Both these sources of doubt and denial have been exemplified in the preceding note. I might indeed have hesitated to exemplify them so fully were it not for the considerations mentioned in my preface to this essay.
B.—ON CORRUPTION OF THE JUDGMENT BY MISDIRECTED MORAL SENTIMENTS.
Talfourd—then Mr. Serjeant Talfourd—thus describes what passed in his own mind when viewing the site of Gibbon's abode at Lausanne:—"That garden in which the Historian took his evening walk, after writing the last lines of the work to which many years had been devoted;—a walk which alone would have hallowed the spot, if, alas! there had not been those intimations in the work itself of a purpose which, tending to desecrate the world, must deprive all associations attendant on its accomplishment of a claim to be dwelt on as holy! How melancholy is it to feel that intellectual congratulation which attends the serene triumph of a life of studious toil chilled by the consciousness that the labour, the research, the Asiatic splendour of illustration, have been devoted, in part at least, to obtain a wicked end—not in the headlong wantonness of youth, or the wild sportiveness of animal spirits, but urged by the deliberate, hearted purpose of crushing the light of human hope—all that is worth living for, and all that is worth dying for—and substituting for them nothing but a rayless scepticism. That evening walk is an awful thing to meditate on; the walk of a man of rare capacities, tending to his own physical decline, among the serenities of loveliest nature, enjoying the thought that, in the chief work of his life, just accomplished, he had embodied a hatred to the doctrines which teach men to love one another, to forgive injuries, and to hope for a diviner life beyond the grave; and exulting in the conviction that this work would survive to teach its deadly lesson to young ingenuous students, when he should be dust. One may derive consolation from reflecting that the style is too meretricious, and the attempt too elaborate and too subtle, to achieve the proposed evil; and in hoping that there were some passages in the secret history of the author's heart, which may extenuate its melancholy error; but our personal veneration for successful toil is destroyed in the sense of the strange malignity which blended with its impulses, and we feel no desire to linger over the spot where so painful a contradiction is presented as a charm."—Vacation Rambles. Ed. 2, p. 238.
We may gladly give Gibbon the benefit of the doubt with which the great judge closes. But surely most attempts to address the mental state depicted must needs be found impotent. There is great force in a dictum of Schelling's ("Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre") to the following effect—"The medium by which spirits understand each other is not the ambient air, but the deep-stirred sympathetic vibrations propagated by a community of spiritual freedom. When a soul is not pervaded by this atmosphere of conscious freedom, all inward communion with self or with another is broken,—what wonder, then, if such a one remain unintelligible to himself and to others, and in his fearful wilderness of spirit wearies himself by idle words, to which no friendly echo responds, either from his own or from another's breast?
"To remain unintelligible to such an one is glory and honour before God and man. Barbarus huic ego sim, nec tali intelligar ulli. This," concludes Schelling, "is a wish and prayer from which no man can keep himself."—Sämmtliche Werke, I. 443.
C.—ON SPECIAL PLEADING IN HISTORY AND MORALS.
A few emphatic sentences from Lord Macaulay's strictures on historical special pleading will repay perusal:—"This species of misrepresentation abounds in the most valuable works of modern historians. Herodotus tells his story like a slovenly witness, who, heated by partialities and prejudices, unacquainted with the established rules of evidence, and uninstructed as to the obligations of his oath, confounds what he imagines with what he has seen and heard, and brings out facts, reports, conjectures, and fancies in one mass. Hume is an accomplished advocate. Without positively asserting much more than he can prove, he gives prominence to all the circumstances which support his case; he glides lightly over those which are unfavourable to it; his own witnesses are applauded and encouraged; the statements which seem to throw discredit on them are controverted; the contradictions into which they fall are explained away; a clear and connected abstract of their evidence is given. Everything that is offered on the other side is scrutinised with the utmost severity; every suspicious circumstance is a ground for comment and invective; what cannot be denied is extenuated, or passed by without notice; concessions even are sometimes made; but this insidious candour only increases the effect of the vast mass of sophistry.
"We have mentioned Hume as the ablest and most popular writer of his class; but the charge which we have brought against him is one to which all our most distinguished historians are in some degree obnoxious. Gibbon, in particular, deserves very severe censure."—Macaulay's Miscellaneous Writings—History.
The reader may very advantageously carry along with him the above quoted just remarks, if he has occasion to travel into Hume's sceptical writings. Respecting these, where every feature of the author's character appears with intensified distinctness of expression, it is not too much to say that their influence, which had suffered suspended animation,[10] is now felt in almost every cultivated circle in Europe. Checked for a time under the empire of Kant and his successors, it has been revived by the German Darwinists (so-called), who are bent on evolving all that can be got from the theory of Evolution. Comte speaks of Hume as his own master—an intellectual debt all the more readily acknowledged, because Hume's treatment of most subjects leans towards the French, rather than the Teutonic, side of English speculation. The master's influence over numbers who, without being Comte's disciples, are addicted to thinking Positively upon questions connected with Mind and Morality, was never greater than at present.