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Materials for Thinking,

EXTRACTED FROM THE WORKS OF

ANCIENT AND MODERN AUTHORS.

"WHATEVER CHARITY WE OWE TO MEN'S PERSONS, WE OWE NONE TO THEIR ERRORS."-Bishop Burnet.

No. XVIII.

Published Weekly.

[Price One Penny.

446. Happiness.-The world has existed many thousands of years. One generation has passed away and another has succeeded. They have all been in the search of happiness. What have they learned from the wisdom and experience of ages? We should suppose that by this time they would have discovered the delusive nature of pleasure, the vanity of riches, and the misery of ambition. We should have supposed that by this time they would have discovered that the more we forget ourselves and become interested for others, the more we promote our own felicity. They have the same common nature. Their hopes and their fears are the same. They must know that evils are lessened by sympathy; and that joy is heightened by sharing it with others. By mutual assistance they might smooth the rough path of life, surmount difficulties, and avert innumerable dangers. Why then should they continue to delude, afflict, and destroy each other?

"If we should be told," says the Abbe Barthelemi, "that two strangers, cast by chance on a desert island, had found in the society of each other a pleasure which indemnified them for being secluded from the rest of the world; if we should be told there exists a family entirely occupied in strengthening the ties of consanguinity by the bands of friendship; if we should be told that there exists, in some corner of the earth, a people who know no other law than that of loving each other, nor any other crime than that of being wanting in mutual affection; who would think of commiserating the lot of the two shipwrecked friends? who would not wish to appertain to that family? who would not wish to fly to the most distant clime to join that happy people?"

If we may be permitted to judge of mankind from our own feelings, we should instantly conclude that there is not one man in ten thousand, who would not desert, with joy approaching to rapture, the pleasures and amusements of the world, and all the gay dreams of am

bition, to appertain to such a family, or to become one of such a people. If this be the case, it proves that there is something divine in human nature which would point out the path that conducts to happiness. To what then are we to impute those artificial miseries, vices, and follies, which distress and debase the children of men? Why shuld these creatures, whom God has endowed with a portion of the divine mind, which is sometimes known to elevate them above all sublunary cares, be miserable from generation to generation? We feel confident that we are right when we trace the cause to those barbarous institutions of civilized society which cramp, brutalize, and distort the human mind. The farther men have strayed from the plain paths of nature, the more vicious and the more wretched have they become.

Nearly all the evils that afflict the sons of men flow from one source -WEALTH, or the appropriation of things to individuals and to societies. Take away this mother curse and all its cursed progeny, and the world would be, comparatively speaking, a paradise!-The Savage.

447. Drunkenness.—

Man with raging drink inflam'd,
Is far more savage and untamed;
Supplies his loss of wit and sense
With barbarousness and insolence;
Believes himself, the less he's able,
The more heroic and formidable;
Lays by his reason in his bowls,
As Turks are said to do their souls,
Until it has so often been

Shut out of its lodging, and let in,
At length it never can attain

To find the right way back again.-Butler.

448. Advocates.-A faithful advocate can never sit without clients. Nor do I believe that any man could lose by it in the end, that would not undertake a cause he knew not honest. A goldsmith may gain an estate as well as he that trades in every coarser metal. An advocate is a limb of friendship; and further than the altar he is not bound to go. And it is observed of as famous a lawyer as I think was then in the world, the Roman Cicero, that he was slain by one he had defended, when accused of the murder of his father. Certainly he that defends an injury is next to him that commits it. recorded, not only as an example of ingratitude, but as a punishment for patronizing an ill cause.-Feltham.

And this is

449. Polemical Divines.-The dispute about religion, and the practice of it, seldom go together.-Young.

450. Conversation.-To speak well, it is requisite to have a great deal of wit, and an excellent judgment. Some who do not talk much, listen with such ingenuous attention, that it is plain they understand what wit is, and have a good deal themselves.-Lady Gethin.

451. Man of Pleasure. He is one who, desirous of being more happy than any man can be, is less happy than most men are.

One who seeks happiness every where but where it is to be found. One who out-toils the labourer, not only without his wages, but paying dearly for it.

He is an immortal being, but has but two marks of a man about him,-upright state, and the power of playing the fool,-which a monkey has not.

He is an immortal being, but triumphs in this single, deplorable, and yet false hope, that he shall be as happy as a monkey when they are both dead; though he despairs of being so while yet alive.

Young.

452. Amusement laboriously procured.-How many there are that take pleasure in toil; that can outrise the sun, outwatch the moon, and outrun the fields' wild beasts! merely out of fancy and delectation, they can find out mirth in vociferation, music in the barking of dogs, and be content to be led about the earth, over hedges and through sloughs, by the windings and the shifts of poor affrighted vermin: yet, after all, come off, as Massalina from her wantonness, tired, and not satisfied with all that the brutes can do. But were a man enjoined to this, that did not like it, how tedious and how punishable to him would it prove! since, in itself, it differs not from riding post.

Feltham.

453. Error imbibed and cherished.-We often believe what our fathers believed before us, without searching into the reason of our belief. There are few sublime wits, that pry into the original of things, or endeavour to make a perfect discovery thereof.-Lady Gethin.

454. Good Breeding.-Perhaps the summary of good breeding may be reduced to this rule." Behave unto all men, as you would they should behave unto you." This will most certainly oblige us to treat all mankind with the utmost civility and respect, there being nothing that we desire more than to be treated so by them. The ambitious, the covetous, the proud, the vain, the angry, the debauchee, the glutton, are all lost in the character of the well-bred man; or if nature should now and then venture to peep forth, she withdraws in an instant, and doth not shew enough of herself to become ridiculous.

Fielding.

455. Gambling.-No passion can lead to such extremities, nor involve a man in such a complicated train of crimes and vices, and ruin whole families so completely, as the baneful rage for gambling. It produces and nourishes all imaginable disgraceful sensations; it is the most fertile nursery of covetousness, envy, rage, malice, dissimulation, falsehood, and foolish reliance on blind fortune; it frequently leads to fraud, quarrels, murder, forgery, meanness, and despair; and robs us in the most unpardonable manner of the greatest and most irrecoverable treasure-time. Those that are rich act foolishly in venturing their money in uncertain speculations; and those that have not much to risk must play with timidity, and cannot long continue play unless the fortune of the game turn, as being obliged to quit the field at the first heavy blow; or if they stake every thing to force the blind goddess to smile upon them at last, madly hazard their being reduced to instant beggary. The gambler but rarely dies a rich man: those that have had the good fortune to realize some property in this miserable way, and continue playing, are guilty of a two-fold folly. Trust no person of that description, of whatever rank or character he may be. Baron Knigg's Philosophy of Social Life.

456. Punctuation, why omitted in Statutes and Legal Instruments.— Old laws have not been suffered to be pointed,

To leave the sense at large the more disjointed,
And furnish lawyers with the greater ease

To turn and wind them any way they please.-Butler.

457. Military Discipline.—The leading idea of military discipline is to reduce the common men, in many respects, to the nature of machines; that they may have no volition of their own, but be actuated solely by that of their officers; that they may have such a superlative dread of those officers as annihilates all fear of the enemies; that they may move forwards when ordered without deeper reasoning or more concern than the firelocks they carry along with them.

Considering the length to which this system is carried, it were to be I wished that it could be carried still farther, and that those unhappy men, while they retained the faculties of hearing and obeying orders, could be deprived of every other kind of feeling.

Moore's View of Society, &c.

458. Correspondence.-Swift, alluding in a letter to the frequent instances of a broken correspondence after a long absence, gives the following natural account of the causes :-" At first one omits writing for a little while; and then one stays a little while longer to consider of excuses-and at last it grows desperate, and one does not write at all. In this manner I have served others, and have been served myself."

459. Varieties in the Human Species.—Each human being has something distinguishing, in form, proportions, countenance, gesture, voice, -in feelings, thought, and temper,-in mental as well as corporeal physiognomy. This variety is the source of every thing beautiful and interesting in the external world, the foundation of the whole moral fabric of the universe.

Certain external circumstances, as food, climate, mode of life, have the power of modifying the animal organization, so as to make it deviate from that of the parent. But this effect terminates in the individual. Thus, a fair Englishman, if exposed to the sun, becomes dark and swarthy in Bengal; but his offspring, if from an English woman, are born just as fair as he himself was originally: and the children, after any number of generations that we have yet observed, are still born equally fair, provided there has been no intermixture of dark blood. Lawrence's Lectures on Man.

460. We are complicated Machines; and though we have one main spring that gives motion to the whole, we have an infinity of little wheels, which, in their turns, retard, precipitate, and sometimes stop that motion.-Chesterfield.

461. Life a Journey.-Human life is the journey of a day; we rise in the morning of youth, full of vigour, and full of expectation; we set forward with spirit and hope, with gaiety and with diligence, and travel on awhile in the road of piety towards the mansions of rest. In a short time, we remit our fervor, and endeavour to find some more easy means of obtaining the same end. We then relax our vigour, and enter the bowers of ease, and repose in the shades of obscurity. Here the heart softens and vigilance subsides; we then turn our eyes upon the gardens of 'pleasure, we enter them, hoping to pass through them without losing the road of virtue, which we for awhile keep in sight, and to which we purpose to return. By degrees we let fall the remembrance of our original intention; we entangle ourselves in business, immerse ourselves in luxury, and rove through the labyrinths of inconstancy, till the darkness of old age begins to invade us, and disease and anxiety obstruct our way.-Rambler.

462. The ambitious and the covetous are madmen to all intents and purposes, as much as those who are shut up in dark rooms; but they have the good luck to have numbers on their side; whereas the frenzy of one who is given up for a lunatic, is more singular in its kind, and does not fall in with the madness of the multitude.

Moral Reflections, 1759.

463. Custom may lead a man into many errors, but it justifies none.

Fielding.

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