John Francis Waller

“ When the discovery of America poured into the coffers of that country an abundant supply of the precious metals—mistaking for wealth itself the mere instrument by which wealth is exchanged, abandoning her industrial pursuits, and realizing to her bitter cost the fable of King Midas, who prayed that whatever he touched might be turned into gold—Spain, hitherto one of the most powerful nations in the world, became gradually impoverished in the midst of her accumulated treasures. ”

“ It may be more instructive, as well as more practicable, to confine ourselves to a smaller field—to consider, namely, the main point at issue between Schelling and some of the leading philosophers of this country. Perhaps some light will be thrown on his philosophy, its drift and purpose will perhaps become apparent in our attempt, not indeed to settle, but to adjust the terms of this dispute.
It is admitted on all hands, that truth of one kind or another is the proper aim of philosophy. But there are two kinds of truth: truth as it exists in itself, and truth as it exists in relation to us. ”

“ The career of thought which his chair demanded was that which his own spirit had all along pointed to; the speculations of which the field is the mind itself of man, and which deal with all his dearest and highest interests, were subjects for Wilson irresistibly attractive by their own nature, and which he never approached without a deep feeling of their solemn and measureless import. ”

“ Our happiness, too, no less than our virtue, consists in acting in conformity with truth. For it is only by acting in accordance with the nature with which we have been endowed, and in accordance with the laws of the universe, that our true well-being can be secured. ”

“ Wordsworth was about five feet ten inches in height. His figure was not graceful, but in his countenance there was a fine mixture of the poet and philosopher. He resembled the portraits of Locke; his eyes burned with an inward glare, and looked as if they saw things (which they did) in nature not revealed to ordinary vision. ”

“ Soon after leaving Oxford Wilson purchased the small estate of Elleray on the banks of the Windermere, attracted thither partly by the beauty of the scenery—for probably no other house in England commands a view of such surpassing loveliness and majesty—and partly by the desire to enjoy the society of Wordsworth, who resided in the neighbourhood. Here he married in 1811 Miss Jane Penny, the daughter of a wealthy Liverpool merchant, a lady adorned with every feminine grace, and thoroughly able to appreciate the genius of her husband. ”

“ According to the policy inculcated by the mercantile system, a nation ought to deal as much as possible in exports, and as little as possible in imports, for then the balance would require to he paid in gold and silver; as if exports could be paid for ultimately by anything except imports; and as if the precious metals, and not the good things which these metals purchase, were the sources of the prosperity of a people! ”

“ Schiller was won by the grace of Charlotte's manner and appearance, and by the amiability of her disposition; she had a strong sympathy with genius, so that they felt every day more and more convinced that they were fitted to make each other happy. But the poet's income was too scanty and precarious to enable them as yet to marry. Many, however, and happy were the visits which Schiller paid to Rudolstadt, and many and beautiful were the love-inspired poems which he wrote, during the three years of his courtship. ”

“ So the man who ill-uses his parents or children affirms, in so doing, that they are not his parents and children, but strangers and enemies. His crime consists in asserting that things are not what they are. On the other hand, to respect the property of others, and to behave with kindness in our family relations, is to admit things to be what they are—such truthfulness is virtue. Moral obligation is explained on the same principle. As rational beings we are bound to acknowledge, by our conduct, that things are what they are, and not to declare that they are different from what they are. ”

“ VANINI, Lucilio, a martyr, like Servetus, Bruno, and Campanella, to the brutal bigotry of a ferocious ecclesiasticism, was born at Tourosano in the kingdom of Naples, in 1585. On the title-pages of his books he called himself Julius Cæsar Vanini. Combining with a rather weak head and unsettled habits an ardent thirst of knowledge, he jumbled together in his brain the opinions of Aristotle and Pomponatius, Averrhoes and Cardan, and travelled into almost every country of Europe where philosophy was cultivated. ”

“ They show that the authority of the senses, as the criterion of truth, was beginning to be displaced by the authority of a higher criterion—that of reason. They evince a disposition to find out not merely relative truth, that is, truth as it presents itself to man, but absolute truth, that is, truth as it exists in itself and for all intelligence. ”

“ Thus stoicism makes our virtue and happiness to centre in the restraint which our reason imposes on our passive modifications, inasmuch as in this restraint we find our true freedom, and assume our true nature, which, as has been said, is a nature above nature; while epicurism places our virtue and happiness in the indulgence, within reasonable limits, of our passive modifications, inasmuch as these, according to this system, constitute the true staple and groundwork of our nature. ”

“ Schelling's opponents, on the other hand, must be prepared to hold and to show that there is no nature common to all intelligence—that the different orders of minds (supposing that there are such) have no point of unity or agreement—that their difference is absolute and complete. This is the only logical ground on which they can deny to the mind of man all cognizance of the unconditioned truth. Such seem to be the grounds on which the famous question respecting the philosophy of the unconditioned has to be debated. ”

“ With regard to the poems themselves of Wordsworth there is but room for this single remark, that, of these poems it may perhaps be said, with greater truth than of any other modern poetry, that they contain passages and lines so startling in their simplicity, subtlety, and freshness, that the perusal of them forms an epoch in the intellectual life of every student of sensibility and taste. When first read they are felt to be unlike anything in poetry which the reader has ever met with before. ”

“ We know that Adam the first man became also the first sinner and mortal, and that so the whole human race propagated from him could be naturally no better than he was; 'by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin.'" To the man who should say, "Still I do not thoroughly understand the origin of sin, there seems to be some mystery about it," Toland would reply, "It may be quite true that we have no adequate idea of the origin of sin, but for all that, it is no mystery." ”

“ Presiding at a Waterloo banquet, he was of course under the necessity of saying something in regard to the duke's great battle. Yet with the instinct of genius he felt that this was a theme which even his powers would attempt in vain to describe; so that after expatiating on the state of Europe previous to the decisive crisis, he despatched the battle of the 18th June in these few but effective words:—"The morning rose in clouds and tempest—and the sun set on the regenerated liberties of Europe, and the immortal fame of the victor of Waterloo." ”

“ Xenocrates was a voluminous writer; but none of his works have come down to us. But from their titles we may learn that he prosecuted diligently the researches in which his great master had led the way. He wrote on logic, on ideas, on the opposite, on the indefinite, on the soul, on the passions, on happiness and virtue, on the state ”

“ Stella fell into bad health, and after lingering for some years, she yielded up her wasted existence at the age of forty-eight, a victim to the caprice and constitutional coldness of one who always treated her with the utmost respect, and felt for her the most unbounded admiration, and as tender an attachment as it was possible for him to entertain. She died in 1728. This passage in Swift's life was combined with another episode of a precisely similar character. ”

“ He has seen too much of the vicissitudes of an author's life, and of the airy basis of an author's hopes in the future, to be flattered by the proposals of a suitor, who finds it easier to charm the world than to pay the butcher." Hence the elder Schwann had looked rather grave on the growing intimacy between Margaret and Schiller; and it was to overcome his scruples that the poet had bethought him of turning his abilities into a more practical channel. ”

“ The unconditioned (truth in itself) is beyond his grasp. But it is plain that this argument proves too much; it proves that the unconditioned truth is equally beyond the grasp of Omniscience; because it is surely manifest that omniscience can know things only in relation to itself; and therefore Omniscience is just as incompetent as man is to apprehend the unconditioned, if this must be apprehended out of all relation to intelligence. If that be the idea of the unconditioned, Schelling's conception of philosophy must be given up, and Hamilton's must be accepted. ”

“ It held that ideas or general notions have some sort of reality independent of the mind which harboured them, and of the language in which they were expressed—that they are the laws or conditions of all reason and of all intelligible existence, and that they may be said, in some sense, to precede all created things, inasmuch as they are the grounds on which alone these latter are possible and conceivable. ”

“ All other industry—that of artificers, manufacturers, and merchants, however useful—is barren and unproductive. The ground on which this strange doctrine rests is twofold:—First, the earth is the quarter from which all the materials in use among mankind are produced, therefore the cultivation of the earth is the only productive species of industry; and secondly, agricultural labour not only replaces with a profit the capital employed in carrying it on, but yields moreover a "nett produce" or surplus, which is rent, and which belongs to the proprietor of the land ”

“ Hamilton's opinion is grounded on the assumption that whatever man knows he knows only in relation, that is, only in relation to his own faculties of knowledge. He can, therefore, apprehend only relative or conditioned truth. ”

“ He attached himself first to the Cynics—a sect who snarled at all mankind—but was soon repelled by their grossness of manners, intellectual narrowness, ignorance, and incapacity. After studying for twenty years under Stilpo of the Megaric sect, and under Xenocrates and Polemon, the successors of Plato in the Academy, he resolved to establish an ethical school of his own, of a more practical and not less enlightened character than any at that time in vogue. ”

“ On the contrary, the oftener and the more signally they failed in their endeavours to disseminate the highly-cherished opinions, the stronger did their conviction become that philosophy was something which existed for themselves alone—not considering that to be universally intelligible is the primary aim of every true philosophy—an aim which, though often missed, ought yet never to be lost sight of, and ought to be the ruling and guiding principle of every system. ”

“ Such, according to Smith, is the process by which our moral judgments of other people are formed. Then, in regard to our estimate of ourselves, the principle of sympathy is still the ground of our decision. By means of this principle we are able to take up a position apart, as it were, from ourselves, and to look at our own affections and actions with the eyes of other people; and according as we are sensible that we are objects of praise or of blame to them, do we become objects of praise or of blame to ourselves. ”

“ Hence sensible knowledge is not true knowledge, for it is not universally valid: the senses may be organs of human cognition merely. The senses show us things in their diversity; and this diversity will vary with every variation in the senses. But there is a unity in things as well as a diversity; if they are πολλά, they are likewise ἑν; and this unity is apprehended not by sense, but by pure intellect. There is thus something which is common to all things, and this which is common to all things is apprehended by something common to all intellects. ”

“ It held that the ideas in question—the genera and species—have no reality whatever—that the words which express them are mere sounds (flatus vocis) , that all existences are particular, and that the particular alone can be thought of. Conceptualism held that the genera and species have no reality in nature: but neither are they mere words: there is something corresponding to them in the mind—some conception of which the general term is the expression. Conceptualism is little more than a developed nominalism. ”

“ He holds that philosophy is the pursuit of truth as it stands related to pure intellect, i.e., to intellect considered universally, and as not modified in any particular way: he holds that man is competent to the attainment of such truth, and that such truth is absolute and unconditioned. The other party (among whom we venture to place Hamilton) maintains that philosophy is the pursuit of truth as it stands related to our minds considered as a particular kind or form of intelligence—that man can attain to no other truth than this, and that this truth is relative and conditioned. ”

“ From the selfish point of view we see ourselves in magnified proportions, while other people occupy but a small space on our moral retina: from the sympathetic point of view we see ourselves on a diminished scale, while the magnitude of our neighbours has increased. If we view sympathy (as we fairly may) as a principle of impartiality, by which the judgments of our original selfishness are suspended or put right, we cannot but attach a high scientific value to the system of Dr. Smith. ”

“ If agricultural industry is productive of materials, manufacturing industry is certainly productive of utilities; and the one form of production is no less important than the other. But secondly, it is not the fact that agricultural labour has in itself any advantage over manufacturing labour in the way of realizing a nett surplus which is the proprietor's rent. It is no doubt true that when the price of farm produce rises under the demands of an increasing population, and inferior soils are taken (as they now must be) into cultivation, a rent arises on the better soils ”

“ Wilson's reverence for the genius of Wordsworth clung to him throughout life, and cannot be better expressed than it was in his own graphic words when, conversing in his latter days about the great lake poet, he said—"I fell down on my knees to him, sir, when I was a boy, and I have never risen since." ”