their highest powers, rather than to a covery of moral truth-the powers of even sure pledges of a GOOD HEART, though among the most common meanings of that many-meaning and too commonly misapplied expression. So far from being either Morality, or one with the Moral Principle, they ought not even to be placed in the same rank with Prudence. For Prudence is at least an offspring of the Understanding; but Sensibility (the Sensibility, I mean, here spoken of) is for the greater part a quality of the nerves, and a result of individual bodily temperament. "Prudence is an active Principle, and implies a sacrifice of Self, though only to the same Self projected, as it were, to a distance. But the very term, Sensibility, marks its passive nature and in its mere self, apart from Choice and Reflection, it proves little more than the coincidence or contagion of pleasurable or painful Sensations in different persons. "Alas! how many are there in this over-stimulated age, in which the occurrence of excessive and unhealthy sensitiveness is so frequent, as even to have reversed the current meaning of the word, nervous,-how many are there whose sensibility prompts them to remove those evils alone, which by hideous spectacle or clamourous outcry are present to their senses and disturb their selfish enjoyments! Provided the dunghill is not before their parlour pampering the coward heart before me Sibylline Leaves, p. 180. "Lastly, where Virtue is, Sensibility is the ornament and becoming At tire of Virtue. On certain occasions it may almost be said to become Virtue. But sensibility and all the amiable Qualities may likewise become, and too often have become, the panders of Vice and the instruments of Seduction, "So must it needs be with all qualities that have their rise only in parts and fragments of our nature. A man of warm opinions may sacrifice half his estate to rescue a friend from Prison: for he is generally sympathetic, and the more sober part of his nature happened to be uppermost. The same man shall afterwards exhibit the same disregard of money in an attempt to seduce that friend's Wife or Daughter. "All the evil achieved by Hobbes and his whole School of Materialists will appear inconsiderable if it be compared with the mischief effected and occa ors. sioned by the sentimental Philosophy of STERNE, and his numerous ImitatThe vilest appetites and the most remorseless inconstancy towards their objects, acquired the titles of the Heart, the irresistible Feelings, the too lender Sensibility: and if the Frosts of Prudence, the icy chains of Human Law thawed and vanished at the genial warmth of Human Nature, who could help it? It was an amiable weak Bess! "About this time, too, the profanation of the word, Love, rose to its height. The French Naturalists, Buffon and others, borrowed it from the sentimental Novelists; the Swedish and English Philosophers took the contagion; and the Muse of Science condescends to seek admission into the Saloons of Fashion and Frivolity, rouged like a Harlot, and with the Harlot's wanton leer. I know not how the Annals of Guilt could be better forced into the service of Virtue, than by such a comment on the present paragraph, as would be afforded by a selection from the sentimental Correspondence produced in Courts of Justice within the last thirty years, fairly translated into the true meaning of the words, and the actual Object and Purpose of the infamous Writers. Do you In good earnest aim at Dignity of Character? By all the treasures of a peaceful mind, by all the charms of an open countenance, I conjure you, O youth! turn away from those who live in the Twilight between Vice and Virtue. Are not Reason, Discrimination, Law, and deliberate Choice, the distinguishing Characters of Humanity? Can aught then worthy of a human Being proceed from a Habit of Soul, which would exclude all these and (to borrow a metaphor from Paganisin) prefer the den of Trophonius to the emple and Oracles of the God af Light? Can any thing manly, I say, proceed from those, who for Law and Light would substitute shapeless feelings, sentiments, impulses, which, as far as they differ from the vital workings in the brute animals, owe the difference to their former connexion with the proper Virtues of Humanity; as Dentrites derive the cutlines, that constitute their value above other clay; stones, from the casual neighbourhood and pressure of the Plants, the names which they assume? Remember, that Love itself in its highest earthly Bearing, as the ground of the marriage union, becomes Love by an inward FIAT of the Will, by a completing and sealing Act of Moral Election, and lays -claim to permanence only under the form of DUTY/ This, on the whole, is a good passage, spirited and eloquent, although not free from the vices incident to Mr. exaggeration. For, in the first place, Coleridge's style, especially the vice of he has taken care so to degrade the character of Sensibility, that it is scarcely possible to imagine any writer, above the very lowest rank, considering it a substitute either for Prudence or the Moral Principle. In the second place, even this kind of sensibility, though not a sure pledge of a good heart, is generally so; and, supposing it to be not altogether instinctive and unreasoning, which scarcely any permanent impulse is, but under some rational control and safeguard, if it were no other than the experience of life frequently thwarting and rendering its undue indulgence disastrous or ridicu lous-then such sensibility is amiable, and symptomatic (we do not fear to say so) of a good heart. It may be right to speak, even with some austerity, of "a constitutional quickness of sympathy, and a keen sense of the gratifications that accompany socia intercourse, mutual endearments, and reciprocal preferences," when these are represented as all in all in the moral character; but it is not right to speak of them with any disparagement in them. selves, since without them, except indeed in the loftiest and most sublime spirits of men, there is no such thing as virtue. In the third place, though it be true that Prudence is an "offspring of the understanding," it is also no less true, that Prudence is often just as constitutional as sensibility, a quality too of the nerves, and a result of individual bodily temperament. cautious are often cold-blooded; and the prudent not unfrequently persons whose nerves are like nails, and who, undisturbed by the agitations of those feelings which they ought to possess, make the head do the work of the heart. The made of the comparative worth of the Were a fair estimate to be best kind of prudence and the best kind of sensibility, or of the comparative worthlessness or danger of the worst-and no other estimate is of any avail in moral disquisition-the result would not be that at which Mr. Coleridge has arrived in his imperfect philosophy. we very much doubt the likelihood Fourthly,of the man of warm passions, who sacrificed half his estate to rescue a friend from prison, afterwards exhibiting the same disregard of money in an attempt to seduce that friend's wife or daughter. No man ever sacrificed the half of his estate for friendship, on a sudden, instinctive, constitutional impulse of temperament. Such an act could only have been performed by a generous man. And although a generous man may commit a wicked action, he is less inclined to do so, we think, than an ungenerous man, more especially an action of consummate baseness and deliberate cruelty. The illustration is striking, but it is not satisfying, and shows the advocate, not the judge. Finally, to assert that all the evil produced by Hobbes and the whole school of materialists will appear inconsiderable, if it be compared with the mischief effected and occasioned by the sentimental philosophy of Sterne, and his numerous imitators, is altogether monstrous, and in the direct teeth of a hundred of Mr. Coleridge's moral speculations in the Friend,' and his Lay Sermons,' in which he has, with considerable force, struck at the root of the selfish system of the Philosopher of Malmsbury. A few fantastic and mawkish novels--what were they to the host-not yet extinct of hard-featured wretches, who, in the name of morality, have laboured to destroy all moral responsibility, and to found duty on power? the very act shows them forth in their native shape aud proper dimensions. From this first strong movement, which, however, is not single, but may spread itself in great diversity of forms through the mind-from this first passive sway of emotion, the mind returns, and rises up in its strength to act on the object, either with power of will and desire to escape from it, or with power of will and desire to possess and enjoy it. This power of feeling, of will, or of desire, is thus far no otherwise dependent on the intellectual mind than as the intellectual fac ulties mix in all its acts-conceiving and understanding the object, conceiv ing and understanding the means to pursue or to fly from it. They act perfectly, and with great subtlety and force, but in mere subservience to passion-as a part of it, but separable from it. In all passion, we find two states perfectly distinct from each otherthe emotion arising from contemplation of the object, which is an affection of pleasure and pain, and in which the mind may be passive merely; and, arising out of this, the movement of the mind to or from the object. There is also a third state, intimately connected with this last, and yet differing from it-the state of the will. The first point, then, is the susceptibility of impression and emotion. İn some minds, this exists to a great extent, without producing strong exertion of the will. It is then properly called Sensibility, which regards simply the capacity of being strongly and deeply affected. However, Sensibility itself may be of very different charac ters; as it may be quick and vivid, but transient; or its affections may But we cannot help thinking that, had Mr. Coleridge taken a more philosophical view of the constitution of our nature, he would have seen that the term Sensibility does, in its best and truest signification, denote one great constituent of our being, by which we are capable of being affected in various and sometimes extraordinary degrees of pleasure and pain, and with various and sometimes extraordinary be more calm, but deep and fixed. degrees of will and desire, by different objects made known to us by our powers of understanding. It denotes a capacity, by which we are susceptible of suffering and misery, by which the whole variety and strength of our moral nature is unfolded, and from which our intellectual reason draws its amplest and most precious stores. It is open to the impression of all the objects which the world may offer it. These present themselves, and the emotion arises, making to the mind disclosure of itself, bringing out to its sight, with visible force and strong undoubted reality, powers which lie there often unknown, and always unmeasured till The susceptibility of great exhilaration of heart, for example, or of sudden and passionate sorrow, is found under the first character. Under the second, deep and steadfast joy, which sustains in the mind no more, perhaps, than a calm bright serenity, and yet implies, not a tranquil indisposition to be affected, but an extreme and fine sensibility to pleasure. On the other hand, the same temper of mind may produce a settled and enduring melancholy. This is the first affection in which the mind is nearly passive. Now, though we may regard those impressions on the Sensibility as given merely in order to prepare and lead on those movements of the will through masters of the most important tenets which the mind is carried into action, of any of our metaphysical moralwhich may be conceived as the ulti- ists. mate purpose and proper end of those affections of pleasure and pain-yet, if the emotion should not reach to will, we by no means necessarily esteem this falling short of its seemingly desired end, as a defect in the work ing of the mind. On the contrary, the affections of the Sensibility are often very touching to us to contemplate, or beautiful, majestic, and sublime, when they reach not to the production of any purpose in the will;-as the sorrow which is felt for those who mourn, when our sympathy can offer them nothing but its sorrow;-as the grief of those who mourn the loss of that which they have loved, when their piety restrains all impatient murmuring at their own privation, and all vain longing towards that which is gone. Their grief, in its simplicity, is most affecting and beautiful. So the happiness of children, on whom joy falls like the sunshine, and passes away. Such, too, is the admiration we feel for characters of greatness, who, in the humility of our reverence, scem to us lifted up far above our imitation. In those instances, and numberless others that might be supposed, all that we see is, the first simple emotion strongly declared in the soul, but not passing on to the effects that naturally and properly arise out of the primary feeling. We have not room now to say more on this subject; but the little we have said, may, perhaps, serve to show, that in his vituperation of Sensibility, Mr. Coleridge has either confined his consideration to the popular, and, we might say, vulgar meaning of the term; or that, if he had in his mind any reference to its proper and philosophical meaning, his invective betrays a very imperfect knowledge of the essence and agency of this part of the constitution of our na ture. It would likewise appear, from the smeer at Sympathy in the long passage now quoted, as well as from other more direct allusions elsewhere, that Mr. Coleridge held very cheap the moral system of Adam Smith. But we suspect that, notwithstanding his too frequent expressions of slight towards what he and others of his school are pleased to call the Scotch Philosophy, neither he nor they are Sympathy is supposed by Dr. Smith to act towards the production of Moral Sentiment in three ways:—First, by enabling us to judge others, viz.-by enabling us to put ourselves in the place of others, and thus to compare their conduct with what ours would be; upon which comparison we approve or condemn. Secondly, by enabling us to conceive the judgment which others make of us. Thirdly, by participation in the gratitude and resentment of those who are benefited or injured either by ourselves or others. On the first of these views, an observation of a simple kind suggests itself, and has been made. If sympathy did no more towards the production of moral sentiment than to enable us to judge others by taking their place, it might be said that the doctrine would contain nothing at variance with any other theory of morality; since sympathy would then do no more than place us in the necessary situation for forming the judgment. The cause of our judgment would still have to be shown. When we imagine ourselves in the place of another, and conceive how we should act, and approve or condemn him accordingly, there must be some principle in our mind, not only determining our conception of how we should act, but determining also our satisfaction in that conception, and this must be already a moral principle. This is the argument of Mr. Stewart and Dr. Brown, and would probably occur to many other inquirers, as it is not unobvious. It does not ap pear, however, on further consideration, entirely satisfactory. The object of Dr. Smith is to set aside the idea of an independent, original, moral principle, by showing that it is made up in many different ways; but he has not himself explained, as distinctly as he might have done, the part which Sympathy takes, under his first head, in superseding an original principle. To understand him consistently, we must explain the first point of his doctrine for ourselves. Thus: When I place myself in the situation of another, and, conceiving my own conduct, find it to be in some essential point at variance with his, I feel a pain in the contemplation of his act. Now, this is not necessarily a pain of moral condemnation, but a -- pain of repugnance and aversion. My ideas evidently inseparable from an adverse judgment-and which, in fact, after all these adjunctive ideas of passion have been separated from it, remain as its essence-are not included in such a feeling, nor appear to be in any way deducible from it. Secondly, that it appears possible for us to entertain moral judgments in direct opposition to the force of all such our natural feelings; as, when we are occasionally called on to judge of acts which we feel it to have been impossible that we ourselves should have performed, which we do not contemplate without repugnance and fear, and which we are nevertheless compelled, even with dislike, to acknowledge to have been right, as we might possibly conceive a case of a father delivering up his son to justice. In like manner on the other hand, our conscience will occasionally constrain us to condemn acts which we cannot say that we ourselves, in the same situation, should not have done; acts indicating no feelings which we do not recognise in ourselves, and with which by nature we are not strongly inclined to sympathize. Both these reasons appear to establish a decided distinction between our natural affections and our feelings, however strong, and our moral principle. own imaginary mode of action is grate ful and satisfying to me; not originally (according to Dr. Smith's theory) by my understanding of moral right in it, but by the strong natural affection, which, in my conceived situation, would, I must suppose, carry me to act in the manner I now conceive, with earnest desire and lively pleasure. It is the opposition of this man's act, and, it is to be presumed, along with his act, his temper, to this my affection, that is the cause of my pain in the first instance, and, in the next, of my aversion towards himself. This pain and dislike are not properly, in their origin, moral sentiment, but natural feeling. They are of the same kind, although, with respect to subjects of a higher order, as that pain and dislike with which we consider men, savages for instance, whose manner of living is loathsome to us. There is, in this last case, no place for inoral condemnation; nothing but a strong, and indeed an invincible natural aversion. Now, according to Smith's theory, it is this natural pain and dislike with which we look upon acts and states of mind, contradicting strong inherent feelings of our own, that is meant to be represented to us as one of those elements, not originally, nor in themselves, properly speaking, moral, but which enter into and make up that variously-compounded feeling, or rather system of feelings, to which, when completed we give the name of moral sense, or conscience. Two things are very certain, with respect to the point of theory we have now been endeavouring to explain :The first, that the natural feeling of which we have spoken does take place; the other, that, on the whole, this natural feeling agrees with, strengthens and supports our moral judgment. The question is, whether we have, in the cases in which such a feeling must be acknowledged, besides this feeling, a distinct and peculiar principle of moral judgment. Grounds for the opinion that we have, are;-first, that there is one element of all moral judgment, which it appears not easy to deduce from such a feeling, namely, condemnation. We may find in it the grounds of dislike, disgust, abhorrence, separation, rejection, exclusion, anger, scorn, hatred; but the distinct and peculiar idea of right violated and consequent condemnation This part of Dr. Smith's argument, therefore, may be considered and answered in either of two ways-Either, with Mr. Stewart and Dr. Brown, we may conceive him to have meant, that, having by sympathy placed ourselves in the situation of another, and found that our conduct would coincide with or differ from his, we therefore morally approve or condemn himin which case, there is the logical defect in the argument which these writers suppose, namely, that it presupposes the principle which it undertakes to deduce, and represents that as causing the judgment which merely places us in the situation for exercising it: Or it may be understood in the way in which we have now attempted to explain it and it then seems to be liable to the two objections which we have made. We are inclined to think that Dr. Smith has not treated this point so explicitly as to enable us to say with certainty which of the two views really represents his opinion. It is possible that he might not have examined it so closely as to make up his opinion with perfect distinctness |