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With Brains, Sir
by
We would recommend the article in the Quarterly Review as first-rate, and written with great eloquence and grace.
SYDNEY SMITH’S Sketches of Lectures on Moral Philosophy.
Second Edition.
SEDGWICK’S Discourse on the Studies at Cambridge, with a
Preface and Appendix. Sixth Edition.
We have put these two worthies here, not because we had forgotten them,–much less because we think less of them than the others, especially Sydney. But because we bring them in at the end of our small entertainment, as we hand round a liqueur–be it Curacoa, Kimmel, or old Glenlivet–after dinner, and end with the heterogeneous plum-pudding–that most English of realized ideas. Sydney Smith’s book is one of rare excellence, and well worthy of the study of men and women, though perhaps not transcendental enough for our modern philosophers, male and female. It is really astonishing how much of the best of everything, from patriotism to nonsense, is to be found in this volume of sketches. You may read it through, if your sides can bear such an accumulation of laughter, with great benefit; and if you open it anywhere, you can’t read three sentences without coming across some, it may be common thought, and often original enough, better expressed and put than you ever before saw it. The lectures on the Affections, the Passions and Desires, and on Study, we would have everybody to read and enjoy.
Sedgwick is a different, and, as a whole, an inferior man; but a man every inch of him, and an Englishman too, in his thoughts, and in his fine mother wit and tongue. He has, in the midst of all his confusion and passionateness, the true instinct of philosophy–the true venatic sense of objective truth. We know nothing better in the main, than his demolition of what is untrue, and his reduction of what is absurd, and his taking the wind out of what is tympanitic, in the notorious Vestiges; we don’t say he always does justice to what is really good in it; his mission is to execute justice upon it, and that he does. His remarks on Oken and Owen, and his quotations from Dr. Clarke’s admirable paper on the Development of the Foetus, in the Cambridge Philosophical Transactions, we would recommend to our medical friends. The very confusion of Sedgwick is the free outcome of a deep and racy nature; it puts us in mind of what happened, when an Englishman was looking with astonishment and disgust at a Scotchman eating a singed sheep’s head, and was asked by the eater what he thought of that dish? “Dish, sir, do you call that a dish?” “Dish or no dish,” rejoined the Caledonian, “there’s a deal o’ fine confused feedin’ aboot it, let me tell you.”
We conclude these rambling remarks with a quotation from Arnauld, the friend of Pascal, and the intrepid antagonist of the Vatican and the Grand Monarque; one of the noblest, freest, most untiring and honest intellects, our world has ever seen. “Why don’t you rest sometimes?” said his friend Nicole to him. “Rest! why should I rest here? haven’t I an eternity to rest in?” The following sentence from his “Port-Royal Logic,” so well introduced and translated by Mr. Baynes, contains the gist of all we have been trying to say. It should be engraven on the tablets of every young student’s heart–for the heart has to do with study as well as the head.
“There is nothing more desirable than good sense and justness of mind,–all other qualities of mind are of limited use, but exactness of judgment is of general utility in every part and in all employments of life.
“We are too apt to employ reason merely as an instrument for acquiring the sciences, whereas we ought to avail ourselves of the sciences, as an instrument for perfecting our reason; justness of mind being infinitely more important than all the speculative knowledge which we can obtain by means of sciences the most solid. This ought to lead wise men to make their sciences the exercise and not the occupation of their mental powers. Men are not born to employ all their time in measuring lines, in considering the various movements of matter: their minds are too great, and their life too short, their time too precious, to be so engrossed; but they are born to be just, equitable, and prudent, in all their thoughts, their actions, their business; to these things they ought especially to train and discipline themselves.”