investigation, reasoning with feeling, a veneration for works of extraordinary merit with a still greater veneration for truth, rules with those exceptions to which every rule is subject, and laws with the freedom of genius, the ardour of sensibility, and the soarings of imagination.
But of a science thus constituted what will be the nature? How shall its principles be defined? Will they admit of a scientific stability?
This science, I reply, will resemble every other species of human knowledge, in so far as it is the united result of industry and observation; a combination of experiments, with few reflections, few conclusions, and still fewer rules and principles. By giving to Polite Literature such a philosophical theory, a successful writer may deserve the appellation of a philosopher of taste. Far from such a man be that systematic superciliousness, which, benumbing the faculties of the mind by synthetic chains, oppresses sensibility with the yoke of argument. Though reasoning analytically, may he never be unmindful of the source of all knowledge; that volume, which, well studied, would, by rendering most other books unnecessary, be more destructive to many learned libraries than the desolating fire of merciless barbarians.
That great volume is experience, and of this experience we ourselves are the principal subjects. All nature operates upon our senses, whether beautiful or tremendous, magestic or mild, gay or awful. Ideas are created in the human mind by the impressions of external objects; these
