Spare Hours Part 3

The principles which art _involves_, science _evolves_. The truths on which the success of art depends lurk in the artist's mind in an undeveloped state, guiding his hand, stimulating his invention, balancing his judgment, but not appearing in regular propositions." "An art (that of medicine for instance) will of course admit into its limits, everything (_and nothing else_) which can conduce to the performance of _its own proper work_; it recognizes no other principles of selection."

"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 a.s.siduous 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 our 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 every _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 circ.u.mscription 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 Curacoa, 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 acc.u.mulation 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 Pa.s.sions 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 pa.s.sionateness, 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 n.o.blest, 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 life 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,-pa.s.sive and receptive, and, at the best, little more than registrative.

Since writing the above, we have read with great satisfaction Dr.

Forbes' Lecture delivered before the Chichester Literary Society and Mechanics' Inst.i.tute, 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 imbued 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 derivanda_, are very curious-showing the native vigor and bent of his mind, and indicating also, at once the ident.i.ty 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 princ.i.p.ally, 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 h.o.a.rded 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 G.o.d; 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 School-days_-in spirit and in 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 veil no mortal hand has ever rent in twain. And we name after him, the thoughtful, candid, impressive little volume of his pupil, his friend, and his successor, Professor Fraser.

The following pa.s.sage 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.

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The highest reach of human science is the scientific recognition of human ignorance; 'Qui nescit ignorare, ignorat 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 jact.i.tas.'

"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 magis quaerimus 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 gla.s.s, 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 ma.s.s-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.

_THE MYSTERY OF BLACK AND TAN._

"_The reader must remember that my work is concerning the_ aspects _of things only._"-RUSKIN.

We,-the _Sine Qua Non_, the d.u.c.h.ess, the Sputchard, the Dutchard, the Ricapicticapic, Oz and Oz, the Maid of Lorn, and myself,-left Crieff some fifteen years ago, on a bright September morning, soon after daybreak, in a gig. It was a morning still and keen: the sun sending his level shafts across Strathearn, and through the thin mist over its river hollows, to the fierce Aberuchil Hills, and searching out the dark blue shadows in the corries of Benvorlich. But who and how many are "we?" To make you as easy as we all were, let me tell you we were four; and are not these dumb friends of ours persons rather than things? is not their soul ampler, as Plato would say, than their body, and contains rather than is contained? Is not what lives and wills in them, and is affectionate, as spiritual, as immaterial, as truly removed from mere flesh, blood, and bones, as that soul which is the proper self of their master? And when we look each other in the face, as I now look in d.i.c.k's, who is lying in his "corny" by the fireside, and he in mine, is it not as much the dog within looking from out his eyes-the windows of his soul-as it is the man from his?

The _Sine Qua Non_, who will not be pleased at being spoken of, is such an one as that vain-glorious and chivalrous Ulric von Hutten-the Reformation's man of wit, and of the world, and of the sword, who slew Monkery with the wild laughter of his _Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_-had in his mind when he wrote thus to his friend Fredericus Piscator (Mr.

Fred. Fisher), on the 19th May 1519, "_Da mihi uxorem, Friderice, et ut scias qualem, venustam, adolescentulam, probe educatam, hilarem, verecundam, patientem._" "_Qualem_," he lets Frederic understand in the sentence preceding, is one "_qua c.u.m ludam, qua jocos conferam, amoeniores et leviusculas fabulas misceam, ubi sollicitudinis aciem obtundam, curarum aestus mitigem_." And if you would know more of the _Sine Qua Non_, and in English, for the world is dead to Latin now, you will find her name and nature in Shakspeare's words, when King Henry the Eighth says, "go thy ways."

_The d.u.c.h.ess_, alias all the other names till you come to the _Maid of Lorn_, is a rough, gnarled, incomparable little bit of a terrier, three parts Dandie-Dinmont, and one part-chiefly in tail and hair-c.o.c.ker: her father being Lord Rutherfurd's famous "Dandie," and her mother the daughter of a Skye, and a light-hearted c.o.c.ker. The d.u.c.h.ess is about the size and weight of a rabbit; but has a soul as big, as fierce, and as faithful as had Meg Merrilies, with a nose as black as Topsy's; and is herself every bit as game and queer as that delicious imp of darkness and of Mrs. Stowe. Her legs set her long slim body about two inches and a half from the ground, making her very like a huge caterpillar or hairy _oobit_-her two eyes, dark and full, and her shining nose, being all of her that seems anything but hair. Her tail was a sort of stump, in size and in look very much like a spare foreleg, stuck in anywhere to be near. Her color was black above and a rich brown below, with two dots of tan above the eyes, which dots are among the deepest of the mysteries of Black and Tan.

This strange little being I had known for some years, but had only possessed about a month. She and her pup (a young lady called _Smoot_, which means smolt, a young salmon), were given me by the widow of an honest and drunken-as much of the one as of the other-Edinburgh street-porter, a native of Badenoch, as a legacy from him and a fee from her for my attendance on the poor man's death-bed. But my first sight of the d.u.c.h.ess was years before in Broughton Street, when I saw her sitting bolt upright, begging, imploring, with those little rough four leggies, and those yearning, beautiful eyes, all the world, or any one, to help her master, who was lying "mortal" in the kennel. I raised him, and with the help of a ragged Samaritan, who was only less drunk than he, I got Macpherson-he held from Glen Truim-home; the excited doggie trotting off, and looking back eagerly to show us the way. I never again pa.s.sed the Porters' Stand without speaking to her. After Malcolm's burial I took possession of her; she escaped to the wretched house, but as her mistress was off to Kingussie, and the door shut, she gave a pitiful howl or two, and was forthwith back at my door, with an impatient, querulous bark. And so this is our second of the four; and is she not deserving of as many names as any other d.u.c.h.ess, from her of Medina Sidonia downwards?

A fierier little soul never dwelt in a queerer or stancher body; see her huddled up, and you would think her a bundle of hair, or a bit of old mossy wood, or a slice of heathery turf, with some red soil underneath but speak to her, or give her a cat to deal with, be it bigger than herself, and what an incarnation of affection, energy, and fury-what a fell unquenchable little ruffian.

_The Maid of Lorn_ was a chestnut mare, a broken down racer, thorough-bred as Beeswing, but less fortunate in her life, and I fear not so happy _occasione mortis_: unlike the d.u.c.h.ess, her body was greater and finer than her soul; still she was a ladylike creature, sleek, slim, nervous, meek, willing, and fleet. She had been thrown down by some brutal half-drunk Forfarshire laird, when he put her wildly and with her wind gone, at the last hurdle on the North Inch at the Perth races. She was done for and bought for ten pounds by the landlord of the Drummond Arms, Crieff, who had been taking as much money out of her, and putting as little corn into her as was compatible with life, purposing to run her for the Consolation Stakes at Stirling. Poor young lady, she was a sad sight-broken in back, in knees, in character, and wind-in everything but temper, which was as sweet and all-enduring as Penelope's or our own Enid's.

Of myself, the fourth, I decline making any account. Be it sufficient that I am the Dutchard's master, and drove the gig.