William Minto

“ The fresh treatment of a simple theme, the warm poetical colouring of commonplace incidents, the freedom and irregularity of the plan, the boldness of the descriptions, the manly and sincere sentiment, the rough vigour of the verse, took by surprise a generation accustomed to witty satire and burlesque, refined diction, translations from the classics, themes valued in proportion to their remoteness from vulgar life. Thomson at once became famous, and, his naturally easy temper roused to full exertion, vigorously followed up his success with Summer and an Ode to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton. ”

“ Thought, properly speaking, does not begin till we pass beyond the identity of an object with itself. Thought begins only when we recognise the likeness between one object and others. To keep within the self-identity of the object is to suspend thought. "Socrates was a native of Attica," "Socrates was a wise man," "Socrates was put to death as a troubler of the commonweal"—whenever we begin to think or say anything about Socrates, to ascribe any attributes to him, we pass out of his self-identity into his relations of likeness with other men, into what he has in common with other men. ”

“ When we find an artist of supreme excellence in any craft, we generally find that he has been practising it all his life. To say that he has a genius for it, means that he has practised it, and concentrated his main force upon it, and that he has been driven irresistibly to do so by sheer bent of nature. It was so with Defoe and his power of circumstantial invention, his unrivalled genius for "lying like truth." ”

“ Aristotle's Logic has been so long before the world in abstract isolation that we can hardly believe that its form was in any way determined by local accident. A horror as of sacrilege is excited by the bare suggestion that the author of this grand and venerable work, one of the most august monuments of transcendent intellect, was in his day and generation only a pre-eminent tutor or schoolmaster, and that his logical writings were designed for the accomplishment of his pupils in a special art in which every intellectually ambitious young Athenian of the period aspired to excel. ”

“ Is it because we are a nation of shopkeepers, and enjoy following lines of business which are a little out of our ordinary routine? Or is it simply that he makes us enjoy their courage and cleverness without thinking of the purposes with which these qualities are displayed? Defoe takes such delight in tracing their bold expedients, their dexterous intriguing and manoeuvring, that he seldom allows us to think of anything but the success or failure of their enterprises. Our attention is concentrated on the game, and we pay no heed for the moment to the players or the stakes. ”

“ For when the fragile little boy was sent into his cousin's blacking warehouse, he entered a better school, as it happened, than his father could have chosen for him. It was an infinitely more painful school than Harrow or Eton, but for one whose destined work was to describe the poorer houses and streets of London, and the many varieties of life, odd and sad, laughter-moving and pitiful, that swarmed in them, it was a more instructive school, it was the true road to knowledge. ”

“ What matters it to us who is King of Spain? asks one adversary. As well ask, retorts Defoe, what it matters to us who is King of Ireland. All this talk about the Balance of Power, says another, is only "a shoeing-horn to draw on a standing army." We do not want an army; only let us make our fleet strong enough and we may defy the world; our militia is perfectly able to defend us against invasion. If our militia is so strong, is Defoe's reply, why should a standing-army make us fear for our domestic liberties? ”

“ Truth often lies hid in the centre of a maze, and logical rules only help the searcher onwards by giving him warning when he is on the wrong track and must try another. It is the searcher's own impulse that carries him forward: Logic does not so much beckon him on to the right path as beckon him back from the wrong. In laying down the conditions of correct interpretation, of valid argument, of trustworthy evidence, of satisfactory explanation, Logic shows the inquirer how to test and purge his conclusions, not how to reach them. ”

“ The work of a man so keenly alive to the impressions of the hour, so closely bound up with his generation as Byron, runs a risk of perishing when the things that most deeply stir that generation have ceased to stir mankind. The secret of his tremendous power was his passionate sympathy with his own time. By the accidents of birth and circumstances, he was placed in opposition to the existing order of things, and his daring temper made him the exponent of the spirit of revolution. ”

“ If we have seen but one man of a nation, we are apt to conclude that all his countrymen are like him; we cannot suspend our judgment till we have seen more. Confident belief, as Dr. Bain remarks, is the primitive attitude of the human mind: it is only by slow degrees that this is corrected by experience. The old adage, "Experience teaches fools," has a meaning of its own, but in one sense it is the reverse of the truth. The mark of a fool is that he is not taught by experience, and we are all more or less intractable pupils, till our energies begin to fail. ”

“ In tracing the vigilant resolution with which she plays upon human weakness, the spasms of compunction which shoot across her wily designs, the selfish afterthoughts which paralyse her generous impulses, her fits of dare-devil courage and uncontrollable panic, and the steady current of good-humoured satisfaction with herself which makes her chuckle equally over mishaps and successes, Defoe has gone much more deeply into the springs of action, and sketched a much richer page in the natural history of his species than in Robinson Crusoe. ”

“ The truth is, he felt too deeply to be a poet of the very highest rank; the feeling of the moment took too large and embarrassing a hold of him to leave his hand free for triumphs of execution. "This interfered both with the perfecting of details, and with the severe ordering of parts into an artistic whole. In Byron we are always struck more with the matter than with the form. It is his theme that absorbs attention, and the impetuous vehemence and stormy play of passion with which he hurries it on. This is, doubtless, an insecure foundation for lasting fame. ”

“ The truth is that generally when we speak of plurality of causes, of alternative possibilities of causation, we are not thinking of the effect in its individual entirety, but only of some general or abstract aspect of it. When we say, e.g., that death may be produced by a great many different causes, poison, gunshot wounds, disease of this or that organ, we are thinking of death in the abstract, not of the particular case under consideration, which as an individual case, has characters so distinctive that only one combination of causes is possible. ”