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son's, but my conduct also, either private or public, as, if wrong, in all cases, I wish to be set right; but I cannot allow to you the right associate me fictitiously in companionship with a person with whom I was never associated in reality, and then to call me a wretch as the past companion of that person. I have had no more acquaintance with William Cobbett, than I have had with Mr. Barnes, the Editor of "The Times;" and, if Mr. Barnes be very much pleased with my little memoir of William Cobbett, I have not a doubt, bat I could equally please William Cobbett, by writing a most true memoir of Mr. Barnes, the Editor of "The Times."

In your paper of the 17th inst. you have noticed my memoir of William Cobbett with approbation; but you conclude it by calling me a wretch, in conjunction with Cobbett. I am not a wretch, in any sense that can be properly applied to that word; but I have a little store of facts about Mr. Barnes, which would go far to shew that he was in reality that description of person which he has falsely stated me to be.

I have long thought that it will form the most useful part of my duty to write memoirs of the persons who influence the press of this country, and, as sure as I return to the task, you, Mr. Barnes, as having often heaped wanton insult on me, shall have the preference as to being the first: so, good bye for the present. RICHARD CARLILE.

STEWART'S DISCOURSES.

INTRODUCTORY DISCOURSE.

My Lectures being concluded, I have now to exhibit my discourses. The first will contain an analysis of human knowledge, to shew how far the actions of intelligence are capable of conformity with the existence of things, whereby we shall discover the uature, extent, and utility of all kuowledge relative to human action, and of the inexperimental sentiments of imagination passing beyond it in regular analogy, marking the boundaries of intellectual energy by conceivability.

In the Greek and Roman Republics, schools of philosophy were held in the open streets among a tumultuous, ignorant, and licentious rabble; and as we hear of no censure being passed upon their bold and comprehensive inquiries, there is every reason to conclude that they diffused a great proportion of light to imbue the characteristic levity of the populace with thought and deliberation. I am highly consoled and encouraged to open my philosophic school under more beneficent auspices than those of Athens or Rome, in a country whose population, organized in representative government, unknown to the ancients, characterized with a thoughtful disposition, spread over a vast territory, every indi

vidual a proprietor, attached to order with the universal and indestructible cement of private interest-among such a population it is reasonable to doubt whether the most inflammatory discourses of sedition, or the most licentious ridicule of religion, could have the least injurious influence. It would however be the height of folly and stupidity to doubt whether among an American population so auspiciously characterized, a serious, candid, and unprejudiced, enquiry into the intelligible nature of man, his intelligible relations with the universe, and the laws of intellectual power, independent of creeds, doctrines, and religious opinions-I say, to doubt whether such philosophy would be beneficent or injurious in this country would be downright idiotism. My school is calculated to suppress action and promote thought, as the only medium of perfectible manhood. A truly thoughtful man may sometimes fall into error, but he never can become either an habitual fool or an unprincipled knave. The doctrines of my new school will be adapted to the improved state of human intellect; the quibbling of logic and the babbling sophistry of metaphysics, that disgraced the ancient schools, will be exploded, and nothing will be offered to public instruction but the intelligible phenomena of nature, amenable to the experience of the senses, in order to establish the laws of human nature in its attribute of intelligence, to render man a competent and concinnate instrument in the great mechanism of the universe.

The philosophy of nature and good sense will strip knowledge of its college foppery, virtue of its didactic cant, and wisdom of its learned sophistry; and will exhibit in plain truth and simple instruction the means of pleasure to the man of pleasure, the means of success to the man of business, and the means of happiness to individual man in the discovery of the laws of intellectual power, explained in a familiar and easy method, adapted to common capacity and common information.

Of all the wonders that exhibit themselves in the great spectacle of the visible universe, the most stupendous is the unaccountable conduct of mankind in studying every part of nature, and abandoning the important knowledge of himself. The laws of motion, after the laborious research of ages, have been discovered by Newton, and the result has been to make us better acquainted with the relative movements of the solar system, but not with man himself.

The laws of light have been discovered by the same scientific genius, and the result has been to make us better acquainted with the constitution of colours, and to improve thereby our scarlet habits, but not our happiness. The improvements of botanical science have enabled us to classify plants, mosses, and caterpillars. Naturai history has filled the cabinets of the curious with stuffed alligators and caterpillars' eggs. Chymistry, the most important of all studies when directed to the knowledge of man

and nature, has been confined to the analysis of air and water, colours, and transmutation of metals. Travellers have gone forth, supported by the treasure and power of kings, to measure mountains, trace the sources of rivers, and bring home their vessels loaded with stuffed animals, fish-hooks, feathers, and canoes. The traveller who now presents himself to your attention has spent thirty years of his life in visiting all the great nations of the globe, with no other support than a small annuity acquired by his own industry; the object of his pursuit was the knowledge of man and not mountains, the laws of intellectual power and not the classification of plants and cockle-shells. The tyrants of the world have encouraged the futile pursuits of arts and sciences, to divert the attention of man to the idle curiosity of Royal Academies and Institutes, while they pinioned him unobservedly with the shackles of Kingcraft and Priestcraft. The traveller who shall attempt to discover and expose the true knowledge of man and nature, can be patronized only by a free and enlightened people, by a nation whose very existence depends on the progress and diffusion of that knowledge, which, according to Pope, alone deserves the name of knowledge

"And all our knowledge is ourselves to know."
"The proper study of mankind is man.'

He does not compare the knowledge of man with any of the sciences, whereby he suggests that the knowledge of man and his relations to the universe are alone worthy the study of mankind, and that the whole encyclopedia of science, according to the opinion of another great poet, Young, is nothing but pompous trifling when compared with the knowledge of man. It is however easy to account for this egregious blunder of human intellect in preferring all studies to that of human nature. In all my librarian studies I never met with a book on the subject of man and his moral powers that did not excite in my mind the most contemptuous disgust. The mind of man was considered as a subject of metaphysics, that is, of preternatural essence and unintelligible mystery; the whole system of philology, from Aristotle down to John Locke, was a continued and imitated logomachy of words, that had no prototypes in things, phrases that had no meaning, and sounds that had no sense. The moral science or study of man appeared a labyrinth that had no exit, a system that had no harmonious parts, and a science that had no rules. The human understanding, disgusted with this metaphysical aspect of its own nature, declined all enquiry, and sought truth in the physical sciences, which offered a plain and intelligible path to the accomplishment of its object; thus man became acquainted with the - most remote relations of the visible universe, and knew more of a comet that he saw only once in 500 years, than of himself, with

whom and in whom he lived throughout the period of a long life, and to whom the sole object of interest was the laws of his own nature directing to happiness. These physical studies in the accomplishment of their object led to fame, while the study of man, guided by the ignis fatuus of metaphysics, terminated in nothing but verbal controversy, absurdity, and reproachful censure. To this abandonment of the moral science or study of man, we may attribute all the evils of human life, luxury, vice, ignorance, superstition, war, and slavery, which never can be remedied by the pompous and trifling knowledge of literature, generating the technical powers of science, and not the essential powers of sagacity, the true character of intellectual energy, the only remedy for human misery.

In the course of my travels, the laws of intellectual power awakened my attention with a glimpse of their nature in the various actions of national modes of thought. Observation, reflection, and experience, in the progress of my travels, had enabled me to classify the various associations of the human species into five distinct classes.

Pasto

Savage life, comprehending the inhabitants of the polar circle on the eastern continent, and the aborigines of America. ral life, comprehending the inhabitants of Tartary and Arabia. Agrestic life, comprehending the inhabitants of Asia and Africa. Scientific life, comprehending the inhabitants of the continent of Europe. Civic life, comprehending the inhabitants of the British Isles, and its colonial offsprings, in the sublime confederacy of the American Republic.

In savage life, I observed the actions of intellectual power in such a great extreme of imbecility and ignorance, that it opened to my research the first glimpse of the laws of human intelligence. The simple pursuit of the chace, which characterizes and distinguishes the savage from the other classes of social life, produces so weak an impulse of mental action, that every action of thought produced by fancy was mistaken for an object of intelligence. Every mountain, rock, river, tree, was supposed to have a spirit that directed its action, and demanded homage from man. This feeble state of observation, preserved by the paucity of wants, desires, and ideas of a hunting life, debilitated the action of the faculties, and the perception of the savage had no power to multiply the relation of objects, the germ of mental sagacity.

When the idea or object, man, presented itself to his mind, he perceived only the two simple relations of friend and foe; and not the various relations of a developing human energy, marked by the poet

"Friend, parent, neighbour, first it does embrace,
Our country next, and next all human race;
Wide and more wide the o'erflowings of the mind,
Takes every creature in of every kind;

Fore'd on by sympathy and reason's power,
Reaches the bounds of all existence's shore;
Sinks in the soil of matter to repose,

And self and nature's endless union shews."

The weak faculty of perception in the savage mind, presenting the subject man in such a paucity of relations, gave but a feeble exercise to the faculties of conception, reflection, judgment, and reason, and produced the most infantine state of human intellect. When I came among the inhabitants of pastoral life, I observed the laws of property in domestic animals had extended the powers of the faculty of perception, and consequently called into exercise the faculties of conception, reflection, judgment, and

reason.

Fancy made less impression on thought, and gave it more object and less action than in the savage mind-trees, rivers, rocks, and mountains, lost their spiritual personalities, and the immortal king, called the lama, engrossed the whole of their adoration and superstition. Progressing in my travels among the inhabitants of agrestic life in Asia, I observed the multiplied and increased relations of laws and institutions to protect new acquisitions of landed property giving improved energy to the intellectual faculties, and as perception multiplied its relations in every idea, the co-operative faculties of reflection, judgment, and reason acquired a more vigorous exercise. Fancy diminished its influence over thought in the proportion of expanding perception, and the adoration of an immor al impostor was transferred to metaphysical and mythological personifications. Passing from Asia into Europe, I found inhabitants characterised by the progress of arts and sciences unknown in Asia. The increased activity of mental energy, through the multiplied relations of laws, institutions, commerce, arts, and sciences, had expanded the powers of all the faculties, and reduced thereby the dominion of fancy over the action of thought, and the multiplied entities of heathen idolatry gave way to the unity of theological power. From the domains of scientific life, I passed into those of civic life, comprehending the British Isles and the continent of America; I have before observed, that the extreme imbecility of human intellect in savage life suggested to my mind the first glimpse of the laws of intellectual power, and I shall now take occasion to demonstrate that the view of civic life in its discriminate character from scientific life has enabled my mind to construct the consummate system of intellectual law or the discipline of the human understanding. In civic life, I observed the arts and sciences in a less active progress than on the continent of Europe, no palaces, no pictures, no statues, no musical academies, the moral science of man and nature in civic, domestic, political and natural relations had superseded the pompous pedantry of literature, and the trifling

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