... the praises of a true modern reader, when he meets with a work in the true modern taste: videlicet, either in skipping, unconnected, short-winded asthmatic sentences, as easy to be understood as impossible to be remembered ...

It has ever been my opinion, that an excessive solicitude to avoid the use of our first personal pronoun more often has its source in conscious selfishness than in true self-oblivion. ... Yet I can with strictest truth assure my Readers that with a pleasure combined with a sense of weariness I see the nigh approach of that point of my labours, in which I can convey my opinions and the workings of my heart without reminding the Reader obtrusively of myself. ...

For merely to call a person arrogant or most arrogant, can convict no one of the vice except perhaps the accuser. ... Many a man, who has contrived to hide his ruling passion or predominant defect from himself, will betray the same to dispassionate observers, bu his proneness on all occasions to suspect or accuse others of it. ...

As long therefore as I obtrude no unsupported assertions on my Readers; and as long as I state my opinions and the evidence which induced or compelled me to adopt them, with calmness and that diffidence in myself, which is by no means incompatible with a firm belief in the justness of the opinions themselves; while I attack no man's private life from any cause, and detract from no man's honors in his public character, from the truth of his doctrines, or the merits of his compositions, without detailing all my reasons and resting the result solely on the arguments adduced; while I moreover explain fully the motives of duty, which influenced me in resolving to institute such investigation; while I confine all asperity of censure, and all expressions of contempt, to gross violations of truth, honor, and decency, to the base corruptor and the detected slanderer; while I write on no subject, which I have not studied with my best attention, on no subject which my education and acquirements have incompacitated me from properly understanding; and above all while I approve myself, alike in praise and in blame, in close reasoning and in impassioned declamation, a steady FRIEND to the two best and surest friends of all men, TRUTH and HONESTY; I will not fear an accusation of either Presumption or Arrogance from the good and the wise, I shall pity it from the weak, and welcome it from the wicked.

I have said, that my very system compels me to make every fair appeal to the feelings, the imagination and even the fancy. If these are to be withheld from the service of truth, virtue, and happiness, to what purpose were they given? in whose service are they retained? ...

... there is one excellence in good music, ... that sense of recognition, which accompanies our sense of novelty in the most original passages of a great composer. If we listen to a Symphony of CIMAROSA, the present strain still seems not only to recal, but almost to renew, some past movement, another and yet the same! Each present movement bringing back, as it were, and embodying the spirit of some melody that had gone before, anticipates and seems trying to overtake something that is to come: and the musician has reached the summit of his art, when having thus modified the Present by the Past, he at the same time weds the Past in the Present to some prepared and corresponsive Future. The auditor's thoughts and feelings move under the same influence: retrospection blends with anticipation, and Hope and Memory (a female Janus) become one power with a double aspect. ...

... I must warn against an opposite error--namely, that if Reason, as distinguished from Prudence, consists merely in knowing that Black cannot be White--or when a man has a clear conception of an inclosed figure, and another equally clear conception of a straight line, his Reason teaches him that these two conceptions are incompatible in the same object, i.e. that two straight lines cannot include a space--the said Reason must be a very insignificant faculty. But a moment's steady self-reflection will shew us, that in the simple determination ``Black is not White''--or, ``that two straight lines cannot include a space''--all the powers are implied, that distinguish Man from Animals--first, the power of reflection--2d. of comparison--3d. and therefore of suspension of the mind--4th. therefore of a controlling will, and the power of acting from notions, instead of mere images exciting appetites; from motives, and not from mere dark instincts. Was it an insignificant thing to weigh the Planets, to determine all their courses, and prophecy every possible relation of the Heavens a thousand years hence? Yet all this mighty chain of science is nothing but a linking together of truths of the same kind, as, the whole is greater than its part:--or, if A and B = C, then A = B--or 3 + 4 = 7, therefore 7 + 5 = 12, and so forth. X is to be found either in A or B, or C. or D: It is not found in A, B, or C, therefore it is to be found in D.--What can be simpler? Apply this to an animal--a Dog misses his master where four roads meet--he has come up one, smells to two of the others, and then with his head aloft darts forward to the third road without any examination. If this was done by a conclusion, the Dog would have Reason--how comes it then, that he never shews it in his ordinary habits? Why does this story excite either wonder or incredulity?--If the story be a fact, and not a fiction, I should say--the Breeze brought his Master's scent down the fourth Road to the Dog's nose, and that therefore he did not put it down to the Road, as in the two former instances. So aweful and almost miraculous does the simple act of concluding, that take 3 from 4, there remains one, appear to us when attributed to the most sagacious of all animals.

STC's footnote:... Under the term SENSE, I comprise whatever is passive in our being, without any reference to the questions of Materialism or Immaterialism; all that man is in common with animals, in kind at least--his sensations, and impressions, whether of his outward senses, or in the inner sense of imagination. ... By the UNDERSTANDING, I mean the faculty of thinking and forming judgments on the notices furnished by the sense, according to certain rules existing in itself, which rules constitute its distinct nature. By the pure REASON, I mean the power by which we become possessed of principle, (the eternal verities of Plato and Descartes) and of ideas, (N.B. not images) as the theorems of a point, a line, a circle, in Mathematics; and the Ideas of Justice, Holiness, Free-Will, &c. in Morals. Hence in works of pure science the definitions of necessity precede the reasoning, in other works they more aptly form the conclusion. ...

... And finally, and above all, let it be remembered by both parties, and indeed by controversialists on all subjects, that every speculative error which boasts a multitude of advocates, has its golden as well as its dark side; that there is always some Truth connected with it, the exclusive attention to which has misled the Understanding, some moral beauty which has given it charms for the heart. Let it be remembered, that no Assailant of an Error can reasonably hope to be listened to by its Advocates, who has not proved to them that he has seen the disputed subject in the same point of view, and is capable of contemplating it with the same feelings as themselves: (for why should we abandon a cause at the persuasions of one who is ignorant of the reasons which have attached us to it?) Let it be remembered, that to write, however ably, merely to convince those who are already convinced, displays but the courage of a boaster; and in any subject to rail against the evil before we have enquired for the good, and to exasperate the passions of those who think with us, by caricaturing the opinions and blackening the motives of our antagonists, is to make the Understanding the pander of the passions; ...

... For can we wonder that men should want humanity, who want all the circumstances of life that humanize? Can we wonder that with the ignorance of brutes they should unite their ferocity? Peace and comfort be with these! But let us shudder to hear from men of dissimilar opportunities sentiments of similar revengefulness. The purifying alchemy of education may transmute the fierceness of an ignorant man into virtuous energy--but what remedy shall we apply to him, whom plenty has not softened, whom knowledge has not taught benevolence? ...

... In scating there are three pleasing circumstances: the infinitely subtle particles of ice which the scate cuts up, and which creep and run before the scate like a low mist, and in sun-rise or sun-set become coloured; second, the shadow of the scater in the water, seen through the transparent ice; and third, the melancholy undulating sound from the scate, not without variety; and when very many are scating together, the sounds and the noises give an impulse to the icy trees, and the woods all round the lake tinkle. ... [Part of the purpose of these lines was to enable him to go on to quote the skating scene from Wordsworth's Prelude]

... so water and flame, the diamond, the charcoal, and the mantling champagne, with its ebullient sparkles, are convoked and fraternized by the theory of the chemist. This is, in truth, the first charm of chemistry, and the secret of the almost universal interest excited by its discoveries. The serious complacency which is afforded by the sense of truth, utility, permanence, and progression, blends with and ennobles the exhilarating surprise and the pleasurable sting of curiosity, which accompany the propounding and the solving of an Enigma. It is the sense of a principle of connection given by the mind, and sanctioned by the correspondency of nature. Hence the strong hold which in all ages chemistry has had on the imagination. ... through the meditative observation of a Davy, a Woollaston, or a Hatchett ... , we find poetry, as it were, substantiated and realized in nature: yea, nature itself disclosed to us, ... as at once the poet and the poem!

But in experimental philosophy, it may be said how much do we not owe to accident? Doubtless: but let it not be forgotten, that if the discoveries so made stop there; if they do not excite some master IDEA; if they do not lead to some LAW (in whatever dress of theory or hypotheses the fashions and prejudices of the time may disguise or disfigure it): the discoveries may remain for ages limited in their uses, insecure and unproductive. How many centuries, we might have said millennia, have passed, since the first accidental discovery of the attraction and repulsion of light bodies by rubbed amber, &c. Compare the interval with the progress made within less than a century, after the discovery of the ph&aeligl;nomena that led immediately to a THEORY of electricity. That here as in many other instances, the theory was supported by insecure hypotheses; that by one theorist two heterogeneous fluids are assumed, the vitreous and the resinous; by another, a plus and minus of the same fluid; that a third considers it a mere modification of light; while a fourth composes the electrical aura of oxygen, hydrogen, and caloric: this does but place the truth we have been evolving in a stronger and clearer light. For abstract from all these suppositions, or rather imaginations, that which is common to, and involved in them all; and we shall have neither notional fluid or fluids, nor chemical compounds, nor elementary matter,--but the idea of two--opposite--forces, tending to rest by equilibrium. These are the sole factors of the calculus, alike in all the theories. These give the law, and in it the method, both of arranging the phænomena and of substantiating appearances into facts of science; with a success proportionate to the clearness or confusedness of the insight into the law. For this reason, we anticipate the greatest improvements in the method, the nearest approaches to a system of electricity from these philosophers, who have presented the law most purely, and the correlative idea as an idea: those, namely, who, since the year 1798, in the true spirit of experimental dynamics, rejecting the imagination of any material substrate, simple or compound, contemplate in the phænomena of electricity the operation of a law which reigns through all nature, the law of POLARITY, or the manifestation of one power by opposite forces ...

...

In what shall we seek the cause of this contrast between the rapid progress of electricity and the stationary condition of magnetism? As many theories, as many hypotheses, have been advanced in the latter science as in the former. But the theories and fictions of the electricians contained an idea, and all the same idea, ... On the contrary, the assumptions of the magnetists (as for instance, the hypothesis that the planet itself is one vast magnet, or that an immence magnet is concealed within it; or that of a concentric globe within the earth, revolving on its own independent axis) are but repetitions of the same fact or phænomenon looked at through a magnifying glass; the reiteration of the problem, not its solution. The naturalist, who cannot or will not see, that one fact is often worth a thousand, as including them all in itself, and that it first makes all the others facts; who has not the head to comprehend, the soul to reverence, a central experiment or observation (what the Greeks would perhaps have called a protophænomon); will never receive an auspicious answer from the oracle of nature.

Hast thou ever raised thy mind to the consideration of EXISTENCE, in and by itself, as the mere act of existing? Hast thou ever said to thyself thoughtfully, IT IS! heedless in that moment, whether it were a man before thee, or a flower, or a grain of sand? Without reference, in short, to this or that particular mode or form of existence? If thou hast indeed attained to this, thou wilt have felt the presence of a mystery, which must have fixed thy spirit in awe and wonder. The very words, There is nothing! or, There was a time, when there was nothing! are self-contradictory. There is that within us which repels the proposition with as full and instantaneous a light, as if it bore evidence against the fact in the right of its own eternity.

Not TO BE, then, is impossible: TO BE, incomprehensible. If thou hast mastered this intuition of absolute existence, thou wilt have learnt likewise, that it was this, and no other, which in the earlier ages seized the nobler minds, the elect among men, with a sort of sacred horrer. This it was which first caused them to feel within themselves a something ineffably greater than their own individual nature. It was this which, raising them aloft, and projecting them to an ideal distance from themselves, prepared them to become the lights and awakening voices of other men, the founders of law and religion, the educators and foster-gods of mankind. The power, which evolved this idea of BEING, BEING in its essence, BEING limitless, comprehending its own limits in its dilatation, and condensing itself into its own apparent mounds--how shall we name it? The idea itself, which like a mighty billow at once overwhelms and bears aloft--what is it? Whence did it come? In vain would we derive it from the organs of sense: for these supply only surfaces, undulations, phantoms! In vain from the instruments of sensation: for these furnish only the chaos, the shapeless elements of sense! And least of all may we hope to find its origin, or sufficient cause, in the moulds and mechanism of the UNDERSTANDING, the whole purport and functions of which consists in individualization, in outlines and differencings by quantity, quality and relation. It were wiser to seek substance in shadow, than absolute fulness in mere negation.

We have asked then for its birth-place in all that constitutes our relative individuality, in all that each man calls exclusively himself. It is an alien of which they know not: and for them the question itself is purposeless, and the very words that convey it are as sounds in an unknown language, or as the vision of heaven and earth expanded by the rising sun, which falls but as warmth on the eye-lids of the blind. To no class of phenomena or particulars can it be referred, itself being none: therefore, to no faculty by which these alone are apprehended. As little dare we refer it to any form of abstraction or generalization: for it has neither co-ordinate or analogon! It is absolutely one, and that it IS, and affirms itself TO BE, is its only predicate. And yet this power, nevertheless, is! In eminence of Being it IS! And he for whom it manifests itself in its adequate idea, dare as little arrogate it to himself as his own, can as little appropriate it either totally or by partition, as he can claim ownership in the breathing air, or make an enclosure in the cope of heaven. He bears witness of it to his own mind, even as he describes life and light: and, with the silence of light, it describes itself and dwells in us only as far as we dwell in it. The truths, which it manifests are such as it alone can manifest, and in all truth it manifests itself. ...

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