Part 24

"He who reads a book on logic, probably thinks no better when he rises up than when he sat down, but if any of the principles there unfolded cleave to his memory, and he afterwards, perhaps unconsciously, shapes and corrects his thoughts by them, no doubt the whole powers of his reasoning receive benefit. In a word, every art, from reasoning to riding and rowing, is learned by assiduous practice, and if principles do any good, it is proportioned to the readiness with which they can be converted into rules, and the patient constancy with which they are applied in all cur attempts at excellence."

"_A man can teach names to another man, but he cannot plant in another's mind that far higher gift--the power of naming."

"Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking_."

"The whole of science may be made the subject of teaching. Not so with _art_; much of it is not teachable."

Coleridge's profound and brilliant, but unequal, and often somewhat nebulous _Essay on Method_, is worth reading over, were it only as an exercitation, and to impress on the mind the meaning and value of _method_. Method is the road by which you reach, or hope to reach, a certain end; it is a process. It is the best direction for the search after truth. System, again, which is often confounded with it, is a mapping out, a circumscription of knowledge, either already gained, or theoretically laid down as probable. Aristotle had a system which did much good, but also much mischief. Bacon was chiefly occupied in preparing and pointing out the way--the only way--of procuring knowledge. He left to others to systematize the knowledge after it was got; but the pride and indolence of the human spirit lead it constantly to build systems on imperfect knowledge. It has the trick of filling up out of its own fancy what it has not the diligence, the humility, and the honesty, to seek in nature; whose servant, and articulate voice, it ought to be.

Descartes' little tract on Method is, like everything the lively and deep-souled Breton did, full of original and bright thought.

Sir John Herschel's volume needs no praise. We know no work of the sort, fuller of the best moral worth, as well as the highest philosophy. We fear it is more talked of than read.

We would recommend the article in the _Quarterly Review_ as first-rate, and written with great eloquence and grace.

Sydney Smith's _Sketches of Lectures on Moral Philosophy_. Second Edition.

Sedgwick's _Discourse on the Studies at Cambridge, with a Preface and Appendix_. Sixth Edition.

We have put these two worthies here, not because we had forgotten them,--much less because we think less of them than the others, especially Sydney; but because we bring them in at the end of our small entertainment, as we hand round a liqueur--be it Curaçoa, Kimmel, or old Glenlivet--after dinner, and end with the heterogeneous plum-pudding, that most English of realized ideas. Sydney Smith's book is one of rare excellence, and well worthy of the study of men and women, though perhaps not transcendental enough for our modern philosophers, male and female. It is really astonishing how much of the best of everything, from patriotism to nonsense, is to be found in this volume of sketches. You may read it through, if your sides can bear such an accumulation of laughter, with great benefit; and if you open it anywhere, you can't read three sentences without coming across some, it may be common thought, and often original enough, better expressed and _put_ than you ever before saw it. The lectures on the Affections, the Passions and Desires, and on Study, we would have everybody to read and enjoy.

Sedgwick is a different, and, as a whole, an inferior man; but a _man_ every inch of him, and an Englishman too, in his thoughts, and in his fine mother wit and tongue. He has, in the midst of all his confusion and passionateness, the true instinct of philosophy--the true venatic sense of objective truth. We know nothing- better in the main, than his demolition of what is untrue, and his reduction of what is absurd, and his taking the wind out of what is tympanitic, in the notorious _Vestiges_; we don't say he always does justice to what is really good in it; his mission is to execute justice _upon it_, and that he does. His remarks on Oken and Owen, and his quotations from Dr. Clarke's admirable paper on the _Development of the Foetus_, in the _Cambridge Philosophical Transactions_, we would recommend to our medical friends. The very confusion of Sedgwick is the free outcome of a deep and racy nature; it puts us in mind of what happened, when an Englishman was looking with astonishment and disgust at a Scotchman eating a singed sheep's head, and was asked by the eater what he thought of that dish? "_Dish_, Sir, do you call that a dish?"

"Dish or no dish," rejoined the Caledonian, "there's a deal o'fine confused feedin' aboot it, let me tell you."

We conclude these rambling remarks with a quotation from Arnauld, the friend of Pascal, and the intrepid antagonist of the Vatican and the Grand Monarque; one of the noblest, freest, most untiring and honest intellects our world has ever seen. "Why don't you rest sometimes?" said his friend Nicole to him. "Rest! why should I rest here? haven't I an eternity to rest in?" The following sentence from his Port-Royal Logic, so well introduced and translated by Mr. Baynes, contains the gist of all we have been trying to say. It should be engraven on the tablets of every young student's heart--for the heart has to do with study as well as the head.

"There is nothing more desirable than good sense and justness of mind,--all other qualities of mind are of limited use, but exactness of judgment is of general utility in every part and in all employments of life.

"_We are too apt to employ reason merely as an instrument for acquiring the sciences, whereas we ought to avail ourselves of the sciences, as an instrument for perfecting our reason_.; justness of mind being infinitely more important than all the speculative knowledge which we can obtain by means of sciences the most solid. This ought to lead wise men to make their sciences _the exercise and not the occupation of their mental powers_. Men are not born to employ all their time in measuring lines, in considering the various movements of matter: their minds are too great, and their lives too short, their time too precious, to be so engrossed; but they are born to be just, equitable, and prudent, in all their thoughts, their actions, their business; to these things they ought especially to train and discipline themselves.''

So, young friends, bring _Brains_ to your work, and mix everything with them, and them with everything. _Arma virumque_, tools and a man to use them. Stir up, direct, and give free scope to Sir Joshua's "that," and try again, and again; and look, _oculo intento, acie acerrima_.. Looking is a voluntary act,--it is the man within coming to the window; seeing is a state,--passive and receptive, and, at the best, little more than registrative.

Since writing the above, we have read with great satisfaction Dr. Forbes's Lecture delivered before the Chichester Literary Society and Mechanics' Institute, and published at their request. Its subject is, Happiness in its relation to Work and Knowledge. It is worthy of its author, and is, we think, more largely and finely embued with his personal character, than any one other of his works that we have met with. We could not wish a fitter present for a young man starting on the game of life. It is a wise, cheerful, manly, and warm-hearted discourse on the words of Bacon,--"He that is wise, let him pursue some desire or other; for he that doth not affect some one thing in chief, unto him all things are distasteful and tedious." We will not spoil this little volume by giving any account of it. Let our readers get it, and read it. The extracts from his Thesis, _De Mentis Exercitatione et Felicitate exinde derivandâ_, are very curious--showing the native vigour and bent of his mind, and indicating also, at once the identity and the growth of his thoughts during the lapse of thirty-three years.

We give the last paragraph, the sense and the filial affection of which are alike admirable. Having mentioned to his hearers that they saw in himself a living illustration of the truth of his position--that happiness is a necessary result of knowledge and work, he thus concludes: --

"If you would further desire to know to what besides I am chiefly indebted for so enviable a lot, I would say 1st, Because I had the good fortune to come into the world with a healthful frame, and with a sanguine temperament. 2d, Because I had no patrimony, and was therefore obliged to trust to my own exertions for a livelihood. 3d, Because I was born in a land where instruction is greatly prized and readily accessible. 4th, Because I was brought up to a profession which not only compelled mental exercise, but supplied for its use materials of the most delightful and varied kind. _And lastly and principally, because the good man to whom I owe my existence, had the foresight to know what would be best for his children. He had the wisdom, and the courage, and the exceeding love, to bestow all that could be spared of his worldly means, to purchase for his sons that which is beyond price_, EDUCATION; well judging that the means so expended, if hoarded for future use, would be, if not valueless, certainly evanescent, while the precious treasure for which they were exchanged, a cultivated and instructed mind, would not only last through life, but might be the fruitful source of treasures far more precious than itself. So equipped he sent them forth into the world to fight Life's battle, leaving the issue in the hand of God; confident, however, that though they might fail to achieve renown or to conquer Fortune, they possessed that which, if rightly used, could win for them the yet higher prize of HAPPINESS."

Since this was written, many good books have appeared, but we would select three, which all young men should read, and get--Hartley Coleridge's _Lives of Northern Worthies_, Thackeray's _Letters of Brown the Elder_, and _Tom Brown's Schooldays_--in spirit and expression, we don't know any better models for manly courage, good sense, and feeling, and they are as well written as they are thought.

There are the works of another man, one of the greatest, not only of our, but of any time, to which we cannot too earnestly draw our young readers. We mean the philosophical writings of Sir William Hamilton. We know no more invigorating, quickening, rectifying kind of exercise, than reading with a will, anything he has written upon permanently important subjects. There is a greatness and simplicity, a closeness of thought, a glance keen and wide, a play of the entire nature, and a truthfulness and downrightness, with an amount, and accuracy, and vivification of learning, such as we know of in no one other writer, ancient or modern--not even Leibnitz; and we know no writings which so wholesomely at once exalt and humble the reader, make him feel what is in him, and what he can and may, as well as what he cannot, and need never hope to know. In this respect, Hamilton is as grand as Pascal, and more simple; he exemplifies everywhere his own sublime adaptation of Scripture-- unless a man become a little child, he cannot enter into the kingdom; he enters the temple stooping, but he presses on, intrepid and alone, to the inmost _adytum_, worshipping the more the nearer he gets to the inaccessible shrine, whose vail no mortal hand has ever rent in twain. And we name after him, the thoughtful, candid, impressive little volume of his pupil, and his successor, Professor Fraser.

The following passage from Sir William Hamilton's _Dissertations_, besides its wise thought, sounds in the ear like the pathetic and majestic sadness of a symphony by Beethoven:--

"There are two sorts of ignorance: we philosophize to escape ignorance, and the consummation of our philosophy is ignorance; we start from the one, we repose in the other; they are the goals from which, and to which, we tend; and the pursuit of knowledge is but a course between two ignorances as human life is itself only a travelling from grave to grave.

[Greek]

The highest reach of human science is the scientific recognition of human ignorance; 'Qui nescit ignorare, ignorât scire.' This 'learned ignorance' is the rational conviction by the human mind of its inability to transcend certain limits; it is the knowledge of ourselves,--the science of man. This is accomplished by a demonstration of the disproportion between what is to be known, and our faculties of knowing,--the disproportion, to wit, between the infinite and the finite. In fact, the recognition of human ignorance is not only the one highest, but the one true, knowledge; and its first-fruit, as has been said, is humility. Simple nescience is not proud; consummated science is positively humble. For this knowledge it is not, which 'puffeth up;' but its opposite, the conceit of false knowledge,--the conceit, in truth, as the apostle notices, of an ignorance of the very nature of knowledge:--

'Nam nesciens quid scire sit,

Te scire cuncta jactitas.'

"But as our knowledge stands to Ignorance, so stands it also to Doubt. Doubt is the beginning and the end of our efforts to know; for as it is true,--'Alte dubitat qui altius credit,' so it is likewise true,--'Quo magisquærimus magis dubitamus.'

"The grand result of human wisdom is thus only a consciousness that what we know is as nothing to what we know not, ('Quantum est quod nescimus!')--an articulate confession, in fact, by our natural reason, of the truth declared in revelation, that 'now we see through a glass darkly.'"

His pupil writes in the same spirit and to the same end:--"A discovery, by means of reflection and mental experiment, of the _limits_ of knowledge, is the highest and most universally applicable discovery of all; it is the one through which our intellectual life most strikingly blends with the moral and practical part of human nature. Progress in knowledge is often paradoxically indicated by a diminution in the _apparent bulk_ of what we know'. Whatever helps to work off the dregs of false opinion, and to purify the intellectual mass--whatever deepens our conviction of our infinite ignorance--really adds to, although it sometimes seems to diminish, the rational possessions of man. This is the highest kind of merit that is claimed for Philosophy by its earliest as well as by its latest representatives. It is by this standard that Socrates and Kant measure the chief results of their toil."

BOOKS REFERRED TO.

1. Arnauld's Port-Royal Logic; translated by T. S. Baynes.--2. Thomson's Outlines of the Necessary Laws of Thought.--3. Descartes on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences.--4. Coleridge's Essay on Method.--5. Whately's Logic and Rhetoric; new and cheap edition.--6. Mill's Logic; new and cheap edition.--7. Dugald Stewart's Outlines.--8. Sir John Herschel's Preliminary Dissertation.--9. Quarterly Review, vol. lxviii.; Article upon Whewell's Philosophy of Inductive Sciences.--10. Isaac Taylor's Elements of Thought.--11. Sir William Hamilton's edition of Reid; Dissertations; and Lectures.--12. Professor Fraser's Rational Philosophy.--13. Locke on the Conduct of the Understanding.

$ARTHUR H. HALLAM.

"_The idea of thy life shall sweetly creep

Into my study of imagination;

And every lovely organ of thy life

Shall come apparelled in more precious habit--

More moving delicately and full of life,

Into the eye and prospect of my soul,

Than when thou livedst indeed."

Much Ado about Nothing.

In the chancel of Clevedon Church, Somersetshire, rest the mortal remains of Arthur Henry Hallam, eldest son of our great philosophic historian and critic,--and the friend to whom _In Memoriam_ is sacred. This place was selected by his father, not only from the connexion of kindred, being the burial-place of his maternal grandfather, Sir Abraham Elton, but likewise "on account of its still and sequestered situation, on a lone hill that overhangs the Bristol Channel.'' That lone hill, with its humble old church, its outlook over the waste of waters, where "the stately ships go on," was, we doubt not, in Tennyson's mind, when the poem, "Break, break, break," which contains the burden of that volume in which are enshrined so much of the deepest affection, poetry, philosophy, and godliness, rose into his "study of imagination"--"into the eye and prospect of his soul."

"Break, break, break,

On thy cold grey stones, O sea!

The passage from Shakspere prefixed to this paper, contains probably as much as can be said of the mental, not less than the affectionate conditions, under which such a record as In Memoriain is produced, and may give us more insight into the imaginative faculty's mode of working, than all our philosophizing and analysis. It seems to let out with the fulness, simplicity, and unconsciousness of a child--"Fancy's Child"--the secret mechanism or procession of the greatest creative mind our race has produced. In itself, it has no recondite meaning, it answers fully its own sweet purpose. We are not believers, like some folks, in the omniscience of even Shakspere. But, like many things that he and other wise men and many simple children say, it has a germ of universal meaning, which it is quite lawful to bring out of it, and which may be enjoyed to the full without any wrong to its own original beauty and fitness. A dew-drop is not the less beautiful that it illustrates in its structure the law of gravitation which holds the world together, and by which "the most ancient heavens are fresh and strong." This is the passage. The Friar speaking of Claudio, hearing that Hero "died upon his words," says--

"The idea of her life shall sweetly creep

Into his study of imagination;

And every lovely organ of her life

Shall come apparelled in more precious habit--

More moving delicate, and full of life,

Into the eye and prospect of his soul,

Than when she lived indeed."

We have here expressed in plain language the imaginative memory of the beloved dead, rising upon the past, like moonlight upon midnight,--

"The gleam, the shadow, and the peace supreme."

This is its simple meaning--the statement of a truth, the utterance of personal feeling. But observe its hidden abstract significance--it is the revelation of what goes on in the depths of the soul, when the dead elements of what once was, are laid before the imagination, and so breathhd upon as to be quickened into a new and higher life. We have first the Idea of her Life--all he remembered and felt of her, gathered into one vague shadowy image, not any one look, or action, or time,--then the idea of her life creeps--is in before he is aware, and sweetly creeps--it might have been softly or gently, but it is the addition of affection to all this, and bringing in another sense,--and now it is in his study of imagination --what a place! fit for such a visitor. Then out comes the Idea, more particular, more questionable, but still ideal, spiritual--every lovely organ of her life--then the clothing upon, the mortal putting on its immortal, spiritual body--shall come apparelled in more precious habit, more moving delicate--this is the transfiguring, the putting on strength, the poco--the little more which makes immortal,--more full of life and all this submitted to--the eye and prospect of the soul.

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.

"O well for the fisherman's boy,

That he shouts with his sister at play!

O well for the sailor lad

That he sings in his boat on the bay!

"And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill!

But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,

And the sound of a voice that is still!

"Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, O sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

Will never come back to me."

Out of these few simple words, deep and melancholy, and sounding as the sea, as out of a well of the living waters1 of love, flows forth all _In Memoriam_, as a stream flows out of its spring--all is here. "I would that my tongue could utter the thoughts that arise in me,"--"the touch of the vanished hand--the sound of the voice that is still,"--the body and soul of his friend. Rising as it were out of the midst of the gloom of the valley of the shadow of death,

"The mountain infant to the sun comes forth

Like human life from darkness;"

and how its waters flow on! carrying life, beauty, magnificence,--shadows and happy lights, depths of blackness, depths clear as the very body of heaven. How it deepens as it goes, involving larger interests, wider views, "thoughts that wander through eternity," greater affections, but still retaining its pure living waters, its unforgotten burden of love and sorrow. How it visits every region! "the long unlovely street," pleasant villages and farms, "the placid ocean-plains," waste howling wildernesses, grim woods, _nemorumque noctem,_ informed with spiritual fears, where may be seen, if shapes they may be called--

"Fear and trembling Hope,

Silence and Foresight; Death the Skeleton,

And Time the Shadow

now within hearing of the Minster clock, now of the College bells, and the vague hum of the mighty city. And over head through all its course the heaven with its clouds, its sun, moon, and stars; but always, and in all places, declaring its source; and even when laying its burden of manifold and faithful affection at the feet of the Almighty Father, still remembering whence it came,

"That friend of mine who lives in God,

That God which ever lives and loves;

One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves."

It is to that chancel, and to the day, 3d January 1834, that he refers in poem xviii. of _In Memoriam_.

"'Tis well,'tis something, we may stand

Where he in English earth is laid,

And from his ashes may be made

The violet of his native land.

"'Tis little; but it looks in truth

As if the quiet bones were blest

Among familiar names to rest,

And in the places of his youth."

And again in XIX.:

"The Danube to the Severn gave

The darken'd heart that beat no more;

They laid him by the pleasant shore,

And in the hearing of the wave.

"There twice a day the Severn fills,

The salt sea-water passes by,

And hushes half the babbling Wye,

And makes a silence in the hills."

Here, too, it is, lxvi.:

"When on my bed the moonlight falls,

I know that in thy place of rest,

By that broad water of the west;

There comes a glory on the walls:

"Thy marble bright in dark appears,

As slowly steals a silver flame

Along the letters of thy name,

And o'er the number of thy years."

This young man, whose memory his friend has consecrated in the hearts of all who can be touched by such love and beauty, was in nowise unworthy of all this. It is not for us to say, for it was not given to us the sad privilege to know, all that a father's heart buried with his son in that grave, all "the hopes of unaccomplished years nor can we feel in its fulness all that is meant by

"Such

A friendship as had mastered Time;

Which masters Time indeed, and is

Eternal, separate from fears.

The all-assuming months and years

Can take no part away from this."