• The French Decade
• Ride and Tie
• Jeremy Taylor
• Criticism
• Public Instruction
• Picturesque Words
• Toleration
• War
• Parodies
• M. Dupuis
• Origin of the Worship of Hymen
• Egotism
• Cap of Liberty
• Bulls
• Wise Ignorance
• Rouge
• Hasty Words
• Motives and Impulses
• Inward Blindness
• The Vices of Slaves no excuse for Slavery
• Curiosity
• New Truths
• Vicious Pleasures
• Meriting Heaven
• Dust to Dust
• Human Countenance
• Lie useful to Truth
• Science in Roman Catholic States
• Voluntary Belief
• Circulation of the Blood
• ‘Peritura Parcere Chartae’.
• To have and to be
• Party Passion
• Goodness of Heart Indispensable to a Man of Genius

• Milton and Ben Jonson
• Statistics
• Magnanimity
• Negroes and Narcissuses
• An Anecdote
• The Pharos at Alexandria
• Sense and Common Sense
• Toleration
• Hint for a New Species of History
• Text Sparring
• Pelagianism
• The Soul and its Organs of Sense
• Sir George Etherege, &c.
• Evidence
• Force of Habit
• Phoenix
• Memory and Recollection
• ‘Aliquid ex Nihilo’.
• Brevity of the Greek and English compared
• The Will and the Deed
• The Will for the Deed
• Sincerity
• Truth and Falsehood
• Religious Ceremonies
• Association
• Amanda
• Hymen’s Torch
• Youth and Age
• December Morning
• Archbishop Leighton
• Christian Honesty
• Inscription on a Clock in Cheapside
• Rationalism is not Reason
• Inconsistency

• Hope in Humanity
• Self-love in Religion
• Limitation of Love of Poetry
• Humility of the Amiable
• Temper in Argument
• Patriarchal Government
• Callous self-conceit
• A Librarian
• Trimming
• Death
• Love an Act of the Will
• Wedded Union
• Difference between Hobbes and Spinosa
• The End may justify the Means
• Negative Thought
• Man’s return to Heaven
• Young Prodigies
• Welch names
• German Language
• The Universe
• Harberous
• An Admonition
• To Thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry
• Definition of Miracle
• Death, and grounds of belief in a Future State
• Hatred of Injustice
• Religion
• The Apostles’ Creed
• A Good Heart
• Evidences of Christianity
• Confessio Fidei

It is hard and uncandid to censure the great reformers in philosophy and religion for the[ir] egotism and boastfulness. It is scarcely possible for a man to meet with continual personal abuse, on account of his superior talents, without associating more and more the sense of the value of his discoveries or detections with his own person. The necessity of repelling unjust contempt, forces the most modest man into a feeling of pride and self-consciousness. How can a tall man help thinking of his size, when dwarfs are constantly on tiptoe beside him? Parcelsus was a braggard and a quack; so was Cardan; but it was their merits, and not their follies, which drew upon them that torrent of detraction and calumny, which compelled them so frequently to think and write concerning themselves, that at length it became a habit to do so. Wolff too, though not a boaster, was yet persecuted into a habit of egotism both in his prefaces and in his ordinary [291] conversation, and the same holds good of the founder of the Brunonian system, and his great namesake Giordano Bruno. The more decorous manner of the present age have attached a disproportionate opprobrium to this foible, and many therefore abstain with cautious prudence from all displays of what they feel. Nay, some do actually flatter themselves, that they abhor all egotism and never betray it either in their writings or their discourse. But watch these men narrowly; and in the greater number of cases you will find their thoughts, feelings, and mode of expression, saturated with the passion of contempt, which is the concentrated vinegar of egotism. [... &c.; dated 1800; here pp.291-92.)

[...]

Contempt is egotism in ill humour. Appetite without moral affection, social sympathy, and even without passion and imagination - (in plain English, mere lust) - is the basest form of egotism, - and being infra human, or below humanity, should be pronounced with the harsh breathing, as he-goat-ism. [End sect.; dated 1820; here p.293.]

[...]

I have read many attempts at a definition of a Bull, and lately in the Edinburgh Review; but it then appeared to me that the definers had fallen into the same fault as Miss Edgeworth, in her delightful essay on Bulls, and given the definition of the genus, Blunder, for that of the [194] particular species. I will venture, therefore, to propose the following: A Bull consists in the mental juxtaposition of incongruous images and thoughts with the sensation, but without the sense, of connection. The psychological conditions of the possibility of a Bull it would not be difficult to determine; but it would require a larger space than can be afforded here, at least more attention than my readers would be likely to afford.
 There is a sort of spurious Bull which consists wholly in mistake of languge, and which the closest thinker may make, if speaking in a languge of which he his not master. [End. sect.; pp.294-95.]

The ancients attributed to the blood the same motion of ascent and descent which really takes place in the sap of trees. Servetus discovered the minor circulation from the heart to the lungs. Do not the following passages of Giordano Bruno (published in 1591) seem to imply more? I put the question, pauperis forma, with unfeigned diffidence.

and still more plainly, in the ninth chapter of the same book,

It is affirmed in the “Supplement to the Scotch Encyclopaedia Britannica,” that Des Cartes was the first who in defiance of Aristotle and the Schools, attributed infinity to [301] the universe. The very title of Bruno’s poem proves, that this honour belongs to him. [...]

We all remember Burke’s curious assertion that there were 80,000 incorrigible jacobins in England. Mr. Colquhoun is equally precise in the number of beggars, prostitutes, and thieves in the City of London. Mercetinus, who wrote under Lewis [Louis] XV, seems to have afforded the precedent; he assures his readers, that by an accurate calculation there were 50,000 incorrigible atheists in the City of Paris! Atheism then may have been a co-cause of the French revolution; but it should not be burthened on it, as its monster-child. (p.305; end sect. - and note that “Magnanimity”, follows immediately, as infra.)

The following ode was written by Giordano Bruno, under prospect of that martyrdom which he soon after suffered at Rome, for atheism: that is, as is proved by all his works, for a lofty and enlightened piety, which was of course unintelligible to bigots and dangerous to an apostate hierarchy. If the human mind be, as it assuredly is, the sublimest object which nature affords to our contemplation, these lines which portray the human mind under the action of its most elevated affections, have a fair claim to the praise of sublimity. The work from which they are extracted is exceedingly rare (as are, indeed, all the works of the Nolan philosopher), and I have never seen them quoted:-

By the by, Addison in the Spectator has grossly misrepresented the design and tendency of Bruno’s Bestia Triomphante; the object of which was to show of all the theologies and theogonies which have been conceived for the mere purpose of solving problems in the material universe, that as they originate in fancy, so they all end in delusion, and act to the hindrance or prevention of sound knowledge and actual discovery. But the principal and most important truth taught in this allegory is, that in the concerns of morality all pretended knowledge of the will of Heaven which is not revealed to man through his conscience; that all commands which do not consist in the unconditional obedience of the will to the pure reason, without tampering with consequences (which are in God’s power, not in ours); in short, that all motives of hope and fear from invisible powers, which are not immediately derived from, and absolutely coincident with, the reverence due to the supreme reason of the [308] universe, are all alike dangerous superstitions. The worship founded on them, whether offered by the Catholic to St. Francis, or by the poor African to his Fetish differ in form only, not in substance. Herein Bruno speaks not only as a philosopher, but as an enlightened Christian; - the Evangelists and Apostles every where representing their moral precepts not as doctrines then first revealed, but as truths implanted in the hearts of men, which their vices only could have obscured. (pp.306-08.)

[ End extracts ]