the conclusions by means of which Hume was supposed to have dislodged them. Common sense, therefore, is not more enlisted on the side of Reid, than on the side of Hume; and the truth is, the question remains as much open to question as ever. But the issue to which these philosophers have brought it, prove that there must have been some flaw in the original observation of the facts of perception. The great discrepancy between them, and the fact that neither of them has brought the question to any satisfactory termination, notwithstanding the thorough and sifting manner in which they have discussed and exhausted all the materials before them, can only be accounted for upon this ground. They have certainly made it apparent that the phenomena of perception have never been correctly observed, or faithfully stated: and that is the good which they have done.
But the danger accruing from inattention on the part of man, to the facts revealed to him in the study of himself, is to be seen in its strongest light when reflected from the surface of his moral and practical life. Man takes to pieces only to reconstruct; and he can only reconstruct a thing out of the materials into which he has analysed it. When, therefore, after having analysed himself, he seeks to build himself up again (such a task is self-education), he can only work with the divided elements which he has found. He has nothing else under his hand. Therefore, when any element has escaped him in the analysis, it will also escape him, and not be combined, in the synthesis: and so far he will go forth into the world again shorn of a portion of himself—and if the neglect has involved any important ingredient of his constitution, he will go forth a mutilated skeleton. Such things have often happened in the history of mankind. Speculative inquirers, who, in analysing man (i.e., themselves), or man's actions (i.e., their own), have found no morality, no honour, no religion therein, have seldom, in putting the same together again, placed any of these elements in their own breasts as practical men. And after a time, it is the tendency of these omissions, and of this influence of theory upon practice, to operate on a wider scale, and pervade the heart of the whole people, among whom such things occur, particularly among its well-educated ranks—witness France towards the end of the last century, with its host of economists, calculators, and atheists, who emptied the universe of morality, and set up expediency in its stead.
"Arouse man," says Schelling, "to the consciousness of what he is, and he will soon learn to be what he ought." It may be added, teach him to think himself something which he is not, and no power in heaven or in earth will long keep him from framing himself practically in conformity with his theoretical pattern, or from becoming that which he ought not to be. Speculative opinion always acts vitally upon practical character, particularly when it acts upon masses of men, and long generations. Theory is the source out of which practice flows. The Hindoo beholds himself, as he conceives, whirling, with all other things, within the eddies of a gigantic fatalism. So far he is a speculator merely. But trace out his philosophy into his actual life, and see how supine he is in conduct and in soul. All his activities are dead. His very personality is really gone, because he looks upon it as gone. He has really no freedom of action, because he believes himself to have none. He views himself but as "dust in the wind," and viewing himself thus, he becomes, in practice, the worthless thing which in theory he dreams himself to be. Fatalism, too, has ever been the creed of usurpers; and they have ever made it their apology, also in their strivings after more tyrannical rule. Did conscience for a moment cross the path of these scourges of the earth, it was brushed aside with the salving dogma that man is but a machine in the hands of a higher power. Napoleon, in his own eyes, was but a phantom of terror shaped on the battle-field, by the winds of circumstance, out of the thunder-smoke of his own desolating wars; and, with this reflection, his enslaving arm was loosed more fiercely than before. Finally, through inattention to the true phenomena of man, we may be misled into all the errors of Rochefoucault. And here our errors will not stop at their theoretical stage. In order to prove our creed to be correct, we must, and will ere long make our own characters correspond with his model of man, believing it to be the true one.
