consequences, should be fully obliterated.

There is further an essential difference between the undertaking
of Columbus and that of Homer. Once fairly engaged, there was
for Columbus no drawing back. Being already at sea on the great
Atlantic Ocean, he could not retrace his steps. Even when he had
presented his project to the sovereigns of Spain, and they had
accepted it, and still more when the ships were engaged, and the
crews mustered, he must go forward, or submit to indelible
disgrace.

It is not so in writing a poem. The author of the latter may
stop whenever he pleases. Of consequence, during every day of
its execution, he requires a fresh stimulus. He must look back
on the past, and forward on what is to come, and feel that he has
considerable reason to be satisfied. The great naval discoverer
may have his intervals of misgiving and discouragement, and may,
as Pope expresses it, "wish that any one would hang him." He goes
forward; for he has no longer the liberty to choose. But the
author of a mighty poem is not in the same manner entangled, and
therefore to a great degree returns to his work each day,
"screwing his courage to the sticking-place." He must feel the
same fortitude and elasticity, and be as entirely the same man of
heroic energy, as when he first arrived at the resolution to
engage. How much then of self-complacency and self-confidence do
his undertaking and performance imply!

I have taken two of the most memorable examples in the catalogue
of human achievements: the discovery of a New World, and the
production of the Iliad. But all those voluntary actions, or
rather series and chains of actions, which comprise energy in the
first determination, and honour in the execution, each in its
degree rests upon self-complacency as the pillar upon which its
weight is sustained, and without which it must sink into nothing.

Self-complacency then being the indispensible condition of all
that is honourable in human achievements, hence we may derive a
multitude of duties, and those of the most delicate nature,
incumbent on the preceptor, as well as a peculiar discipline to
be observed by the candidate, both while he is "under a
schoolmaster," and afterwards when he is emancipated, and his
plan of conduct is to he regulated by his own discretion.

The first duty of the preceptor is encouragement.

Not that his face is to be for ever dressed in smiles, and that
his tone is to be at all times that of invitation and courtship.
The great theatre of the world is of a mingled constitution, made
up of advantages and sufferings; and it is perhaps best that so
should be the different scenes of the drama as they pass. The
young adventurer is not to expect to have every difficulty
smoothed for him by the hand of another. This were to teach him
a lesson of effeminacy and cowardice. On the contrary it is
necessary that he should learn that human life is a state of
hardship, that the adversary we have to encounter does not always
present himself with his fangs sheathed in the woolly softness
which occasionally renders them harmless, and that nothing great
or eminently honourable was ever achieved but through the dint of
resolution, energy and struggle. It is good that the winds of
heaven should blow upon him, that he should encounter the tempest
of the elements, and occasionally sustain the inclemency of the
summer's heat and winter's cold, both literally and
metaphorically.

But the preceptor, however he conducts himself in other respects,
ought never to allow his pupil to despise himself, or to hold
himself as of no account. Self-contempt can never be a
discipline favourable to energy or to virtue. The pupil ought at
all times to judge himself in some degree worthy, worthy and
competent now to attempt, and hereafter to accomplish, things
deserving of commendation. The preceptor must never degrade his
pupil in his own eyes, but on the contrary must teach him that
nothing but resolution and perseverance are necessary, to enable
him to effect all that the judicious director can expect from
him. He should be encouraged through every step of his progress,
and specially encouraged when he has gained a certain point, and
arrived at an important resting-place. It is thus we are taught
the whole circle of what are called accomplishments, dancing,
music, fencing, and the rest; and it is surely a strange anomaly,
if those things which are most essential in raising the mind to
its true standard, cannot be communicated with equal suavity and
kindness, be surrounded with allurements, and regarded as sources
of pleasure and genuine hilarity.

In the mean time it is to be admitted that every human creature,
especially in the season of youth, and not being the victim of
some depressing disease either of body or mind, has in him a good
obstinate sort of self-complacency, which cannot without much
difficulty be eradicated. "Though he falleth seven times, yet
will he rise again." And, when we have encountered various
mortifications, and have been many times rebuked and inveighed
against, we nevertheless recover our own good opinion, and are
ready to enter into a fresh contention for the prize, if not in
one kind, then in another.

It is in allusion to this feature in the human character, that we
have an expressive phrase in the English language,--"to break the
spirit." The preceptor may occasionally perhaps prescribe to the
pupil a severe task; and the young adventurer may say, Can I be
expected to accomplish this? But all must be done in kindness.
The generous attempter must be reminded of the powers he has
within him, perhaps yet unexercised; with cheering sounds his
progress must be encouraged; and, above all, the director of the
course must take care not to tax him beyond his strength. And,
be it observed, that the strength of a human creature is to be
ascertained by two things; first, the abstract capacity, that the
thing required is not beyond the power of a being so constituted
to perform; and, secondly, we must take into the account his past
achievements, the things he has already accomplished, and not
expect that he is at once to overleap a thousand obstacles.

For there is such a thing as a broken spirit. I remember a boy
who was my schoolfellow, that, having been treated with uncalled
for severity, never appeared afterwards in the scene of
instruction, but with a neglected appearance, and the articles of
his dress scarcely half put on. I was very young at the time,
and viewed only the outside of things. I cannot tell whether he
had any true ambition previously to his disgrace, but I am sure
he never had afterwards.

How melancholy an object is the man, who, "for the privilege to
breathe, bears up and down the city

A discontented and repining spirit
Burthensome to itself,"

incapable of enterprise, listless, with no courage to undertake,
and no anticipation of the practicability of success and honour!
And this spectacle is still more affecting, when the subject
shall be a human creature in the dawn of youth, when nature opens
to him a vista of beauty and fruition on every side, and all is
encouraging, redolent of energy and enterprise!

To break the spirit of a man, bears a considerable resemblance to
the breaking the main spring, or principal movement, of a
complicated and ingeniously constructed machine. We cannot tell
when it is to happen; and it comes at last perhaps at the time
that it is least expected. A judicious superintendent therefore
will be far from trying consequences in his office, and will,
like a man walking on a cliff whose extremes are ever and anon
crumbling away and falling into the ocean, keep much within the
edge, and at a safe distance from the line of danger.

But this consideration has led me much beyond the true subject of
this Essay. The instructor of youth, as I have already said, is
called upon to use all his skill, to animate the courage, and
maintain the cheerfulness and self-complacency of his pupil.
And, as such is the discipline to be observed to the candidate,
while he is "under a schoolmaster," so, when he is emancipated,
and his plan of conduct is to be regulated by his own discretion,
it is necessary that he should carry forward the same scheme, and
cultivate that tone of feeling, which should best reconcile him
to himself, and, by teaching him to esteem himself and bear in
mind his own value, enable him to achieve things honourable to
his character, and memorably useful to others. Melancholy, and a
disposition anticipating evil are carefully to be guarded
against, by him who is desirous to perform his part well on the
theatre of society. He should habitually meditate all cheerful
things, and sing the song of battle which has a thousand times
spurred on his predecessors to victory. He should contemplate
the crown that awaits him, and say to himself, I also will do my
part, and endeavour to enrol myself in the select number of those
champions, of whom it has been predicated that they were men, of
whom, compared with the herd of ordinary mortals, "the world,"
the species among whom they were rated, "was not worthy."

Another consideration is to be recollected here. Without
self-complacency in the agent no generous enterprise is to be
expected, and no train of voluntary actions, such as may purchase
honour to the person engaged in them.

But, beside this, there is no true and substantial happiness but
for the self-complacent. "The good man," as Solomon says, "is
satisfied from himself." The reflex act is inseparable from the
constitution of the human mind. How can any one have genuine
happiness, unless in proportion as he looks round, and, "behold!
every thing is very good?" This is the sunshine of the soul, the
true joy, that gives cheerfulness to all our circulations, and
makes us feel ourselves entire and complete. What indeed is
life, unless so far as it is enjoyed? It does not merit the
name. If I go into a school, and look round on a number of young
faces, the scene is destitute of its true charm, unless so far as
I see inward peace and contentment on all sides. And, if we
require this eminently in the young, neither can it be less
essential, when in growing manhood we have the real cares of the
world to contend with, or when in declining age we need every
auxiliary to enable us to sustain our infirmities.

But, before I conclude my remarks on this subject, it is
necessary that I should carefully distinguish between the thesis,
that self-complacency is the indispensible condition of all that
is honourable in human achievements, and the proposition
contended against in Essay XI, that "self-love is the source of
all our actions." Self-complacency is indeed the feeling without
which we cannot proceed in an honourable course; but is far from
being the motive that impels us to act. The motive is in the
real nature and absolute properties of the good thing that is
proposed to our choice: we seek the happiness of another,
because his happiness is the object of our desire.
Self-complacency may be likened to the bottle-holder in one of
those contentions for bodily prowess, so characteristic of our
old English manners. The bottle-holder is necessary to supply
the combatant with refreshment, and to encourage him to persist;
but it would be most unnatural to regard him as the cause of the
contest. No: the parties have found reason for competition,
they apprehend a misunderstanding or a rivalry impossible to be
settled but by open contention, and the putting forth of mental
and corporeal energy; and the bottle-holder is an auxiliary
called in afterwards, his interference implying that the parties
have already a motive to act, and have thrown down the gauntlet
in token of the earnest good-will which animates them to engage.

ESSAY XX.
OF PHRENOLOGY.

The following remarks can pretend to he nothing more than a few
loose and undigested thoughts upon a subject, which has recently
occupied the attention of many men, and obtained an extraordinary
vogue in the world. It were to be wished, that the task had
fallen into the hands of a writer whose studies were more
familiar with all the sciences which bear more or less on the
topic I propose to consider: but, if abler and more competent
men pass it by, I feel disposed to plant myself in the breach,
and to offer suggestions which may have the fortune to lead
others, better fitted for the office than myself, to engage in
the investigation. One advantage I may claim, growing out of my
partial deficiency. It is known not to be uncommon for a man to
stand too near to the subject of his survey, to allow him to
obtain a large view of it in all its bearings. I am no
anatomist: I simply take my stand upon the broad ground of the
general philosophy of man.

It is a very usual thing for fanciful theories to have their turn
amidst the eccentricities of the human mind, and then to be heard
of no more. But it is perhaps no ill occupation, now and then,
for an impartial observer, to analyse these theories, and attempt
to blow away the dust which will occasionally settle on the
surface of science. If phrenology, as taught by Gall and
Spurzheim, be a truth, I shall probably render a service to that
truth, by endeavouring to shew where the edifice stands in need
of more solid supports than have yet been assigned to it. If it
be a falshood, the sooner it is swept away to the gulph of
oblivion the better. Let the inquisitive and the studious fix
their minds on more substantial topics, instead of being led away
by gaudy and deceitful appearances. The human head, that
crowning capital of the column of man, is too interesting a
subject, to be the proper theme of every dabbler. And it is
obvious, that the professors of this so called discovery, if they
be rash and groundless in their assertions, will be in danger of
producing momentous errors, of exciting false hopes never
destined to be realised, and of visiting with pernicious blasts
the opening buds of excellence, at the time when they are most
exposed to the chance of destruction.

I shall set out with acknowledging, that there is, as I
apprehend, a science in relation to the human head, something
like what Plato predicates of the statue hid in a block of
marble. It is really contained in the block; but it is only the
most consummate sculptor, that can bring it to the eyes of men,
and free it from all the incumbrances, which, till he makes
application of his art to it, surround the statue, and load it
with obscurities and disfigurement. The man, who, without long
study and premeditation, rushes in at once, and expects to
withdraw the curtain, will only find himself disgraced by the
attempt.

There is a passage in an acute writer[39], whose talents
singularly fitted him, even when he appeared totally immerged in
mummery and trifles, to illustrate the most important truths,
that is applicable to the point I am considering.

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