wilfully, and then to complain of it as violating the laws of probability founded on life within the ordinary conditions of experience.
12
Perhaps, seriously, the most of a cosmopolitical act that has ever been attempted. Next to it, in point of dignity, I should feel disposed to class the inauguration of the Crusades.
13
This appeared in Tait's Magazine for February, 1841. Although practically an independent paper, it was included in the series entitled 'Sketches of Life and Manners; from the Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater.' The reference to Allan Cunningham occurs in the previous chapter of these 'Sketches.'—H.
14
No terms of art are used so arbitrarily, and with such perfect levity, as the terms hypothesis, theory, system. Most writers use one or other with the same indifference that they use in constructing the title of a novel, or, suppose, of a pamphlet, where the phrase thoughts, or strictures, or considerations, upon so and so, are used ad libitum. Meantime, the distinctions are essential. That is properly an hypothesis where the question is about a cause: certain phenomena are known and given: the object is to place below these phenomena a basis [α ὑποθοσις] capable of supporting them, and accounting for them. Thus, if you were to assign a cause sufficient to account for the aurora borealis, that would be an hypothesis. But a theory, on the other hand, takes a multitude of facts all disjointed, or, at most, suspected, of some inter-dependency: these it takes and places under strict laws of relation to each other. But here there is no question of a cause. Finally, a system is the synthesis of a theory and an hypothesis: it states the relations as amongst an undigested mass, rudis indigestaque moles, of known phenomena; and it assigns a basis for the whole, as in an hypothesis. These distinctions would become vivid and convincing by the help of proper illustrations.
15
Neither would it be open to Paley to plead that the final or remotest consequences must be taken into the calculation; and that one of these would be the weakening of all moral sanctions, and thus, indirectly, an injury to morality, which might more than compensate the immediate benefit to social peace and security; for this mode of arguing the case would bring us back to the very principle which his own implicitly, or by involution, rejects: since it would tell us to obey the principle itself without reference to the apparent consequences. By the bye, Paley has an express section of his work against the law of honour as a valid rule of action; but, as Cicero says of Epicurus, it matters little what he says; the question for us is quam sibi convenienter, how far consistently with himself. Now, as Sir James Mackintosh justly remarks, all that Paley says in refutation of the principle of worldly honour is hollow and unmeaning. In fact, it is merely one of the commonplaces adopted by satire, and no philosophy at all. Honour, for instance, allows you, upon paying gambling debts, to neglect or evade all others: honour, again, allows you to seduce a married woman: and he would secretly insinuate that honour enjoins all this; but it is evident that honour simply forbears to forbid all this: in other words, it is a very limited rule of action, not applying to one case of conduct in fifty. It might as well be said, that Ecclesiastical Courts sanction murder, because that crime lies out of their jurisdiction.
wilfully, and then to complain of it as violating the laws of probability founded on life within the ordinary conditions of experience.
