The note-book opens with “Hints Towards the Investigation of Truth in Religious and Political Opinions, composed as they occurred, to be placed in a more regular manner hereafter.” Then follow essays “On the Immortality and Immateriality of the Soul”; “Body, Organised Matter”; on “Governments”; on “The Credulity of Mortals”; “An Essay to Prove that the Thinking Powers depend on the Organisation of the Body”; “A Defence of Materialism”; “An Essay on the Ultimate End of Being”; “On Happiness”; “On Moral Obligation.”
These early essays display the workings of an original mind, intent, it may be, on problems beyond its immature powers, but striving in all sincerity to work out its own thoughts and to arrive at its own conclusions. Of course, the daring youth of sixteen who enters upon an inquiry into the most difficult problems of theology and metaphysics, with, what he is pleased to call, unprejudiced reason as his sole guide, quickly passes into a cold fit of materialism. His mind was too impressionable, however, to have reached the stage of settled convictions; and in the same note-book we subsequently find the heads of a train of argument in favour of a rational religious belief founded on immaterialism.
Metaphysical inquiries seem, indeed, to have occupied the greater part of his time at this period; and his note-books show that he made himself acquainted with the writings of Locke, Hartley, Bishop Berkeley, Hume, Helvetius, Condorcet, and Reid, and that he had some knowledge of the doctrines of Kant and the Transcendentalists.
That he thought for himself, and was not unduly swayed by authority, is evident from the general tenour of his notes, and from the critical remarks and comments by which they are accompanied. Some of these are worth quoting:—
“Science or knowledge is the association of a number of ideas, with some idea or term capable of recalling them to the mind in a certain order.”
“By examining the phenomena of Nature, a certain similarity of effects is discovered. The business of science is to discover these effects, and to refer them to some common cause; that is to generalise ideas.”
As his impulsive, ingenuous disposition led him, even to the last, to speak freely of what was uppermost in his mind at the moment, we may be sure that his elders, the Rev. Dr. Tonkin, his good friend John Tonkin, and his grandmother Davy, with whom he was a great favourite, as he was with most old people, must have been considerably exercised at times with the metaphysical disquisitions to which they were treated; and we can well imagine that their patience was occasionally as greatly tried as that of the worthy member of the Society of Friends who wound up an argument with the remark, “I tell thee what, Humphry, thou art the most quibbling hand at a dispute I ever met with in my life.” Whether it was in revenge for this sally that the young disputant composed the “Letter on the Pretended Inspiration of the Quakers” which is to be found in one of his early note-books, does not appear.
We easily trace in these early essays the evidences of that facility and charm of expression which a few years later astonished and delighted his audiences at the Royal Institution, and which remained the characteristic features of his literary style. These qualities were in no small degree strengthened by his frequent exercises in poetry. For Davy had early tasted of the Pierian spring, and, like Pope, may be said to have lisped in numbers. At five he was an improvisatore, reciting his rhymes at some Christmas gambols, attired in a fanciful dress prepared by a playful girl who was related to him. That he had the divine gift was acknowledged by no less an authority than Coleridge, who said that “if Davy had not been the first Chemist, he would have been the first Poet of his age.” Southey also, who knew him well, said after his death, “Davy was a most extraordinary man; he would have excelled in any department of art or science to which he had directed the powers of his mind. He had all the elements of a poet; he only wanted the art. I have read some beautiful verses of his. When I went to Portugal, I left Davy to revise and publish my poem of ‘Thalaba.’”
Throughout his life he was wont, when deeply moved, to express his feelings in verse; and at times even his prose was so suffused with the glow of poetry that to some it seemed altiloquent and inflated. Some of his first efforts appeared in the “Annual Anthology,” a work printed in Bristol in 1799, and edited by Southey and Tobin, and interesting to the book-hunter as one of the first of the literary “Annuals” which subsequently became so fashionable.
Davy had an intense love of Nature, and nothing stirred the poetic fire within him more than the sight of some sublime natural object such as a storm-beaten cliff, a mighty mountain, a resistless torrent, or some spectacle which recalled the power and majesty of the sea. Not that he was insensible to the simpler charms of pastoral beauty, or incapable of sympathy with Nature in her softest, tenderest moods. But these things never seemed to move him as did some scene of grandeur, or some manifestation of stupendous natural energy.
The following lines, written on Fair Head during the summer of 1806, may serve as an example of how scenery when associated in his mind with the sentiments of dignity or strength affected him:—