ESSAY VI. Πολυμαθίη κάρτα μὲν ὠφελέει, κάρτα δὲ βλάπτει τὸν ἔχοντα. Ωφελέει μὲν τὸν δεξιὸν ἄνδρα, βλάπτει δὲ τὸν ῥηϊδίως φωνεῦντα πᾶν ἔπος καὶ ἐν παντὶ δήμῳ. Χρὴ δὲ καιροῦ μέτρα εἰδέναι· σοφίης γὰρ οὗτος ὅρος. Εἰ δὲ οἱ ἔξω καιροῦ ῥῆσιν μουσικὴν πεπνυμένως ἀείσουσιν, οὐ παρα δέχονται ἐν ἀργίῃ γνώμην, αἰτίην δ' ἔχουσι μωρίας. ANAXARCHUS, apud Stobæum, Serm. xxxiv.* General knowledge and ready talent may be of very great benefit, but they may likewise be of very great disservice to the possessor. They are highly advantageous to the man of sound judgment, and dexterous in applying them; but they injure your fluent holder-forth on all subjects in all companies. It is necessary to know the measures of the time and occasion: for this is the very boundary of wisdom-(that by which it is defined, and distinguished from mere ability). But he, who without regard to the unfitness of the time and the audience, will soar in the high region of his fancies with his garland and singing robes about him, will not acquire the credit of seriousness amidst frivolity, but will be condemned for his silliness, as the greatest idler of the company, because the most unseasonable. THE moral law, it has been shown, permits an inadequate communication of unsophisticated truth, on the condition that it alone is practicable, and binds us to silence when neither an adequate, nor even a right, exposition of the truth is in our power. We must first inquire then,—what is necessary to constitute, and what may allowably accompany, a right though inadequate notion, and, secondly, what are the circumstances, from which we may deduce the impracticability of conveying even a right notion; the presence or absence of which circumstances it therefore becomes our duty to ascertain. In answer to the first question, the conscience demands: 1. That it should be the wish and design of the mind to convey the truth only; that if in addition to the negative loss implied in its inadequateness, the notion communicated should lead to any positive error, the cause should lie in *Edit. Gaisford.-Ed. the fault or defect of the recipient, not of the communicator, whose paramount duty, whose inalienable right, it is to preserve his own integrity, the integral character of his own moral being. Selfrespect; the reverence which he owes to the presence of humanity in the person of his neighbor; the reverential upholding of the faith of man in man; gratitude for the particular act of confidence; and religious awe for the divine purposes in the gift of language; are duties too sacred and important to be sacrificed to the guesses of an individual, concerning the advantages to be gained by the breach of them. 2. It is further required, that the supposed error shall not be such as will pervert or materially vitiate the imperfect truth, in communicating which we had unwillingly, though not perhaps unwittingly, occasioned it. A barbarian so instructed in the power and intelligence of the infinite Being as to be left wholly ignorant of his moral attributes, would have acquired none but erroneous notions even of the former. At the very best, he would gain only a theory to satisfy his curiosity with; but more probably, would deduce the belief of a Moloch or a Baal. For the idea of an irresistible, invisible Being, naturally produces terror in the mind of uninstructed and unprotected man, and with terror there will be associated whatever has been accustomed to excite it, anger, vengeance, &c.; as is proved by * The best and most forcible sense of a word is often that which is contained in its etymology. The author of the poems, the Synagogue, frequently affixed to Herbert's Temple, gives the original purport of the word "integrity," in the following lines of the fourth stanza of the eighth poem :* Next to sincerity, remember still, Thou must resolve upon integrity. God will have all thou hast, thy mind, thy will, And again, after some verses on constancy and humility, the poem concludes with man, He that desires to see The face of God, in his religion must Sincere, entire, constant, and humble be. Having mentioned the name of Herbert, that model of a man, a gentleand a clergyman, let me add, that the quaintness of some of his thoughts, not of his diction, than which nothing can be more pure, manly, and unaffected, has blinded modern readers to the great general merit of his poems, which are for the most part exquisite in their kind. * Church-Porch.-Ed. the mythology of all barbarous nations. This must be the case with all organized truths; the component parts derive their significance from the idea of the whole. Bolingbroke removed love, justice, and choice, from power and intelligence, and yet pretended to have left unimpaired the conviction of a Deity. He might as consistently have paralyzed the optic nerve, and then excused himself by affirming, that he had, however, not touched the eye. The third condition of a right though inadequate notion is, that the error occasioned be greatly outweighed by the importance of the truth communicated. The rustic would have little reason to thank the philosopher, who should give him true conceptions of the folly of believing in ghosts, omens, dreams, &c. at the price of abandoning his faith in divine providence, and in the continued existence of his fellow-creatures after their death. The teeth of the old serpent planted by the Cadmuses of French literature, under Lewis XV., produced a plenteous crop of philosophers and truth-trumpeters of this kind, in the reign of his successor. They taught many truths, historical, political, physiological, and ecclesiastical, and diffused their notions so widely, that the very ladies and hair-dressers of Paris became fluent encyclopedists: and the sole price which their scholars paid for these treasures of new information, was to believe Christianity an imposture, the Scriptures a forgery, the worship, if not the belief, of God superstition, hell a fable, heaven a dream, our life without providence, and our death without hope. They became as gods as soon as the fruit of this Upas tree of knowledge and liberty had opened their eyes to perceive that they were no more than beasts—somewhat more cunning, perhaps, and abundantly more mischievous. What can be conceived more natural than the result,-that self-acknowledged beasts should first act, and next suffer themselves to be treated, as beasts. We judge by comparison. To exclude the great is to magnify the little. The disbelief of essential wisdom and goodness, necessarily prepares the imagination for the supremacy of cunning with malignity. Folly and vice have their appropriate religions, as well as virtue and true knowledge and in some way or other fools will dance round the golden calf, and wicked men beat their timbrels and kettle-drums to, -Moloch, horrid king, besmeared with blood Of human sacrifice and parents' tears. My feelings have led me on, and in my illustration I had almost lost from my view the subject to be illustrated. One condition yet remains that the error foreseen shall not be of a kind to prevent or impede the after acquirement of that knowledge which will remove it. Observe, how graciously nature instructs her human children. She can not give us the knowledge derived from sight without occasioning us at first to mistake images of reflection for substances. But the very consequences of the delusion lead inevitably to its detection; and out of the ashes of the error rises a new flower of knowledge. We not only see, but are enabled to discover by what means we see. So, too, we are under the necessity, in given circumstances, of mistaking a square for a round object but ere the mistake can have any practical consequences, it is not only removed, but in its removal gives us the symbol of a new fact, that of distance. In a similar train of thought, though more fancifully, I might have elucidated the preceding condition, and have referred our hurrying enlighteners and revolutionary amputators to the gentleness of nature, in the oak and the beech, the dry foliage of which she pushes off only by the propulsion of the new buds, that supply its place. My friends! a clothing even of withered leaves is better than bareness. Having thus determined the nature and conditions of a right notion, it remains to consider the circumstances which tend to render the communication of it impracticable, and oblige us of course, to abstain from the attempt-oblige us not to convey falsehood under the pretext of saying truth. These circumstances, it is plain, must consist either in natural or moral impediments. The former, including the obvious gradatic is of constitutional insensibility and derangement, preclude all temptation to misconduct, as well as all probability of ill-consequences from accidental oversight, on the part of the communicator. Far otherwise is it with the impediments from moral causes. These demand all the attention and forecast of the genuine lovers of truth in the matter, the manner, and the time of their communications public and private; and these are the ordinary materials of the vain and the factious, determine them in the choice of their audiences and of their arguments, and to each argument give powers not its own. They are distinguishable into two sources, the streams from which, however, most often become confluent, namely, hindrances from ignorance,-(I here use the word in relation to the habits of reasoning as well as to the previous knowledge requisite for the due comprehension of the subject,)-and hindrances from predominant passions.* From both these the law of conscience commands us to abstain, because such being the ignorance and such the passions of the supposed auditors, we ought to deduce the impracticability of conveying not only adequate but even right notions of our own convictions: much less does it permit us to avail ourselves of the causes of this impracticability in order to procure nominal proselytes, each of whom will have a different, and all a false, conception of those notions that were to be conveyed for their truth's sake alone. Whatever is, or but for some defect in our moral character would have been, foreseen as preventing the conveyance of our thoughts, makes the attempt an act of self-contradiction and whether the faulty cause exist in our choice of unfit words or our choice of unfit auditors, the result is the same and so is the guilt. We have voluntarily communicated falsehood. Thus, without reference to consequences,-if only one short digression be excepted-from the sole principle of self-consistence or moral integrity, we have evolved the clue of right reason, which we are bound to follow in the communication of truth. Now then let me appeal to the judgment and experience of the reader, whether he who most faithfully adheres to the letter of the law of conscience will not likewise act in strictest correspondence to the maxims of prudence and sound policy. I am at least unable to recollect a single instance, either in history or in my personal experience, of a preponderance of injurious consequences from the publication of any truth, under the observance of the moral conditions above stated: much less can I even imagine any case, in which truth, as truth, can be pernicious. But if the assertor of the indifferency of truth and falsehood in their own natures, attempt to justify his position by confining the word truth, in the first instance, to the correspondence of given words to given facts, without reference to the total impression left by such words,-what is this more than to assert, that articulated sounds are things of moral indifferency;-and that we may relate a fact accurately, and nevertheless deceive grossly and wickedly? Blifil related accurately Tom Jones's riotous joy * See Lay Sermon addressed to the higher and middle classes. VI. |