A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies Part 20

(One might ask _how_, if a man worship these ideas with _all_ his heart, a portion could be left? but the sense is so excellent, I cannot quarrel with a slight inaccuracy in the expression. I never quite understood before why it is difficult to subscribe to the truth of the phrase "He is a good but a narrow-minded man," but _felt_ the incompatibility.)

9.

He says "the word _useful_ implies the idea of good robbed of its n.o.bleness." Is this true? the _useful_ is the _good_ applied to practical purposes; it need not, therefore, be less n.o.ble. The n.o.bleness lies in the spirit in which it is so applied.

10.

Benthamism (what _is_ it?), Puritanism, Judaism, how he hates them! I suppose, because he _fears_ G.o.d and _fears_ for the Church of G.o.d.

Hatred of all kinds seems to originate in fear.

11.

What he says of conscience, very remarkable!

"Men get embarra.s.sed by the common cases of a misguided conscience: but a compa.s.s may be out of order as well as a conscience; and you can trace the deranging influence on the latter quite as surely as on the former.

The needle may point due south if you hold a powerful magnet in that direction; still the compa.s.s, generally speaking, is a true and sure guide," &c.; and then he adds, "he who believes his conscience to be G.o.d's law, by obeying it obeys G.o.d."

I think there would be much to say about all this pa.s.sage relating to conscience, nor am I sure that I quite understand it. Derangement of the intellect is madness; is not derangement of the conscience also madness?

might it not be induced, as we bring on a morbid state of the other faculties, by over use and abuse? by giving it more than its due share of power in the commonwealth of the mind? It should preside, not tyrannise; rule, not exercise a petty cramping despotism. A healthy courageous conscience gives to the powers, instincts, impulses, fair play; and having once settled the order of government with a strong hand, is not always meddling though always watchful.

Then again, how is conscience "G.o.d's law?" Conscience is not the law, but the interpreter of the law; it does not teach the difference between right and wrong, it only impels us to do what we believe to be right, and smites us when we _think_ we have been wrong. How is it that many have done wrong, and every day do wrong for conscience' sake?-and does that sanctify the wrong in the eyes of G.o.d, as well as in those of John Huss?[1]

12.

"Prayer," he says, "and kindly intercourse with the poor, are the two great safeguards of spiritual life-its more than food and raiment."

True; but there is something higher than this fed and clothed spiritual life; something more difficult, yet less conscious.

13.

In allusion to Coleridge, he says very truly, that the power of contemplation becomes diseased and perverted when it is the main employment of life. But to the same great intellect he does beautiful justice in another pa.s.sage. "Coleridge seemed to me to love truth really, and, therefore, truth presented herself to him, not negatively, as she does to many minds, who can see that the objections against her are unfounded, and therefore that she is to be received; but she filled him, as it were, heart and mind, imbuing him with her very self, so that all his being comprehended her fully, and loved her ardently; and that seems to me to be true wisdom."

14.

Very fine is a pa.s.sage wherein he speaks against meeting what is wrong and bad with negatives, with merely proving the wrong to be wrong, and the false to be false, without subst.i.tuting for either the positively good and true.

15.

He contrasts as the two forms of the present danger to the Church and to society, the prevalent epicurean atheism, and the lying and formal spirit of priestcraft. He seems to have had an impression that the Church of G.o.d may be "utterly destroyed"(?), or, he asks, "must we look forward for centuries to come to the mere alternations of infidelity and superst.i.tion, scepticism, and Newmanism?" It is very curious to see two such men as Arnold and Carlyle both overwhelmed with a terror of the magnitude of the mischiefs they see impending over us. They are oppressed with the antic.i.p.ation of evil as with a sense of personal calamity. Something alike, perhaps, in the temperaments of these two extraordinary men;-large conscientiousness, large destructiveness, and small hope: there was great mutual sympathy and admiration.

16.

Very admirable what he says in favour of comprehensive reading, against exclusive reading in one line of study. He says, "Preserve proportion in your reading, keep your view of men and things extensive, and depend upon it a mixed knowledge is not a superficial one; as far as it goes the views that it gives are true; but he who reads deeply in one cla.s.s of writers only, gets views which are almost sure to be perverted, and which are not only _narrow but false_."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

17.

All his descriptions of natural scenery and beauty show his intense sensibility to them, but nowhere is there a trace of the love or the comprehension of art, as the reflection from the mind of man of the nature and the beauty he so loved. Thus, after dwelling on a scene of exquisite natural beauty, he says, "Much more beautiful, because made truly after G.o.d's own image, are the forms and colours of kind, and wise, and holy thoughts, words, and actions;" that is to say-although he knew not or made not the application-ART, in the high sense of the word, for that is the embodying in beautiful hues and forms, what is kind, wise, and holy; in one word-_good_. In fact, he says himself, art, physical science, and natural history, were not included within the reach of his mind; the first for want of taste, the second for want of time, and the third for want of inclination.

18.

He says, "The whole subject of the brute creation is to me one of such painful mystery, that I dare not approach it." This is very striking from such a man. How deep, consciously or unconsciously, does this feeling lie in many minds!

Bayle had already termed the acts, motives, and feelings of the lower order of animals, "un des plus profonds abimes sur quoi notre raison peut s'exerciser."

There is nothing, as I have sometimes thought, in which men so blindly sin as in their appreciation and treatment of the whole lower order of creatures. It is affirmed that love and mercy towards animals are not inculcated by any direct precept of Christianity, but surely they are included in its spirit; yet it has been remarked that cruelty towards animals is far more common in Western Christendom than in the East. With the Mahometan and Brahminical races humanity to animals, and the sacredness of life in all its forms, is much more of a religious principle than among ourselves.

Bacon, in his "Advancement of Learning," does not think it beneath his philosophy to point out as a part of human morals, and a condition of human improvement, justice and mercy to the lower animals-"the extension of a n.o.ble and excellent principle of compa.s.sion to the creatures subject to man." "The Turks," he says, "though a cruel and sanguinary nation both in descent and discipline, give alms to brutes, and suffer them not to be tortured."

It should seem as if the primitive Christians, by laying so much stress upon a future life in contradistinction to this life, and placing the lower creatures out of the pale of hope, placed them at the same time out of the pale of sympathy, and thus laid the foundation for this utter disregard of animals in the light of our fellow creatures. The definition of virtue among the early Christians was the same as Paley's-that it was good performed for the sake of ensuring everlasting happiness-which of course excluded all the so-called brute creatures.

Kind, loving, submissive, conscientious, much enduring, we know them to be; but because we deprive them of all stake in the future, because they have no selfish calculated aim, these are not virtues; yet if we say "a _vicious_ horse," why not say a _virtuous_ horse?

The following pa.s.sage, bearing curiously enough on the most abstruse part of the question, I found in Hallam's Literature of the Middle Ages:-"Few," he says, "at present, who believe in the immateriality of the human soul, would deny the same to an elephant; but it must be owned that the discoveries of zoology have pushed this to consequences which some might not readily adopt. The spiritual being of a sponge revolts a little our prejudices; yet there is no resting-place, and we must admit this, or be content to sink ourselves into a ma.s.s of medullary fibre.

Brutes have been as slowly emanc.i.p.ated in philosophy as some cla.s.ses of mankind have been in civil polity; their souls, we see, were almost universally disputed to them at the end of the seventeenth century, even by those who did not absolutely bring them down to machinery. Even within the recollection of many, it was common to deny them any kind of reasoning faculty, and to solve their most sagacious actions by the vague word instinct. We have come of late years to think better of our humble companions; and, as usual in similar cases, the preponderant bias seems rather too much of a levelling character."

When natural philosophers speak of "the higher reason and more limited instincts of man," as compared with animals, do they mean savage man or cultivated man? In the savage man the instincts have a power, a range, a cert.i.tude, like those of animals. As the mental faculties become expanded and refined the instincts become subordinate. In tame animals are the instincts as strong as in wild animals? Can we not, by a process of training, subst.i.tute an entirely different set of motives and habits?

Why, in managing animals, do men in general make brutes of themselves to address what is most _brute_ in the lower creature, as if it had not been demonstrated that in using our higher faculties, our reason and benevolence, we develop sympathetically higher powers in _them_, and in subduing them through what is best within us, raise them and bring them nearer to ourselves?

In general the more we can gather of facts, the nearer we are to the elucidation of theoretic truth. But with regard to animals, the multiplication of facts only increases our difficulties and puts us to confusion.

"Can we otherwise explain animal instincts than by supposing that the Deity himself is virtually the active and present moving principle within them? If we deny them _soul_, we must admit that they have some spirit direct from G.o.d, what we call _unerring_ instinct, which holds the place of it." This is the opinion which Newton adopts. Then are we to infer that the reason of man removes him further from G.o.d than the animals, since we cannot offend G.o.d in our instincts, only in our reason? and that the superiority of the human animal lies in the power of sinning? Terrible power! terrible privilege! out of which we deduce the law of progress and the necessity for a future life.

The following pa.s.sage bearing on the subject is from Bentham:-

"The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. It may come one day to be recognised that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the _os sacrum_, are reasons insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the caprice of a tormentor. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line?

is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational as well as a more conversable animal than an infant of a day, a week, or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, 'can they reason?' nor 'can they speak?' but 'can they suffer?'"

I do not remember ever to have heard the kind and just treatment of animals enforced upon Christian principles or made the subject of a sermon.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

19.

Once, when I was at Vienna, there was a dread of hydrophobia, and orders were given to ma.s.sacre all the dogs which were found unclaimed or uncollared in the city or suburbs. Men were employed for this purpose, and they generally carried a short heavy stick, which they flung at the poor proscribed animal with such certain aim as either to kill or maim it mortally at one blow. It happened one day that, close to the edge of the river, near the Ferdinand's-Brucke, one of these men flung his stick at a wretched dog, but with such bad aim that it fell into the river.

The poor animal, following his instinct or his teaching, immediately plunged in, redeemed the stick, and laid it down at the feet of its owner, who, s.n.a.t.c.hing it up, dashed out the creature's brains.