On this page

• Text (1)

  Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

  • 

    Untitled Article

• Transcript

  • Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

    Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.

    Untitled Article

    would remove one disease of the mind—for instance , apathy and inertness—without riak of producing the opposite disease , —excitability and restlessness , I would have proposed it . But in roedi- * curing the mind , as in medicining the body , little good can be expected from the employment of those innocent remedies which , to use a common expression , cannot possibly do any harm .

    Were we obliged to choose between the orthodox innocent specifics , which were being prescribed in churcfi and chapel before Wesley ' time , and the violent intellectual and moral medicines he boldly administered , * we should not hesitate to prefer the latter : but there is no necessity to adopt either of these extremes .

    If the discipline we have proposed incline somewhat more to imaginativeness than to apathy , we say , in the first place , that we desire it to be so , in order to secure a moving power for « ftrr discipline ; and , secondly , that for admitted , and , we insist , unavoidable defects in our plan , there is a gulficieiit temedj to be found .

    Let us suppose that in establishing a Mechanics * Institution in a small country town , we hare succeeded in our first object , namely , in drawing audiences to our readings of Shakspeare and Scott , Edgeworth and Martineau , and that we hare also sneceeded in exciting an interest in our readings ; all whkti cook not have been effected , had we commenced with the comparatively dry facts of history , and the abstract reasonings of

    philosophy . I am now supposing the mind ready to pass on to a dryer discipline of facts and reasonings ; and I assert , that m order to accomplish this most effectually , we mast advance from subjects of the imagination and feelings , which hare been ttsefnl in rousing the spirit which is within us , to objects of the senses , wfiich may exercise us in observing and reasoning , without

    letting in upon the operations of our intellect any of those imaginations and feelings , which have , if we may use the metaphor , coloured and heated our thoughts . It is by means of objects external to ourselves , which we may look at and handle , taste and smell , that we can proceed to an apprehension of trhat may be called truth in things . For in subjects internal to ouisclres ,

    about which our imaginations get excited , and our feelings become roused , we are too often in danger of attaining to Kttle more than sincerity in the person . Thus , for example , religious and political fanatics , who conceive a Millennium or a Utopia which cannot exist out of their own vivid imaginations and burn

    * I am . not aware that the objects of Wesley and Whitfield hare tan efimrfy < 8 » - t inguished . The object of Wesley was to attain a superhuman purity , that of Whitfield to escape from au infrahuman corruption . The key-fttonn oc that * Qfimima mAy he seen in their conversions more especially , but also through the whefetoMft mi Iror preaching . Each brought the force of hi * imagination , to boar ,, tfc * « m upon ~** t ** ii grace * , and the other upou human winfulniMw » It warn am piMliiiiim mt fearen and of boll , rather than of human nature , human dufcu mmk 1 mm * fcn >»

    Untitled Article

    The Diffusion of Knowledge , amongsi the Pt&ple . 97 t

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1834, page 271, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2632/page/39/