Thoughts on Man

U >> Unknown >> Thoughts on Man

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27

While Shakespear was partly forgotten, it continued to be totally
unknown that he had contemporaries as inexpressibly superior to
the dramatic writers that have appeared since, as these
contemporaries were themselves below the almighty master of
scenic composition. It was the fashion to say, that Shakespear
existed alone in a barbarous age, and that all his imputed
crudities, and intermixture of what was noblest with unparalleled
absurdity and buffoonery, were to be allowed for to him on that
consideration.

Cowley stands forward as a memorable instance of the inconstancy
of fame. He was a most amiable man; and the loveliness of his
mind shines out in his productions. He had a truly poetic frame
of soul; and he pours out the beautiful feelings that possessed
him unreservedly and at large. He was a great sufferer in the
Stuart cause, he had been a principal member of the court of the
exiled queen; and, when the king was restored, it was a deep
sentiment among his followers and friends to admire the verses of
Cowley. He was "the Poet." The royalist rhymers were set
lightly by in comparison with him. Milton, the republican, who,
by his collection published during the civil war, had shewn that
he was entitled to the highest eminence, was unanimously
consigned to oblivion. Cowley died in 1667; and the duke of
Buckingham, the author of the Rehearsal, eight years after, set
up his tomb in the cemetery of the nation, with an inscription,
declaring him to be at once "the Pindar, the Horace and Virgil of
his country, the delight and the glory of his age, which by his
death was left a perpetual mourner."--Yet--so capricious is fame
--a century has nearly elapsed, since Pope said,

Who now reads Cowley? If he pleases yet,
His moral pleases, not his pointed wit;
Forgot his epic, nay, Pindaric art,
But still I love the language of his heart.

As Cowley was the great royalist poet after the Restoration,
Cleveland stood in the same rank during the civil war. In the
publication of his works one edition succeeded to another, yearly
or oftener, for more than twenty years. His satire is eminently
poignant; he is of a strength and energy of thinking uncommonly
masculine; and he compresses his meaning so as to give it every
advantage. His imagination is full of coruscation and
brilliancy. His petition to Cromwel, lord protector of England,
when the poet was under confinement for his loyal principles, is
a singular example of manly firmness, great independence of mind,
and a happy choice of topics to awaken feelings of forbearance
and clemency. It is unnecessary to say that Cleveland is now
unknown, except to such as feel themselves impelled to search
into things forgotten.

It would be endless to adduce all the examples that might be
found of the caprices of fame. It has been one of the arts of
the envious to set up a contemptible rival to eclipse the
splendour of sterling merit. Thus Crowne and Settle for a time
disturbed the serenity of Dryden. Voltaire says, the Phaedra of
Pradon has not less passion than that of Racine, but expressed in
rugged verse and barbarous language. Pradon is now forgotten:
and the whole French poetry of the Augustan age of Louis the
Fourteenth is threatened with the same fate. Hayley for a few
years was applauded as the genuine successor of Pope; and the
poem of Sympathy by Pratt went through twelve editions. For a
brief period almost each successive age appears fraught with
resplendent genius; but they go out one after another; they set,
"like stars that fall, to rise no more." Few indeed are endowed
with that strength of construction, that should enable them to
ride triumphant on the tide of ages.

It is the same with conquerors. What tremendous battles have
been fought, what oceans of blood have been spilled, by men who
were resolved that their achievements should be remembered for
ever! And now even their names are scarcely preserved; and the
very effects of the disasters they inflicted on mankind seem to
be swept away, as of no more validity than things that never
existed. Warriors and poets, the authors of systems and the
lights of philosophy, men that astonished the earth, and were
looked up to as Gods, even like an actor on the stage, have
strutted their hour, and then been heard of no more.

Books have the advantage of all other productions of the human
head or hand. Copies of them may be multiplied for ever, the
last as good as the first, except so far as some slight
inadvertent errors may have insinuated themselves. The Iliad
flourishes as green now, as on the day that Pisistratus is said
first to have stamped upon it its present order. The songs of
the Rhapsodists, the Scalds, and the Minstrels, which once seemed
as fugitive as the breath of him who chaunted them, repose in
libraries, and are embalmed in collections. The sportive sallies
of eminent wits, and the Table Talk of Luther and Selden, may
live as long as there shall be men to read, and judges to
appreciate them.

But other human productions have their date. Pictures, however
admirable, will only last as long as the colours of which they
are composed, and the substance on which they are painted. Three
or four hundred years ordinarily limit the existence of the most
favoured. We have scarcely any paintings of the ancients, and
but a small portion of their statues, while of these a great part
are mutilated, and various members supplied by later and inferior
artists. The library of Bufo is by Pope described,

where busts of poets dead,
And a true Pindar stood without a head.

Monumental records, alike the slightest and the most solid, are
subjected to the destructive operation of time, or to the being
removed at the caprice or convenience of successive generations.
The pyramids of Egypt remain, but the names of him who founded
them, and of him whose memory they seemed destined to perpetuate,
have perished together. Buildings for the use or habitation of
man do not last for ever. Mighty cities, as well as detached
edifices, are destined to disappear. Thebes, and Troy, and
Persepolis, and Palmyra have vanished from the face of the earth.

"Thorns and brambles have grown up in their palaces: they are
habitations for serpents, and a court for the owl."

There are productions of man however that seem more durable than
any of the edifices he has raised. Such are, in the first place,
modes of government. The constitution of Sparta lasted for seven
hundred years. That of Rome for about the same period.
Institutions, once deeply rooted in the habits of a people, will
operate in their effects through successive revolutions. Modes
of faith will sometimes be still more permanent. Not to mention
the systems of Moses and Christ, which we consider as delivered
to us by divine inspiration, that of Mahomet has continued for
twelve hundred years, and may last, for aught that appears,
twelve hundred more. The practices of the empire of China are
celebrated all over the earth for their immutability.

This brings us naturally to reflect upon the durability of the
sciences. According to Bailly, the observation of the heavens,
and a calculation of the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, in
other words, astronomy, subsisted in maturity in China and the
East, for at least three thousand years before the birth of
Christ: and, such as it was then, it bids fair to last as long
as civilisation shall continue. The additions it has acquired of
late years may fall away and perish, but the substance shall
remain. The circulation of the blood in man and other animals,
is a discovery that shall never be antiquated. And the same may
be averred of the fundamental elements of geometry and of some
other sciences. Knowledge, in its most considerable branches
shall endure, as long as books shall exist to hand it down to
successive generations.

It is just therefore, that we should regard with admiration and
awe the nature of man, by whom these mighty things have been
accomplished, at the same time that the perishable quality of its
individual monuments, and the temporary character and inconstancy
of that fame which in many instances has filled the whole earth
with its renown, may reasonably quell the fumes of an inordinate
vanity, and keep alive in us the sentiment of a wholsome
diffidence and humility.

ESSAY V.
OF THE REBELLIOUSNESS OF MAN.

There is a particular characteristic in the nature of the human
mind, which is somewhat difficult to be explained.

Man is a being of a rational and an irrational nature.

It has often been said that we have two souls. Araspes, in the
Cyropedia, adopts this language to explain his inconsistency, and
desertion of principle and honour. The two souls of man,
according to this hypothesis, are, first, animal, and, secondly,
intellectual.

But I am not going into any thing of this slight and every-day
character.

Man is a rational being. It is by this particular that he is
eminently distinguished from the brute creation. He collects
premises and deduces conclusions. He enters into systems of
thinking, and combines systems of action, which he pursues from
day to day, and from year to year. It is by this feature in his
constitution that he becomes emphatically the subject of history,
of poetry and fiction. It is by this that he is raised above the
other inhabitants of the globe of earth, and that the individuals
of our race are made the partners of "gods, and men like gods."

But our nature, beside this, has another section. We start
occasionally ten thousand miles awry. We resign the sceptre of
reason, and the high dignity that belongs to us as beings of a
superior species; and, without authority derived to us from any
system of thinking, even without the scheme of gratifying any
vehement and uncontrolable passion, we are impelled to do, or at
least feel ourselves excited to do, something disordinate and
strange. It seems as if we had a spring within us, that found
the perpetual restraint of being wise and sober insupportable.
We long to be something, or to do something, sudden and
unexpected, to throw the furniture of our apartment out at
window, or, when we are leaving a place of worship, in which
perhaps the most solemn feelings of our nature have been excited,
to push the grave person that is just before us, from the top of
the stairs to the bottom. A thousand absurdities, wild and
extravagant vagaries, come into our heads, and we are only
restrained from perpetrating them by the fear, that we may be
subjected to the treatment appropriated to the insane, or may
perhaps be made amenable to the criminal laws of our country.

A story occurs to me, which I learned from the late Dr. Parr at
Hatton, that may not unhappily illustrate the point I am
endeavouring to explain.

Dr. Samuel Clarke, rector of St. James's, Westminster, the
especial friend of Sir Isaac Newton, the distinguished editor of
the poems of Homer, and author of the Demonstration of the Being
and Attributes of God, was one day summoned from his study, to
receive two visitors in the parlour. When he came downstairs,
and entered the room, he saw a foreigner, who by his air seemed
to be a person of distinction, a professor perhaps of some
university on the continent; and an alderman of London, a
relation of the doctor, who had come to introduce the foreigner.
The alderman, a man of uncultivated mind and manners, and whom
the doctor had been accustomed to see in sordid attire,
surrounded with the incumbrances of his trade, was decked out for
the occasion in a full-dress suit, with a wig of majestic and
voluminous structure. Clarke was, as it appears, so much struck
with the whimsical nature of this unexpected metamorphosis, and
the extraordinary solemnity of his kinsman's demeanour, as to
have felt impelled, almost immediately upon entering the room, to
snatch the wig from the alderman's head, and throw it against the
ceiling: after which this eminent person immediately escaped,
and retired to his own apartment. I was informed from the same
authority, that Clarke, after exhausting his intellectual
faculties by long and intense study, would not unfrequently quit
his seat, leap upon the table, and place himself cross-legged
like a tailor, being prompted, by these antagonist sallies, to
relieve himself from the effect of the too severe strain he had
previously put upon his intellectual powers.

But the deviousness and aberration of our human faculties
frequently amount to something considerably more serious than
this.

I will put a case.

I will suppose myself and another human being together, in some
spot secure from the intrusion of spectators. A musket is
conveniently at hand. It is already loaded. I say to my
companion, "I will place myself before you; I will stand
motionless: take up that musket, and shoot me through the
heart." I want to know what passes in the mind of the man to
whom these words are addressed.

I say, that one of the thoughts that will occur to many of the
persons who should be so invited, will be, "Shall I take him at
his word?"

There are two things that restrain us from acts of violence and
crime. The first is, the laws of morality. The second is, the
construction that will be put upon our actions by our
fellow-creatures, and the treatment we shall receive from
them.--I put out of the question here any particular value I may
entertain for my challenger, or any degree of friendship and
attachment I may feel for him.

The laws of morality (setting aside the consideration of any
documents of religion or otherwise I may have imbibed from my
parents and instructors) are matured within us by experience. In
proportion as I am rendered familiar with my fellow-creatures, or
with society at large, I come to feel the ties which bind men to
each other, and the wisdom and necessity of governing my conduct
by inexorable rules. We are thus further and further removed
from unexpected sallies of the mind, and the danger of suddenly
starting away into acts not previously reflected on and
considered.

With respect to the censure and retaliation of other men on my
proceeding, these, by the terms of my supposition, are left out
of the question.

It may be taken for granted, that no man but a madman, would in
the case I have stated take the challenger at his word. But what
I want to ascertain is, why the bare thought of doing so takes a
momentary hold of the mind of the person addressed?

There are three principles in the nature of man which contribute
to account for this.

First, the love of novelty.

Secondly, the love of enterprise and adventure. I become
insupportably wearied with the repetition of rotatory acts and
every-day occurrences. I want to be alive, to be something more
than I commonly am, to change the scene, to cut the cable that
binds my bark to the shore, to launch into the wide sea of
possibilities, and to nourish my thoughts with observing a train
of unforeseen consequences as they arise.

A third principle, which discovers itself in early childhood, and
which never entirely quits us, is the love of power. We wish to
be assured that we are something, and that we can produce notable
effects upon other beings out of ourselves. It is this
principle, which instigates a child to destroy his playthings,
and to torment and kill the animals around him.

But, even independently of the laws of morality, and the fear of
censure and retaliation from our fellow-creatures, there are
other things which would obviously restrain us from taking the
challenger in the above supposition at his word.

If man were an omnipotent being, and at the same time retained
all his present mental infirmities, it would be difficult to say
of what extravagances he would be guilty. It is proverbially
affirmed that power has a tendency to corrupt the best
dispositions. Then what would not omnipotence effect?

If, when I put an end to the life of a fellow-creature, all
vestiges of what I had done were to disappear, this would take
off a great part of the control upon my actions which at present
subsists. But, as it is, there are many consequences that "give
us pause." I do not like to see his blood streaming on the
ground. I do not like to witness the spasms and convulsions of a
dying man. Though wounded to the heart, he may speak. Then what
may he chance to say? What looks of reproach may he cast upon
me? The musket may miss fire. If I wound him, the wound may be
less mortal than I contemplated. Then what may I not have to
fear? His dead body will be an incumbrance to me. It must be
moved from the place where it lies. It must be buried. How is
all this to be done by me? By one precipitate act, I have
involved myself in a long train of loathsome and heart-sickening
consequences.

If it should be said, that no one but a person of an abandoned
character would fail, when the scene was actually before him, to
feel an instant repugnance to the proposition, yet it will
perhaps be admitted, that almost every reader, when he regards it
as a supposition merely, says to himself for a moment, "Would I?
Could I?"

But, to bring the irrationality of man more completely to the
test, let us change the supposition. Let us imagine him to be
gifted with the powers of the fabled basilisk, "to monarchise, be
feared, and kill with looks." His present impulses, his
passions, his modes of reasoning and choosing shall continue; but
his "will is neighboured to his act;" whatever he has formed a
conception of with preference, is immediately realised; his
thought is succeeded by the effect; and no traces are left
behind, by means of which a shadow of censure or suspicion can be
reflected on him.

Man is in truth a miracle. The human mind is a creature of
celestial origin, shut up and confined in a wall of flesh. We
feel a kind of proud impatience of the degradation to which we
are condemned. We beat ourselves to pieces against the wires of
our cage, and long to escape, to shoot through the elements, and
be as free to change at any instant the place where we dwell, as
to change the subject to which our thoughts are applied.

This, or something like this, seems to be the source of our most
portentous follies and absurdities. This is the original sin
upon which St. Austin and Calvin descanted. Certain Arabic
writers seem to have had this in their minds, when they tell us,
that there is a black drop of blood in the heart of every man, in
which is contained the fomes peccati, and add that, when Mahomet
was in the fourth year of his age, the angel Gabriel caught him
up from among his playfellows, and taking his heart from his
bosom, squeezed out of it this first principle of frailty, in
consequence of which he for ever after remained inaccessible to
the weaknesses of other men[6].

[6] Life of Mahomet, by Prideaux.

It is the observation of sir Thomas Browne: "Man is a noble
animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave." One of the
most remarkable examples of this is to he found in the pyramids
of Egypt. They are generally considered as having been erected
to be the tombs of the kings of that country. They have no
opening by which for the light of heaven to enter, and afford no
means for the accommodation of living man. An hundred thousand
men are said to have been constantly employed in the building;
ten years to have been consumed in hewing and conveying the
stones, and twenty more in completing the edifice. Of the
largest the base is a square, and the sides are triangles,
gradually diminishing as they mount in the air. The sides of the
base are two hundred and twenty feet in length, and the
perpendicular height is above one hundred and fifty-five feet.
The figure of the pyramid is precisely that which is most
calculated for duration: it cannot perish by accident; and it
would require almost as much labour to demolish it, as it did to
raise it at first.

What a light does this fact convey into the inmost recesses of
the human heart! Man reflects deeply, and with feelings of a
mortified nature, upon the perishableness of his frame, and the
approaching close, so far as depends upon the evidence of our
senses, of his existence. He has indeed an irrepressible
"longing after immortality;" and this is one of the various and
striking modes in which he has sought to give effect to his
desire.

Various obvious causes might be selected, which should be
calculated to give birth to the feeling of discontent.

One is, the not being at home.

I will here put together some of the particulars which make up
the idea of home in the most emphatical sense of the word.

Home is the place where a man is principally at his ease. It is
the place where he most breathes his native air: his lungs play
without impediment; and every respiration brings a pure element,
and a cheerful and gay frame of mind. Home is the place where he
most easily accomplishes all his designs; he has his furniture
and materials and the elements of his occupations entirely within
his reach. Home is the place where he can be uninterrupted. He
is in a castle which is his in full propriety. No unwelcome
guests can intrude; no harsh sounds can disturb his
contemplations; he is the master, and can command a silence equal
to that of the tomb, whenever he pleases.

In this sense every man feels, while cribbed in a cabin of flesh,
and shut up by the capricious and arbitrary injunctions of human
communities, that he is not at home.

Another cause of our discontent is to be traced to the disparity
of the two parts of which we are composed, the thinking
principle, and the body in which it acts. The machine which
constitutes the visible man, bears no proportion to our thoughts,
our wishes and desires. Hence we are never satisfied; we always
feel the want of something we have not; and this uneasiness is
continually pushing us on to precipitate and abortive resolves.

I find in a book, entitled, Illustrations of Phrenology, by Sir
George Mackenzie, Baronet, the following remark. 'If this
portrait be correctly drawn, the right side does not quite agree
with the left in the region of ideality. This dissimilarity may
have produced something contradictory in the feelings of the
person it represents, which he may have felt extremely
annoying[7]." An observation of this sort may be urged with
striking propriety as to the dissimilar attributes of the body
and the thinking principle in man.

[7] The remark thus delivered is applied to the portrait of the
author of the present volume.

It is perhaps thus that we are to account for a phenomenon, in
itself sufficiently obvious, that our nature has within it a
principle of boundless ambition, a desire to be something that we
are not, a feeling that we are out of our place, and ought to be
where we are not. This feeling produces in us quick and earnest
sallies and goings forth of the mind, a restlessness of soul, and
an aspiration after some object that we do not find ourselves
able to chalk out and define.

Hence comes the practice of castle-building, and of engaging the
soul in endless reveries and imaginations of something mysterious
and unlike to what we behold in the scenes of sublunary life.
Many writers, having remarked this, have endeavoured to explain
it from the doctrine of a preexistent state, and have said that,
though we have no clear and distinct recollection of what
happened to us previously to our being launched in our present
condition, yet we have certain broken and imperfect conceptions,
as if, when the tablet of the memory was cleared for the most
part of the traces of what we had passed through in some other
mode of being, there were a few characters that had escaped the
diligence of the hand by which the rest had been obliterated.

It is this that, in less enlightened ages of the world, led men
to engage so much of their thoughts upon supposed existences,
which, though they might never become subject to our organs of
vision, were yet conceived to be perpetually near us, fairies,
ghosts, witches, demons and angels. Our ancestors often derived
suggestions from these, were informed of things beyond the ken of
ordinary faculties, were tempted to the commission of forbidden
acts, or encouraged to proceed in the paths of virtue.

The most remarkable of these phenomena was that of necromancy,
sorcery and magic. There were men who devoted themselves to
"curious arts," and had books fraught with hidden knowledge.
They could "bedim

The noon-tide sun, call forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread, rattling thunder
They could give fire, and rift even Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt--graves at their command
Have waked their sleepers, oped and let them forth.

And of these things the actors in them were so certain, that many
witches were led to the stake, their guilt being principally
established on their own confessions. But the most memorable
matters in the history of the black art, were the contracts which
those who practised it not unfrequently entered into with the
devil, that he should assist them by his supernatural power for
ten or twenty years, and, in consideration of this aid, they
consented to resign their souls into his possession, when the
period of the contract was expired.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27