The Beauties of the Anti-jacobin, in which, having previously informed
the public that I had been dishonoured at Cambridge for preaching
Deism, at a time when, for my youthful ardour in defence of
Christianity, I was decried as a bigot by the proselytes of French
phi-(or to speak more truly psi-)-losophy, the writer concludes with
these words; “since this time he has left his native country, commenced
citizen of the world, left his poor children fatherless, and his wife
destitute. Ex his disce his friends, LAMB and SOUTHEY.” With severest
truth it may be asserted, that it would not be easy to select two men
more exemplary in their domestic affections than those whose names were
thus printed at full length as in the same rank of morals with a
denounced infidel and fugitive, who had left his children fatherless
and his wife destitute! Is it surprising, that many good men remained
longer than perhaps they otherwise would have done adverse to a party,
which encouraged and openly rewarded the authors of such atrocious
calumnies? Qualis es, nescio; sed per quales agis, scio et doleo.]
[Footnote 18: In opinions of long continuance, and in which we have
never before been molested by a single doubt, to be suddenly convinced
of an error, is almost like being convicted of a fault. There is a
state of mind, which is the direct antithesis of that, which takes
place when we make a bull. The bull namely consists in the bringing her
two incompatible thoughts, with the sensation, but without the sense,
of their connection. The psychological condition, or that which
constitutes the possibility, of this state, being such disproportionate
vividness of two distant thoughts, as extinguishes or obscures the
consciousness of the intermediate images or conceptions, or wholly
abstracts the attention from them. Thus in the well known bull, “I was
a fine child, but they changed me:” the first conception expressed in
the word “I,” is that of personal identity--Ego contemplans: the second
expressed in the word “me,” is the visual image or object by which the
mind represents to itself its past condition, or rather, its personal
identity under the form in which it imagined itself previously to have
existed,--Ego contemplatus. Now the change of one visual image for
another involves in itself no absurdity, and becomes absurd only by its
immediate juxta-position with the fast thought, which is rendered
possible by the whole attention being successively absorbed to each
singly, so as not to notice the interjacent notion, changed, which by
its incongruity, with the first thought, I, constitutes the bull. Add
only, that this process is facilitated by the circumstance of the words
I, and me, being sometimes equivalent, and sometimes having a distinct
meaning; sometimes, namely, signifying the act of self-consciousness,
sometimes the external image in and by which the mind represents that
act to itself, the result and symbol of its individuality. Now suppose
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