Thomas Brown

“ But he who has lived, as man should live, is permitted to enjoy that best happiness which man can enjoy,—to behold, in one continued series, those years of benevolent wishes or of heroic suffering, which are at once his merit and his reward. He is surrounded by his own pure thoughts and actions, which, from the most remote distance, seem to shine upon him wherever his glance can reach; as in some climate of perpetual summer, in which the inhabitant sees nothing but fruits and blossoms, and inhales only fragrance, and sunshine, and delight. ”

“ It is this appearance of happy life which spreads a charm over every little group, with which Nature animates her scenery; and he who can look without interest on the young lamb, as it frolics around the bush, may gaze, indeed, on the magnificent landscape as it opens before him,—but it will be with an eye which looks languidly, and in vain, for pleasure which it cannot find. ”

“ Indeed, so truly prior and paramount is it to mere reasoning, that the very notion of reasoning necessarily involves the belief of our identity as admitted. To reason, is to draw a conclusion from some former proposition; and how can one truth be inferred from another truth, unless the mind, which admits the one, be the mind, which admitted the other? In its order, as much as in its importance, it may be truly considered as the first of those truths which do not depend on reasoning, and as itself necessarily implied, perhaps in all, certainly in the greater number, of our other intuitions. ”

“ It is to see the mind, in a great measure, as it is in nature, divested of every thing foreign, passing instantly from thought to thought, from sensation to sensation, in almost endless variety of states, and differing as completely from that cumbrous representation of it, which philosophers are fond of representing to us, as the planets revolving freely in the immense space of our solar system, differ from those mimic orbs, which, without any principle of motion in themselves, are, as it were, dragged along, in the complex mechanism of our orreries. ”

“ In the eye, for example, how wide a scene is open to us, wherever our glance maybe turned?—woods, fields, mountains, rivers, the whole atmosphere of light, and that magnificent luminary, which converts into light the whole space through which it moves, as if incapable of existing but in splendour. The mere opening of our eyelid is like the withdrawing of a veil, which before covered the universe:—It is more; it is almost like saying to the universe, which had perished, Exist again! ”

“ But politeness itself, in all its most important respects,—indeed in every respect, in which it is to be separated from the mere fluctuating and arbitrary forms and ceremonies of the month or year,—is nothing more than knowledge of the human mind directing general benevolence. It is the art of producing the greatest happiness, which, in the mere external courtesies of life, can be produced, by raising such ideas or other feelings in the minds of those with whom we are conversant, as will afford the most pleasure, and averting, as much as possible, every idea which may lead to pain. ”

“ Wherever we turn our eyes,—to the earth—to the heavens—to the myriads of beings that live and move around us—or to those more than myriads of worlds, which seem themselves almost like animated inhabitants of the infinity through which they range,—above us, beneath us, on every side, we discover, with a certainty that admits not of doubt, intelligence and design, that must have preceded the existence of every thing which exists. ”

“ Time, in short, is to our conception, a series in constant onward progress, and cannot be conceived by us, but as a progressive series, of which our separate feelings are parts; the remembrance of the events of our life, whenever we take any distant retrospect of them, being like the remembrance of the space, which we have traversed in a journey,—an indistinct continuity of length, as truly divisible, in our conception, into the separate events which we remember, as the space, which we remember to have traversed, into its separate variety of scenes. ”

“ Suppose that you see, at once, all the hours of the day, and all the seasons of the year,—a morning of spring and of autumn,—a night brilliant with stars, and a night obscure with clouds,—meadows, enamelled with flowers,—fields, waving with harvest,—woods, heavy with the frosts of winter,—you will then have a just notion of the spectacle of the universe. ”

“ To say of this hypothesis, which was the dream of a great mind,—but of a mind, I must confess, which was very fond of dreaming, and very apt to dream,—that it is a mere hypothesis, is to speak of it too favourably. Like the doctrine of occasional causes, it supposes a system of external things, of which, by the very principle of the hypothesis, there can be no evidence, and which is absolutely of no utility whatever, but as it enables a philosopher to talk, more justly, of pre-established harmonies, without the possibility, however, of knowing that he is talking more justly. ”

“ In the physics of the material universe, there is, it must be owned, much that is truly worthy of our philosophic admiration, and of the sublimest exertions of philosophic genius. But even that material world will appear more admirable, to him who contemplates it, as it were, from the height of his own mind, and who measures its infinity with the range of his own limited but aspiring faculties. He is unquestionably the philosopher most worthy of the name, who unites to the most accurate knowledge of mind, the most accurate knowledge of all the physical objects amid which he is placed ”

“ If we imagine all the innumerable flowers which nature pours out, like a tribute of incense to the God who is adorning her, again to be stripped, in a single moment, of their odour, though they were to retain all their bright diversities of colouring, it would seem as if they were deprived of a spirit which animates them,—how cold and dead would they instantly become,—and how much should we lose of that vernal joy, which renders the season of blossoms almost a new life to ourselves. ”

“ We have already formed,—spontaneously, and without the aid of any one,—our little system of physical science, and have, in truth, enriched ourselves with acquisitions, far more important than any which we are afterwards to form, with all the mature vigour of our faculties, and all the splendid aids of traditionary philosophy,—at a time, when we seem scarcely capable of more than of breathing and moving, and taking our aliment, and when the faculties, that leave us so much invaluable knowledge, are to leave us no knowledge of the means, by which we have acquired it. ”

“ Is mere grief, for example, or mere astonishment, to be referred to our intellectual or to our active powers? I do not speak of the faculties which they may or may not call into action; but of the feelings themselves, as present phenomena or states of the mind. And, in whatsoever manner we may define the term active, is the mind more active, when it merely desires good and fears evil, when it looks with esteem on virtue, and with indignation, or disgust, and contempt on vice, than when it pursues a continued train of reasoning, or fancy, or historical investigation? ”

“ It is to man, when he thinks upon his own beginning, as if he felt himself in a world of enchantment, amid the shades and flowers of which he had been wandering, unconscious of the time at which he entered it, or of the objects that are awaiting him, when he shall have arrived at the close of that path, whose windings still lead him forward,—and knowing little more, than that he is himself happy, and that the unknown Being, who has raised this magnificent scene around him, must be the Friend of the mortal, whom he has deigned to admit into it. ”

“ Though we know mind, then only relatively, in the series of feelings, of which we are conscious, as we know matter relatively in the series of phenomena, which it exhibits to our observation, we have, in this relative knowledge, subjects worthy of the contemplation of beings permitted, in these shadowings of a higher power, to trace some faint image of the very majesty which formed them. Even of the humblest mind, as we have seen, the various affections, sensitive, intellectual, and moral, that arise in it as affections of our common nature, are truly admirable ”

“ We judge of the perspicuity and order of a discourse, by knowing the progress in which the mind, by the developement of truth after truth, may be made at last to see the full meaning of the most complex proposition. We judge of the beauty of impassioned poetry or eloquence, by knowing whether the figures, the images, the very feelings described, be such as, from our observation of the laws that regulate the internal series of changes in the mind, we know to be consistent with that state of emotion, in which a mind must exist that has been placed in the situation supposed. ”

“ To these high capacities of our being, the subjects, which can exercise our powers and feelings, however distant in time or place, are as it were everlastingly present,—like that mysterious eternal now, of which theologians speak,—in which past, present, and future are considered, as, in every moment of every age, alike visible to the omniscient glance of the Divinity. We love the virtues, of which we read, with the same sort of emotion, with which we love the virtues that are mingling with us in the present hour. ”

“ Happiness, though necessarily involving present pleasure, is the direct or indirect, and often the very distant result of feelings of every kind, pleasurable, painful, and indifferent. It is like the beautiful profusion of flowers, which adorn our summer fields. In our admiration of the foliage, and the blossoms, and the pure airs and sunshine, in which they seem to live, we almost forget the darkness of the soil in which their roots are spread. ”

“ If, when we are looking at the glittering firmament of suns in a winter night, any one of those distant orbs were to become as radiant as our own sun, which is itself but the star of our planetary system, there can be no question, that, like our sun on its rising, it would quench with its brilliancy, all those little glimmering lights, which would still shine on us, indeed, as before, but would shine on us without being perceived. ”

“ The thoughts of beings who had trod the most distant soil, in the most distant period, arise again in our mind, with the same warmth and freshness as when they first awoke to life in the bosom of their author. That system of perpetual transmigration, which was but a fable, as believed by Pythagoras,—becomes reality when it is applied, not to the soul itself, but to its feelings. There is then a true metempsychosis, by which the poet and the sage, in spreading their conceptions and emotions from breast to breast, may be said to extend their existence through an ever-changing immortality. ”