Thoughts on Man

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In the animal creation there are some species that may be tamed,
and others whose wildness is irreclaimable. Horace says, that
all men are mad: and no doubt mankind in general has one of the
features of madness. In the ordinary current of our existence we
are to a considerable degree rational and tractable. But we are
not altogether safe. I may converse with a maniac for hours; he
shall talk as soberly, and conduct himself with as much
propriety, as any other of the species who has never been
afflicted with his disease; but touch upon a particular string,
and, before you are aware of it, he shall fly out into the
wildest and most terrifying extravagances. Such, though in a
greatly inferior degree, are the majority of human beings.

The original impulse of man is uncontrolableness. When the
spirit of life first descends upon us, we desire and attempt to
be as free as air. We are impatient of restraint. This is the
period of the empire of will. There is a power within us that
wars against the restraint of another. We are eager to follow
our own impulses and caprices, and are with difficulty subjected
to those who believe they best know how to control inexperienced
youth in a way that shall tend to his ultimate advantage.

The most moderate and auspicious method in which the old may
endeavour to guide and control the pursuits of the young,
undoubtedly is by the conviction of the understanding. But this
is not always easy. It is not at all times practicable fully to
explain to the apprehension of a very young person the advantage,
which at a period a little more advanced he would be able clearly
to recognise.

There is a further evil appertaining to this view of the subject.

A young man even, in the early season of life, is not always
disposed to obey the convictions of his understanding. He has
prescribed to himself a task which returns with the returning
day; but he is often not disposed to apply. The very sense that
it is what he conceives to be an incumbent duty, inspires him
with reluctance.

An obvious source of this reluctance is, that the convictions of
our understanding are not always equally present to us. I have
entered into a deduction of premises, and arrived at a
conclusion; but some of the steps of the chain are scarcely
obvious to me, at the time that I am called upon to act upon the
conclusion I have drawn. Beside which, there was a freshness in
the first conception of the reasons on which my conduct was to be
framed, which, by successive rehearsals, and by process of time,
is no longer in any degree spirit-stirring and pregnant.

This restiveness and impracticability are principally incident to
us in the period of youth. By degrees the novelties of life wear
out, and we become sober. We are like soldiers at drill, and in
a review. At first we perform our exercise from necessity, and
with an ill grace. We had rather be doing almost any thing else.

By degrees we are reconciled to our occupation. We are like
horses in a manege, or oxen or dogs taught to draw the plough, or
be harnessed to a carriage. Our stubbornness is subdued; we no
longer exhaust our strength in vain efforts to free ourselves
from the yoke.

Conviction at first is strong. Having arrived at years of
discretion, I revolve with a sobered mind the different
occupations to which my efforts and my time may be devoted, and
determine at length upon that which under all the circumstances
displays the most cogent recommendations. Having done so, I
rouse my faculties and direct my energies to the performance of
my task. By degrees however my resolution grows less vigorous,
and my exertions relax. I accept any pretence to be let off, and
fly into a thousand episodes and eccentricities.

But, as the newness of life subsides, the power of temptation
becomes less. That conviction, which was at first strong, and
gradually became fainter and less impressive, is made by
incessant repetitions a part of my nature. I no more think of
doubting its truth, than of my own existence. Practice has
rendered the pursuits that engage me more easy, till at length I
grow disturbed and uncomfortable if I am withheld from them.
They are like my daily bread. If they are not afforded me, I
grow sick and attenuated, and my life verges to a close. The sun
is not surer to rise, than I am to feel the want of my stated
employment.

It is the business of education to tame the wild ass, the restive
and rebellious principle, in our nature. The judicious parent or
instructor essays a thousand methods to accomplish his end. The
considerate elder tempts the child with inticements and caresses,
that he may win his attention to the first rudiments of learning.

He sets before him, as he grows older, all the considerations and
reasons he can devise, to make him apprehend the advantage of
improvement and literature. He does his utmost to make his
progress easy, and to remove all impediments. He smooths the
path by which he is to proceed, and endeavours to root out all
its thorns. He exerts his eloquence to inspire his pupil with a
love for the studies in which he is engaged. He opens to him the
beauties and genius of the authors he reads, and endeavours to
proceed with him hand in hand, and step by step. He persuades,
he exhorts, and occasionally he reproves. He awakens in him the
love of excellence, the fear of disgrace, and an ambition to
accomplish that which "the excellent of the earth" accomplished
before him.

At a certain period the young man is delivered into his own
hands, and becomes an instructor to himself. And, if he is
blessed with an ingenuous disposition, he will enter on his task
with an earnest desire and a devoted spirit. No person of a
sober and enlarged mind can for a moment delude himself into the
opinion that, when he is delivered into his own hands, his
education is ended. In a sense to which no one is a stranger,
the education of man and his life terminate together. We should
at no period of our existence be backward to receive information,
and should at all times preserve our minds open to conviction.
We should through every day of our lives seek to add to the
stores of our knowledge and refinement. But, independently of
this more extended sense of the word, a great portion of the
education of the young man is left to the direction of the man
himself. The epoch of entire liberty is a dangerous period, and
calls upon him for all his discretion, that he may not make an
ill use of that, which is in itself perhaps the first of
sublunary blessings. The season of puberty also, and all the
excitements from this source, "that flesh is heir to," demand the
utmost vigilance and the strictest restraint. In a word, if we
would counteract the innate rebelliousness of man, that
indocility of mind which is at all times at hand to plunge us
into folly, we must never slumber at our post, but govern
ourselves with steady severity, and by the dictates of an
enlightened understanding. We must be like a skilful pilot in a
perilous sea, and be thoroughly aware of all the rocks and
quicksands, and the multiplied and hourly dangers that beset our
navigation.

In this Essay I have treated of nothing more than the inherent
restiveness and indocility of man, which accompany him at least
through all the earlier sections and divisions of his life. I
have not treated of those temptations calculated to lead him into
a thousand excesses and miseries, which originate in our lower
nature, and are connected with what we call the passion of love.
Nor have I entered upon the still more copious chapter, of the
incentives and provocations which are administered to us by those
wants which at all times beset us as living creatures, and by the
unequal distribution of property generally in civil society. I
have not considered those attributes of man which may serve
indifferently for good or for ill, as he may happen to be or not
to be the subject of those fiercer excitements, that will oft
times corrupt the most ingenuous nature, and have a tendency to
inspire into us subtle schemes and a deep contrivance. I have
confined myself to the consideration of man, as yet untamed to
the modes of civilised community, and unbroken to the steps which
are not only prescribed by the interests of our social existence,
but which are even in some degree indispensible to the
improvement and welfare of the individual. I have considered
him, not as he is often acted upon by causes and motives which
seem almost to compel him to vice, but merely as he is restless,
and impatient, and disdainful both of the control of others, and
the shackles of system.

For the same reason I have not taken notice of another species of
irrationality, and which seems to answer more exactly to the
Arabic notion of the fomes peccati, the black drop of blood at
the bottom of the heart. We act from motives apprehended by the
judgment; but we do not stop at them. Once set in motion, it
will not seldom happen that we proceed beyond our original mark.
We are like Othello in the play:

Our blood begins our safer guides to rule;
And passion, having our best judgment quelled,
Assays to lead the way.

This is the explanation of the greatest enormities that have been
perpetrated by man, and the inhuman deeds of Nero and Caligula.
We proceed from bad to worse. The reins of our discretion drop
from our hands. It fortunately happens however, that we do not
in the majority of cases, like Phaeton in the fable, set the
world on fire; but that, with ordinary men, the fiercest excesses
of passion extend to no greater distance than can be reached by
the sound of their voice.

ESSAY VI.
OF HUMAN INNOCENCE.

One of the most obvious views which are presented to us by man in
society is the inoffensiveness and innocence that ordinarily
characterise him.

Society for the greater part carries on its own organization.
Each man pursues his proper occupation, and there are few
individuals that feel the propensity to interrupt the pursuits of
their neighbours by personal violence. When we observe the quiet
manner in which the inhabitants of a great city, and, in the
country, the frequenters of the fields, the high roads, and the
heaths, pass along, each engrossed by his private contemplations,
feeling no disposition to molest the strangers he encounters, but
on the contrary prepared to afford them every courteous
assistance, we cannot in equity do less than admire the innocence
of our species, and fancy that, like the patriarchs of old, we
have fallen in with "angels unawares."

There are a few men in every community, that are sons of riot and
plunder, and for the sake of these the satirical and censorious
throw a general slur and aspersion upon the whole species.

When we look at human society with kind and complacent survey, we
are more than half tempted to imagine that men might subsist very
well in clusters and congregated bodies without the coercion of
law; and in truth criminal laws were only made to prevent the
ill-disposed few from interrupting the regular and inoffensive
proceedings of the vast majority.

From what disposition in human nature is it that all this
accommodation and concurrence proceed?

It is not primarily love. We feel in a very slight degree
excited to good will towards the stranger whom we accidentally
light upon in our path.

Neither is it fear.

It is principally forecast and prudence. We have a
sensitiveness, that forbids us for a slight cause to expose
ourselves to we know not what. We are unwilling to bc disturbed.

We have a mental vis inertiae, analogous to that quality in
material substances, by means of which, being at rest, they
resist being put into a state of motion. We love our security;
we love our respectability; and both of these may be put to
hazard by our rashly and unadvisedly thrusting ourselves upon the
course of another. We like to act for ourselves. We like to act
with others, when we think we can foresee the way in which the
proposed transaction will proceed, and that it will proceed to
our wish.

Let us put the case, that I am passing along the highway,
destitute and pennyless, and without foresight of any means by
which I am to procure the next meal that my nature requires.

The vagrant, who revolves in his mind the thought of extorting
from another the supply of which he is urgently in need, surveys
the person upon whom he meditates this violence with a
scrutinising eye. He considers, Will this man submit to my
summons without resistance, or in what manner will he repel my
trespass? He watches his eye, he measures his limbs, his
strength, and his agility. Though they have met in the deserts
of Africa, where there is no law to punish the violator, he knows
that he exposes himself to a fearful hazard; and he enters upon
his purpose with desperate resolve. All this and more must occur
to the man of violence, within the pale of a civilised community.

Begging is the mildest form in which a man can obtain from the
stranger he meets, the means of supplying his urgent necessities.

But, even here, the beggar knows that he exposes himself not only
to refusal, but to the harsh and opprobrious terms in which that
refusal may be conveyed. In this city there are laws against
begging; and the man that asks alms of me, is an offender against
the state. In country-towns it is usual to remark a notice upon
entering, to say, Whoever shall be found begging in this place,
shall be set in the stocks.

There are modes however in which I may accost a stranger, with
small apprehension that I shall be made to repent of it. I may
enquire of him my way to the place towards which my business or
my pleasure invites me. Ennius of old has observed, that lumen
de lumine, to light my candle at my neighbour's lamp, is one of
the privileges that the practices of civil society concede.

But it is not merely from forecast and prudence that we refrain
from interrupting the stranger in his way. We have all of us a
certain degree of kindness for a being of our own species. A
multitude of men feel this kindness for every thing that has
animal life. We would not willingly molest the stranger who has
done us no injury. On the contrary we would all of us to a
certain extent assist him, under any unforeseen casualty and
tribulation. A part therefore of the innocence that
characterises our species is to be attributed to philanthropy.

Childhood is diffident. Children for the most part are averse to
the addressing themselves to strangers, unless in cases where,
from the mere want of anticipation and reflection, they proceed
as if they were wholly without the faculty of making calculations
and deducing conclusions. The child neither knows himself nor
the stranger he meets in his path. He has not measured either
the one or the other. He does not know what the stranger may be
able, or may likely be prompted to do to him, nor what are his
own means of defence or escape. He takes refuge therefore in a
wary, sometimes an obstinate silence. It is for this reason that
a boy at school often appears duller and more inept, than would
be the amount of a fair proportion to what he is found to be when
grown up to a man.

As we improve in judgment and strength, we know better ourselves
and others, and in a majority of instances take our due place in
the ranks of society. We acquire a modest and cautious firmness,
yield what belongs to another, and assert what is due to
ourselves. To the last however, we for the most part retain the
inoffensiveness described in the beginning of this Essay.

How comes it then that our nature labours under so bitter an
aspersion? We have been described as cunning, malicious and
treacherous. Other animals herd together for mutual convenience;
and their intercourse with their species is for the most part a
reciprocation of social feeling and kindness. But community
among men, we are told, is that condition of human existence,
which brings out all our evil qualities to the face of day. We
lie in wait for, and circumvent each other by multiplied
artifices. We cannot depend upon each other for the truth of
what is stated to us; and promises and the most solemn
engagements often seem as if they were made only to mislead. We
are violent and deadly in our animosities, easily worked up to
ferocity, and satisfied with scarcely any thing short of
mutilation and blood. We are revengeful: we lay up an injury,
real or imaginary, in the store-house of an undecaying memory,
waiting only till we can repay the evil we have sustained
tenfold, at a time when our adversary shall be lulled in
unsuspecting security. We are rapacious, with no symptom that
the appetite for gain within us will ever be appeased; and we
practise a thousand deceits, that it may be the sooner, and to
the greater degree glutted. The ambition of man is unbounded;
and he hesitates at no means in the course it prompts him to
pursue. In short, man is to man ever the most fearful and
dangerous foe: and it is in this view of his nature that the
king of Brobdingnag says to Gulliver, "I cannot but conclude the
bulk of your race to be the most pernicious generation of little,
odious vermin, that were ever suffered to crawl upon the surface
of the earth." The comprehensive faculties of man therefore, and
the refinements and subtlety of his intellect, serve only to
render him the more formidable companion, and to hold us up as a
species to merited condemnation.

It is obvious however that the picture thus drawn is greatly
overcharged, that it describes a very small part of our race, and
that even as to them it sets before us a few features only, and a
partial representation

History--the successive scenes of the drama in which individuals
play their part--is a labyrinth, of which no man has as yet
exactly seized the clue.

It has long since been observed, that the history of the four
great monarchies, of tyrannies and free states, of chivalry and
clanship, of Mahometanism and the Christian church, of the
balance of Europe and the revolution of empires, is little else
than a tissue of crimes, exhibiting nations as if they were so
many herds of ferocious animals, whose genuine occupation was to
tear each other to pieces, and to deform their mother-earth with
mangled carcases and seas of blood.

But it is not just that we should establish our opinion of human
nature purely from the records of history. Man is alternately
devoted to tranquillity and to violence. But the latter only
affords the proper materials of narration. When he is wrought
upon by some powerful impulse, our curiosity is most roused to
observe him. We remark his emotions, his energies, his tempest.
It is then that he becomes the person of a drama. And, where
this disquietude is not the affair of a single individual, but of
several persons together, of nations, it is there that history
finds her harvest. She goes into the field with all the
implements of her industry, and fills her storehouses and
magazines with the abundance of her crop. But times of
tranquillity and peace furnish her with no materials. They are
dismissed in a few slight sentences, and leave no memory behind.

Let us divide this spacious earth into equal compartments, and
see in which violence, and in which tranquillity prevails. Let
us look through the various ranks and occupations of human
society, and endeavour to arrive at a conclusion of a similar
sort. The soldier by occupation, and the officer who commands
him, would seem, when they are employed in their express
functions, to be men of strife. Kings and ministers of state
have in a multitude of instances fallen under this description.
Conquerors, the firebrands of the earth, have sufficiently
displayed their noxious propensities.

But these are but a small part of the tenantry of the
many-peopled globe. Man lives by the sweat of his brow. The
teeming earth is given him, that by his labour he may raise from
it the means of his subsistence. Agriculture is, at least among
civilised nations, the first, and certainly the most
indispensible of professions. The profession itself is the
emblem of peace. All its occupations, from seed-time to harvest,
are tranquil; and there is nothing which belongs to it, that can
obviously be applied to rouse the angry passions, and place men
in a frame of hostility to each other. Next to the cultivator,
come the manufacturer, the artificer, the carpenter, the mason,
the joiner, the cabinet-maker, all those numerous classes of
persons, who are employed in forming garments for us to wear,
houses to live in, and moveables and instruments for the
accommodation of the species. All these persons are, of
necessity, of a peaceable demeanour. So are those who are not
employed in producing the conveniencies of life, but in
conducting the affairs of barter and exchange. Add to these,
such as are engaged in literature, either in the study of what
has already been produced, or in adding to the stock, in science
or the liberal arts, in the instructing mankind in religion and
their duties, or in the education of youth. "Civility," "civil,"
are indeed terms which express a state of peaceable occupation,
in opposition to what is military, and imply a tranquil frame of
mind, and the absence of contention, uproar and violence. It is
therefore clear, that the majority of mankind are civil, devoted
to the arts of peace, and so far as relates to acts of violence
innocent, and that the sons of rapine constitute the exception to
the general character.

We come into the world under a hard and unpalatable law, "In the
sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread." It is a bitter decree
that is promulgated against us, "He that will not work, neither
shall he eat." We all of us love to do our own will, and to be
free from the manacles of restraint. What our hearts "find us to
do," that we are disposed to execute "with all our might." Some
men are lovers of strenuous occupation. They build and they
plant; they raise splendid edifices, and lay out pleasure-grounds
of mighty extent. Or they devote their minds to the acquisition
of knowledge; they

----outwatch the bear,
With thrice great Hermes, or unsphere
The spirit of Plato, to unfold
What worlds, or what vast regions hold
The immortal mind.

Others again would waste perhaps their whole lives in reverie and
idleness. They are constituted of materials so kindly and
serene, that their spirits never flag from want of occupation and
external excitement. They could lie for ever on a sunny bank, in
a condition divided between thinking and no thinking, refreshed
by the fanning breeze, viewing the undulations of the soil, and
the rippling of the brook, admiring the azure heavens, and the
vast, the bold, and the sublime figure of the clouds, yielding
themselves occasionally to "thick-coming fancies," and
day-dreams, and the endless romances of an undisciplined mind;

And find no end, in wandering mazes lost.

But all men, alike the busy of constitution and the idle, would
desire to follow the impulses of their own minds, unbroken in
upon by harsh necessity, or the imperious commands of their
fellows.

We cannot however, by the resistless law of our existence, live,
except the few who by the accident of their birth are privileged
to draw their supplies from the labour of others, without
exerting ourselves to procure by our efforts or ingenuity the
necessaries of food, lodging and attire. He that would obtain
them for himself in an uninhabited island, would find that this
amounted to a severe tax upon that freedom of motion and thought
which would otherwise be his inheritance. And he who has his lot
cast in a populous community, exists in a condition somewhat
analogous to that of a negro slave, except that he may to a
limited extent select the occupation to which he shall addict
himself, or may at least starve, in part or in whole,
uncontroled, and at his choice. Such is, as it were, the
universal lot.

'Tis destiny unshunnable like death:
Even then this dire necessity falls on us,
When we do quicken.

I go forth in the streets, and observe the occupations of other
men. I remark the shops that on every side beset my path. It is
curious and striking, how vast are the ingenuity and contrivance
of human beings, to wring from their fellow-creatures, "from the
hard hands of peasants" and artisans, a part of their earnings,
that they also may live. We soon become feelingly convinced,
that we also must enter into the vast procession of industry,
upon pain that otherwise,

Like to an entered tide, they all rush by,
And leave you hindmost: there you lie,
For pavement to the abject rear, o'errun
And trampled on.

It is through the effect of this necessity, that civilised
communities become what they are. We all fall into our ranks.
Each one is member of a certain company or squadron. We know our
respective places, and are marshaled and disciplined with an
exactness scarcely less than that of the individuals of a mighty
army. We are therefore little disposed to interrupt the
occupations of each other. We are intent upon the peculiar
employment to which we have become devoted. We "rise up early,
and lie down late," and have no leisure to trouble ourselves with
the pursuits of others. Hence of necessity it happens in a
civilised community, that a vast majority of the species are
innocent, and have no inclination to molest or interrupt each
other's avocations.

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