This “despair of truth,” this intellectual cowardice, is more offensive to Mr. Martineau than unbelief itself. He describes the class of thinkers he most dislikes in one sentence of beautiful sharpness. “Checked and frightened,” he says, “at the entrance of every path on which they venture, they _spend their strength in standing still_; or devise ingenious proofs, that, in a world where periodicity is the only progress, retrogradation is the discreetest method of advance.” His whole volume is therefore a protest against the practice, common both in England and the United States, of erecting in the republic of thought a despotism of dullness and timidity, by which independent investigation is to be allowed only so far as it results in fortifying accredited systems, and a bounty is put on that worst form of disbelief, infidelity to the laws of thought, the monitions of conscience, and the beckonings of new and inspiring truths. But while he is properly angry at such noodleism as this, which, if unlashed and unrebuked, would reduce men of thought into a corporation of intellectual Jerry Sneaks, he does not appear to us properly to distinguish between that independence which seeks truth and that independence which is merely a blustering egotism, and ostentatious exhibition of the commonplaces of error. His discrimination is not always of that sort which detects through the verbal disguises of moral energy the unmistakable features of moral pertness. The charlatans of dignity and convention have provoked a corresponding clique of charlatans, who revel in the bravadoes of license and anarchy; and it is no part of a wise man’s duty to allow his disgust of one form of nonsense to tempt him into championship of another form, because it happens to be on the opposite extreme. The defect of Mr. Martineau’s nature appears to be the dominion of the reflective portion of his nature over all its other powers. He is emphatically a thinker, but a thinker on subjects so allied to sentiment and passion, that some action should be combined with it, in order that the mind shall receive no morbid taint, be not “sicklied o’er” by a thought that broadens into unpractical comprehension. The fertility of his mind in thoughts is altogether out of proportion to the vigor of his nature, and though intellectually brave he is not intellectually robust. Hence a lack of muscle and nerve in his most beautiful paragraphs; hence the absence of electric force and condensed energy of expression in his finest statements; hence a certain sadness and languor in the atmosphere spread over his writings, the breathing of which does not invigorate the mind so much as it enlarges its view. He communicates thoughts, but he does not always communicate the inspiration to think.