set of truths reject the other with obstinate incredulity? Cicero shall
account for it:--"Sensus nostros non parens, non nutrix, non poeta, non
scena depravat; animis omnes tendentur insidiæ." The discoveries of
physical science, in the present day at least, allow little scope to
prejudice and inclination. Whig and Tory, Radical and Conservative,
agree, that fire will burn and water suffocate; nay, no tractarian, so
far as we know, has ventured to call in question the truths established
by Cuvier and La Place. But every proposition in moral or political
science enlists a host of feelings in zealous support or implacable
hostility; and the same system, according to the creed and
prepossessions of the speaker, is put forward as self-evident, or
stigmatized as chimerical. One set of people throw corn into the river
and burn mills, in order to cheapen bread--another vote that sixteen
shillings are equal to twenty-one, in order to support public
credit--proceedings in no degree more reasonable than a denial that two
and two make four, or using gunpowder instead of water to stop a
conflagration. Again, in physical science, the chain which binds the
cause to its effect is short, simple, and passes through no region of
vapour and obscurity; in moral phenomena, it is long hidden and
intertwined with the links of ten thousand other chains, which ramify
and cross each other in a confusion which it requires no common patience
and sagacity to unravel. Therefore it is that the lessons of history,
dearly as they have been purchased, are forgotten and thrown
away--therefore it is that nations sow in folly and reap in
affliction--that thrones are shaken, and empires convulsed, and commerce
fettered by vexatious restrictions, by those who live in one century,
without enabling their descendants to become wiser or richer in the
next. The death of Charles I. did not prevent the exile of James II.,
and, in spite of the disasters of Charles XII., Napoleon tempted fortune
too often and too long. It is not, then, by the mere knowledge of