initial commit of ebook 5428HEADmain

2 files changed, 3257 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/adpoe10.txt b/old/adpoe10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..13012c1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/adpoe10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3257 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays
+by Percy Bysshe Shelley
+(#8 in our series by Percy Bysshe Shelley)
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
+Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
+header without written permission.
+
+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
+eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
+important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
+how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
+donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays
+
+Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley
+
+Release Date: April, 2004  [EBook #5428]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on July 18, 2002]
+[Date last updated: August 28, 2005]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, A DEFENCE OF POETRY AND OTHER ESSAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Steve Harris, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+A DEFENCE OF POETRY AND OTHER ESSAYS
+
+By Percy Bysshe Shelley
+
+
+
+
+ON LOVE
+ON LIFE IN A FUTURE STATE
+ON THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH SPECULATIONS
+ON METAPHYSICS SPECULATIONS
+ON MORALS ON THE LITERATURE, THE ARTS AND THE MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS
+ON THE SYMPOSIUM, OR PREFACE TO THE BANQUET OF PLATO
+A DEFENCE OF POETRY
+
+
+
+
+
+ON LOVE
+
+What is love? Ask him who lives, what is life? ask him who adores,
+what is God?
+
+I know not the internal constitution of other men, nor even thine,
+whom I now address. I see that in some external attributes they
+resemble me, but when, misled by that appearance, I have thought
+to appeal to something in common, and unburthen my inmost soul to
+them, I have found my language misunderstood, like one in a distant
+and savage land. The more opportunities they have afforded me for
+experience, the wider has appeared the interval between us, and
+to a greater distance have the points of sympathy been withdrawn.
+With a spirit ill fitted to sustain such proof, trembling and feeble
+through its tenderness, I have everywhere sought sympathy and have
+found only repulse and disappointment.
+
+Thou demandest what is love? It is that powerful attraction towards
+all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we
+find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void,
+and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we
+experience within ourselves. If we reason, we would be understood;
+if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were
+born anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another's
+nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes
+should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of
+motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with
+the heart's best blood. This is Love. This is the bond and the
+sanction which connects not only man with man, but with everything
+which exists. We are born into the world, and there is something
+within us which, from the instant that we live, more and more
+thirsts after its likeness. It is probably in correspondence with
+this law that the infant drains milk from the bosom of its mother;
+this propensity develops itself with the development of our nature.
+We dimly see within our intellectual nature a miniature as it were
+of our entire self, yet deprived of all that we condemn or despise,
+the ideal prototype of everything excellent or lovely that we are
+capable of conceiving as belonging to the nature of man. Not only
+the portrait of our external being, but an assemblage of the minutest
+particles of which our nature is composed;[Footnote: These words
+are ineffectual and metaphorical. Most words are so--No help!] a
+mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness;
+a soul within our soul that describes a circle around its proper
+paradise, which pain, and sorrow, and evil dare not overleap. To
+this we eagerly refer all sensations, thirsting that they should
+resemble or correspond with it. The discovery of its antitype; the
+meeting with an understanding capable of clearly estimating our own;
+an imagination which should enter into and seize upon the subtle
+and delicate peculiarities which we have delighted to cherish and
+unfold in secret; with a frame whose nerves, like the chords of
+two exquisite lyres, strung to the accompaniment of one delightful
+voice, vibrate with the vibrations of our own; and of a combination
+of all these in such proportion as the type within demands; this
+is the invisible and unattainable point to which Love tends; and
+to attain which, it urges forth the powers of man to arrest the
+faintest shadow of that, without the possession of which there
+is no rest nor respite to the heart over which it rules. Hence in
+solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by human
+beings, and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers,
+the grass, and the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very
+leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret
+correspondence with our heart. There is eloquence in the tongueless
+wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the
+reeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to something
+within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless
+rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like
+the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved
+singing to you alone. Sterne says that, if he were in a desert,
+he would love some cypress. So soon as this want or power is dead,
+man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives
+is the mere husk of what once he was.
+
+[1815; publ. 1840]
+
+
+
+ON LIFE
+
+Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel,
+is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us
+the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of
+its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle.
+What are changes of empires, the wreck of dynasties, with the
+opinions which supported them; what is the birth and the extinction
+of religious and of political systems to life? What are the revolutions
+of the globe which we inhabit, and the operations of the elements
+of which it is composed, compared with life? What is the universe
+of stars, and suns, of which this inhabited earth is one, and their
+motions, and their destiny, compared with life? Life, the great
+miracle, we admire not, because it is so miraculous. It is well
+that we are thus shielded by the familiarity of what is at once
+so certain and so unfathomable, from an astonishment which would
+otherwise absorb and overawe the functions of that which is its
+object.
+
+If any artist, I do not say had executed, but had merely conceived
+in his mind the system of the sun, and the stars, and planets, they
+not existing, and had painted to us in words, or upon canvas, the
+spectacle now afforded by the nightly cope of heaven, and illustrated it
+by the wisdom of astronomy, great would be our admiration. Or had
+he imagined the scenery of this earth, the mountains, the seas,
+and the rivers; the grass, and the flowers, and the variety of
+the forms and masses of the leaves of the woods, and the colours
+which attend the setting and the rising sun, and the hues of the
+atmosphere, turbid or serene, these things not before existing,
+truly we should have been astonished, and it would not have been a
+vain boast to have said of such a man, 'Non merita nome di creatore,
+se non Iddio ed il Poeta.' But now these things are looked on with
+little wonder, and to be conscious of them with intense delight is
+esteemed to be the distinguishing mark of a refined and extraordinary
+person. The multitude of men care not for them. It is thus with
+Life--that which includes all.
+
+What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will,
+and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is
+unremembered, and our infancy remembered but in fragments; we live
+on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it
+to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being! Rightly
+used they may make evident our ignorance to ourselves, and this is
+much. For what are we? Whence do we come? and whither do we go? Is
+birth the commencement, is death the conclusion of our being? What
+is birth and death?
+
+The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life,
+which, though startling to the apprehension, is, in fact, that which
+the habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguished
+in us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this scene
+of things. I confess that I am one of those who are unable to refuse
+my assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that
+nothing exists but as it is perceived.
+
+It is a decision against which all our persuasions struggle, and we
+must be long convicted before we can be convinced that the solid
+universe of external things is 'such stuff as dreams are made
+of.' The shocking absurdities of the popular philosophy of mind
+and matter, its fatal consequences in morals, and their violent
+dogmatism concerning the source of all things, had early conducted
+me to materialism. This materialism is a seducing system to young and
+superficial minds. It allows its disciples to talk, and dispenses
+them from thinking. But I was discontented with such a view of
+things as it afforded; man is a being of high aspirations, 'looking
+both before and after,' whose 'thoughts wander through eternity,'
+disclaiming alliance with transience and decay; incapable of
+imagining to himself annihilation; existing but in the future and
+the past; being, not what he is, but what he has been and shall be.
+Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spirit
+within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. This is the
+character of all life and being. Each is at once the centre and
+the circumference; the point to which all things are referred, and
+the line in which all things are contained. Such contemplations as
+these, materialism and the popular philosophy of mind and matter
+alike forbid; they are only consistent with the intellectual system.
+
+It is absurd to enter into a long recapitulation of arguments
+sufficiently familiar to those inquiring minds, whom alone a writer
+on abstruse subjects can be conceived to address. Perhaps the most
+clear and vigorous statement of the intellectual system is to be
+found in Sir William Drummond's Academical Questions.
+
+After such an exposition, it would be idle to translate into other
+words what could only lose its energy and fitness by the change.
+Examined point by point, and word by word, the most discriminating
+intellects have been able to discern no train of thoughts in the
+process of reasoning, which does not conduct inevitably to the
+conclusion which has been stated.
+
+What follows from the admission? It establishes no new truth, it
+gives us no additional insight into our hidden nature, neither its
+action nor itself. Philosophy, impatient as it may be to build,
+has much work yet remaining, as pioneer for the overgrowth of ages.
+It makes one step towards this object; it destroys error, and the
+roots of error. It leaves, what it is too often the duty of the
+reformer in political and ethical questions to leave, a vacancy.
+It reduces the mind to that freedom in which it would have acted,
+but for the misuse of words and signs, the instruments of its own
+creation. By signs, I would be understood in a wide sense, including
+what is properly meant by that term, and what I peculiarly mean. In
+this latter sense, almost all familiar objects are signs, standing,
+not for themselves, but for others, in their capacity of suggesting
+one thought which shall lead to a train of thoughts. Our whole life
+is thus an education of error.
+
+Let us recollect our sensations as children. What a distinct and
+intense apprehension had we of the world and of ourselves! Many of
+the circumstances of social life were then important to us which
+are now no longer so. But that is not the point of comparison on
+which I mean to insist. We less habitually distinguished all that
+we saw and felt, from ourselves. They seemed as it were to constitute
+one mass. There are some persons who, in this respect, are always
+children. Those who are subject to the state called reverie, feel
+as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe,
+or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being.
+They are conscious of no distinction. And these are states which
+precede, or accompany, or follow an unusually intense and vivid
+apprehension of life. As men grow up this power commonly decays,
+and they become mechanical and habitual agents. Thus feelings and
+then reasonings are the combined result of a multitude of entangled
+thoughts, and of a series of what are called impressions, planted
+by reiteration.
+
+The view of life presented by the most refined deductions of the
+intellectual philosophy, is that of unity. Nothing exists but as
+it is perceived. The difference is merely nominal between those two
+classes of thought, which are vulgarly distinguished by the names
+of ideas and of external objects. Pursuing the same thread of
+reasoning, the existence of distinct individual minds, similar to
+that which is employed in now questioning its own nature, is likewise
+found to be a delusion. The words _I_, YOU, THEY, are not signs of
+any actual difference subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts
+thus indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different
+modifications of the one mind.
+
+Let it not be supposed that this doctrine conducts to the monstrous
+presumption that I, the person who now write and think, am that one
+mind. I am but a portion of it. The words _I_, and YOU, and THEY,
+are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement, and totally
+devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attached to
+them. It is difficult to find terms adequate to express so subtle
+a conception as that to which the Intellectual Philosophy has
+conducted us. We are on that verge where words abandon us, and what
+wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of how little
+we know. The relations of THINGS remain unchanged, by whatever system.
+By the word THINGS is to be understood any object of thought, that
+is any thought upon which any other thought is employed, with an
+apprehension of distinction.
+
+The relations of these remain unchanged; and such is the material
+of our knowledge. What is the cause of life? that is, how was it
+produced, or what agencies distinct from life have acted or act
+upon life? All recorded generations of mankind have weariedly busied
+themselves in inventing answers to this question; and the result
+has been,--Religion. Yet, that the basis of all things cannot be,
+as the popular philosophy alleges, mind, is sufficiently evident.
+Mind, as far as we have any experience of its properties, and beyond
+that experience how vain is argument! cannot create, it can only
+perceive. It is said also to be the cause. But cause is only a
+word expressing a certain state of the human mind with regard to
+the manner in which two thoughts are apprehended to be related to
+each other. If any one desires to know how unsatisfactorily the
+popular philosophy employs itself upon this great question, they
+need only impartially reflect upon the manner in which thoughts
+develop themselves in their minds. It is infinitely improbable that
+the cause of mind, that is, of existence, is similar to mind.
+
+[1815; publ. 1840]
+
+
+
+ON A FUTURE STATE
+
+It has been the persuasion of an immense majority of human beings
+in all ages and nations that we continue to live after death,--that
+apparent termination of all the functions of sensitive and intellectual
+existence. Nor has mankind been contented with supposing that
+species of existence which some philosophers have asserted; namely,
+the resolution of the component parts of the mechanism of a living
+being into its elements, and the impossibility of the minutest
+particle of these sustaining the smallest diminution. They have
+clung to the idea that sensibility and thought, which they have
+distinguished from the objects of it, under the several names
+of spirit and matter, is, in its own nature, less susceptible of
+division and decay, and that, when the body is resolved into its
+elements, the principle which animated it will remain perpetual
+and unchanged.  Some philosophers-and those to whom we are indebted
+for the most stupendous discoveries in physical science, suppose,
+on the other hand, that intelligence is the mere result of certain
+combinations among the particles of its objects; and those among
+them who believe that we live after death, recur to the interposition
+of a supernatural power, which shall overcome the tendency inherent
+in all material combinations, to dissipate and be absorbed into
+other forms.
+
+Let us trace the reasonings which in one and the other have conducted
+to these two opinions, and endeavour to discover what we ought to
+think on a question of such momentous interest. Let us analyse the
+ideas and feelings which constitute the contending beliefs, and
+watchfully establish a discrimination between words and thoughts.
+Let us bring the question to the test of experience and fact; and
+ask ourselves, considering our nature in its entire extent, what
+light we derive from a sustained and comprehensive view of its
+component parts, which may enable, us to assert, with certainty,
+that we do or do not live after death.
+
+The examination of this subject requires that it should be stript
+of all those accessory topics which adhere to it in the common opinion
+of men. The existence of a God, and a future state of rewards and
+punishments, are totally foreign to the subject. If it be proved
+that the world is ruled by a Divine Power, no inference necessarily
+can be drawn from that circumstance in favour of a future state.
+It has been asserted, indeed, that as goodness and justice are to
+be numbered among the attributes of the Deity, He will undoubtedly
+compensate the virtuous who suffer during life, and that He will
+make every sensitive being who does not deserve punishment, happy
+for ever. But this view of the subject, which it would be tedious
+as well as superfluous to develop and expose, satisfies no person,
+and cuts the knot which we now seek to untie. Moreover, should it
+be proved, on the other hand, that the mysterious principle which
+regulates the proceedings of the universe, is neither intelligent
+nor sensitive, yet it is not an inconsistency to suppose at the
+same time, that the animating power survives the body which it
+has animated, by laws as independent of any supernatural agent as
+those through which it first became united with it. Nor, if a future
+state be clearly proved, does it follow that it will be a state of
+punishment or reward.
+
+By the word death, we express that condition in which natures
+resembling ourselves apparently cease to be that which they were.
+We no longer hear them speak, nor see them move. If they have
+sensations and apprehensions, we no longer participate in them.
+We know no more than that those external organs, and all that fine
+texture of material frame, without which we have no experience that
+life or thought can subsist, are dissolved and scattered abroad.
+The body is placed under the earth, and after a certain period there
+remains no vestige even of its form. This is that contemplation
+of inexhaustible melancholy, whose shadow eclipses the brightness
+of the world. The common observer is struck with dejection at the
+spectacle. He contends in vain against the persuasion of the grave,
+that the dead indeed cease to be. The corpse at his feet is prophetic
+of his own destiny. Those who have preceded him, and whose voice
+was delightful to his ear; whose touch met his like sweet and subtle
+fire; whose aspect spread a visionary light upon his path--these
+he cannot meet again. The organs of sense are destroyed, and the
+intellectual operations dependent on them have perished with their
+sources. How can a corpse see or feel? its eyes are eaten out, and
+its heart is black and without motion. What intercourse can two
+heaps of putrid clay and crumbling bones hold together? When you
+can discover where the fresh colours of the faded flower abide,
+or the music of the broken lyre, seek life among the dead. Such
+are the anxious and fearful contemplations of the common observer,
+though the popular religion often prevents him from confessing them
+even to himself.
+
+The natural philosopher, in addition to the sensations common
+to all men inspired by the event of death, believes that he sees
+with more certainty that it is attended with the annihilation of
+sentiment and thought. He observes the mental powers increase and
+fade with those of the body, and even accommodate themselves to
+the most transitory changes of our physical nature. Sleep suspends
+many of the faculties of the vital and intellectual principle;
+drunkenness and disease will either temporarily or permanently
+derange them. Madness or idiotcy may utterly extinguish the most
+excellent and delicate of those powers. In old age the mind gradually
+withers; and as it grew and was strengthened with the body, so does
+it together with the body sink into decrepitude. Assuredly these
+are convincing evidences that so soon as the organs of the body
+are subjected to the laws of inanimate matter, sensation, and
+perception, and apprehension, are at an end.  It is probable that
+what we call thought is not an actual being, but no more than the
+relation between certain parts of that infinitely varied mass,
+of which the rest of the universe is composed, and which ceases
+to exist so soon as those parts change their position with regard
+to each other. Thus colour, and sound, and taste, and odour exist
+only relatively. But let thought be considered as some peculiar
+substance, which permeates, and is the cause of, the animation of
+living beings. Why should that substance be assumed to be something
+essentially distinct from all others, and exempt from subjection
+to those laws from which no other substance is exempt? It differs,
+indeed, from all other substances, as electricity, and light, and
+magnetism, and the constituent parts of air and earth, severally
+differ from all others. Each of these is subject to change and
+to decay, and to conversion into other forms. Yet the difference
+between light and earth is scarcely greater than that which exists
+between life, or thought, and fire. The difference between the two
+former was never alleged as an argument for the eternal permanence
+of either, in that form under which they first might offer themselves
+to our notice. Why should the difference between the two latter
+substances be an argument for the prolongation of the existence
+of one and not the other, when the existence of both has arrived
+at their apparent termination? To say that fire exists without
+manifesting any of the properties of fire, such as light, heat,
+etc., or that the principle of life exists without consciousness,
+or memory, or desire, or motive, is to resign, by an awkward
+distortion of language, the affirmative of the dispute. To say
+that the principle of life MAY exist in distribution among various
+forms, is to assert what cannot be proved to be either true or
+false, but which, were it true, annihilates all hope of existence
+after death, in any sense in which that event can belong to the
+hopes and fears of men. Suppose, however, that the intellectual
+and vital principle differs in the most marked and essential manner
+from all other known substances; that they have all some resemblance
+between themselves which it in no degree participates.  In what manner
+can this concession be made an argument for its imperishability?
+All that we see or know perishes and is changed.  Life and thought
+differ indeed from everything else. But that it survives that
+period, beyond which we have no experience of its existence, such
+distinction and dissimilarity affords no shadow of proof, and nothing
+but our own desires could have led us to conjecture or imagine.
+Have we existed before birth? It is difficult to conceive the
+possibility of this. There is, in the generative principle of each
+animal and plant, a power which converts the substances by which
+it is surrounded into a substance homogeneous with itself. That
+is, the relations between certain elementary particles of matter
+undergo a change, and submit to new combinations. For when we use
+the words PRINCIPLE, POWER, CAUSE, we mean to express no real being,
+but only to class under those terms a certain series of co-existing
+phenomena; but let it be supposed that this principle is a certain
+substance which escapes the observation of the chemist and anatomist.
+It certainly MAY BE; though it is sufficiently unphilosophical
+to allege the possibility of an opinion as a proof of its truth.
+Does it see, hear, feel, before its combination with those organs
+on which sensation depends? Does it reason, imagine, apprehend,
+without those ideas which sensation alone can communicate? If we
+have not existed before birth; if, at the period when the parts
+of our nature on which thought and life depend, seem to be woven
+together; if there are no reasons to suppose that we have existed
+before that period at which our existence apparently commences,
+then there are no grounds for supposition that we shall continue
+to exist after our existence has apparently ceased.  So far as
+thought is concerned, the same will take place with regard to use,
+individually considered, after death, as had place before our birth.
+
+It is said that it, is possible that we should continue to exist
+in some mode totally inconceivable to us at present. This is a most
+unreasonable presumption. It casts on the adherents of annihilation
+the burthen of proving the negative of a question, the affirmative
+of which is not supported by a single argument, and which, by its
+very nature, lies beyond the experience of the human understanding.
+It is sufficiently easy, indeed, to form any proposition, concerning
+which we are ignorant, just not so absurd as not to be contradictory
+in itself, and defy refutation. The possibility of whatever enters
+into the wildest imagination to conceive is thus triumphantly
+vindicated. But it is enough that such assertions should be either
+contradictory to the known laws of nature, or exceed the limits of our
+experience, that their fallacy or irrelevancy to our consideration
+should be demonstrated. They persuade, indeed, only those who
+desire to be persuaded. This desire to be for ever as we are; the
+reluctance to a violent and unexperienced change, which is common
+to all the animated and inanimate combinations of the universe, is,
+indeed, the secret persuasion which has given birth to the opinions
+of a future state.
+
+[1815; publ. 1840]
+
+
+
+
+ON THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH
+
+A FRAGMENT
+
+The first law which it becomes a Reformer to propose and support,
+at the approach of a period of great political change, is the
+abolition of the punishment of death.
+
+It is sufficiently clear that revenge, retaliation, atonement,
+expiation, are rules and motives, so far from deserving a place in
+any enlightened system of political life, that they are the chief
+sources of a prodigious class of miseries in the domestic circles
+of society. It is clear that however the spirit of legislation may
+appear to frame institutions upon more philosophical maxims, it
+has hitherto, in those cases which are termed criminal, done little
+more than palliate the spirit, by gratifying a portion of it; and
+afforded a compromise between that which is bests--the inflicting
+of no evil upon a sensitive being, without a decisively beneficial
+result in which he should at least participates--and that which is
+worst; that he should be put to torture for the amusement of those
+whom he may have injured, or may seem to have injured.
+
+Omitting these remoter considerations, let us inquire what, DEATH
+is; that punishment which is applied as a measure of transgressions
+of indefinite shades of distinction, so soon as they shall have
+passed that degree and colour of enormity, with which it is supposed
+no, inferior infliction is commensurate.
+
+And first, whether death is good or evil, a punishment or a reward,
+or whether it be wholly indifferent, no man can take upon himself
+to assert. That that within us which thinks and feels, continues
+to think and feel after the dissolution of the body, has been the
+almost universal opinion of mankind, and the accurate philosophy
+of what I may be permitted to term the modern Academy, by showing
+the prodigious depth and extent of our ignorance respecting the
+causes and nature of sensation, renders probable the affirmative
+of a proposition, the negative of which it is so difficult to
+conceive, and the popular arguments against which, derived from
+what is called the atomic system, are proved to be applicable only
+to the relation which one object bears to another, as apprehended
+by the mind, and not to existence itself, or the nature of that
+essence which is the medium and receptacle of objects.
+
+The popular system of religion suggests the idea that the mind,
+after death, will be painfully or pleasurably affected according to
+its determinations during life. However ridiculous and pernicious
+we must admit the vulgar accessories of this creed to be, there
+is a certain analogy, not wholly absurd, between the consequences
+resulting to an individual during life from the virtuous or vicious,
+prudent or imprudent, conduct of his external actions, to those
+consequences which are conjectured to ensue from the discipline
+and order of his internal thoughts, as affecting his condition in
+a future state. They omit, indeed, to calculate upon the accidents
+of disease, and temperament, and organization, and circumstance,
+together with the multitude of independent agencies which affect
+the opinions, the conduct, and the happiness of individuals, and
+produce determinations of the will, and modify the judgement, so
+as to produce effects the most opposite in natures considerably
+similar. These are those operations in the order of the whole of
+nature, tending, we are prone to believe, to some definite mighty
+end, to which the agencies of our peculiar nature are subordinate;
+nor is there any reason to suppose, that in a future state they should
+become suddenly exempt from that subordination.  The philosopher is
+unable to determine whether our existence in a previous state has
+affected our present condition, and abstains from deciding whether
+our present condition will affect us in that which may be future.
+That, if we continue to exist, the manner of our existence will be
+such as no inferences nor conjectures, afforded by a consideration
+of our earthly experience, can elucidate, is sufficiently obvious.
+The opinion that the vital principle within us, in whatever mode
+it may continue to exist, must lose that consciousness of definite
+and individual being which now characterizes it, and become a unit
+in the vast sum of action and of thought which disposes and animates
+the universe, and is called God, seems to belong to that class of
+opinion which has been designated as indifferent.
+
+To compel a person to know all that can be known by the dead
+concerning that which the living fear, hope, or forget; to plunge
+him into the pleasure or pain which there awaits him; to punish or
+reward him in a manner and in a degree incalculable and incomprehensible
+by us; to disrobe him at once from all that intertexture of good
+and evil with which Nature seems to have clothed every form of
+individual existence, is to inflict on him the doom of death.
+
+A certain degree of pain and terror usually accompany the infliction
+of death. This degree is infinitely varied by the infinite variety
+in the temperament and opinions of the sufferers.  As a measure of
+punishment, strictly so considered, and as an exhibition, which, by
+its known effects on the sensibility of the sufferer, is intended
+to intimidate the spectators from incurring a similar liability,
+it is singularly inadequate.
+
+Firstly, Persons of energetic character, in whom, as in men who
+suffer for political crimes, there is a large mixture of enterprise,
+and fortitude, and disinterestedness, and the elements, though
+misguided and disarranged, by which the strength and happiness of a
+nation might have been cemented, die in such a manner, as to make
+death appear not evil, but good. The death of what is called a
+traitor, that is, a person who, from whatever motive, would abolish
+the government of the day, is as often a triumphant exhibition
+of suffering virtue, as the warning of a culprit. The multitude,
+instead of departing with a panic-stricken approbation of the laws
+which exhibited such a spectacle, are inspired with pity, admiration
+and sympathy; and the most generous among them feel an emulation
+to be the authors of such flattering emotions, as they experience
+stirring in their bosoms.  Impressed by what they see and feel,
+they make no distinctive between the motives which incited the
+criminals to the action for which they suffer, or the heroic courage
+with which they turned into good that which their judges awarded
+to them as evil or the purpose itself of those actions, though that
+purpose may happen to be eminently pernicious. The laws in this
+case lose their sympathy, which it ought to be their chief object
+to secure, and in a participation of which consists their chief
+strength in maintaining those sanctions by which the parts of the
+social union are bound together, so as to produce, as nearly as
+possible, the ends for which it is instituted.
+
+Secondly,--Persons of energetic character, in communities not
+modelled with philosophical skill to turn all the energies which
+they contain to the purposes of common good, are prone also to fall
+into the temptation of undertaking, and are peculiarly fitted for
+despising the perils attendant upon consummating, the most enormous
+crimes. Murder, rapes, extensive schemes of plunder are the actions
+of persons belonging to this class; and death is the penalty of
+conviction. But the coarseness of organization, peculiar to men
+capable of committing acts wholly selfish, is usually found to
+be associated with a proportionate insensibility to fear or pain.
+Their sufferings communicate to those of the spectators, who may be
+liable to the commission of similar crimes a sense of the lightness
+of that event, when closely examined which, at a distance, as
+uneducated persons are accustomed to do, probably they regarded with
+horror. But a great majority of the spectators are so bound up in
+the interests and the habits of social union that no temptation
+would be sufficiently strong to induce them to a commission of the
+enormities to which this penalty is assigned. The more powerful, and
+the richer among them,--and a numerous class of little tradesmen are
+richer and more powerful than those who are employed by them, and
+the employer, in general, bears this relation to the employed,--regard
+their own wrongs as, in some degree, avenged, and their own rights
+secured by this punishment, inflicted as the penalty of whatever
+crime. In cases of murder or mutilation, this feeling is almost
+universal. In those, therefore, whom this exhibition does not
+awaken to the sympathy which extenuates crime and discredits the
+law which restrains it, it produces feelings more directly at war
+with the genuine purposes of political society.  It excites those
+emotions which it is the chief object of civilization to extinguish
+for ever, and in the extinction of which alone there can be any
+hope of better institutions than those under which men now misgovern
+one another. Men feel that their revenge is gratified, and that
+their security is established by the extinction and the sufferings
+of beings, in most respects resembling themselves; and their daily
+occupations constraining them to a precise form in all their thoughts,
+they come to connect inseparably the idea of their own advantage
+with that of the death and torture of others. It is manifest that
+the object of sane polity is directly the reverse; and that laws
+founded upon reason, should accustom the gross vulgar to associate
+their ideas of security and of interest with the reformation, and
+the strict restraint, for that purpose alone, of those who might
+invade it.
+
+The passion of revenge is originally nothing more than an habitual
+perception of the ideas of the sufferings of the person who inflicts
+an injury, as connected, as they are in a savage state, or in such
+portions of society as are yet undisciplined to civilization, with
+security that that injury will not be repeated in future. This
+feeling, engrafted upon superstition and confirmed by habit, at
+last loses sight of the only object for which it may be supposed
+to have been implanted, and becomes a passion and a duty to be
+pursued and fulfilled, even to the destruction of those ends to
+which it originally tended. The other passions, both good and evil.
+Avarice, Remorse, Love, Patriotism, present a similar appearance;
+and to this principle of the mind over-shooting the mark at which
+it aims, we owe all that is eminently base or excellent in human
+nature; in providing for the nutriment or the extinction of which,
+consists the true art of the legislator. [Footnote: The savage and
+the illiterate are but faintly aware of the distinction between
+the future and the past; they make actions belonging to periods so
+distinct, the subjects of similar feelings; they live only in the
+present, or in the past, as it is present. It is in this that the
+philosopher excels one of the many; it is this which distinguishes
+the doctrine of philosophic necessity from fatalism; and that
+determination of the will, by which it is the active source of future
+events, from that liberty or indifference, to which the abstract
+liability of irremediable actions is attached, according to the
+notions of the vulgar.
+
+This is the source of the erroneous excesses of Remorse and Revenge;
+the one extending itself over the future, and the other over the
+past; provinces in which their suggestions can only be the sources
+of evil. The purpose of a resolution to act more wisely and virtuously
+in future, and the sense of a necessity of caution in repressing
+an enemy, are the sources from which the enormous superstitions
+implied in the words cited have arisen.]
+
+Nothing is more clear than that the infliction of punishment in
+general, in a degree which the reformation and the restraint of
+those who transgress the laws does not render indispensable, and
+none more than death, confirms all the inhuman and unsocial impulses
+of men. It is almost a proverbial remark, that those nations in which
+the penal code has been particularly mild, have been distinguished
+from all others by the rarity of crime.  But the example is to be
+admitted to be equivocal. A more decisive argument is afforded by
+a consideration of the universal connexion of ferocity of manners,
+and a contempt of social ties, with the contempt of human life.
+Governments which derive their institutions from the existence of
+circumstances of barbarism and violence, with some rare exceptions
+perhaps, are bloody in proportion as they are despotic, and form
+the manners of their subjects to a sympathy with their own spirit.
+
+The spectators who feel no abhorrence at a public execution, but
+rather a self-applauding superiority, and a sense of gratified
+indignation, are surely excited to the most inauspicious emotions. The
+first reflection of such a one is the sense of his own internal and
+actual worth, as preferable to that of the victim, whom circumstances
+have led to destruction. The meanest wretch is impressed with a
+sense of his own comparative merit. He is one of those on whom the
+tower of Siloam fell not--he is such a one as Jesus Christ found
+not in all Samaria, who, in his own soul, throws the first stone at
+the woman taken in adultery.  The popular religion of the country
+takes its designation from that illustrious person whose beautiful
+sentiment I have quoted.  Any one who has stript from the doctrines
+of this person the veil of familiarity, will perceive how adverse
+their spirit is to feelings of this nature.
+
+
+
+
+
+SPECULATIONS ON METAPHYSICS
+
+I--THE MIND
+
+It is an axiom in mental philosophy, that we can think of nothing
+which we have not perceived. When I say that we can think of nothing,
+I mean, we can imagine nothing, we can reason of nothing, we can
+remember nothing, we can foresee nothing.  The most astonishing
+combinations of poetry, the subtlest deductions of logic and
+mathematics, are no other than combinations which the intellect
+makes of sensations according to its own laws.  A catalogue of all
+the thoughts of the mind, and of all their possible modifications,
+is a cyclopedic history of the universe.
+
+But, it will be objected, the inhabitants of the various planets of
+this and other solar systems; and the existence of a Power bearing
+the same relation to all that we perceive and are, as what we
+call a cause does to what we call effect, were never subjects of
+sensation, and yet the laws of mind almost universally suggest,
+according to the various disposition of each, a conjecture,
+a persuasion, or a conviction of their existence. The reply is
+simple; these thoughts are also to be included in the catalogue
+of existence; they are modes in which thoughts are combined; the
+objection only adds force to the conclusion, that beyond the limits
+of perception and thought nothing can exist.
+
+Thoughts, or ideas, or notions, call them what you will, differ
+from each other, not in kind, but in force. It has commonly been
+supposed that those distinct thoughts which affect a number of
+persons, at regular intervals, during the passage of a multitude
+of other thoughts, which are called REAL or EXTERNAL OBJECTS,
+are totally different in kind from those which affect only a few
+persons, and which recur at irregular intervals, and are usually
+more obscure and indistinct, such as hallucinations, dreams, and the
+ideas of madness. No essential distinction between any one of these
+ideas, or any class of them, is founded on a correct observation of
+the nature of things, but merely on a consideration of what thoughts
+are most invariably subservient to the security and happiness of
+life; and if nothing more were expressed by the distinction, the
+philosopher might safely accommodate his language to that of the
+vulgar. But they pretend to assert an essential difference, which
+has no foundation in truth, and which suggests a narrow and false
+conception of universal nature, the parent of the most fatal errors
+in speculation. A specific difference between every thought of the
+mind, is, indeed, a necessary consequence of that law by which it
+perceives diversity and number; but a generic and essential difference
+is wholly arbitrary. The principle of the agreement and similarity
+of all thoughts, is, that they are all thoughts; the principle
+of their disagreement consists in the variety and irregularity of
+the occasions on which they arise in the mind. That in which they
+agree, to that in which they differ, is as everything to nothing.
+Important distinctions, of various degrees of force, indeed, are to
+be established between them, if they were, as they may be, subjects
+of ethical and economical discussion; but that is a question
+altogether distinct. By considering all knowledge as bounded by
+perception, whose operations may be indefinitely combined, we arrive
+at a conception of Nature inexpressibly more magnificent, simple
+and true, than accords with the ordinary systems of complicated and
+partial consideration. Nor does a contemplation of the universe,
+in this comprehensive and synthetical view, exclude the subtlest
+analysis of its modifications and parts.
+
+A scale might be formed, graduated according to the degrees
+of a combined ratio of intensity, duration, connexion, periods of
+recurrence, and utility, which would be the standard, according to
+which all ideas might be measured, and an uninterrupted chain of
+nicely shadowed distinctions would be observed, from the faintest
+impression on the senses, to the most distinct combination of those
+impressions; from the simplest of those combinations, to that mass
+of knowledge which, including our own nature, constitutes what we
+call the universe.
+
+We are intuitively conscious of our own existence, and of that
+connexion in the train of our successive ideas, which we term our
+identity. We are conscious also of the existence of other minds;
+but not intuitively. Our evidence, with respect to the existence of
+other minds, is founded upon a very complicated relation of ideas,
+which it is foreign to the purpose of this treatise to anatomize.
+The basis of this relation is, undoubtedly, a periodical recurrence
+of masses of ideas, which our voluntary determinations have, in
+one peculiar direction, no power to circumscribe or to arrest, and
+against the recurrence of which they can only imperfectly provide.
+The irresistible laws of thought constrain us to believe that the
+precise limits of our actual ideas are not the actual limits of
+possible ideas; the law, according to which these deductions are
+drawn, is called analogy; and this is the foundation of all our
+inferences, from one idea to another, inasmuch as they resemble
+each other.
+
+We see trees, houses, fields, living beings in our own shape, and
+in shapes more or less analogous to our own. These are perpetually
+changing the mode of their existence relatively to us. To express
+the varieties of these modes, we say, WE MOVE, THEY MOVE; and as this
+motion is continual, though not uniform, we express our conception
+of the diversities of its course by--IT HAS BEEN, IT IS, IT SHALL
+BE. These diversities are events or objects, and are essential,
+considered relatively to human identity, for the existence of the
+human mind. For if the inequalities, produced by what has been
+termed the operations of the external universe, were levelled by the
+perception of our being, uniting and filling up their interstices,
+motion and mensuration, and time, and space; the elements of the
+human mind being thus abstracted, sensation and imagination cease.
+Mind cannot be considered pure.
+
+II--WHAT METAPHYSICS ARE. ERRORS IN THE USUAL METHODS OF CONSIDERING
+THEM
+
+We do not attend sufficiently to what passes within ourselves. We
+combine words, combined a thousand times before. In our minds we
+assume entire opinions; and in the expression of those opinions,
+entire phrases, when we would philosophize. Our whole style of
+expression and sentiment is infected with the tritest plagiarisms.
+Our words are dead, our thoughts are cold and borrowed.
+
+Let us contemplate facts; let us, in the great study of ourselves,
+resolutely compel the mind to a rigid consideration of itself. We
+are not content with conjecture, and inductions, and syllogisms,
+in sciences regarding external objects. As in these, let us also,
+in considering the phenomena of mind, severely collect those
+facts which cannot be disputed. Metaphysics will thus possess this
+conspicuous advantage over every other science, that each student,
+by attentively referring to his own mind, may ascertain the
+authorities upon which any assertions regarding it are supported.
+There can thus be no deception, we ourselves being the depositaries
+of the evidence of the subject which we consider.
+
+Metaphysics may be defined as an inquiry concerning those things
+belonging to, or connected with, the internal nature of man.
+
+It is said that mind produces motion; and it might as well have
+been said, that motion produces mind.
+
+III--DIFFICULTY OF ANALYSING THE HUMAN MIND
+
+If it were possible that a person should give a faithful history of
+his being, from the earliest epochs of his recollection, a picture
+would be presented such as the world has never contemplated before.
+A mirror would be held up to all men in which they might behold
+their own recollections, and, in dim perspective, their shadowy hopes
+and fears,--all that they dare not, or that, daring and desiring,
+they could not expose to the open eyes of day. But thought can
+with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it
+inhabits. It is like a river whose rapid and perpetual stream flows
+outwards;--like one in dread who speeds through the recesses of
+some haunted pile, and dares not look behind. The caverns of the
+mind are obscure, and shadowy; or pervaded with a lustre, beautifully
+bright indeed, but shining not beyond their portals. If it were
+possible to be where we have been, vitally and indeed--if, at the
+moment of our presence there, we could define the results of our
+experience,--if the passage from sensation to reflection--from a
+state of passive perception to voluntary contemplation, were not
+so dizzying and so tumultuous, this attempt would be less difficult.
+
+IV--HOW THE ANALYSIS SHOULD BE CARRIED ON
+
+Most of the errors of philosophers have arisen from considering
+the human being in a point of view too detailed and circumscribed
+He is not a moral, and an intellectual,--but also, and pre-eminently,
+an imaginative being. His own mind is his law; his own mind is all
+things to him. If we would arrive at any knowledge which should be
+serviceable from the practical conclusions to which it leads, we
+ought to consider the mind of man and the universe as the great
+whole on which to exercise our speculations. Here, above all,
+verbal disputes ought to be laid aside, though this has long been
+their chosen field of battle. It imports little to inquire whether
+thought be distinct from the objects of thought. The use of the
+words EXTERNAL and INTERNAL, as applied to the establishment of this
+distinction, has been the symbol and the source of much dispute.
+This is merely an affair of words, and as the dispute deserves, to
+say, that when speaking of the objects of thought, we indeed only
+describe one of the forms of thought--or that, speaking of thought,
+we only apprehend one of the operations of the universal system of
+beings.
+
+V--CATALOGUE OF THE PHENOMENA OF DREAMS, AS CONNECTING SLEEPING
+AND WAKING
+
+1. Let us reflect on our infancy, and give as faithfully as possible
+a relation of the events of sleep.
+
+And first I am bound to present a faithful picture of my own peculiar
+nature relatively to sleep. I do not doubt that were every individual
+to imitate me, it would be found that among many circumstances
+peculiar to their individual nature, a sufficiently general
+resemblance would be found to prove the connexion existing between
+those peculiarities and the most universal phenomena. I shall employ
+caution, indeed, as to the facts which I state, that they contain
+nothing false or exaggerated. But they contain no more than certain
+elucidations of my own nature; concerning the degree in which
+it resembles, or differs from, that of others, I am by no means
+accurately aware. It is sufficient, however, to caution the reader
+against drawing general inferences from particular instances.
+
+I omit the general instances of delusion in fever or delirium, as
+well as mere dreams considered in themselves. A delineation of this
+subject, however inexhaustible and interesting, is to be passed
+over. What is the connexion of sleeping and of waking?
+
+2. I distinctly remember dreaming three several times, between
+intervals of two or more years, the same precise dream.  It was
+not so much what is ordinarily called a dream; the single image,
+unconnected with all other images, of a youth who was educated at
+the same school with myself, presented itself in sleep. Even now,
+after the lapse of many years, I can never hear the name of this
+youth, without the three places where I dreamed of him presenting
+themselves distinctly to my mind.
+
+3. In dreams, images acquire associations peculiar to dreaming; so
+that the idea of a particular house, when it recurs a second time
+in dreams, will have relation with the idea of the same house, in
+the first time, of a nature entirely different from that which the
+house excites, when seen or thought of in relation to waking ideas.
+
+4. I have beheld scenes, with the intimate and unaccountable
+connexion of which with the obscure parts of my own nature, I
+have been irresistibly impressed. I have beheld a scene which has
+produced no unusual effect on my thoughts. After the lapse of many
+years I have dreamed of this scene. It has hung on my memory, it
+has haunted my thoughts, at intervals, with the pertinacity of an
+object connected with human affections. I have visited this scene
+again. Neither the dream could be dissociated from the landscape,
+nor the landscape from the dream, nor feelings, such as neither
+singly could have awakened, from both.
+
+But the most remarkable event of this nature, which ever occurred
+to me, happened five years ago at Oxford. I was walking with
+a friend, in the neighbourhood of that city, engaged in earnest
+and interesting conversation. We suddenly turned the corner of a
+lane, and the view, which its high banks and hedges had concealed,
+presented itself. The view consisted of a wind-mill, standing
+in one among many plashy meadows, inclosed with stone walls; the
+irregular and broken ground, between the wall and the road on which
+we stood; a long low hill behind the windmill, and a grey covering
+of uniform cloud spread over the evening sky. It was that season
+when the last leaf had just fallen from the scant and stunted ash.
+The scene surely was a common scene; the season and the hour little
+calculated to kindle lawless thought; it was a tame uninteresting
+assemblage of objects, such as would drive the imagination for
+refuge in serious and sober talk, to the evening fireside, and the
+dessert of winter fruits and wine. The effect which it produced on
+me was not such as could have been expected. I suddenly remembered
+to have seen that exact scene in some dream of long--. [Footnote:
+Here I was obliged to leave off, overcome by thrilling horror.]
+
+[1815; publ. 1840]
+
+
+
+
+SPECULATIONS ON MORALS
+
+I--PLAN OF A TREATISE ON MORALS
+
+That great science which regards nature and the operations of
+the human mind, is popularly divided into Morals and Metaphysics.
+The latter relates to a just classification, and the assignment
+of distinct names to its ideas; the former regards simply the
+determination of that arrangement of them which produces the greatest
+and most solid happiness. It is admitted that a virtuous or moral
+action, is that action which, when considered in all its accessories
+and consequences, is fitted to produce the highest pleasure to the
+greatest number of sensitive beings. The laws according to which
+all pleasure, since it cannot be equally felt by all sensitive
+beings, ought to be distributed by a voluntary agent, are reserved
+for a separate chapter.
+
+The design of this little treatise is restricted to the development
+of the elementary principles of morals. As far as regards that
+purpose, metaphysical science will be treated merely so far as a
+source of negative truth; whilst morality will be considered as a
+science, respecting which we can arrive at positive conclusions.
+
+The misguided imaginations of men have rendered the ascertaining of
+what IS NOT TRUE, the principal direct service which metaphysical
+science can bestow upon moral science. Moral science itself is the
+doctrine of the voluntary actions of man, as a sentient and social
+being. These actions depend on the thoughts in his mind. But there
+is a mass of popular opinion, from which the most enlightened persons
+are seldom wholly free, into the truth or falsehood of which it
+is incumbent on us to inquire, before we can arrive at any firm
+conclusions as to the conduct which we ought to pursue in the
+regulation of our own minds, or towards our fellow beings; or before
+we can ascertain the elementary laws, according to which these
+thoughts, from which these actions flow, are originally combined.
+
+The object of the forms according to which human society is administered,
+is the happiness of the individuals composing the communities which
+they regard, and these forms are perfect or imperfect in proportion
+to the degree in which they promote this end.
+
+This object is not merely the quantity of happiness enjoyed by
+individuals as sensitive beings, but the mode in which it should
+be distributed among them as social beings. It is not enough, if
+such a coincidence can be conceived as possible, that one person
+or class of persons should enjoy the highest happiness, whilst
+another is suffering a disproportionate degree of misery. It is
+necessary that the happiness produced by the common efforts, and
+preserved by the common care, should be distributed according to
+the just claims of each individual; if not, although the quantity
+produced should be the same, the end of society would remain
+unfulfilled. The object is in a compound proportion to the quantity
+of happiness produced, and the correspondence of the mode in which
+it is distributed, to the elementary feelings of man as a social
+being.
+
+The disposition in an individual to promote this object is called
+virtue; and the two constituent parts of virtue, benevolence and
+justice, are correlative with these two great portions of the only
+true object of all voluntary actions of a human being. Benevolence
+is the desire to be the author of good, and justice the apprehension
+of the manner in which good ought to be done.
+
+Justice and benevolence result from the elementary laws of the
+human mind.
+
+CHAPTER I ON THE NATURE OF VIRTUE
+
+SECT. 1. General View of the Nature and Objects of Virtue.--2.  The
+Origin and Basis of Virtue, as founded on the Elementary Principles
+of Mind.--3. The Laws which flow from the nature of Mind regulating
+the application of those principles to human actions;--4. Virtue,
+a possible attribute of man.
+
+We exist in the midst of a multitude of beings like ourselves, upon
+whose happiness most of our actions exert some obvious and decisive
+influence.
+
+The regulation of this influence is the object of moral science.
+We know that we are susceptible of receiving painful or pleasurable
+impressions of greater or less intensity and duration. That is called
+good which produces pleasure; that is called evil which produces
+pain. These are general names, applicable to every class of causes,
+from which an overbalance of pain or pleasure may result. But when
+a human being is the active instrument of generating or diffusing
+happiness, the principle through which it is most effectually
+instrumental to that purpose, is called virtue. And benevolence,
+or the desire to be the author of good, united with justice, or
+an apprehension of the manner in which that good is to be done,
+constitutes virtue.
+
+But wherefore should a man be benevolent and just? The immediate
+emotions of his nature, especially in its most inartificial state,
+prompt him to inflict pain, and to arrogate dominion. He desires
+to heap superfluities to his own store, although others perish with
+famine. He is propelled to guard against the smallest invasion of
+his own liberty, though he reduces others to a condition of the most
+pitiless servitude. He is revengeful, proud and selfish. Wherefore
+should he curb these propensities?
+
+It is inquired, for what reason a human being should engage
+in procuring the happiness, or refrain from producing the pain of
+another? When a reason is required to prove the necessity of adopting
+any system of conduct, what is it that the objector demands? He
+requires proof of that system of conduct being such as will most
+effectually promote the happiness of mankind.  To demonstrate this,
+is to render a moral reason. Such is the object of virtue.
+
+A common sophism, which, like many others, depends on the abuse of
+a metaphorical expression to a literal purpose, has produced much
+of the confusion which has involved the theory of morals. It is said
+that no person is bound to be just or kind, if, on his neglect, he
+should fail to incur some penalty. Duty is obligation. There can
+be no obligation without an obliger. Virtue is a law, to which it
+is the will of the lawgiver that we should conform; which will we
+should in no manner be bound to obey, unless some dreadful punishment
+were attached to disobedience. This is the philosophy of slavery
+and superstition.
+
+In fact, no person can be BOUND or OBLIGED, without some power
+preceding to bind and oblige. If I observe a man bound hand and
+foot, I know that some one bound him. But if I observe him returning
+self-satisfied from the performance of some action, by which he has
+been the willing author of extensive benefit, I do not infer that
+the anticipation of hellish agonies, or the hope of heavenly reward,
+has constrained him to such an act.
+
+       .      .      .      .      .       .       .
+
+It remains to be stated in what manner the sensations which
+constitute the basis of virtue originate in the human mind; what
+are the laws which it receives there; how far the principles of
+mind allow it to be an attribute of a human being; and, lastly,
+what is the probability of persuading mankind to adopt it as a
+universal and systematic motive of conduct.
+
+BENEVOLENCE
+
+There is a class of emotions which we instinctively avoid. A human
+being, such as is man considered in his origin, a child a month
+old, has a very imperfect consciousness of the existence of other
+natures resembling itself. All the energies of its being are
+directed to the extinction of the pains with which it is perpetually
+assailed. At length it discovers that it is surrounded by natures
+susceptible of sensations similar to its own. It is very late before
+children attain to this knowledge. If a child observes, without
+emotion, its nurse or its mother suffering acute pain, it is
+attributable rather to ignorance than insensibility. So soon as
+the accents and gestures, significant of pain, are referred to the
+feelings which they express, they awaken in the mind of the beholder
+a desire that they should cease. Pain is thus apprehended to be evil
+for its own sake, without any other necessary reference to the mind
+by which its existence is perceived, than such as is indispensable
+to its perception. The tendencies of our original sensations, indeed,
+all have for their object the preservation of our individual being.
+But these are passive and unconscious. In proportion as the mind
+acquires an active power, the empire of these tendencies becomes
+limited. Thus an infant, a savage, and a solitary beast, is selfish,
+because its mind is incapable of receiving an accurate intimation
+of the nature of pain as existing in beings resembling itself.
+The inhabitant of a highly civilized community will more acutely
+sympathize with the sufferings and enjoyments of others, than
+the inhabitant of a society of a less degree of civilization. He
+who shall have cultivated his intellectual powers by familiarity
+with the highest specimens of poetry and philosophy, will usually
+sympathize more than one engaged in the less refined functions
+of manual labour. Every one has experience of the fact, that to
+sympathize with the sufferings of another, is to enjoy a transitory
+oblivion of his own.
+
+The mind thus acquires, by exercise, a habit, as it were, of
+perceiving and abhorring evil, however remote from the immediate
+sphere of sensations with which that individual mind is conversant.
+Imagination or mind employed in prophetically imaging forth its
+objects, is that faculty of human nature on which every gradation
+of its progress, nay, every, the minutest, change, depends. Pain
+or pleasure, if subtly analysed, will be found to consist entirely
+in prospect. The only distinction between the selfish man and the
+virtuous man is, that the imagination of the former is confined within
+a narrow limit, whilst that of the latter embraces a comprehensive
+circumference. In this sense, wisdom and virtue may be said to be
+inseparable, and criteria of each other. Selfishness is the offspring
+of ignorance and mistake; it is the portion of unreflecting infancy,
+and savage solitude, or of those whom toil or evil occupations
+have blunted or rendered torpid; disinterested benevolence is the
+product of a cultivated imagination, and has an intimate connexion
+with all the arts which add ornament, or dignity, or power,
+or stability to the social state of man. Virtue is thus entirely
+a refinement of civilized life; a creation of the human mind; or,
+rather, a combination which it has made, according to elementary
+rules contained within itself, of the feelings suggested by the
+relations established between man and man.
+
+All the theories which have refined and exalted humanity, or those
+which have been devised as alleviations of its mistakes and evils,
+have been based upon the elementary emotions of disinterestedness,
+which we feel to constitute the majesty of our nature. Patriotism,
+as it existed in the ancient republics, was never, as has been
+supposed, a calculation of personal advantages. When Mutius Scaevola
+thrust his hand into the burning coals, and Regulus returned
+to Carthage, and Epicharis sustained the rack silently, in the
+torments of which she knew that she would speedily perish, rather
+than betray the conspirators to the tyrant [Footnote: Tacitus.];
+these illustrious persons certainly made a small estimate of their
+private interest. If it be said that they sought posthumous fame;
+instances are not wanting in history which prove that men have even
+defied infamy for the sake of good. But there is a great error in
+the world with respect to the selfishness of fame. It is certainly
+possible that a person should seek distinction as a medium of
+personal gratification. But the love of fame is frequently no more
+than a desire that the feelings of others should confirm, illustrate,
+and sympathize with, our own. In this respect it is allied with all
+that draws us out of ourselves. It is the 'last infirmity of noble
+minds'. Chivalry was likewise founded on the theory of self-sacrifice.
+Love possesses so extraordinary a power over the human heart, only
+because disinterestedness is united with the natural propensities.
+These propensities themselves are comparatively impotent in cases
+where the imagination of pleasure to be given, as well as to be
+received, does not enter into the account. Let it not be objected
+that patriotism, and chivalry, and sentimental love, have been the
+fountains of enormous mischief. They are cited only to establish the
+proposition that, according to the elementary principles of mind,
+man is capable of desiring and pursuing good for its own sake.
+
+
+JUSTICE
+
+The benevolent propensities are thus inherent in the human mind.
+We are impelled to seek the happiness of others. We experience
+a satisfaction in being the authors of that happiness. Everything
+that lives is open to impressions or pleasure and pain. We are
+led by our benevolent propensities to regard every human being
+indifferently with whom we come in contact. They have preference
+only with respect to those who offer themselves most obviously
+to our notice. Human beings are indiscriminating and blind; they
+will avoid inflicting pain, though that pain should be attended
+with eventual benefit; they will seek to confer pleasure without
+calculating the mischief that may result. They benefit one at the
+expense of many.
+
+There is a sentiment in the human mind that regulates benevolence
+in its application as a principle of action. This is the sense of
+justice. Justice, as well as benevolence, is an elementary law of
+human nature. It is through this principle that men are impelled
+to distribute any means of pleasure which benevolence may suggest
+the communication of to others, in equal portions among an equal
+number of applicants. If ten men are shipwrecked on a desert island,
+they distribute whatever subsistence may remain to them, into equal
+portions among themselves. If six of them conspire to deprive the
+remaining four of their share, their conduct is termed unjust.
+
+The existence of pain has been shown to be a circumstance which the
+human mind regards with dissatisfaction, and of which it desires
+the cessation. It is equally according to its nature to desire that
+the advantages to be enjoyed by a limited number of persons should
+be enjoyed equally by all. This proposition is supported by the
+evidence of indisputable facts. Tell some ungarbled tale of a number
+of persons being made the victims of the enjoyments of one, and he
+who would appeal in favour of any system which might produce such
+an evil to the primary emotions of our nature, would have nothing
+to reply. Let two persons, equally strangers, make application for
+some benefit in the possession of a third to bestow, and to which
+he feels that they have an equal claim. They are both sensitive
+beings; pleasure and pain affect them alike.
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+It is foreign to the general scope of this little treatise to encumber
+a simple argument by controverting any of the trite objections of
+habit or fanaticism. But there are two; the first, the basis of all
+political mistake, and the second, the prolific cause and effect
+of religious error, which it seems useful to refute.
+
+First, it is inquired, 'Wherefore should a man be benevolent and
+just?' The answer has been given in the preceding chapter.
+
+If a man persists to inquire why he ought to promote the happiness
+of mankind, he demands a mathematical or metaphysical reason for
+a moral action. The absurdity of this scepticism is more apparent,
+but not less real than the exacting a moral reason for a mathematical
+or metaphysical fact. If any person should refuse to admit that all
+the radii of a circle are of equal length, or that human actions
+are necessarily determined by motives, until it could be proved that
+these radii and these actions uniformly tended to the production of
+the greatest general good, who would not wonder at the unreasonable
+and capricious association of his ideas?
+
+The writer of a philosophical treatise may, I imagine, at this
+advanced era of human intellect, be held excused from entering into
+a controversy with those reasoners, if such there are, who would
+claim an exemption from its decrees in favour of any one among those
+diversified systems of obscure opinion respecting morals, which,
+under the name of religions, have in various ages and countries
+prevailed among mankind. Besides that if, as these reasoners have
+pretended, eternal torture or happiness will ensue as the consequence
+of certain actions, we should be no nearer the possession of a
+standard to determine what actions were right and wrong, even if this
+pretended revelation, which is by no means the case, had furnished
+us with a complete catalogue of them. The character of actions as
+virtuous or vicious would by no means be determined alone by the
+personal advantage or disadvantage of each moral agent individually
+considered. Indeed, an action is often virtuous in proportion to
+the greatness of the personal calamity which the author willingly
+draws upon himself by daring to perform it. It is because an
+action produces an overbalance of pleasure or pain to the greatest
+number of sentient beings, and not merely because its consequences
+are beneficial or injurious to the author of that action, that it
+is good or evil. Nay, this latter consideration has a tendency to
+pollute the purity of virtue, inasmuch as it consists in the motive
+rather than in the consequences of an action. A person who should
+labour for the happiness of mankind lest he should be tormented
+eternally in Hell, would, with reference to that motive, possess as
+little claim to the epithet of virtuous, as he who should torture,
+imprison, and burn them alive, a more usual and natural consequence
+of such principles, for the sake of the enjoyments of Heaven.
+
+My neighbour, presuming on his strength, may direct me to perform
+or to refrain from a particular action; indicating a certain arbitrary
+penalty in the event of disobedience within power to inflict.
+My action, if modified by his menaces, can no degree participate
+in virtue. He has afforded me no criterion as to what is right or
+wrong. A king, or an assembly of men, may publish a proclamation
+affixing any penalty to any particular action, but that is not
+immoral because such penalty is affixed. Nothing is more evident
+than that the epithet of virtue is inapplicable to the refraining
+from that action on account of the evil arbitrarily attached to it.
+If the action is in itself beneficial, virtue would rather consist
+in not refraining from it, but in firmly defying the personal
+consequences attached to its performance.
+
+Some usurper of supernatural energy might subdue the whole globe
+to his power; he might possess new and unheard-of resources for
+enduing his punishments with the most terrible attributes or pain.
+The torments of his victims might be intense in their degree,
+and protracted to an infinite duration. Still the 'will of the
+lawgiver' would afford no surer criterion as to what actions were
+right or wrong. It would only increase the possible virtue of those
+who refuse to become the instruments of his tyranny.
+
+II--MORAL SCIENCE CONSISTS IN CONSIDERING THE DIFFERENCE, NOT THE
+RESEMBLANCE, OF PERSONS
+
+The internal influence, derived from the constitution of the mind
+from which they flow, produces that peculiar modification of actions,
+which makes them intrinsically good or evil.
+
+To attain an apprehension of the importance of this distinction,
+let us visit, in imagination, the proceedings of some metropolis.
+Consider the multitude of human beings who inhabit it, and survey,
+in thought, the actions of the several classes into which they are
+divided. Their obvious actions are apparently uniform: the stability
+of human society seems to be maintained sufficiently by the uniformity
+of the conduct of its members, both with regard to themselves,
+and with regard to others.  The labourer arises at a certain hour,
+and applies himself to the task enjoined him. The functionaries
+of government and law are regularly employed in their offices and
+courts. The trader holds a train of conduct from which he never
+deviates. The ministers of religion employ an accustomed language,
+and maintain a decent and equable regard. The army is drawn forth,
+the motions of every soldier are such as they were expected to be;
+the general commands, and his words are echoed from troop to troop.
+The domestic actions of men are, for the most part, undistinguishable
+one from the other, at a superficial glance. The actions which
+are classed under the general appellation of marriage, education,
+friendship, &c., are perpetually going on, and to a superficial
+glance, are similar one to the other.
+
+But, if we would see the truth of things, they must be stripped of
+this fallacious appearance of uniformity. In truth, no one action
+has, when considered in its whole extent, any essential resemblance
+with any other. Each individual, who composes the vast multitude
+which we have been contemplating, has a peculiar frame of mind,
+which, whilst the features of the great mass of his actions remain
+uniform, impresses the minuter lineaments with its peculiar hues.
+Thus, whilst his life, as a whole, is like the lives of other men,
+in detail, it is most unlike; and the more subdivided the actions
+become; that is, the more they enter into that class which have
+a vital influence on the happiness of others and his own, so much
+the more are they distinct from those of other men.
+
+      Those little, nameless, unremembered acts
+          Of kindness and of love,
+
+as well as those deadly outrages which are inflicted by a look,
+a word--or less--the very refraining from some faint and most
+evanescent expression of countenance; these flow from a profounder
+source than the series of our habitual conduct, which, it has
+been already said, derives its origin from without. These are the
+actions, and such as these, which make human life what it is, and
+are the fountains of all the good and evil with which its entire
+surface is so widely and impartially overspread; and though they are
+called minute, they are called so in compliance with the blindness
+of those who cannot estimate their importance. It is in the due
+appreciating the general effects of their peculiarities, and in
+cultivating the habit of acquiring decisive knowledge respecting
+the tendencies arising out of them in particular cases, that the
+most important part of moral science consists. The deepest abyss
+of these vast and multitudinous caverns, it is necessary that we
+should visit.
+
+This is the difference between social and individual man. Not that
+this distinction is to be considered definite, or characteristic
+of one human being as compared with another; it denotes rather two
+classes of agency, common in a degree to every human being. None
+is exempt, indeed, from that species of influence which affects, as
+it were, the surface of his being, and gives the specific outline
+to his conduct. Almost all that is ostensible submits to that
+legislature created by the general representation of the past
+feelings of mankind--imperfect as it is from a variety of causes,
+as it exists in the government, the religion, and domestic habits.
+Those who do not nominally, yet actually, submit to the same power.
+The external features of their conduct, indeed, can no more escape
+it, than the clouds can escape from the stream of the wind; and
+his opinion, which he often hopes he has dispassionately secured
+from all contagion of prejudice and vulgarity, would be found, on
+examination, to be the inevitable excrescence of the very usages
+from which he vehemently dissents. Internally all is conducted
+otherwise; the efficiency, the essence, the vitality of actions,
+derives its colour from what is no ways contributed to from any
+external source. Like the plant which while it derives the accident
+of its size and shape from the soil in which it springs, and is
+cankered, or distorted, or inflated, yet retains those qualities
+which essentially divide it from all others; so that hemlock
+continues to be poison, and the violet does not cease to emit its
+odour in whatever soil it may grow.
+
+We consider our own nature too superficially. We look on all that
+in ourselves with which we can discover a resemblance in others;
+and consider those resemblances as the materials of moral knowledge.
+It is in the differences that it actually consists.
+
+[1815; publ. 1840]
+
+
+
+
+ESSAY ON THE LITERATURE, THE ARTS, AND THE MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS
+
+A FRAGMENT
+
+The period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the
+death of Aristotle, is undoubtedly, whether considered in itself,
+or with reference to the effects which it has produced upon
+the subsequent destinies of civilized man, the most memorable in
+the history of the world. What was the combination of moral and
+political circumstances which produced so unparalleled a progress
+during that period in literature and the arts;--why that progress,
+so rapid and so sustained, so soon received a check, and became
+retrograde,--are problems left to the wonder and conjecture of
+posterity. The wrecks and fragments of those subtle and profound
+minds, like the ruins of a fine statue, obscurely suggest to us the
+grandeur and perfection of the whole. Their very language--a type
+of the understandings of which it was the creation and the image--in
+variety, in simplicity, in flexibility, and in copiousness, excels
+every other language of the western world. Their sculptures are
+such as we, in our presumption, assume to be the models of ideal
+truth and beauty, and to which no artist of modern times can
+produce forms in any degree comparable. Their paintings, according
+to Pliny and Pausanias, were full of delicacy and harmony; and some
+even were powerfully pathetic, so as to awaken, like tender music
+or tragic poetry, the most overwhelming emotions. We are accustomed
+to conceive the painters of the sixteenth century, as those who
+have brought their art to the highest perfection, probably because
+none of the ancient paintings have been preserved. For all the
+inventive arts maintain, as it were, a sympathetic connexion between
+each other, being no more than various expressions of one internal
+power, modified by different circumstances, either of an individual,
+or of society; and the paintings of that period would probably bear
+the same relation as is confessedly borne by the sculptures to all
+succeeding ones. Of their music we know little; but the effects
+which it is said to have produced, whether they be attributed to
+the skill of the composer, or the sensibility of his audience, are
+far more powerful than any which we experience from the music of
+our own times; and if, indeed, the melody of their compositions
+were more tender and delicate, and inspiring, than the melodies of
+some modern European nations, their superiority in this art must
+have been something wonderful, and wholly beyond conception.
+
+Their poetry seems to maintain a very high, though not so
+disproportionate a rank, in the comparison. Perhaps Shakespeare, from
+the variety and comprehension of his genius, is to be considered,
+on the whole, as the greatest individual mind, of which we have
+specimens remaining. Perhaps Dante created imaginations of greater
+loveliness and energy than any that are to be found in the ancient
+literature of Greece. Perhaps nothing has been discovered in the
+fragments of the Greek lyric poets equivalent to the sublime and
+chivalric sensibility of Petrarch.--But, as a poet. Homer must be
+acknowledged to excel Shakespeare in the truth, the harmony, the
+sustained grandeur, the satisfying completeness of his images, their
+exact fitness to the illustration, and to that to which they belong.
+Nor could Dante, deficient in conduct, plan, nature, variety, and
+temperance, have been brought into comparison with these men, but
+for those fortunate isles laden with golden fruit, which alone
+could tempt any one to embark in the misty ocean of his dark and
+extravagant fiction.
+
+But, omitting the comparison of individual minds, which can afford
+no general inference, how superior was the spirit and system of
+their poetry to that of any other period! So that had any other
+genius equal in other respects to the greatest that ever enlightened
+the world, arisen in that age, he would have been superior to all,
+from this circumstance alone--that had conceptions would have assumed
+a more harmonious and perfect form. For it is worthy of observation,
+that whatever the poet of that age produced is as harmonious and
+perfect as possible. In a drama, for instance, were the composition
+of a person of inferior talent, it was still homogeneous and free
+from inequalities it was a whole, consistent with itself. The
+compositions of great minds bore throughout the sustained stamp of
+their greatness. In the poetry of succeeding ages the expectations
+are often exalted on Icarian wings, and fall, too much disappointed
+to give a memory and a name to the oblivious pool in which they
+fell.
+
+In physical knowledge Aristotle and Theophrastus had already--no
+doubt assisted by the labours of those of their predecessor whom
+they criticize--made advances worthy of the maturity of science.
+The astonishing invention of geometry, that series of discoveries
+which have enabled man to command the element and foresee future
+events, before the subjects of his ignorant wonder, and which have
+opened as it were the doors of the mysteries of nature, had already
+been brought to great perfection. Metaphysics, the science of man's
+intimate nature, and logic, or the grammar and elementary principles
+of that science received from the latter philosophers of the Periclean
+age a firm basis. All our more exact philosophy is built upon the
+labours of these great men, and many of the words which we employ
+in metaphysical distinctions were invented by them to give accuracy
+and system to their reasonings. The science of morals, or the
+voluntary conduct of men in relation to themselves or others, dates
+from this epoch. How inexpressibly bolder and more pure were the
+doctrines of those great men, in comparison with the timid maxims
+which prevail in the writings of the most esteemed modern moralists!
+They were such as Phocion, and Epaminondas, and Timoleon, who formed
+themselves on their influence, were to the wretched heroes of our
+own age.
+
+Their political and religious institutions are more difficult to
+bring into comparison with those of other times. A summary idea
+may be formed of the worth of any political and religious system,
+by observing the comparative degree of happiness and of intellect
+produced under its influence. And whilst many institution and
+opinions, which in ancient Greece were obstacles to the improvement
+of the human race, have been abolished among modern nations, how
+many pernicious superstitions and new contrivances of misrule, and
+unheard-of complications of public mischief, have not been invented
+among them by the ever-watchful spirit of avarice and tyranny!
+
+The modern nations of the civilized world owe the progress which
+they have made--as well in those physical sciences in which they
+have already excelled their masters, as in the moral and intellectual
+inquiries, in which, with all the advantage of the experience of
+the latter, it can scarcely be said that they have yet equalled
+them,--to what is called the revival of learning; that is, the study
+of the writers of the age which preceded and immediately followed
+the government of Pericles, or of subsequent writers, who were,
+so to speak, the rivers flowing from those immortal fountains.
+And though there seems to be a principle in the modern world,
+which, should circumstances analogous to those which modelled
+the intellectual resources of the age to which we refer, into so
+harmonious a proportion, again arise, would arrest and perpetuate
+them, and consign their results to a more equal, extensive, and
+lasting improvement of the condition of man--though justice and
+the true meaning of human society are, if not more accurately, more
+generally understood; though perhaps men know more, and therefore
+are more, as a mass, yet this principle has never been called into
+action, and requires indeed a universal and an almost appalling change
+in the system of existing things. The study of modern history is
+the study of kings, financiers, statesmen, and priests. The history
+of ancient Greece is the study of legislators, philosophers,
+and poets; it is the history of men, compared with the history of
+titles. What the Greeks were, was a reality, not a promise. And what
+we are and hope to be, is derived, as it were, from the influence
+and inspiration of these glorious generations.
+
+Whatever tends to afford a further illustration of the manners and
+opinions of those to whom we owe so much, and who were perhaps, on
+the whole, the most perfect specimens of humanity of whom we have
+authentic record, were infinitely valuable. Let us see their errors,
+their weaknesses, their daily actions, their familiar conversation,
+and catch the tone of their society. When we discover how far the
+most admirable community ever framed was removed from that perfection
+to which human society is impelled by some active power within each
+bosom to aspire, how great ought to be our hopes, how resolute our
+struggles! For the Greeks of the Periclean age were widely different
+from us. It is to be lamented that no modern writer has hitherto
+dared to show them precisely as they were. Barthelemi cannot
+be denied the praise of industry and system; but he never forgets
+that he is a Christian and a Frenchman. Wieland, in his delightful
+novels, makes indeed a very tolerable Pagan, but cherishes too many
+political prejudices, and refrains from diminishing the interest of
+his romances by painting sentiments in which no European of modern
+times can possibly sympathize. There is no book which shows the
+Greeks precisely as they were; they seem all written for children
+with the caution that no practice or sentiment, highly inconsistent
+with our present manners, should be mentioned, lest those manners
+should receive outrage and violation. But there are many to whom
+the Greek language is inaccessible, who ought not to be excluded by
+this prudery from possessing an exact and comprehensive conception
+of the history of man; for there is no knowledge concerning what man
+has been and may be, from partaking of which a person can depart,
+without becoming in some degree more philosophical, tolerant, and
+just.
+
+One of the chief distinctions between the manners of ancient Greece
+and modern Europe, consisted in the regulations and the sentiments
+respecting sexual intercourse. Whether this difference arises from
+some imperfect influence of the doctrines of Jesus, who alleges
+the absolute and unconditional equality of all human beings, or
+from the institutions of chivalry, or from a certain fundamental
+difference of physical nature existing in the Celts, or from a
+combination of all or any of these causes acting on each other, is
+a question worthy of voluminous investigation. The fact is, that
+the modern Europeans have in this circumstance, and in the abolition
+of slavery, made an improvement the most decisive in the regulation
+of human society; and all the virtue and the wisdom of the Periclean
+age arose under other institutions, in spite of the diminution
+which personal slavery and the inferiority of women, recognized by
+law and opinion, must have produced in the delicacy, the strength,
+the comprehensiveness, and the accuracy of their conceptions, in
+moral, political, and metaphysical science, and perhaps in every
+other art and science.
+
+The women, thus degraded, became such as it was expected they
+would become. They possessed, except with extraordinary exceptions,
+the habits and the qualities of slaves. They were probably not
+extremely beautiful; at least there was no such disproportion in
+the attractions of the external form between the female and male
+sex among the Greeks, as exists among the modern Europeans. They
+were certainly devoid of that moral and intellectual loveliness
+with which the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of
+sentiment animates, as with another life of overpowering grace,
+the lineaments and the gestures of every form which they inhabit.
+Their eyes could not have been deep and intricate from the workings
+of the mind, and could have entangled no heart in soul-enwoven
+labyrinths.
+
+Let it not be imagined that because the Greeks were deprived of
+its legitimate object, they were incapable of sentimental love; and
+that this passion is the mere child of chivalry and the literature of
+modern times. This object or its archetype for ever exists in the
+mind, which selects among those who resemble it that which most
+resembles it; and instinctively fills up the interstices of the
+imperfect image, in the same manner as the imagination moulds and
+completes the shapes in clouds, or in the fire, into the resemblances
+of whatever form, animal, building, &c., happens to be present to
+it. Man is in his wildest state a social being: a certain degree
+of civilization and refinement ever produces the want of sympathies
+still more intimate and complete; and the gratification of the
+senses is no longer all that is sought in sexual connexion. It
+soon becomes a very small part of that profound and complicated
+sentiment, which we call love, which is rather the universal thirst
+for a communion not only of the senses, but of our whole nature,
+intellectual, imaginative and sensitive, and which, when individualized,
+becomes an imperious necessity, only to be satisfied by the complete
+or partial, actual or supposed fulfilment of its claims. This want
+grows more powerful in proportion to the development which our
+nature receives from civilization, for man never ceases to be a
+social being. The sexual impulse, which is only one, and often a
+small part of those claims, serves, from its obvious and external
+nature, as a kind of type or expression of the rest, a common basis,
+an acknowledged and visible link. Still it is a claim which even
+derives a strength not its own from the accessory circumstances
+which surround it, and one which our nature thirsts to satisfy. To
+estimate this, observe the degree of intensity and durability of
+the love of the male towards the female in animals and savages and
+acknowledge all the duration and intensity observable in the love
+of civilized beings beyond that of savages to be produced from
+other causes. In the susceptibility of the external senses there
+is probably no important difference.
+
+Among the ancient Greeks the male sex, one half of the human race,
+received the highest cultivation and refinement: whilst the other,
+so far as intellect is concerned, were educated as slaves and were
+raised but few degrees in all that related to moral of intellectual
+excellence above the condition of savages. The gradations in the
+society of man present us with slow improvement in this respect.
+The Roman women held a higher consideration in society, and were
+esteemed almost as the equal partners with their husbands in the
+regulation of domestic economy and the education of their children.
+The practices and customs of modern Europe are essentially different
+from and incomparably less pernicious than either, however remote
+from what an enlightened mind cannot fail to desire as the future
+destiny of human beings.
+
+[1818; publ. 1840]
+
+
+
+ON THE SYMPOSIUM, OR PREFACE TO THE BANQUET OF PLATO
+
+A FRAGMENT
+
+The dialogue entitled The Banquet was selected by the translator
+as the most beautiful and perfect among all the works of Plato.
+[Footnote: The Republic, though replete with considerable errors
+of speculation, is, indeed, the greatest repository of important
+truths of all the works of Plato. This, perhaps, is because it is
+the longest. He first, and perhaps last, maintained that a state
+ought to be governed, not by the wealthiest, or the most ambitious,
+or the most cunning, but by the wisest; the method of selecting
+such rulers, and the laws by which such a selection is made, must
+correspond with and arise out of the moral freedom and refinement
+of the people.] He despairs of having communicated to the English
+language any portion of the surpassing graces of the composition,
+or having done more than present an imperfect shadow of the language
+and the sentiment of this astonishing production.
+
+Plato is eminently the greatest among the Greek philosophers, and
+from, or, rather, perhaps through him, his master Socrates, have
+proceeded those emanations of moral and metaphysical knowledge,
+on which a long series and an incalculable variety of popular
+superstitions have sheltered their absurdities from the slow contempt
+of mankind. Plato exhibits the rare union of close and subtle logic
+with the Pythian enthusiasm of poetry, melted by the splendour
+and harmony of his periods into one irresistible stream of musical
+impressions, which hurry the persuasions onward, as in a breathless
+career. His language is that of an immortal spirit, rather than
+a man. Lord Bacon is, perhaps, the only writer, who, in these
+particulars, can be compared with him: his imitator, Cicero, sinks
+in the comparison into an ape mocking the gestures of a man.  His
+views into the nature of mind and existence are often obscure, only
+because they are profound; and though his theories respecting the
+government of the world, and the elementary laws of moral action,
+are not always correct, yet there is scarcely any of his treatises
+which do not, however stained by puerile sophisms, contain the
+most remarkable intuitions into all that can be the subject of the
+human mind. His excellence consists especially in intuition, and
+it is this faculty which raises him far above Aristotle, whose
+genius, though vivid and various, is obscure in comparison with
+that of Plato.
+
+The dialogue entitled the Banquet, is called [word in Greek], or
+a Discussion upon Love, and is supposed to have taken place at the
+house of Agathon, at one of a series of festivals given by that
+poet, on the occasion of his gaining the prize of tragedy at the
+Dionysiaca. The account of the debate on this occasion is supposed
+to have been given by Apollodorus, a pupil of Socrates, many
+years after it had taken place, to a companion who was curious to
+hear it.  This Apollodorus appears, both from the style in which
+he is represented in this piece, as well as from a passage in the
+Phaedon, to have been a person of an impassioned and enthusiastic
+disposition; to borrow an image from the Italian painters, he seems
+to have been the St. John of the Socratic group. The drama (for so
+the lively distinction of character and the various and well-wrought
+circumstances of the story almost entitle it to be called) begins
+by Socrates persuading Aristodemus to sup at Agathon's, uninvited.
+The whole of this introduction affords the most lively conception
+of refined Athenian manners.
+
+[1818; publ. 1840] [UNFINISHED]
+
+
+
+
+A DEFENCE OF POETRY
+
+PART I
+
+According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental
+action, which are called reason and imagination, the former may be
+considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought
+to another, however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon
+those thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composing
+from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within
+itself the principle of its own integrity. The one is the [word
+in Greek], or the principle of synthesis, and has for its objects
+those forms which are common to universal nature and existence
+itself; the other is the [word in Greek], or principle of analysis,
+and its action regards the relations of things, simply as relations;
+considering thoughts, not in their integral unity, but as the
+algebraical representations which conduct to certain general results.
+Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination
+is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately
+and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination
+the similitudes of things.  Reason is to the imagination as the
+instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow
+to the substance.
+
+Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression
+of the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man.
+Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal
+impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing
+wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to
+ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human
+being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise
+than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony,
+by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited
+to the impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could
+accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them,
+in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can
+accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A child at play
+by itself will express its delight by its voice and motions; and
+every inflexion of tone and every gesture will bear exact relation
+to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions which
+awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression;
+and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away,
+so the child seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions the
+duration of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the
+cause. In relation to the objects which delight a child, these
+expressions are, what poetry is to higher objects. The savage (for
+the savage is to ages what the child is to years) expresses the
+emotions produced in him by surrounding objects in a similar manner;
+and language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation,
+become the image of the combined effect of those objects, and of
+his apprehension of them. Man in society, with all his passions and
+his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures
+of man; an additional class of emotions produces an augmented
+treasure of expressions; and language, gesture, and the imitative
+arts, become at once the representation and the medium, the pencil
+and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and the
+harmony. The social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from
+its elements, society results, begin to develop themselves from
+the moment that two human beings coexist; the future is contained
+within the present, as the plant within the seed; and equality,
+diversity, unity, contrast, mutual dependence, become the principles
+alone capable of affording the motives according to which the
+will of a social being is determined to action, inasmuch as he is
+social; and constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment,
+beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of
+kind. Hence men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certain
+order in their words and actions, distinct from that of the objects
+and the impressions represented by them, all expression being
+subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds. But let us
+dismiss those more general considerations which might involve an
+inquiry into the principles of society itself, and restrict our
+view to the manner in which the imagination is expressed upon its
+forms.
+
+In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural
+objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain
+rhythm or order. And, although all men observe a similar, they
+observe not the same order, in the motions of the dance, in the
+melody of the song, in the combinations of language, in the series
+of their imitations of natural objects. For there is a certain
+order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of mimetic
+representation, from which the hearer and the spectator receive
+an intenser and purer pleasure than from any other: the sense
+of an approximation to this order has been called taste by modern
+writers.  Every man in the infancy of art observes an order which
+approximates more or less closely to that from which this highest
+delight results: but the diversity is not sufficiently marked, as
+that its gradations should be sensible, except in those instances
+where the predominance of this faculty of approximation to the
+beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the relation between
+this highest pleasure and its cause) is very great. Those in whom
+it exists in excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the
+word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they
+express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds,
+communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort or reduplication
+from that community. Their language is vitally metaphorical; that
+is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and
+perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent
+them become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts
+instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets
+should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus
+disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of
+human intercourse. These similitudes or relations are finely said
+by Lord Bacon to be 'the same footsteps of nature impressed upon
+the various subjects of the world'; [Footnote: De Augment. Scient.,
+cap. i, lib.  iii.] and he considers the faculty which perceives
+them as the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge. In the
+infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because
+language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the
+true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the
+relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and
+secondly between perception and expression. Every original language
+near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the
+copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the
+works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of
+the creations of poetry.
+
+But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible
+order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the
+dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the
+institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the
+inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a
+certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial
+apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is
+called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or
+susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of
+false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and
+nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs
+of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises
+and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely
+the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which
+present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in
+the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the
+fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in
+the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as
+surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence
+of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy,
+rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participates
+in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to
+his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical
+forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons,
+and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the
+highest poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses of
+Aeschylus, and the book of Job, and Dante's Paradise, would afford,
+more than any other writings, examples of this fact, if the limits
+of this essay did not forbid citation. The creations of sculpture,
+painting, and music, are illustrations still more decisive.
+
+Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action,
+are all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called
+poetry by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a
+synonym of the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses
+those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language,
+which are created by that imperial faculty; whose throne is curtained
+within the invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature
+itself of language, which is a more direct representation of the
+actions and passions of our internal being, and is susceptible
+of more various and delicate combinations, than colour, form, or
+motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the control of that
+faculty of which it is the creation. For language is arbitrarily
+produced by the imagination and has relation to thoughts alone;
+but all other materials, instruments and conditions of art, have
+relations among each other, which limit and interpose between
+conception and expression The former is as a mirror which reflects,
+the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of which both are
+mediums of communication. Hence the fame of sculptors, painters,
+and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of the great masters
+of these arts may yield in no degree to that of those who have
+employed language as the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has never
+equalled that of poets in the restricted sense of the term, as
+two performers of equal skill will produce unequal effects from a
+guitar and a harp. The fame of legislators and founders of religions,
+so long as their institutions last, alone seems to exceed that of
+poets in the restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a question,
+whether, if we deduct the celebrity which their flattery of the
+gross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with
+that which belonged to them in their higher character of poets,
+any excess will remain.
+
+We have thus circumscribed the word poetry within the limits of that
+art which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of
+the faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make the circle
+still narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured
+and unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose and
+verse is inadmissible in accurate philosophy.
+
+Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other
+and towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order
+of those relations has always been found connected with a perception
+of the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of
+poets has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence
+of sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely
+less indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the
+words themselves, without reference to that peculiar order. Hence
+the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a
+crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour
+and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the
+creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed,
+or it will bear no flower--and this is the burthen of the curse of
+Babel.
+
+An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony
+in the language of poetical minds, together with its relation to
+music, produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of
+harmony and language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet
+should accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the
+harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. The practice is indeed
+convenient and popular, and to be preferred, especially in such
+composition as includes much action: but every great poet must
+inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the
+exact structure of his peculiar versification. The distinction
+between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error. The distinction
+between philosophers and poets has been anticipated. Plato was
+essentially a poet--the truth and splendour of his imagery, and the
+melody of his language, are the most intense that it is possible
+to conceive. He rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and
+lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts
+divested of shape and action, and he forbore to invent any regular
+plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate forms, the
+varied pauses of his style. Cicero sought to imitate the cadence
+of his periods, but with little success. Lord Bacon was a poet.
+[Footnote: See the Filum Labyrinthi, and the Essay on Death
+particularly]. His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which
+satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom
+of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which
+distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader's mind,
+and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element
+with which it has perpetual sympathy. All the authors of revolutions
+in opinion are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors,
+nor even as their words unveil the permanent analogy of things
+by images which participate in the life of truth; but as their
+periods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in themselves
+the elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music. Nor are
+those supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms of rhythm
+on account of the form and action of their subjects, less capable
+of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than those who
+have omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (to confine
+ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest
+power.
+
+A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.
+There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story
+is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connexion
+than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the
+creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human
+nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself
+the image of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies only
+to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events
+which can never again recur; the other is universal, and contains
+within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions
+have place in the possible varieties of human nature. Time, which
+destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts,
+stripped of the poetry which should invest them, augments that of
+poetry, and for ever develops new and wonderful applications of the
+eternal truth which it contains. Hence epitomes have been called
+the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it. A story
+of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that
+which should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful
+that which is distorted.
+
+The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition
+as a whole being a poem. A single sentence may be a considered as
+a whole, though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated
+portions: a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable
+thought. And thus all the great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch,
+Livy, were poets; and although, the plan of these writers, especially
+that of Livy, restrained them; from developing this faculty in
+its highest degree, they made copious and ample amends for their
+subjection, by filling all the interstices of their subjects with
+living images.
+
+Having determined what is poetry, and who are poets, let us proceed
+to estimate its effects upon society.
+
+Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it
+falls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with
+its delight. In the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves
+nor their auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry:
+for it acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above
+consciousness; and it is reserved for future generations to contemplate
+and measure the mighty cause and effect in all the strength and
+splendour of their union. Even in modern times, no living poet ever
+arrived at the fullness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgement
+upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed
+of his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the selectest of
+the wise of many generations. A poet is a nightingale, who sits
+in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds;
+his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen
+musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not
+whence or why. The poems of Homer and his contemporaries were the
+delight of infant Greece; they were the elements of that social
+system which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization
+has reposed. Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in
+human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses
+were awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector,
+and Ulysses the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and
+persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in
+these immortal creations: the sentiments of the auditors must have
+been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovely
+impersonations, until from admiring they imitated, and from imitation
+they identified themselves with the objects of their admiration.
+Nor let it be objected, that these characters are remote from moral
+perfection, and that they can by no means be considered as edifying
+patterns for general imitation. Every epoch, under names more
+or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is the
+naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age; and Self-deceit
+is the veiled image of unknown evil, before which luxury and satiety
+lie prostrate. But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries
+as a temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and
+which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of their
+beauty. An epic or dramatic personage is understood to wear them
+around his soul, as he may the ancient armour or the modern uniform
+around his body; whilst it is easy to conceive a dress more graceful
+than either. The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far
+concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its
+form shall communicate itself to the very disguise, and indicate
+the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic
+form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most
+barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets of the highest class
+have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its
+naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful whether the alloy
+of costume, habit, &c., be not necessary to temper this planetary
+music for mortal ears.
+
+The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests
+upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce
+the moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements
+which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes
+examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable
+doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive,
+and subjugate one another. But poetry acts in another and diviner
+manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it
+the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.
+Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes
+familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all
+that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian
+light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once
+contemplated them as memorials of that gentle and exalted content
+which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it
+coexists. The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our
+own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful
+which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man,
+to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he
+must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the
+pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great
+instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers
+to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the
+circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thought of
+ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating
+to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals
+and interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. Poetry
+strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature
+of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet
+therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and
+wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical
+creations, which participate in neither By this assumption of the
+inferior office of interpreting the effect in which perhaps after
+all he might acquit himself but imperfectly, he would resign a
+glory in a participation in the cause. There was little danger that
+Homer, or any of the eternal poets should have so far misunderstood
+themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their widest dominion.
+Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense,
+as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected a
+moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact
+proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to this
+purpose.
+
+
+
+Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval
+by the dramatic and lyrical poets of Athens, who flourished
+contemporaneously with all that is most perfect in the kindred
+expressions of the poetical faculty; architecture, painting, music
+the dance, sculpture, philosophy, and, we may add, the forms of
+civil life. For although the scheme of Athenian society was deformed
+by many imperfections which the poetry existing in chivalry and
+Christianity has erased from the habits and institutions of modern
+Europe; yet never at any other period has so much energy, beauty,
+and virtue, been developed; never was blind strength and stubborn
+form so disciplined and rendered subject to the will of man, or
+that will less repugnant to the dictates of the beautiful and the
+true, as during the century which preceded the death of Socrates.
+Of no other epoch in the history of our species have we records
+and fragments stamped so visibly with the image of the divinity in
+man. But it is poetry alone, in form, in action, or in language,
+which has rendered this epoch memorable above all others, and the
+storehouse of examples to everlasting time. For written poetry
+existed at that epoch simultaneously with the other arts, and it is
+an idle inquiry to demand which gave and which received the light,
+which all, as from a common focus, have scattered over the darkest
+periods of succeeding time. We know no more of cause and effect than
+a constant conjunction of events: poetry is ever found to coexist
+with whatever other arts contribute to the happiness and perfection
+of man. I appeal to what has already been established to distinguish
+between the cause and the effect.
+
+It was at the period here adverted to, that the drama had its birth;
+and however a succeeding writer may have equalled or surpassed
+those few great specimens of the Athenian drama which have been
+preserved to us, it is indisputable that the art itself never was
+understood or practised according to the true philosophy of it,
+as at Athens. For the Athenians employed language, action, music,
+painting, the dance, and religious institutions, to produce a common
+effect in the representation of the highest idealisms of passion
+and of power; each division in the art was made perfect in its kind
+by artists of the most consummate skill, and was disciplined into
+a beautiful proportion and unity one towards the other. On the modern
+stage a few only of the elements capable of expressing the image
+of the poet's conception are employed at once. We have tragedy
+without music and dancing; and music and dancing without the highest
+impersonations of which they are the fit accompaniment, and both
+without religion and solemnity. Religious institution has indeed
+been usually banished from the stage. Our system of divesting the
+actor's face of a mask, on which the many expressions appropriated
+to his dramatic character might be moulded into one permanent
+and unchanging expression, is favourable only to a partial and
+inharmonious effect; it is fit for nothing but a monologue, where
+all the attention may be directed to some great master of ideal
+mimicry. The modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy,
+though liable to great abuse in point of practice, is undoubtedly
+an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should be
+as in KING LEAR, universal, ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the
+intervention of this principle which determines the balance in
+favour of KING LEAR against the OEDIPUS TYRANNUS or the AGAMEMNON,
+or, if you will, the trilogies with which they are connected; unless
+the intense power of the choral poetry, especially that of the
+latter, should be considered as restoring the equilibrium. KING
+LEAR, if it can sustain this comparison, may be judged to be the
+most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world;
+in spite of the narrow conditions to which the poet was subjected
+by the ignorance of the philosophy of the drama which has prevailed
+in modern Europe. Calderon, in his religious AUTOS, has attempted
+to fulfil some of the high conditions of dramatic representation
+neglected by Shakespeare; such as the establishing a relation
+between the drama and religion and the accommodating them to music
+and dancing; but he omits the observation of conditions still
+more important, and more is lost than gained by the substitution
+of the rigidly-defined and ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted
+superstition for the living impersonations of the truth of human
+passion.
+
+But I digress.--The connexion of scenic exhibitions with the
+improvement or corruption of the manners of men, has been universally
+recognized: in other words, the presence or absence of poetry in
+its most perfect and universal form, has been found to be connected
+with good and evil in conduct or habit. The corruption which has
+been imputed to the drama as an effect, begins when the poetry
+employed in its constitution ends: I appeal to the history of manners
+whether the periods of the growth of the one and the decline of the
+other have not corresponded with an exactness equal to any example
+of moral cause and effect.
+
+The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have approached
+to its perfection, ever co-existed with the moral and intellectual
+greatness of the age. The tragedies of the Athenian poets are
+as mirrors in which the spectator beholds himself, under a thin
+disguise of circumstance, stript of all but that ideal perfection
+and energy which every one feels to be the internal type of all that
+he loves, admires, and would become. The imagination is enlarged
+by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they distend
+in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived;
+the good affections are strengthened by pity, indignation, terror,
+and sorrow; and an exalted calm is prolonged from the satiety of
+this high exercise of them into the tumult of familiar life: even
+crime is disarmed of half its horror and all its contagion by being
+represented as the fatal consequence of the unfathomable agencies
+of nature; error is thus divested of its wilfulness; men can no
+longer cherish it as the creation of their choice. In a drama of
+the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it
+teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect. Neither the eye
+nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it
+resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry, is
+as a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the brightest
+rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from the
+simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with majesty
+and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it with
+the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall.
+
+But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes
+with that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of
+the great masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious
+accompaniment of the kindred arts; and often the very form
+misunderstood, or a weak attempt to teach certain doctrines, which
+the writer considers as moral truths; and which are usually no
+more than specious flatteries of some gross vice or weakness, with
+which the author, in common with his auditors, are infected. Hence
+what has been called the classical and domestic drama. Addison's
+CATO is a specimen of the one; and would it were not superfluous
+to cite examples of the other! To such purposes poetry cannot be
+made subservient. Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed,
+which consumes the scabbard that would contain it. And thus we
+observe that all dramatic writings of this nature are unimaginative
+in a singular degree; they affect sentiment and passion, which,
+divested of imagination, are other names for caprice and appetite.
+The period in our own history of the grossest degradation of the
+drama is the reign of Charles II, when all forms in which poetry
+had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the triumph of
+kingly power over liberty and virtue. Milton stood alone illuminating
+an age unworthy of him. At such periods the calculating principle
+pervades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry ceases
+to be expressed upon them. Comedy loses its ideal universality:
+wit succeeds to humour; we laugh from self-complacency and triumph,
+instead of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt, succeed to
+sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we Obscenity, which
+is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from
+the very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: it
+is a monster for which the corruption of society for ever brings
+forth new food, which it devours in secret.
+
+The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes
+of expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any
+other, the connexion of poetry and social good is more observable
+in the drama than in whatever other form. And it is indisputable
+that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded
+with the highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the
+extinction of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished,
+is a mark of a corruption of manners and an extinction of the
+energies which sustain the soul of social life. But, as Machiavelli
+says of political institutions, that life may be preserved and
+renewed, if men should arise capable of bringing back the drama
+to its principles. And this is true with respect to poetry in its
+most extended sense: all language, institution and form, require not
+only to be produced but to be sustained: the office and character
+of a poet participates in the divine nature as regards providence,
+no less than as regards creation.
+
+Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance first of
+the Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms, were so many symbols
+of the extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in Greece.
+The bucolic writers, who found patronage under the lettered tyrants
+of Sicily and Egypt, were the latest representatives of its most
+glorious reign. Their poetry is intensely melodious, like the odour
+of the tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess
+of sweetness; whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as a
+meadow-gale of June, which mingles the fragrance all the flowers
+of the field, and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its
+own, which endows the sense with a power of sustaining its extreme
+delight. The bucolic and erotic delicacy in written poetry is
+correlative with that softness in statuary, music and the kindred
+arts, and even in manners and institutions, which distinguished the
+epoch to which I now refer. Nor is it the poetical faculty itself,
+or any misapplication of it, to which this want of harmony is to
+be imputed. An equal sensibility to the influence of the senses
+and the affections is to be found in the writings of Homer and
+Sophocles: the former, especially, has clothed sensual and pathetic
+images with irresistible attractions. Their superiority over these
+succeeding writers consists in the presence of those thoughts which
+belong to the inner faculties of our nature, not in the absence
+of those which are connected with the external: their incomparable
+perfection consists in a harmony of the union of all.  It is not
+what the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which their
+imperfection consists. It is not inasmuch as they were poets, but
+inasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be considered with
+any plausibility as connected with the corruption of their age. Had
+that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility
+to pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which is imputed to them
+as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been achieved.
+For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility
+to pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the
+imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself
+thence as a paralysing venom, through the affections into the very
+appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense
+survives. At the approach of such a period, poetry ever addresses
+itself to those faculties which are the last to be destroyed, and
+its voice is heard, like the footsteps of Astraea, departing from
+the world. Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which men
+are capable of receiving: it is ever still the light of life; the
+source of whatever of beautiful or generous or true can have place
+in an evil time. It will readily be confessed that those among the
+luxurious citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria, who were delighted
+with the poems of Theocritus, were less cold, cruel, and sensual
+than the remnant of their tribe. But corruption must utterly have
+destroyed the fabric of human society before poetry can ever cease.
+The sacred links of that chain have never been entirely disjoined,
+which descending through the minds of many men is attached to those
+great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence is
+sent forth, which at once connects, animates, and sustains the life
+of all. It is the faculty which contains within itself the seeds
+at once of its own and of social renovation.  And let us not
+circumscribe the effects of the bucolic and erotic poetry within
+the limits of the sensibility of those to whom it was addressed.
+They may have perceived the beauty of those immortal compositions,
+simply as fragments and isolated portions: those who are more
+finely organized, or born in a happier age, may recognize them as
+episodes to that great poem, which all poets, like the cooperating
+thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of
+the world.
+
+The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in ancient
+Rome; but the actions and forms of its social life never seem to
+have been perfectly saturated with the poetical element. The Romans
+appear to have considered the Greeks as the selectest treasuries
+of the selectest forms of manners and of nature, and to have
+abstained from creating in measured language, sculpture, music, or
+architecture, anything which might bear a particular relation to
+their own condition, whilst it should bear a general one to the
+universal constitution of the world. But we judge from partial
+evidence, and we judge perhaps partially Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius,
+and Accius, all great poets, have been lost. Lucretius is in the
+highest, and Virgil in a very high sense, a creator. The chosen
+delicacy of expressions of the latter, are as a mist of light which
+conceal from us the intense and exceeding truth of his conceptions
+of nature. Livy is instinct with poetry. Yet Horace, Catullus,
+Ovid, and generally the other great writers of the Virgilian age,
+saw man and nature in the mirror of Greece. The institutions also,
+and the religion of Rome were less poetical than those of Greece,
+as the shadow is less vivid than the substance. Hence poetry in
+Rome, seemed to follow, rather than accompany, the perfection of
+political and domestic society. The true poetry of Rome lived in
+its institutions; for whatever of beautiful, true, and majestic,
+they contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which creates
+the order in which they consist. The life of Camillus, the death of
+Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their godlike state,
+of the victorious Gauls: the refusal of the republic to make peace
+with Hannibal, after the battle of Cannae, were not the consequences
+of a refined calculation of the probable personal advantage to
+result from such a rhythm and order in the shows of life, to those
+who were at once the poets and the actors of these immortal dramas.
+The imagination beholding the beauty of this order, created it out
+of itself according to its own idea; the consequence was empire,
+and the reward everliving fame. These things are not the less poetry
+quid carent vate sacro. They are the episodes of that cyclic poem
+written by Time upon the memories of men. The Past, like an inspired
+rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations with their
+harmony.
+
+At length the ancient system of religion and manners had fulfilled
+the circle of its revolutions. And the world would have fallen into
+utter anarchy and darkness, but that there were found poets among
+the authors of the Christian and chivalric systems of manners and
+religion, who created forms of opinion and action never before
+conceived; which, copied into the imaginations of men, become as
+generals to the bewildered armies of their thoughts. It is foreign
+to the present purpose to touch upon the evil produced by these
+systems: except that we protest, on the ground of the principles
+already established, that no portion of it can be attributed to
+the poetry they contain.
+
+It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, and
+Isaiah, had produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his
+disciples. The scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographers
+of this extraordinary person, are all instinct with the most vivid
+poetry. But his doctrines seem to have been quickly distorted.
+At a certain period after the prevalence of a system of opinions
+founded upon those promulgated by him, the three forms into which
+Plato had distributed the faculties of mind underwent a sort of
+apotheosis, and became the object of the worship of the civilized
+world. Here it is to be confessed that 'Light seems to thicken,'
+and
+
+       The crow makes wing to the rooky wood,
+       Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
+       And night's black agents to their preys do rouze.
+
+But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and
+blood of this fierce chaos! how the world, as from a resurrection,
+balancing itself on the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has
+reassumed its yet unwearied flight into the heaven of time. Listen
+to the music, unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and
+invisible wind, nourishing its everlasting course with strength
+and swiftness.
+
+The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology and
+institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman empire, outlived
+the darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and
+victory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and
+opinion. It is an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to
+the Christian doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations.
+Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprang from the
+extinction of the poetical principle, connected with the progress
+of despotism and superstition. Men, from causes too intricate to be
+here discussed, had become insensible and selfish: their own will
+had become feeble, and yet they were its slaves, and thence the
+slaves of the will of others: lust, fear, avarice, cruelty, and
+fraud, characterized a race amongst whom no one was to be found
+capable of CREATING in form, language, or institution. The moral
+anomalies of such a state of society are not justly to be charged
+upon any class of events immediately connected with them, and those
+events are most entitled to our approbation which could dissolve
+it most expeditiously. It is unfortunate for those who cannot
+distinguish words from thoughts, that many of these anomalies have
+been incorporated into our popular religion.
+
+It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the
+poetry of the Christian and chivalric systems began to manifest
+themselves.  The principle of equality had been discovered and
+applied by Plato in his Republic, as the theoretical rule of the
+mode in which the materials of pleasure and of power, produced by
+the common skill and labour of human beings, ought to be distributed
+among them. The limitations of this rule were asserted by him
+to be determined only by the sensibility of each, or the utility
+to result to all. Plato, following the doctrines of Timaeus and
+Pythagoras, taught also a moral and intellectual system of doctrine,
+comprehending at once the past, the present, and the future condition
+of man. Jesus Christ divulged the sacred and eternal truths contained
+in these views to mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract purity,
+became the exoteric expression of the esoteric doctrines of the
+poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The incorporation of the Celtic
+nations with the exhausted population of the south, impressed
+upon it the figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and
+institutions. The result was a sum of the action and reaction of
+all the causes included in it; for it may be assumed as a maxim that
+no nation or religion can supersede any other without incorporating
+into itself a portion of that which it supersedes. The abolition of
+personal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of women from
+a great part of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were among
+the consequences of these events.
+
+The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest
+political hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive.
+The freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love.  Love
+became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present.
+It was as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed
+with life and motion, and had walked forth among their worshippers;
+so that earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner world.
+The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful
+and heavenly, and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of
+Eden. And as this creation itself is poetry, so its creators were
+poets; and language was the instrument of their art: 'Galeotto fu
+il libro, e chi lo scrisse.' The Provencal Trouveurs, or inventors,
+preceded Petrarch, whose verses are as spells, which unseal the
+inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is in the grief of
+love. It is impossible to feel them without becoming a portion of
+that beauty which we contemplate: it were superfluous to explain
+how the gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with these
+sacred emotions can render men more amiable, more generous and wise,
+and lift them out of the dull vapours of the little world of self.
+Dante understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch.
+His Vita Nuova is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment
+and language: it is the idealized history of that period, and those
+intervals of his life which were dedicated to love. His apotheosis
+of Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of his own love and her
+loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended
+to the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious imagination
+of modern poetry. The acutest critics have justly reversed the
+judgement of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the
+'Divine Drama', in the measure of the admiration which they accord
+to the Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The latter is a perpetual
+hymn of everlasting love. Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato
+alone of all the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the
+greatest writers of the renovated world; and the music has penetrated
+the caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance
+of arms and superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso,
+Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers
+of our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, planting
+as it were trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory
+over sensuality and force. The true relation borne to each other
+by the sexes into which human kind is distributed, has become
+less misunderstood; and if the error which confounded diversity
+with inequality of the powers of the two sexes has been partially
+recognized in the opinions and institutions of modern Europe, we
+owe this great benefit to the worship of which chivalry was the
+law, and poets the prophets.
+
+The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over
+the stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient world. The
+distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival
+Milton have idealized, are merely the mask and the mantle in which
+these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised.
+It is a difficult question to determine how far they were conscious
+of the distinction which must have subsisted in their minds between
+their own creeds and that of the people. Dante at least appears to
+wish to mark the full extent of it by placing Riphaeus, whom Virgil
+calls justissimns unus, in Paradise, and observing a most heretical
+caprice in his distribution of rewards and punishments. And Milton's
+poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that
+system, of which by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been
+a chief popular support. Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence
+of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a
+mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the
+popular personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning,
+and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest
+anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial
+in a slave are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed
+by much that ennobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked by
+all that dishonours his conquest in the victor. Milton's Devil as
+a moral being is as far superior to his God, as one who perseveres
+in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of
+adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted
+triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from
+any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in
+enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve
+new torments. Milton has so far violated the popular creed (if this
+shall be judged to be a violation) as to have alleged no superiority
+of moral virtue to his God over his Devil. And this bold neglect of
+a direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof of the supremacy
+of Milton's genius.  He mingled as it were the elements of human
+nature as colours upon a single pallet, and arranged them in the
+composition of his great picture according to the laws of epic
+truth; that is, according to the laws of that principle by which a
+series of actions of the external universe and of intelligent and
+ethical beings is calculated to excite the sympathy of succeeding
+generations of mankind. The Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost have
+conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form; and when change
+and time shall have added one more superstition to the mass of
+those which have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators
+will be learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral
+Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped
+with the eternity of genius.
+
+Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet: that is,
+the second poet, the series of whose creations bore a defined and
+intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion
+of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it:
+developing itself in correspondence with their development. For
+Lucretius had limed the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of
+the sensible world; and Virgil, with a modesty that ill became his
+genius, had affected the fame of an imitator, even whilst he created
+anew all that he copied; and none among the flock of mock-birds,
+though their notes were sweet, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber,
+Nonnus, Lucan, Statius, or Claudian, have sought even to fulfil
+a single condition of epic truth. Milton was the third epic poet.
+For if the title of epic in its highest sense be refused to the
+Aeneid, still less can it be conceded to the Orlando Furioso, the
+Gerusalemme Liberata, the Lusiad, or the Fairy Queen.
+
+Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the ancient
+religion of the civilized world; and its spirit exists in their
+poetry probably in the same proportion as its forms survived in
+the unreformed worship of modern Europe. The one preceded and the
+other followed the Reformation at almost equal intervals. Dante
+was the first religious reformer, and Luther surpassed him rather
+in the rudeness and acrimony, than in the boldness of his censures
+of papal usurpation. Dante was the first awakener of entranced
+Europe; he created a language, in itself music and persuasion, out
+of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms. He was the congregator of
+those great spirits who presided over the resurrection of learning;
+the Lucifer of that starry flock which in the thirteenth century
+shone forth from republican Italy, as from a heaven, into the
+darkness of the benighted world. His very words are instinct with
+spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable
+thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth, and
+pregnant with a lightning which has yet found no conductor. All
+high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained
+all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the
+inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A great poem
+is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and
+delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all its
+divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to
+share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever
+developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight.
+
+The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch, and
+Boccaccio, was characterized by a revival of painting, sculpture,
+and architecture. Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, and the
+superstructure of English literature is based upon the materials
+of Italian invention.
+
+But let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical history
+of poetry and its influence on society. Be it enough to have pointed
+out the effects of poets, in the large and true sense of the word,
+upon their own and all succeeding times.
+
+But poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners
+and mechanists, on another plea. It is admitted that the exercise
+of the imagination is most delightful, but it is alleged that that
+of reason is more useful. Let us examine as the grounds of this
+distinction, what is here meant by utility. Pleasure or good, in a
+general sense, is that which the consciousness of a sensitive and
+intelligent being seeks, and in which, when found, it acquiesces.
+There are two kinds of pleasure, one durable, universal and
+permanent; the other transitory and particular. Utility may either
+express the means of producing the former or the latter. In the
+former sense, whatever strengthens and purifies the affections,
+enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. But
+a narrower meaning may be assigned to the word utility, confining
+it to express that which banishes the importunity of the wants of
+our animal nature, the surrounding men with security of life, the
+dispersing the grosser delusions of superstition, and the conciliating
+such a degree of mutual forbearance among men as may consist with
+the motives of personal advantage.
+
+Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, have
+their appointed office in society. They follow the footsteps of
+poets, and copy the sketches of their creations into the book of
+common life. They make space, and give time. Their exertions are
+of the highest value, so long as they confine their administration
+of the concerns of the inferior powers of our nature within the
+limits due to the superior ones. But whilst the sceptic destroys
+gross superstitions, let him spare to deface, as some of the
+French writers have defaced, the eternal truths charactered upon
+the imaginations of men. Whilst the mechanist abridges, and the
+political economist combines labour, let them beware that their
+speculations, for want of correspondence with those first principles
+which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have in
+modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and
+want. They have exemplified the saying, 'To him that hath, more
+shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little that he hath
+shall be taken away.' The rich have become richer, and the poor
+have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between
+the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are the
+effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the
+calculating faculty.
+
+It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the
+definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an
+inexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature,
+the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures
+of the superior portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish,
+despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation
+to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this
+principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure
+which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy
+which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that
+is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. And
+hence the saying, 'It is better to go to the house of mourning, than
+to the house of mirth.' Not that this highest species of pleasure
+is necessarily linked with pain. The delight of love and friendship,
+the ecstasy of the admiration of nature, the joy of the perception
+and still more of the creation of poetry, is often wholly unalloyed.
+
+The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense
+is true utility. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are
+poets or poetical philosophers.
+
+The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, [Footnote:
+Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was essentially a
+poet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere reasoners.] and their
+disciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled
+to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree
+of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have
+exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would have
+been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women,
+and children, burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment have
+been congratulating each other on the abolition of the Inquisition
+in Spain. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have
+been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch,
+Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton,
+had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been
+born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival
+of the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no
+monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if
+the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished
+together with its belief. The human mind could never, except by
+the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the
+invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical
+reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted
+to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative
+faculty itself.
+
+We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know
+how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical
+knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the
+produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought,
+is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes.
+There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best
+in morals, government, and political economy, or at least, what
+is wiser and better than what men now practise and endure. But we
+let '_I_ DARE NOT wait upon I WOULD, like the poor cat in the adage.'
+We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we
+want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the
+poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have
+eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences
+which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the
+external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally
+circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved
+the elements, remains himself a slave. To what but a cultivation
+of the mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to the presence
+of the creative faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge,
+is to be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging and
+combining labour, to the exasperation of the inequality of mankind?
+From what other cause has it arisen that the discoveries which should
+have lightened, have added a weight to the curse imposed on Adam?
+Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible,
+incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.
+
+The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold; by one it
+creates new materials of knowledge and power and pleasure; by the
+other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange
+them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called
+the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more
+to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish
+and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of
+external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them
+to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too
+unwieldy for that which animates it.
+
+Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and
+circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science,
+and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same
+time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is
+that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that
+which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds
+from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the
+scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface
+and bloom of all things; it is as the odour and the colour of the
+rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form
+and splendour of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and
+corruption. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship--what
+were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; what
+were our consolations on this side of the grave--and what were our
+aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and
+fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of
+calculation dare not ever soar?  Poetry is not like reasoning, a
+power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A
+man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot
+say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some
+invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory
+brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a
+flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious
+portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or
+its departure.  Could this influence be durable in its original
+purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the
+results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the
+decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated
+to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions
+of the poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day,
+whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of
+poetry are produced by labour and study. The toil and the delay
+recommended by critics, can be justly interpreted to mean no more
+than a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial
+connexion of the spaces between their suggestions by the intertexture
+of conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by the
+limitedness of the poetical faculty itself; for Milton conceived
+the Paradise Lost as a whole before he executed it in portions; We
+have his own authority also for the muse having 'dictated' to him
+the 'unpremeditated song'. And let this be an answer to those who
+would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of
+the Orlando Furioso. Compositions so produced are to poetry what
+mosaic is to painting. This instinct and intuition of the poetical
+faculty, is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts;
+a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as
+a child in the mother's womb; and the very mind which directs the
+hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the
+origin, the gradations, or the media of the process.
+
+Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest
+and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought
+and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes
+regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen
+and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all
+expression; so that even in the desire and regret they leave, there
+cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature
+of its object. It is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner
+nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind
+over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain
+only, as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corresponding
+conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the
+most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the
+state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire.
+The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship,
+is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last,
+self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not
+only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined
+organization, but they can colour all that they combine with the
+evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the
+representation of a scene or a passion, will touch the enchanted
+chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these
+emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past.
+Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in
+the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the
+interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form,
+sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy
+to those with whom their sisters abide--abide, because there is
+no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they
+inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the
+visitations of the divinity in man.
+
+Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that
+which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most
+deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure,
+eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke,
+all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and
+every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed
+by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it
+breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous
+waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of
+familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping
+beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.
+
+All things exist as they are perceived; at least in relation to
+the percipient. 'The mind is its own place, and of itself can make
+a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' But poetry defeats the curse
+which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding
+impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain,
+or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it
+equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the
+inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos.
+It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and
+percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity
+which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to
+feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It
+creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our
+minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.
+It justifies the bold and true words of Tasso: Non merita nome di
+creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta.
+
+A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure,
+virtue and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the
+best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men. As to his glory,
+let time be challenged to declare whether the fame of any other
+institutor of human life be comparable to that of a poet.  That
+he is the wisest, the happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is
+a poet, is equally incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been
+men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence,
+and, if we would look into the interior of their lives, the most
+fortunate of men: and the exceptions, as they regard those who
+possessed the poetic faculty in a high yet inferior degree, will
+be found on consideration to confine rather than destroy the rule.
+Let us for a moment stoop to the arbitration of popular breath, and
+usurping and uniting in our own persons the incompatible characters
+of accuser, witness, judge, and executioner, let us decide without
+trial, testimony, or form, that certain motives of those who are
+'there sitting where we dare not soar', are reprehensible. Let
+us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil was a flatterer,
+that Horace was a coward, that Tasso a madman, that Lord Bacon was
+a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet
+laureate. It is inconsistent with this division of our subject
+to cite living poets, but posterity has done ample justice to the
+great names now referred to. Their errors have been weighed and found
+to have been dust in the balance; if their sins 'were as scarlet,
+they are now white as snow'; they have been washed in the blood of
+the mediator and redeemer, Time. Observe in what a ludicrous chaos
+the imputation of real or fictitious crime have been confused in
+the contemporary calumnies against poetry and poets; consider how
+little is, as it appears--or appears, as it is; look to your own
+motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged.
+
+Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic, that
+it is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind,
+and that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connexion with
+the consciousness or will. It is presumptuous  to determine that
+these are the necessary conditions of all mental causation, when
+mental effects are experienced unsusceptible of being referred to
+them. The frequent recurrence of the poetical power, it is obvious
+to suppose, may produce in the mind a habit of order and harmony
+correlative with its own nature and its effects upon other minds.
+But in the intervals of inspiration, and they may be frequent
+without being durable, a poet becomes a man, and is abandoned to
+the sudden reflux of the influences under which others habitually
+live.  But as he is more delicately organized than other men, and
+sensible to pain and pleasure, both his own and that of others, in
+a degree unknown to them, he will avoid the one and pursue the other
+with an ardour proportioned to this difference. And he renders
+himself obnoxious to calumny, when he neglects to observe the
+circumstances under which these objects of universal pursuit and
+flight have disguised themselves in one another's garments.
+
+But there is nothing necessarily evil in this error, and thus
+cruelty, envy, revenge, avarice, and the passions purely evil, have
+never formed any portion of the popular imputations on the lives
+of poets.
+
+I have thought it most favourable to the cause of truth to set down
+these remarks according to the order in which they were suggested
+to my mind, by a consideration of the subject itself, instead of
+observing the formality of a polemical reply; but if the view which
+they contain be just, they will be found to involve a refutation
+of the arguers against poetry, so far at least as regards the first
+division of the subject. I can readily conjecture what should have
+moved the gall of some learned and intelligent writers who quarrel
+with certain versifiers; I confess myself, like them, unwilling
+to be stunned, by the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day.
+Bavius and Maevius undoubtedly are, as they ever were, insufferable
+persons. But it belongs to a philosophical critic to distinguish
+rather than confound.
+
+The first part of these remarks has related to poetry in its
+elements and principles; and it has been shown, as well as the narrow
+limits assigned them would permit, that what is called poetry, in
+a restricted sense, has a common source with all other forms of order
+and of beauty, according to which the materials of human life are
+susceptible of being arranged, and which is poetry in a universal
+sense.
+
+The second part will have for its object an application of these
+principles to the present state of the cultivation of poetry, and
+a defence of the attempt to idealize the modern forms of manners and
+opinions, and compel them into a subordination to the imaginative
+and creative faculty. For the literature of England, an energetic
+development of which has ever preceded or accompanied a great and
+free development of the national will, has arisen as it were from a
+new birth. In spite of the low-thoughted envy which would undervalue
+contemporary merit, our own will be a memorable age in intellectual
+achievements, and we live among such philosophers and poets
+as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last
+national struggle for civil and religious liberty. The most unfailing
+herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people
+to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry.
+At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating
+and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man
+and nature. The persons in whom this power resides may often, as far
+as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent
+correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are
+the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet
+compelled to serve, the power which is seated on the throne of
+their own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the
+most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled
+with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure
+the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a
+comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves
+perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for
+it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the
+hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the
+gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words
+which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing
+to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is
+moved not, but moves.  Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of
+the world.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, A DEFENCE OF POETRY AND OTHER ESSAYS ***
+
+This file should be named adpoe10.txt or adpoe10.zip
+Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, adpoe11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, adpoe10a.txt
+
+Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+http://gutenberg.net or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext04 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext04
+
+Or /etext03, 02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information online at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
+when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
+Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
+used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
+they hardware or software or any other related product without
+express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*
+
diff --git a/old/adpoe10.zip b/old/adpoe10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b260d04
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/adpoe10.zip