Читать книгу Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Various - Страница 1

A distinguished general-officer being appointed to a command in which he would be called on to discharge judicial as well as military duties, expressed to Lord Mansfield his apprehensions, that he would execute his office but ill in the former respect, and that his inexperience and ignorance of technical jurisprudence would prove a serious impediment to his efficient administration of justice. 'Make your mind perfectly easy,' said the great judge; 'trust to your native good sense in forming your opinions, but beware of attempting to state the grounds of your judgments. The judgment will probably be right—the argument infallibly wrong.'

This is a common case, especially with practical men, who rarely have either leisure or inclination to recall the workings of their own minds, or observe the intellectual process by which they have been conducted to any conclusion. By what they are prone to consider as a kind of instinct—if by chance they are philosophers, and delight in what old Wilson, the essayist, calls 'inkhorn terms,' they designate it 'intuition'—they arrive at a truth, but have no recollection whatever of the road they travelled to reach it, and are able neither to retrace their own steps nor indicate to another the way they came. The poet, in describing and contrasting the intellectual characteristics of the two sexes, attributes to the softer something of this instinct as a distinguishing mental peculiarity, and seems to consider it as somewhat analogous in its constitution to those animal senses by means of which the mind becomes cognisant of external objects, of their existence, their qualities, and their relations. In his view, the reasoning process is vitally and essentially distinct, as it is exercised by men and by women—

And certainly this is a very pretty, very poetical, and very convenient way of accounting for a phenomenon that, if examined with common care, suggests a solution more accurate and complete, if not exactly so complimentary. In sober truth, a positive incapacity clearly to point out the precise manner in which a conviction has been formed, is one of the commonest of logical deficiencies, and no more to be ascribed exclusively to the softer sex, than it is an attribute of intellectual excellency in either.

When, in Euripides's beautiful play, the untranslatable Hippolylus, Phædra's nurse is made to conclude that certain men she refers to cannot be otherwise than lax in their morals, because they have finished the roofs of their houses in a very imperfect manner, her reasoning is inconsequential enough; but not more so than that of the renowned French chancellor, Michael L'Hôpital, who, when employed in negotiating a treaty between Charles IX. and our Elizabeth, insisted on the well-known line of the Latin poet—

as a reason that Calais should not be returned to the English. The connection between the premises and the conclusion was not more real in one case than in the other. A learned member of the medical profession, in an elaborate work on the climate and the people of Malta, enjoins on the invalid a participation in the amusements of cheerful society; and the propriety of his injunction few will be disposed to dispute: they may well, however, marvel at the reason he assigns for such sensible advice—that, so far as invalids are concerned, society has a direct tendency to promote cutaneous perspiration!

Cardinal de Retz severely reprehends the historians of his time for their pedantic affectation of explaining and accounting for every event they record—the motives that actuated this statesman, the reasons which prompted that policy, the wherefore it was this enterprise miscarried, or that undertaking brought to a successful issue. It would not be difficult to furnish a lengthy catalogue of the blunders historical writers have perpetrated through their overweening addiction to this folly. Let two instances here suffice: When the Roman Church, about the middle of the eleventh century, was endeavouring to insure the celibacy of its priesthood, the married clergy, who braved its censures and contemned its authority, became known as Nicolaites; which name, grave writers assure us, was given them in consequence of the active share Pope Nicholas II. had taken in punishing their contumacy and effecting their suppression. The notion that any sect or class of religionists should have borrowed its name from that of its most zealous opponent and indefatigable persecutor, is worthy only of those critics, so severely reprehended by Quintilian, who professed to discover the etymon of the Latin word lucus, a grove, in the substantive lux, light; and vindicated the derivation on the ground, that in groves darkness usually prevailed. The familiar expression of lucus à non lucendo, owes its birth to this striking manifestation of critical sagacity.

Again: a certain portion of the eastern and southern coast of England was, in early times, denominated 'the Saxon Shore'—Littus Saxonicum—and was, during the days of Roman supremacy, under the government of a military court enjoying the appellative of Comes Littoris Saxonici. Acute historical critics inform us, that this tract was so denominated in consequence of its being open to the aggressions of the Saxons; that, in short, it received its name from its occasional invaders, and not from its permanent inhabitants. The absurdity of this explanation is the greater, inasmuch as, on the other side of the Channel, there was a large district bearing precisely the same name, and settled entirely by adventurers, Saxon in birth or by descent. This, one would have thought, would have suggested to our English antiquaries a more probable explanation of the name than that they adopted. The people of Genoa have, or had, in speaking, a peculiar way of clipping or cutting short their syllables. Their Italian has never been considered pure. You must not go to maritime towns for purity of language, especially to such as have been long and extensively engaged in commercial pursuits. Labat, however, gives a special and peculiar reason for the fashion of mutilated speech in which, he declares, the Genoese indulge, telling us they call their superb city Gena, and not Genoa. He refers their 'chopping' pronunciation to their habitual economy—an economy distinctly traceable to their mercantile habits. 'Telle est leur économie,' he says, 'ils rognent tout jusqu'aux paroles.'

The old English law-writer, Bracton, desiring to account for the ancient doctrine of English law, that inheritances shall lineally descend, and never lineally ascend, finds a reason in the fact, that a bowl being trundled, runs down a hill and never up a hill; and Littleton, the first great writer on English real property-law, traces the origin of the phrase 'hotchpot'—a familiar legal term—to the archaic denomination of a pudding, in our English tongue. 'It seemeth,'he says, 'that this word, hotchpot, is in English a pudding; for in this pudding is not commonly put one thing alone, and therefore it behoveth, in this case, to put the lands given in frank-marriage,' &c. Erasmus used to say of lawyers, that of ignorant people, they were the most learned. Questionless they are not always sound logicians. When the clown in Hamlet disserts so learnedly on 'crowner's quest-law,' he is only parodying, and that closely, a scarcely less ludicrous judgment which had actually been pronounced, not long before, in the Court of Queen's Bench. Dr Clarke, the traveller, tells an amusing story to the purpose. According to him, the Turkish lawyers recognise as an offence what they style 'homicide by an intermediate cause'—an instance of which offence our traveller details in these words: 'A young man, desperately in love with a girl of Stanchio—the ancient Cos, the birthplace of Hippocrates and Apelles, the lovely isle renowned for its lettuces and turpentine—eagerly sought to marry her. But his proposals were rejected. In consequence, he destroyed himself by poison. The Turkish police arrested the father of the obdurate fairy, and tried him for culpable homicide. "If the accused," they argued, with becoming gravity, "had not had a daughter, the deceased would not have fallen in love; consequently, he would not have been disappointed; consequently, he would not have died: but he (the accused) had a daughter, and the deceased had fallen in love," &c. &c. Upon all these counts he was called upon to pay the price of the young man's life; and this, being eighty piastres, was accordingly exacted.' When the amiable and gentle John Evelyn was in the Netherlands, a woman was pointed out to him who had had twenty-five husbands, and was then a widow; 'yet it could not be proved,' he says, that 'she had made any of her husbands away, though the suspicion had brought her several times to trouble.' However, the Dutch logicians made no difficulty of the matter; and arguing, from the number of the woman's husbands, that she could not be wholly innocent of their death, prohibited her from marrying again—which, her addiction to matrimony being considered, was perhaps, of all the 'troubles' she had undergone, by no means the least.

The logical faculty, which not only consists with the poetical, but is invariably and necessarily associated with it, whenever the latter exists in an advanced stage of development, is in no writer more conspicuous as an intellectual characteristic than in Schiller. In this respect he is not excelled even by Wordsworth himself; but Homer sometimes snoozes, and Schiller's reasoning is not always consequential: as, for instance, when he denies two compositions of Ovid—the Tristia and Ex Ponto—to be genuine poetry, on the ground that they were the results not of inspiration, but of necessity; just as if poetry were not a thing to be judged of by itself; and as if one could not determine whether it were present or absent in a composition, without knowing to what influences the author was subjected at the time the composition was produced!

Rousseau, in one of his moods of bilious cynicism, falls foul of human reason altogether. No man despised it more in action; no one could more consistently decry it in speculation. In his opinion, the exercise of the reasoning powers is absolutely sinful—l'homme qui raisonne est l'homme qui péche. Franklin, on the other hand, in a familiar tone of playful banter, vindicates its utility, alleging that it is mightily 'convenient to be a rational animal, who knows how to find or invent a plausible pretext for whatever it has an inclination to do.' Examples of this convenience abound. The Barbary Jews were rich and industrious, and, accordingly, their wealth provoke the cupidity of the indolent and avaricious Mussulmans. These latter, whenever a long drought had destroyed vegetation, and the strenuous prayers offered up in the mosques had proved unavailing for its removal, were accustomed to argue—and a mighty convenient argument it was—that it was the foul breath of the Jews that had offended Heaven, and rendered the pious petitions of the faithful of none effect. The remedy for the drought, then, who could doubt? The true believers drove the Jews out of their cities, and quietly confiscated their goods. Dryden, anxious to congratulate Charles II. on his 'happy restoration,' amidst a thousand fulsome compliments—all tending to shew that that prince was the author of blessings, not only to his own kingdoms, but to universal humanity—declares, that it was to Charles, and to him only, Spain was indebted for her magnificent colonial possessions in either hemisphere. Addressing the sovereign, his words are—

A convenient fashion of reasoning truly: as convenient every whit as that of Daniel Burgess, a witty Presbyterian minister, devoted to the House of Brunswick and the principles of the Revolution, who was wont to affirm, as the reason the descendants of Jacob were called Israelites, and did not receive the original name of their progenitor, that Heaven was unwilling they should bear a name in every way so odious as that of Jacobites.

Once more: it appears from Dr Tschudi's valuable and interesting work on South America, that in Peru rice is cheap, and servants both lazy and dirty. Now, the servants in Lima have a theory about rice. They consider it possesses certain qualities antagonistic to water, so that, after eating, to touch water would be seriously injurious to health; and thus does their frequent consumption of rice supply them with a most convenient reason or excuse for their habitual abstinence from an operation they detest—that of washing their hands.

Verily, they are mighty fine and convenient words, therefore and because.