VIII. LETTER down in each the same deductions, the same opinions, the same moral reasonings and results." How this has been accomplished, I cannot explain satisfactorily to myself; for the smallest exertion rouses individual will to debate and opposition. Yet amid all the discord and battle of individual self-will, we have been so formed, and our life so arranged, and such effective means have been put in action, that no one naturally contends that two and two make five, that vice is becoming, or that virtue is a disgrace; that to be a fool is a creditable, or that a knave is an honorable character; tho artificial habits and ideas may be adopted, which engraft variations that make some wrong actions laudable, while such impressions influence.18 17 A beautiful dissuasive against envy by the Persian poet Jami has just met my eye, which I will add as one of the instances of our similarities of thought and moral judgment: 'Fate once gave me this disinterested advice. Indeed, there is not a single dispensation of Providence which, if properly viewed, will not afford an excellent lesson: Never (said she), repine at the good fortune of others; for many are they who wish to be raised to your situation.' The Persian original of Jami is very elegant and forcible. Gladw. Asiat. Misc. p. 30. The Poet of Bokhara, Rodoki, presents to us an identity of thought and feeling with Solomon, in the following fine distich on a contemporary friend and poet : He 'Muradi, alas, is dead! But, no! he certainly cannot be dead. It is not so easy for death to triumph over such an illustrious man. has only restored his noble soul to our universal Father. He has only resigned his sordid body to our universal mother.' Ib. p. 32. 18 Piracy and robbery of strangers are instances of this sort. When these have been artificially made the sources of subsistence, the mind trained to them from childhood, loses its natural feelings against them, and yet often shows the rudiments of what has been suppressed by the bad habits. Thus Lieut. Conolly found a strange medley of hospitality and natural good feeling combined with this exotic rapacity in the Toorkmuns of Asia. Your person is sacred, and your life dearer to him than his own, while you are under the shadow of his tent; but the VIII. By producing so effectually these designed uni- LETTER formities, our Creator has made abundant provision for our being all human beings of the same general kind; and by subjecting every one of us to the same wants, and causing us all to have the same natural appetites and desires, the general similarity is carefully preserved. So much identity is specially produced by His selected means, acting with constant efficiency to their appointed ends; and so completely do these cause all our race to be human beings of some kind or other, that the most destitute and lowest savage never becomes in his mind or habits or occupations an ourang-outang, a simia, or a walrus. One or two wild men of the woods have been found: these are the nearest degradations of man to the animal. Yet this was no voluntary transformation. The lost or abandoned babe had grown up in a forest apart from all human society. None became so under the usual laws of human life. The man that is born and bred among his fellows, of whatever sort, can no more become a monkey or a wild beast, than a horse or a parrot can identify itself with a man. By an individual process, which we cannot detect, every animal is assimilated to its species, and kept from uniformity with any other. This system is peculiarly pursued towards man with undeviating success. Every division of his population has all the very man who gives you bread in his tent, will not scruple to fall upon you when you are beyond its precincts. Perhaps at the very moment you are eating his salt, your host is thinking how, on a future occasion, he may transfer a part of your wealth to himself.' Conolly's Journey in the North of India. But a Mooselmaun who had been robbed by some Bedouins, said, 'afterwards, having nothing, at whatever tent I stayed, I got food and a welcome.' Ib. VIII. LETTER the main features and qualities of a human being, and not of the brute animals about them. Each meets the other with this impression and certainty, and acts towards each other as such. So, the cultivated European approaches the naked Australian and the poorest negro; and such they mutually find each other to be; tho doubt of each other's purposes, and fear of each other's hostility, from their reciprocal ignorance and strangeness, and the excitement of each other's passions, may soon put them into a state of deadly hostility and vindictive battle.19 19 We can hardly select a stronger instance of the efficacy and uniformity of the moral constitution of man, and of the adaptation of the appointed course of nature to it, than in that connexion which all ages and climes have found to subsist between wickedness and misery. Our celebrated Junius exclaims, in one of his private letters to Mr. Woodfall, No. 44, 'after long experience of the world, I affirm before God, I NEVER KNEW A ROGUE WHO WAS NOT UNHAPPY.' Woodfall's Junius, v. i. p. 237. Juvenal found the same fact to be as true 1,600 years before; for he also says, 'Nemo malus felix' (no bad man is a happy one.) Satire iv. In Job's earlier days, and in very different countries, it was the same. The wicked man travaileth with pain all his days,' xv. 10. "Knowest thou not that of old, since man was placed upon earth, that the triumphing of the wicked is short, and the joy of the hyprocrite for a moment,' xx. 4, 5. In his royal station, David remarked the same: 'I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree. Yet he passed away. Lo! he was not. I sought him, but he could not be found.' Psalm xxxvii. 35, 36. Every where else the same experience occurs, whatever the external aspect or present condition may be. LETTER IX. FURTHER CONSIDERATION OF THE RESULTS WHICH HAVE IX. Ir was another part of the plan of our Creator LETTER when he settled his system of human nature, that we should be all, in every age and country, and of every condition, universally and without exception born into this world in total ignorance, and destitute of ideas. The prince, the beggar, the savage and the most civilized, come into existence in perfect equality and uniformity in this respect. The same rule of nature operates to this end now, as it did in the time of Noah, Theseus and Semiramis. It has been likewise as invariably ordained that we should acquire all our ideas from our own sensations and emotions, each for himself, as external things act upon us; and that we should thus derive all the knowlege we may possess, from the material substances and existences which are about us, which exist independently of us, and which have no necessary or indispensable connection with any individual. Plato imagined, and has made Socrates intimate, from whom he may have had the notion, that we have all been living in pre-existent states, and come into being here with minds ready stocked with ideas, which events and things in this world IX. LETTER only re-call and re-awaken to our reminiscence;' and it is a rooted opinion among the Hindoo varieties of population, that we are born here out of a preceding life, and die but to transmigrate into another." But these are mere dreams, which no realities warrant, and deserve no consideration. We know not when our soul was first created, but we may be all sure, from our personal experience, and from studying our filial babes, that it comes into human life without form and void, urshaped and empty, with as little furniture in its mental capacity as it has apparel upon its soft and beautiful body. None of the subjects of our memory, none of our Kebes reminds Socrates of his doctrine: According to what you frequently mention, our learning is nothing else than reminiscence, and we have learnt in some former time, what we now remember; but this would be impossible, unless our soul had been somewhere else before it came into this human form.' Among other remarks on this, Socrates observes, 'If we have received any thing before we are born, and lose it when born, and afterwards, by using our senses concerning it, obtain again the cognition of it, should we not say, that this is a recovery of the knowlege which had been familiar to us? When did our souls receive this knowlege? Not since the time we were born here. Then it was anterior to that. Then, O Simmias, our souls existed before they came into this human form, without bodies, and had then intelligence.' Plato Phæd. s. 16-18. This is much insisted on as a favourite idea. 2 This was also a main doctrine of Pythagoras; and therefore Ovid makes him say, 'I myself was in the Trojan war, as Euphorbus.' Ov. Met. lib. xv. 160. Our ancient Druids had the same belief, which Lucan, in Rowe's pleasing translation, thus mentions of them : In this spirit, Taliesin, the old British Bard, half a Druid in mind, frequently mentions his own pre-existences. |