turer years, pouring truth after truth in rapid and dazzling profusion, upon the world, or grasping in his single hand the destiny of empires, how few are the circumstances of resemblance which we can trace, of all that intelligence which is afterwards to be displayed, how little more is seen, than what serves to give feeble motion to the mere machinery of life. What prophetic eye can venture to look beyond the period of distinct utterance, and discern that variety of character by which even boyhood is marked, far less are the intellectual and moral growth of the years that follow-the genius, before whose quick glance the errors and prejudices, which all the ages and nations of mankind have received as truths, are to disappear-the political wisdom, with which, in his calm and silent meditations, he is to afford more security to his country than could be given to it by a thousand armies, and which, with a single thought, is to spread protection and happiness to the most distant lands or that ferocious ambition, with which, in unfortunate circumstances of power, he is perhaps to burst the whole frame of civil society, and to stamp, through every age, the deep and dark impression of his existence, in the same manner as he leaves on the earth which he has desolated, the track of his sanguinary footsteps. The cradle has its equality almost as the grave. Talents, imbecilities, virtues, vices, slumber in it together, undistinguished; and it is well that it is so, since, to those who are most interested in the preservation of a life that would be helpless but for their aid, it leaves those delightful illusions which more than repay their anxiety and fatigue, and allows them to hope, for a single being, every thing which it is possible for the race of man to become. If clearer presages of the future mind were then discoverable, how large a portion of human happiness would be destroyed by this single circumstance! What pleasure could the mother feel, in her most delightful of offices, if she knew that she was nursing into strength, powers, which were to be exerted for the misery of that great or narrow circle, in which they were destined to move, and which to her were to be a source, not of blessing, but of grief, and shame, and despair! "These shall the fury passions tear, The vultures of the mind," says Gray, on thinking of a group of happy children ; To tell them they are men, though they were capable of understanding it, even in this sense of the word, would not communicate information so melancholy or so astonishing to themselves, as, by breaking too soon that dream of expectation, which is not to last forever, but which fulfils the benevolent purpose of nature while it lasts, it would communicate to the parent who watches over them, and who sees in them only those pure virtues, and that happiness as pure, which are perhaps more than the nature of man admits, and which, at least in the case before her, are never to be realized. Is the mind, then, in infancy, and in mature life, precisely the same, when in the one case, so many prominent diversities of character force themselves upon the view, and, in the other case, so little appears to distinguish the future ornament of mankind, from him who is afterwards "To eat his glutton meal with greedy haste, Nor know the hand which feeds him?” If we apply the test of identity, do we find that the same objects, in these different periods, act upon the mind in exactly the same manner; and are its own feelings, in the successive trains, intellectual and moral, of which they form a part, attended with consequents exactly the same? Every age, if we may speak of many ages, in the few years of human life, seems to be marked with a distinct character. Each has its peculiar objects that excite lively affections; and in each, exertion is excited by affections, which, in other periods, terminate, without inducing active desire. The boy finds a world in less space than that which bounds his visible horizon; he wanders over his range of field, and exhausts his strength in pursuit of objects, which, in the years that follow, are seen only to be neglected; while, to him, the objects that are afterwards to absorb his whole soul, are as indifferent as the objects of his present passions are destined then to appear. In the progress of life, though we are often gratified with the prospect of benevolence increasing as its objects increase, and of powers rising over the greatness of their past attainments, this gratification is not always ours. Not slight changes of character only appear, which require our attentive investigation to trace them, but, in innumerable cases, complete and striking contrasts press, of themselves, upon view. How many melancholy opportunities must every one have had in witnessing the progress of intellectual decay, and the coldness that steals upon the once benevolent heart! We quit our country, perhaps at an early period of life, and, after an absence of many years, we return with all the remembrances of past pleasure, which grow more tender as we approach their objects. We eagerly seek him, to whose paternal voice we have been accustomed to listen, with the same reverence as if its predictions had possessed oracular certainty,— who first led us into knowledge, and whose image has been constantly joined in our mind, with all that veneration which does not forbid love. We find him sunk, perhaps, in the imbecility of idiotism, unable to recognize us-ignorant alike of the past and of the future, and living only in the sensibility of animal gratification. We seek the favourite companion of our childhood, whose gentleness of heart we have often witnessed when we have wept together over the same ballad, or in the thousand little incidents that called forth our mutual compassion, in those years when compassion requires so little to call it forth. We find him hardened into man, meeting us scarcely with the cold hypocrisy of dissembled friendship-in his general relations to the world, careless of the misery which he is not to feel-and, if he ever think of the happiness of others, seeking it as an instrument, not as an end. When we thus observe all that made us one, and gave an heroic interest even to our childish adventures, absorbed in the chillness of selfish enjoyment, do we truly recognize in him the same unaltered friend, from whom we were accustomed to regret our separation, and do we use only a metaphor of little meaning, when we say of him, that he is become a different person, and that his mind and character are changed? In what does the identity consist? The same objects no longer act upon him in the same manner; the same views of things are no longer followed by similar approbation or disapprobation, grief, joy, admiration, disgust; and if we affirm that sub stance to be, in the strictest sense of identity, the same on which, in two corresponding series of phenomena, the same objects act differently, while itself also acts differently on the same objects; in short, in which the antecedents being the same, the consequents are different, and, the consequents being the same, the antecedents are different, what definition of absolute diversity can we give, with which this affirmation of absolute identity may not be equally consistent? "Behold the child, by nature's kindly law, Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage ; Till, tir'd, he sleeps,— and life's poor play is o'er."* The supposed test of identity, when applied to the mind in these cases, completely fails. It neither affects, nor is affected, in the same manner, in the same circumstances. It, therefore, if the test be a just one, is not the same identical mind. This argument against the identity of the mind, drawn from the occasional striking contrasts of character in the same individual at different periods of life, or when, by great changes of fortune, he may have been placed suddenly in circumstances remarkably different, must, in some degree, have forced itself upon every one who has been at all accustomed to reflect; and yet, in no one instance, I may safely say, can it have produced conviction even for a moment. I have stated it to you, without attempting to lessen its force by any allusion to the fallacy on which it is founded; because the nature of this fallacy is afterwards to be fully considered by us. There is another argument that may be urged against the identity of the sentient and thinking principle, which has at least equal semblance of force, though it does not occur so readily, because it does not proceed on those general and lasting changes of character with which every one must be struck, but on the passing phenomena of the moment, which are not inconsistent with a continuance of the same general character, and which, as common * Pope's Essay on Man, Ep. II. v. 275–282. to all mankind, and forming, indeed, the whole customary and familiar series of our thoughts and emotions, excite no astonishment when we look back on them in the order of their succession. The mere diversity of our feelings at different moments, it may be said, is of itself incompatible with the strict and absolute unity which is supposed to belong to the thinking principle. If joy and sorrow, such as every one has felt, be different, that which is joyful, and that which is sorrowful, cannot be precisely the same. On the supposition of complete unity and permanence of the thinking principle, nothing is added to it, nothing is taken away from it; and, as it has no parts, no internal change of elementary composition can take place in it. But that to which nothing is added, from which nothing is taken away, and which has no parts to vary their own relative positions and affinities, is so strictly the same, it may be said, that it would surely be absurd to predicate of it any diversity whatever. Joy and sorrow imply an unquestionable diversity of some kind; and if this diversity cannot be predicated of that substance which is precisely the same, without addition, subtraction, or any internal change of composition whatever, that which is joyful, and that which is sorrowful, cannot have absolute identity; or if we affirm, that a diversity, so striking as to form an absolute contrast, is yet not inconsistent with complete and permanent unity and identity, we may, in like manner, affirm, that a substance which is hard, heavy, blue, transparent, which unites with acids, not, with alkalies, and which is volatilizable at a low temperature,―is precisely the same substance as that, which is soft, light, green, opaque,-which unites with alkalies, not with acids, and which is absolutely infusible and fixed in the highest temperature to which we can expose it. I have thus endeavoured to place, in the strongest possible light, the most imposing arguments which I can conceive to be urged against the permanent identity of the sentient and thinking principle, that, in combating even Sophistry itself, you may learn, as I have said, to combat with it on equal ground, and assume no advantage but that irresistible advantage which Truth must always afford to him who is the combatant of Error. The positive evidence of the identity of the mind I shall proceed to consider in my next Lecture. |