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ESSAY IX.

Sapimus animo, fruimur animâ: sine animo anima est debilis. L. Accii Fragmenta.

As there are two wants connatural to man, so are there two main directions of human activity, pervading in modern times the whole civilized world; and constituting and sustaining that nationality which yet it is their tendency, and, more or less, their effect, to transcend and to moderate-Trade and Literature. These were they, which, after the dismemberment of the old Roman world, gradually reduced the conquerors and the conquered at once into several nations and a common Christendom. The natural law of increase and the instincts of family may produce tribes, and under rare and peculiar circumstances, settlements and neighbourhoods: and conquest may form empires. But without trade and literature, mutually commingled, there can be no nation; with

out commerce and science, no bond of nations. As the one hath for its object the wants of the body, real or artificial, the desires for which are for the greater part, nay, as far as respects the origination of trade and commerce, altogether excited from without; so the other has for its origin, as well as for its object, the wants of the mind, the gratification of which is a natural and necessary condition of its growth and sanity. And the man (or the nation, considered according to its predominant character as one man) may be regarded under these circumstances, as acting in two forms of method, inseparably co-existent, yet producing very different effects according as one or the other obtains the primacy.* As is the rank assigned to each in the theory and practice of the governing classes, and, according to its prevalence in forming the foundation of their public habits and opinions, so will be the outward and inward life of the people at large: such will the nation be. In tracing the epochs, and alter

The senses, the memory, and the understanding (i. e. the retentive, reflective, and judicial functions of his mind) being common to both methods.

nations of their relative sovereignty or subjection, consists the PHILOSOPHY of History. In the power of distinguishing and appreciating their several results consists the historic SENSE. And that under the ascendency of the mental and moral character the commercial relations may thrive to the utmost desirable point, while the reverse is ruinous to both, and sooner or later effectuates the fall or debasement of the country itself this is the richest truth obtained for mankind by historic RESEARCH: though unhappily it is the truth, to which a rich and commercial nation listens with most reluctance and receives with least faith. Where the brain and the immediate conductors of its influence remain healthy and vigorous, the defects and diseases of the eye will most often admit either of a cure or a substitute. And so is it with the outward prosperity of a state, where the well-being of the people possesses the primatcy in the aims of the governing classes, and in the public feeling. But what avails the perfect state of the eye,

Tho' clear

To outward view of blemish or of spot,

where the optic nerve is paralyzed by a pressure on the brain? And even so is it not only with the well-being, but ultimately with the prosperity of a people, where the former is considered (if it be considered at all) as subordinate and secondary to wealth and revenue.

In the pursuits of commerce the man is called into action from without, in order to appropriate the outward world, as far as he can bring it within his reach, to the purposes of his senses and sensual nature. His ultimate end is-appearance and enjoyment. Where on the other hand the nurture and evolution of humanity is the final aim, there will soon be seen a general tendency toward,an earnest seeking after, some ground common to the world and to man, therein to find the one principle of permanence and identity, the rock of strength and refuge, to which the soul may cling amid the fleeting surge-like objects of the senses. Disturbed as by the obscure quickening of an inward birth; made restless by swarming thoughts, that, like bees when they first miss the queen and mother of the hive, with vain discursion seek each in the other what is the common need of all;

man sallies forth into nature-in nature, as in the shadows and reflections of a clear river, to discover the originals of the forms presented to him in his own intellect. Over these shadows, as if they were the substantial powers and presiding spirits of the stream, Narcissuslike, he hangs delighted: till finding nowhere a representative of that free agency which yet is a fact of immediate consciousness sanctioned and made fearfully significant by his prophetic conscience, he learns at last that what he seeks he has left behind, and but lengthens the distance as he prolongs the search. Under the tutorage of scientific ANALYSIS, haply first given to him by express revelation (e cœlo descendit, ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ) he separates the relations that are wholly the creatures of his own abstracting and comparing intellect, and at once discovers and recoils from the discovery, that the reality, the objective truth, of the objects he has been adoring, derives its whole and sole evidence from an obscure sensation, which he is alike unable to resist or to comprehend, which compels him to contemplate as without and independent of himself what yet he could not VOL. III.

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