MONUMENT TO PEEL.—The proposal to erect a national monument to Sir Robert Peel, by subscriptions limited to one penny each person, will be entirely successful.
_Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy: Delivered at the Royal Institution, in the years 1804, 1805 and 1806: By the late Rev. Sidney Smith, M. A. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1 vol. 12mo._
Sidney Smith appears, in this volume, as an ethical and metaphysical philosopher, and certainly ethics and metaphysics were never before made so clear and so entertaining. Sharp, shrewd, sensible, witty, humorous, eloquent, discriminating, the author goes on, from topic to topic, analyzing and laughing, condensing maxims into epigrams, embodying principles in sarcasms, eliciting jokes from abstractions; and after making his reader laugh tears into his eyes and pains into his sides, really leaves him in possession of more metaphysical knowledge than he would get from Dugald Stewart. The mind of Sidney Smith was so beautiful and brilliant, that men have done injustice to its depth and exactness. He was really an accomplished belles-lettres scholar, a close reasoner, a proficient in the philosophy of politics, morals and mind, as well as a wit and humorist; and in one of the rarest gifts of reason, justness and readiness in the conception of premises, he evinced equal force and fertility. Besides all this, he was an honest, courageous, uncanting, and disinterested man—loving and possessing goodness and virtue, hating and denouncing wickedness and vice. His goodness had not the weak diffusion which characterises the quality in the so-called “good people;” but will and intellect condensed it into lightning, and launched it at error and evil. It smiles sweetly, but it also smites sharply; and no man is more worthy of contemptuous pity than the bigot, dunce, libertine, professional rascal or knavish politician, who comes within word-shot of Sidney’s indignation.
There is no part of the present book which will not delight and instruct the general reader; but the most original portions are those devoted to practical remarks on mental diseases and to acute observations on minor topics of the great subject. To all who know Sidney Smith’s writings it is needless to add, that every idea in the volume is conceived and stated clearly, and that the author’s ignorance in the higher regions of his theme never seeks refuge in obscure terms, but is boldly, and some times exultingly, acknowledged. Many of the great philosophers, and especially the idealists and skeptics, are rather fleeringly disposed of. Common sense is Sydney’s test; but common sense is hardly able to grapple with Aristotle and Descartes, the greatest of metaphysicians; and they are, therefore, praised for their power and ridiculed for its perversion. The author’s peculiar felicity in making ludicrous statements which operate with the force of arguments, is displayed throughout the volume. “Bishop Berkeley,” he says, “destroyed this world in one volume octavo, and nothing remained after his time but mind; which experienced a similar fate from the hand of Mr. Hume, in 1737.” Nothing could be more felicitous than this statement, considered as a practical argument against the systems of the idealists and skeptics. Again he says: “A great philosopher may sit in his study, and deny the existence of matter; but if he take a walk into the streets he must take care to leave his theory behind him. Pyrrho said there was no such thing as pain; and he saw no _proof_ that there were such things as carts and wagons; and he refused to get out of their way: but Pyrrho had, fortunately for him, three or four stout slaves, who followed their master without following his doctrine; and whenever they saw one of these ideal machines approaching, took him up by the arms and legs, and, without attempting to controvert his arguments, put him down in a place of safety.”