The

beyond the limits set to human inquiry. A great intelligence recognises its ignorance and refuses to confound the dim and unsubstantial dreams of the mind with the true knowledge permitted to man. In general, however, it will be found that the mystic has been employed in troubling waters which were before translucent, and that the whole of their muddiness is contracted in the dull understanding through which they flow. The sham philosopher is commonly a person, who has the ambition to be original without the capacity, and hopes to gain the credit of soaring to the clouds by shrouding familiar objects in mist. To the frequent remark, 'It is a pity such an author does not express matter so admirable in intelligible English,' Archbishop Whately replies, that, except for the strangeness of the style, the matter would be seen to be common-place. A writer with a little talent and a great deal of eccentricity is sure of followers, since foolish scholars are still more numerous than foolish masters. quack philosopher can always meet with a M. Jourdain, who will fly into ecstacies when he is told in pompous jargon how to pronounce those letters of the alphabet which he has been speaking from infancy. Nothing,' said Cardinal de Retz, 'imposes so much upon people of weak understanding as what they do not comprehend.' This mental defect, by the nature of the case, is common to all the partizans of the shallow-profound school, and the majority are probably striving to compensate for their inferiority by affecting to be at home in pathless regions which wiser and honester men confess their inability to tread. In poetry, in politics, in art, in science, nay even in history and biography, we have delusive mystics who are applauded by pretentious admirers. But it is a fashion which passes away. The next generation of worshippers set up their own idols, and the true judges who are the ultimate arbiters of fame are not wont to construct pedestals for rejected and misshapen gods.

The Essays of Bacon open appropriately with an essay on Truth,' the foundation of all excellence and all knowledge. He starts with one of his pregnant propositions, which in this instance he derived from antiquity, that there is often among men 'a corrupt love of a lie for its own sake,' and he assigns as the reason for it, that truth is a naked and open daylight that doth not show the masques and mummeries and triumphs of the world half so stately and daintily as candlelights.' Unless the lie looked more attractive than the truth no one would prefer it, but, we believe, in every case, it is embraced less for its own sake than for some supposed personal advantage to be derived from it. Bacon seems to confess as much when he asks, in proof of his position, whether it can be

doubted

6

doubted that it would leave numbers of minds poor, shrunken things, full of melancholy and unpleasing to themselves, if vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, and the like, were taken away?' These, in the milder language of our day, would be termed self-deceptions. They are the lies told by a man to himself. The inducement to them is manifestly the selfesteem and visionary prospects which they foster, and not strictly 'the love of the lies for their own sake.' Whatever be the motive, the importance of Bacon's assertion is the same—that in framing opinions, it is common to give the preference to falsehood. Of the deliberate deviation from 'theological and philosophical truth,' which he places first, Rousseau was a flagrant example. He perceived,' as he told Hume, that to strike and interest the public the marvellous must be produced; that the marvellous of the heathen mythology had long since lost its effect; that giants, magicians, fairies, and heroes of romance which succeeded, had exhausted the portion of credulity which belonged to their age; and that now nothing was left to a writer but the marvellous in life, in manners, in characters, and in extraordinary situations, giving rise to new and unlooked-for strokes in politics and morals.'* Upon this principle he framed his paradoxical creed, the offspring of a morbid passion for notoriety. In the language of La Rochefoucauld he found the first places on the right side forestalled, and was not content to occupy the last. Truth,' said Dr. Johnson of the sceptics who went astray from the same motive, will not afford sufficient food to their vanity, so they have betaken themselves to error. Truth is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.'

6

Party feeling has a still larger influence in perverting the judgments of mankind, in causing them to substitute bigoted belief for honest inquiry, misrepresentations for facts, transparent fallacies for solid conclusions. Religion, above all subjects, has given rise to a spirit which it rebukes and disowns. The satirical portrait which Le Clerc has drawn of the ecclesiastical historian has had innumerable originals. 'He must adhere inviolably to the maxim that whatever can be favourable to heretics is false, and whatever can be said against them is true; while, on the other hand, all that does honour to the orthodox is unquestionable, and everything that can do them discredit is a lie. He must suppress with care, or at least extenuate as far as possible, the errors of those whom the orthodox are accustomed to respect, and must exaggerate the faults of the

*Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.'

heterodox

heterodox to the utmost of his power. He must remember that any orthodox writer is a competent witness against a heretic, and is to be trusted implicitly on his word; while a heretic is never to be believed against the orthodox, and has honour enough done him in allowing him to speak against his own side or in behalf of ours. It is thus that Cardinal Baronius and the authors of the Centuries of Magdeburg have written, each of their works having by this means acquired an immortal glory with its own party. But it must be owned that in the plan they adopted they have only imitated most of their predecessors. For many ages men had sought in ecclesiastical antiquity not what was to be found there, but what they conceived ought to be there for the good of their sect.' The faculty of seeing not what is, but solely what makes for the advantage of the sect, has in no way declined since the days of Le Clerc. M. Guizot has lately quoted, as a curious example of the illusions into which men may be betrayed by passion, that the greater part of the Popish journals on the Continent are incessantly repeating that Protestantism is in a state of rapid decline; that it is cold and decaying like the dead, and has hardly any adherents who are not either totally indifferent or eager to return to the Roman Catholic Church. The process is easy by which the papal zealot, without avowing his disingenuousness to his own mind, contrives to dupe himself. He overlooks the secessions from his own persuasion, the scepticism and the lukewarmness, and concentrates his attention on the few Protestants who have lapsed into Romanism or infidelity. These exceptions he assumes to be a fair specimen of the whole anti-Papal community, and he has the weakness to believe, without further inquiry, that the reformed religion is tottering to its fall.

Archbishop Whately gives some forcible illustrations of this propensity of mankind to close their eyes to all evidence which does not support their antecedent conclusions. Tourists in Ireland have shown themselves particularly subject to the infirmity. They are typified, the Archbishop says, in the jaunting-car of the country in which the passengers sit back to back. Each can only take in the view on his own side of the road; one sees the green prospect, the other the orange. The report brought back by the English travellers who visited France after the first abdication of Napoleon is a striking instance of the tendency. A nephew of one of our ministers wrote a letter in which he stated that every one from the Continent with whom he had conversed agreed that Louis XVIII. was firmly fixed on his throne, and was steadily gaining strength. The letter was dated on the identical day that Napoleon sailed from Elba! Archbishop

Archbishop Whately, who relates this singular anecdote, ascribes many of the partial views of the tourist to the circumstance of his falling into the company of a faction who pass him on to others of the same persuasion, just, he says, as in the old days of posting the bad inn of one town was connected with the bad inn of the next, and the person who started wrong was pretty sure to have bad dinners, bad beds, and bad horses to his journey's end. The case is common; but frequently the traveller deliberately chooses his companions for the similarity of their views, and carefully avoids all contact with people whose sentiments he dislikes. In the same way vehement partisans will only read the arguments on their own side of the question, and hold it a sort of treason to truth to examine the opinions of an adversary. Some will not hesitate to avow that they fear to be infected, which is only saying in other words that they fear to be convinced. I know some of them,' relates Lord Bacon of certain religious zealots of Queen Elizabeth's time, 'that would think it a tempting of God to hear or read what may be said against them, as if there could be a "hold fast that which is good" without a "prove all things" going before.' Strange as is the inconsistency, it is by no means unusual for men to have the fullest confidence in a cause, and very little in its being able to endure the test of examination. The Roman Catholic priesthood prohibit the Bible wherever they can venture, and by the interdict confess their dread that the Bible will make against them.

The followers of a party being regarded through the party medium there is the same preference of falsehood to truth in the judgment of persons that is frequently found in the judgment of things. Among the many weighty and beautiful observations which Hume has dispersed through his History there is nothing more admirable than his reflection on this frailty. It is no wonder that faction is so productive of vices of all kinds, for besides that it inflames the passions, it tends much to remove those great restraints, honour and shame, when men find that no iniquity can lose them the applause of their own party, and no innocence secure them against the calumnies of the opposite.' Those who have been foremost in the aspersion of a political adversary while he is living, often acknowledge the injustice of it by their eulogies when he is dead. Bolingbroke, who had been one of the principal detractors of the famous Duke of Marlborough, was called upon in a private company to confirm some anecdotes of his parsimony: "He was so great a man,' he

An Advertisement touching the controversies of the Church of England.Bacon's Works, vol. vii. p. 59.

replied,

replied, that I have forgotten his vices.' The answer has been much commended, and it is undoubtedly better to be just late than never, but we agree with Archbishop Whately that the tardy reparation in these cases is less deserving of applause than the previous calumnies of reproach. The detractions were addressed to a sentient being, and whether they effect their purpose or not, were designed to wound or discredit him, but the laudatory recantation is spoken over ashes and cannot soothe the dull, cold, ear of death.'

Archbishop Whately dwells on the necessity of allowing the question, 'What is the truth?' to anticipate every other consideration. If it is only asked in the second place, the mind, he justly urges, will have been drawn by a law as sure as that of gravitation towards the belief to which it is predisposed, and will employ its ingenuity in discovering arguments for a conclusion which it has adopted independently of them. Rely upon it,' it was said of a dexterous and not ever-scrupulous person in power, 'he will never take any step that is bad without having a very good reason to give for it.' The Archbishop adds the comment, that we are ready enough to be warned against the sophistry of another, but need no less to be warned against our own. The confidence which a barrister will sometimes have in the cause of his client when it is palpable to every unbiassed mind that it is utterly bad, is a wonderful example of the belief into which men can reason themselves by ingenious fallacies. A false conviction once introduced, and assumed as an axiom, is an erroneous element which must vitiate all the after processes of the understanding. The most bigotted writers constantly make the most emphatic protestations of their impartiality, because the points in which they are prejudiced have attained in their apprehensions to the rank of indisputable truths. Hume repeatedly boasted that his History of the Stuarts was free from all bias, and that he had kept the balance between Whig and Tory nicely true. Ten years afterwards, on revising the work, he thus confesses his delusion to a friend. As I began the History with these two reigns [James I. and Charles I.] I now find that they, above all the rest, have been corrupted with Whig rancour, and that I really deserved the name of a party writer, and boasted without any foundation of my impartiality; but if you now do me the honour to give this part of my work a second perusal, I am persuaded that you will no longer throw on me this reproachful epithet, and will acquit me of all propensity to Whiggism.' Whether even in the second instance he had attained to the vaunted judicial equanimity is somewhat doubtful. He had been irritated by the outcry which was raised

against