To Hibernicus

SIR,

 Mr Addison in his fourth Whig Examiner has given an excellent description of a certain way of writing which is absolutely unanswerable, and he has pointed out the secret strength by which it is made so. That the Fable of the Bees is a performance of this kind, may be easily shewn, not by general encomiums, but by pointing out its particular excellencies.
 There is one outwork of this sort of authors, which though it be not their main strength, yet is often of great consequence to terrify the timorous reader, or adversary; I mean open vanity, and pretences to the deepest knowledge. - Hic murus abencus esso.
 How formidable must that writer be, who lets us know “he has observed so much above the short-sighted vulgar, and has given himself leisure to gaze upon the prospect of concatenated events, and seen good spring and pullulate from evil as naturally,” (p.89) so condescending is he to the meanest of his readers, “as chickens do from eggs!” How does he raise admiration in the first paragraph of his preface, letting us know that he has seen the “chief organs and nicest springs of our machine,” which are yet but “trifling films, and little pipes, not such gross strong things as nerves, bone, or skin!” Nay, he has no doubt seen “the very strength, elasticity, and due contexture of spirits which constitute the fear of shame, and anger, or courage;” (p.234) and also all the other qualities of spirits which constitute the other passions: these passions “along with skin, flesh, and bone, make the compound man.” But this is not all his knowledge; he has “anatomised the invisible part, has seen the gentle strokes,and slight touches of the passions.” (p. 155 and p.77.) This author can “swagger about fortitude and poverty as well as Seneca, and shew the way to summum bonum as easily as his way home.” (p. 164.) He has searched through “every degree of life; and foresees opposition only from those who have lost public spirit, and are narrow-souled, incapable of thinking of things of uncommon extent, which are noble and sublime. He cries apage vulgus to very opposer,” (p. 163 and pp.366, 367) and writes only “for the few who think abstractly, and are elevated above the vulgar.” (See the journal subjoined to the Fable.)
 He tells us, “he has pleased men of unquestionable sense; will always live, and be esteemed while such read him.”
 Who will not stand in awe of that author, “who describes the nature and symptoms of human passions; detects their force and disguises; and traces self-love in its darkest recess beyond any other system of ethics?”(p.467)
 Who, after all this and much more, and egotisms, and affectations in every page, needs be told by the author that “his vanity he could never conquer?” (p.472.)
 Another useful secret of invincible authors is to interperse a contempt of pedantry and of the clergy. These damned pendants have got a trick of reading many authors, observing the sentiments of the greatest men in all ages; and acquire an impertinent facility of discerning nonsense in the writings of your easy genteel authors, who are above perplexing themselves with the sourness and intricacies of thought. Without some defiances and contempt of pendants and clergy, readers would never have so much as dreamed that some of our authors were witty and easy writers. When this point is obtained, then we may fall upon our readers like thunder, with all the little learning we are masters of in season and out of season: “about Greek and Roman religions, Egyptian worship of onions (though long ago laughed at by a pedantic clergyman in a brother-easy-writer on freethinking) trophies, monuments, arches, military crowns, Alexander, Lorenzo Gratian, Hydaspes, Ostracisms; the Laconic spirit of our nation appearing in the word gin: that fiery lake, the Lethe, the Stygian and Circean cup, from whence pullutate Leucophlegmacies: “we may talk of Stoics, Epicureans, Seneca’s estate; nay, even cite Ovid, and transpose a passage in Juvenal: Si licit exemplis: make double entendres upon the word envervate; trabat sua quemque voluptas: a Latin joke from Erasmus: nay, may make most philosophico-philosophical digressions about “the essences of hope, inkerns, ice, and oak;” we may launch out into those profound depths in optics, that “air is not the object of sight; that bulk diminishes by distance, is owing to our imperfection; that the sky might appear through a hole in a wall as near as the stones; talk of Pythagoras’s abstaining from flesh, Aesop’s making beasts to speak; ira furor brevis est: Lucretia killed herself for fear of shame.” We may improve our language by that easy phrase, “meliorating our condition.” We may use that most grammatical epithet “superlative;” talk of Vannini, Bruno and Essendi as martyrs, though some of the facts have been disapproved long ago; “that Homer’s heroes talk as porters; Lycurgus’s Laws; Epaminondas, Leotychidas, Agis, the Polemarchi; saturnine tempers, adoration of the manes of the British Aesculapius; Cicero’s vanity, he wrote O fortunatam, &c. My friend Horace:” with may other most pert evidences of immense critical erudition; which having spend several years at a Latin school, and reading Plutarch’s lives Englished by several hands.
 When thus the character of erudition is secured, next comes knowledge of the world, another essential quality of an easy writer. This may be displayed by a word or two of French, though we have English words exactly of the same meaning; by talking in the strain of porters and hands, about their affairs. Then the polite gentleman of fine genius will soon appear by a great deal of poetical language, mixed with prose. What pity it had not at all been in rhime, like the fable itself! the author’s slaughter-house and gin-shop would have been as renowned as the cave of the Cyclops, or the dwelling of Circes ingeniuni par materiae!
 These are but additional helps. The main strength of the impregnable writer consists in intricate contradictions and inconsistencies; with some manifest absurdities boldly asserted, against which no man can produce an argument, any more than to prove that twice three are not ten. Thus his first sentences is, that “all untaught animals desire only to please themselves, and follow the bent of their inclination, without regard to the good or harm of others:” but a few pages after we shall find that gratitude is natural, or that men “must wish well to benefactors: that pity or avertion to the misery of others is a natural passion; that affection to offspring, and desire of their happiness, is natural: that men may wish well to any other in what they themselves cannot obtain.” (pp.34 and p.68 and 140.)
 His very definition of vice is “gratifying appetite without regard to the public:”(p. 34) by “without regard”, we may charitably understand him to have intended “pernicious to the public”, unless he can shew that all men have agreed to call eating when one is hungry, or going to sleep when one is weary, vitious, whenever he does not think of a community. Vice then here is “doing detriment to the public by gratifying appetite”. But go on, and you will find the whole strain of the book to be, that “vices are useful to the public, and necessary to its happiness: the solid comforts and happiness of life are the gratifications of appetite.”
 His definition of virtue is “endeavouring the benefit of others contrary to the impulse of nature.”(p. 34) Yet through the whole book “Universal virtue would be detrimental to society;” that is, all mens endeavouring to benefit others would be detrimental to all. “The moral virtues are the offspring of flattery begot upon pride;”(p.37) yet in the very same page, and many other places, “No passion more natural or universal than pride.” Virtue then, which was before contrary to the impulse of nature, now is become following the strongest impulse of nature.
 Again, “Virtue is the conquest of passion out of the rational ambition of being good;” (p.36) but a few pages after this, “doing worthy actions from love of goodness has certain signs of pride, which is the strongest passion:” and yet, says the author, “This is a sublimer notion of virtue than his own”.
 “Heathen religion could not influence men to virtue,”(p.36) says he: the direct contrary is asserted by all the heathen philosophers, historians, orators, tragedians and comedians. The wiser men saw the folly of their theological fables, but never denied a governing mind, the vulgar might believe the fables of Jupiter and his brothers; but imagining in the gods a right superior to that of men, they might fear the judgment of the gods for like facts to those done by Jupiter, and expect rewards for obedience to laws given by men, which yet did not bind superior natures. This notion may make it probable that even very corrupt religions may have in the whole much more good effects than evil. But who will regard the testimonies of poor heathens, against this “Observer of concatenated events?”
 Presently we find “the seeds of all virtue in the two passions of pride and shame, which are most natural.”(p. 56) In another place, “Virtue was contrary to the impulse of nature, and the conquest of the passions;” and soon after it will become what it was again, “No virtue in what is designed to gratify pride; the only recompence of virtue is the pleasure of doing good;”(p.68 and p.246) but even this pleasure of “doing good, or acting from love of goodness, was pride.” (p.43)
 Pag. 59. He begins his anatomizing of passions; “The passions, concealed from modesty or good manners, are pride, lust, and selfishness.” Either then pride and lust is not selfish, but disinterested; or this division amounts to these three members, to wit, “one sort of selfishness, another sort of selfishness, and selfishness in general.”
 He asserts, that “Ambassadors debates about precedency flow from pride concealed under shew of virtue,” (p.73) that is, of “conquering the passions from the ambition of being good.” It seems they all naturally desire to be hindmost, but affect precedency, that they may seem to conquer this passion.
 “Gratitude is a natural motive of inclination, and not virtue: returns of good offices are not from gratitude but from virtue; or manners, that is, concealment of pride, lust, and selfishness, in order to gratify them.” (p.76.)
 “Luxury is the use of any thing above necessity; nor can any other bounds be fixed:” (pp.108 and 132.) and yet a few pages after, “All men ought to dress suitably to condition.”
 “Envy is a mixture of sorrow and anger. Sorrow arises from our want of what we desire, and anger is raised by us for our ease.” (p.140 and 221) A pleasing passion surely! “Anger is the passion arising when our desire is crossed.” Thus envy amounts to sorrow for want of what we desire, compounded with the “passion arising when desire is crossed.” This composition is as artful as that of a merry fellow’s punch, who liked to have it made of two quarts of brandy, and one quart of brandy; si licet exemplis.
 “Self-Love bids us look on every satisfied being as a rival:” and “yet nothing can excite any being to oppose another but his being unsatisfied.” (p.143.)
 “Laughing at another’s fall, is either from envy or malice.” (p.146.)
 “Love signifies affection, that is, liking or wishing well.” The object’s interest becomes our own in this wonderful manner. “Self-love makes us believe that the sufferings we feel must lessen those of our friend; and then a secret pleasure arises from our grieving, because we imagine we are relieving him.” (p. 149.) How strangely does our self-love govern us! It first forms an opinion so prodigiously secret, that never any mortal believed it; and then makes us feel pleasure, not in relieving ourselves, but another. Nay, what is it that self-love cannot perform? “When a man stands in the “street, and shrieks at another’s fall from a high window or scaffold, he believes that he himself is flying through the air: when a man blushes, upon seeing another do a base action, he believes he is doing it himself.” (p.55.)
 I have got yet no further than the 150th page, but with many omissions; you may have, when you please,twice as many, rather greater beauties of the same nature; but these may suffice at present. Only I cannot pass over two passages more; the one is a wonderful composition, so dearly does he love making a very dispensatory of passions, that rather than want composition, he will take two pieces of the same thing for want of different materials: “Laziness is an aversion to business, generally attended with a desire of being unactive.” (p.267.) The other passage is a most important maxim; “That man never exerts himself but when he is roused by desire;” or, never exerts himself but when he desires something or other. And he subjoins this sublime simile, of “a huge windmill without a breath of air.”
 Before any one pretends to answer this book, he must know what the author means by “good opinion, high value, worth, unworthiness, merit, noble actions, overvaluing, thinking well, or having a right to do any thing.” But upon these terms, all mortals may despair of it.
 We may make one general observation on the dexterity of this author in confuting opposite schemes. Suppose the scheme of almost all moralists, except Epicureans, to be true; “That we have in our nature kind affections in different degrees, that we have a moral sense determining us to approve them whenever they are observed, and al actions which flow from them; that we are naturally bound together by desire of esteem from each other, and by compassion; and that withal we have self-love or desire of private goods.” What would be the consequence of this constitution, or the appearances in human nature? All men would call those actions virtuous, which they imagine to tend to the public good: where men differ in “opinions of the natural tendencies of actions.” they must differ in approbation or condemnation: they will find pleasure in contemplating or reflecting on their own kind affections and actions: they will delight in the society of the kind, good-natured, and beneficent: they will be uneasy upon seeing or even hearing of the misery of others, and be delighted with the happiness of any persons believed: men will have regard to private goods as well as public: and when other circumstances are equal, will prefer what tends most to private advantage. Now these are the direct and necessary consequences of this supposition: and yet this penetrating swaggerer, who surpasses all writers of ethics, makes those very appearances proofs against the hypothesis. No proofs will please him but the contrary appearances: if he saw “men approving what is pernicious to the public; or men agreeing to approve the same action, though one thought it useful to the public, and another thought it pernicious; or if men had no manner of pleasure in good actions, orin reflecting upon them, nor would value themselves more for heroism than villany; then indeed he would acknowledge a moral sense independent of interest and true virtue.” So also ”Men must delight in the company of the proud, morose, revengeful and quarrelsome; they must be indifferent in beholding the most cruel tortures, or the greatest joy and happiness of our fellows, or even of our offspring. Men must do mischief to themselves, or neglect their most innocent pleasures, and interest, by a thorough self-denial, without any inclination to the good of others; and must have no more pleasure in gratitude, generosity, or humanity, than in malice and revenge; otherwise this author will never believe any other affection than self-love: at present he sees all to be but disguises of it, from his deep reflection about fresh herrings, and the company he would choose.”
 He has probably been struck with some old fanatic sermon upon self-denial in his youth, and can never get it out of his head since. It is absolutely impossible upon his scheme, that God himself can make a being naturally disposed to virtue: for virtue is “self-denial, and acting against the impulse of nature.” What else then can we imagine concerning al the works of God in their best state, but

Might we poor vulgar make conjectures concerning the spirits of nations, we would be apt to conclude, that through incapacity for abstract thinking, the Bocotic spirit of the British is much better discovered by a fourth edition of his book, than the Laconic by the word Gin.
 Thus may thine enemies triumph, O Virtue and Christianity!