Hartley just able to speak a few words, making a fire-place of stones, with stones for fire--four stones for the fire-place, two for the fire--seems to illustrate a theory of language, the use of arbitrary symbols in imagination. Hartley walked remarkably soon and, therefore, learnt to talk remarkably late.
Anti-optimism! Praised be our Maker, and to the honour of human nature is it, that we may truly call this an inhuman opinion. Man strives after good.
Materialists unwilling to admit the mysterious element of our nature make it all mysterious--nothing mysterious in nerves, eyes, &c., but that nerves think, etc.! Stir up the sediment into the transparent water, and so make all opaque.
As we recede from anthropomorphism we must go either to the Trinity or Pantheism. The Fathers who were Unitarians were anthropomorphites.
Empirics are boastful and egotists because they introduce real or apparent novelty, which excites great opposition, [while] personal opposition creates re-action (which is of course a consciousness of power) associated with the person re-acting. Paracelsus was a boaster, it is true; so were the French Jacobins, and Wolff, though not a boaster, was persecuted into a habit of egotism in his philosophical writings; so Dr. John Brown, and Milton in his prose works; and those, in similar circumstances, who, from prudence, abstain from egotism in their writings are still egotists among their friends. It would be unnatural effort not to be so, and egotism in such cases is by no means offensive to a kind and discerning man.
Some flatter themselves that they abhor egotism, and do not suffer it to appear _primâ facie_, either in their writings or conversation, however much and however personally they or their opinions have been opposed. What now? Observe, watch those men; their habits of feeling and thinking are made up of _contempt_, which is the concentrated vinegar of egotism--it is _lætitia mixta cum odio_, a notion of the weakness of another conjoined with a notion of our own comparative strength, though that weakness is still strong enough to be troublesome to us, though not formidable.
"--and the deep power of Joy We see into the Life of Things."
By deep feeling we make our _ideas dim_, and this is what we mean by our life, ourselves. I think of the wall--it is before me a distinct image. Here I necessarily think of the _idea_ and the thinking _I_ as two distinct and opposite things. Now let me think of _myself_, of the thinking being. The idea becomes dim, whatever it be--so dim that I know not what it is; but the feeling is deep and steady, and this I call _I_--identifying the percipient and the perceived.
