[920] C. 3.
Puffendorf and Paley compared. 49. Puffendorf and Cumberland are the two great promoters, if not founders of that school in ethics, which abandoning the higher ground of both philosophers and theologians, that of an intrinsic fitness and propriety in actions, resolved them all into their conduciveness towards good. Their utile indeed is very different from what Cicero has so named, which is merely personal, but it is different also from his honestum. The sociableness of Puffendorf is perhaps much the same with the general good of Cumberland, but is somewhat less comprehensive and less clear. Paley, who had not read a great deal, had certainly read Puffendorf; he has borrowed from him several minor illustrations, such as the equivocal promise of Timur (called by Paley Temures) to the garrison of Sebastia, and the rules for division of profits in partnership. Their minds were in some respects alike; both phlegmatic, honest, and sincere, without warmth or fancy; yet there seems a more thorough good-nature and kindliness of heart in our countryman. Though an ennobled German, Puffendorf had as little respect for the law of honour as Paley himself. They do not indeed resemble each other in their modes of writing; one was very laborious, the other very indolent; one sometimes misses his mark by circuity, the other by precipitance. The quotations in Puffendorf are often as thickly strewed as in Grotius, though he takes less from the poets; but he seems not to build upon their authority, which gives them still more the air of superfluity. His theory indeed, which assigns no weight to anything but a close geometrical deduction from axioms, is incompatible with much deference to authority; and he sets aside the customs of mankind as unstable and arbitrary. He has not taken much from Hobbes, whose principles are far from his; but a great deal from Grotius. The leading difference between the treatises of these celebrated men is that, while the former contemplated the law that ought to be observed among independent communities as his primary object, to render which more evident he lays down the fundamental principles of private right or the law of nature, the latter, on the other hand, not only begins with natural law, but makes it the great theme of his inquiries.
Rochefoucault. 50. Few books have been more highly extolled or more severely blamed than the Thoughts or Maxims of the Duke of Rochefoucault. They have, indeed, the greatest advantages for popularity; the production of a man less distinguished by his high rank than by his active participation in the factions of his country at a time when they reached the limits of civil war, and by his brilliancy among the accomplished courtiers of Louis XIV.; concise and energetic in expression; reduced to those short aphorisms, which leave much to the reader’s acuteness, and yet save his labour; not often obscure and never wearisome; an evident generalisation of long experience, without pedantry, without method, without deductive reasonings, yet wearing an appearance at least of profundity, they delight the intelligent though indolent man of the world, and must be read with some admiration by the philosopher. Among the books in ancient and modern times which record the conclusions of observing men on the moral qualities of their fellows, a high place should be reserved for the Maxims of Rochefoucault.
51. The censure that has so heavily fallen upon this writer is founded on his proneness to assign a low and selfish motive to human actions, and even to those which are most usually denominated virtuous. It is impossible to dispute the partial truth of this charge. Yet it may be pleaded, that many of his maxims are not universal even in their enunciation; and that, in others, where, for the sake of a more effective expression, the position seems general, we ought to understand it with such limitations as our experience may suggest. The society with which the Duke of la Rochefoucault was conversant could not elevate his notions of disinterested probity in man, or of unblemished purity in woman. Those who call themselves the world, it is easy to perceive, set aside, in their remarks on human nature, all the species but themselves, and sometimes generalise their maxims, to an amusing degree, from the manners and sentiments which have grown up in the atmosphere of a court or an aristocratic society. Rochefoucault was of far too reflecting a mind to be confounded with such mere worldlings; yet he bears witness to the contracted observation and the precipitate inferences which an intercourse with a single class of society scarcely fails to generate. The malignity of Rochefoucault is always directed against the false virtues of mankind, but never touches the reality of moral truths, and leaves us less injured than the cold, heartless indifference to right which distils from the pages of Hobbes. Nor does he deal in those sweeping denials of goodness to human nature which are so frequently hazarded under the mask of religion. His maxims are not exempt from defects of a different kind; they are sometimes refined to a degree of obscurity, and sometimes, under an epigrammatic turn, convey little more than a trivial meaning. Perhaps, however, it would be just to say that one third of the number deserve to be remembered, as at least partially true and useful; and this is a large proportion, if we exclude all that are not in some measure original.
La Bruyere. 52. The Characters of La Bruyere, published in 1687, approach to the Maxims of La Rochefoucault by their refinement, their brevity, their general tendency to an unfavourable explanation of human conduct. This nevertheless is not so strongly marked, and the picture of selfishness wants the darkest touches of his contemporary’s colouring. La Bruyere had a model in antiquity, Theophrastus, whose short book of Characters he had himself translated, and prefixed to his own; a step not impolitic for his own glory, since the Greek writer, with no contemptible degree of merit, has been incomparably surpassed by his imitator. Many changes in the condition of society, the greater diversity of ranks and occupations in modern Europe, the influence of women over the other sex, as well as their own varieties of character and manners, the effects of religion, learning, chivalry, royalty, have given a range to this very pleasing department of moral literature which no ancient could have compassed. Nor has Theophrastus taken much pains to search the springs of character; his delineations are bold and clear, but merely in outline; we see more of manners than of nature, and the former more in general classes than in portraiture. La Bruyere has often painted single persons; whether accurately or no, we cannot at this time determine, but with a felicity of description which at once renders the likeness probable, and suggests its application to those we ourselves have seen. His general reflections, like those of Rochefoucault, are brilliant with antithesis and epigrammatic conciseness; sometimes perhaps not quite just or quite perspicuous. But he pleases more, on the whole, from his greater variety, his greater liveliness, and his gentler spirit of raillery. Nor does he forget to mingle the praise of some with his satire. But he is rather a bold writer for his age and his position in the court, and what looks like flattery may well have been ironical. Few have been more imitated, as well as more admired, than La Bruyere, who fills up the list of those whom France has boasted as most conspicuous for their knowledge of human nature. The others are Montaigne, Charron, Pascal, and Rochefoucault; but we might withdraw the second name without injustice.
Education. Milton’s Tractate. 53. Moral philosophy comprehends in its literature whatever has been written on the best theory and precepts of moral education, disregarding what is confined to erudition, though this may frequently be partially treated in works of the former class. Education, notwithstanding its recognised importance, was miserably neglected in England, and quite as much, perhaps, in every part of Europe. Schools, kept by low-born illiberal pedants, teaching little, and that little ill, without regard to any judicious discipline or moral culture, on the one hand, or, on the other, a pretence of instruction at home under some ignorant and servile tutor, seem to have been the alternatives of our juvenile gentry. Milton raised his voice against these faulty methods in his short Tractate on Education. This abounds with bursts of his elevated spirit; and sketches out a model of public colleges, wherein the teaching should be more comprehensive, more liberal, more accommodated to what he deems the great aim of education than what was in use. “That,” he says, “I call a complete and generous education which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.” But when Milton descends to specify the course of studies he would recommend, it appears singularly ill-chosen and impracticable, nearly confined to ancient writers, even in mathematics and other subjects where they could not be sufficient, and likely to leave the student very far from that aptitude for offices of war and peace which he had held forth as the reward of his diligence.
Locke on Education. Its merits. 54. Locke, many years afterwards, turned his thoughts to education with all the advantages that a strong understanding and entire disinterestedness could give him; but, as we should imagine, with some necessary deficiencies of experience, though we hardly perceive much of them in his writings. He looked on the methods usual in his age with severity, or, some would say, with prejudice; yet I know not by what proof we can refute his testimony. In his Treatise on Education, which may be reckoned an introduction to that on the Conduct of the Understanding, since the latter is but a scheme of that education an adult person should give himself, he has uttered, to say the least, more good sense on the subject than will be found in any preceding writer. Locke was not like the pedants of his own or other ages, who think that to pour their wordy book-learning into the memory is the true discipline of childhood. The culture of the intellectual and moral faculties in their most extensive sense, the health of the body, the accomplishments which common utility or social custom have rendered valuable, enter into his idea of the best model of education, conjointly at least with any knowledge that can be imparted by books. The ancients had written in the same spirit: in Xenophon, in Plato, in Aristotle, the noble conception which Milton has expressed, of forming the perfect man, is always predominant over mere literary instruction, if indeed the latter can be said to appear at all in their writings on this subject; but we had become the dupes of schoolmasters in our riper years, as we had been their slaves in our youth. Much has been written, and often well, since the days of Locke; but he is the chief source from which it has been ultimately derived; and though the Emile is more attractive in manner, it may be doubtful whether it is as rational and practicable as the Treatise on Education. If they have both the same defect, that their authors wanted sufficient observation of children, it is certain that the caution and sound judgment of Locke have rescued him better from error.
And defects. 55. There are, indeed, from this or from other causes, several passages in the Treatise on Education to which we cannot give an unhesitating assent. Locke appears to have somewhat exaggerated the efficacy of education. This is an error on the right side in a work that aims at persuasion in a practical matter; but we are now looking at theoretical truth alone. “I think I may say,” he begins, “that of all the men we meet with nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. It is this which makes the great difference in mankind. The little or almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies have very important and lasting consequences; and there it is as in the fountains of some rivers, where a gentle application of the hand turns the flexible waters into channels that make them take quite contrary courses; and by this little direction given them at first in the source, they receive different tendencies, and arrive at last at very remote and distant places.” “I imagine,” he adds soon afterwards, “the minds of children as easily turned this or that way as water itself.”[921]
[921] Treatise on Education, § 152. “The difference,” he afterwards says, “to be found in the manners and abilities of men is owing more to their education than to anything else.” § 32.
56. This passage is an instance of Locke’s unfortunate fondness for analogical parallels, which, as far as I have observed, much more frequently obscure a philosophical theorem, than shed any light upon it. Nothing would be easier than to confirm the contrary proposition by such fanciful analogies from external nature. In itself, the position is hyperbolical to extravagance. It is no more disparagement to the uses of education that it will not produce the like effects upon every individual, than it is to those of agriculture (I purposely use this sort of idle analogy) that we do not reap the same quantity of corn from every soil. Those who are conversant with children on a large scale will, I believe, unanimously deny this levelling efficacy of tuition. The variety of characters even in children of the same family, where the domestic associations of infancy have run in the same trains, and where many physical congenialities may produce, and ordinarily do produce, a moral resemblance, is of sufficiently frequent occurrence to prove that in human beings there are intrinsic dissimilitudes, which no education can essentially overcome. Among mere theorists, however, this hypothesis seems to be popular. And as many of these extend their notion of the plasticity of human nature to the effects of government and legislation, which is a sort of continuance of the same controlling power, they are generally induced to disregard past experience of human affairs, because they flatter themselves that under a more scientific administration mankind will become something very different from what they have been.