Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 2Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
General
Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 2
Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
English essays
The Westminster Reviewer tells us that "we wish to see the science of
Government unsettled because we see no prospect of a settlement which
accords with our interests." His angry eagerness to have questions
settled resembles that of a judge in one of Dryden's plays--the
Amphitryon, we think--who wishes to decide a cause after hearing only
one party, and, when he has been at last compelled to listen to the
statement of the defendant, flies into a passion, and exclaims, "There
now, sir! See what you have done. The case was quite clear a minute ago;
and you must come and puzzle it!" He is the zealot of a sect. We are
searchers after truth. He wishes to have the question settled. We wish
to have it sifted first. The querulous manner in which we have been
blamed for attacking Mr Mill's system, and propounding no system of
our own, reminds us of the horror with which that shallow dogmatist,
Epicurus, the worst parts of whose nonsense the Utilitarians have
attempted to revive, shrank from the keen and searching scepticism of
the second Academy.
It is not our fault that an experimental science of vast extent does not
admit of being settled by a short demonstration; that the subtilty
of nature, in the moral as in the physical world, triumphs over the
subtilty of syllogism. The quack, who declares on affidavit that, by
using his pills and attending to his printed directions, hundreds who
had been dismissed incurable from the hospitals have renewed their youth
like the eagles, may, perhaps, think that Sir Henry Halford, when
he feels the pulses of patients, inquires about their symptoms, and
prescribes a different remedy to each, is unsettling the science of
medicine for the sake of a fee.
If, in the course of this controversy, we have refrained from expressing
any opinion respecting the political institutions of England, it is not
because we have not an opinion, or because we shrink from avowing
it. The Utilitarians, indeed, conscious that their boasted theory of
government would not bear investigation, were desirous to turn the
dispute about Mr Mill's Essay into a dispute about the Whig party,
rotten boroughs, unpaid magistrates, and ex-officio informations. When
we blamed them for talking nonsense, they cried out that they were
insulted for being reformers,--just as poor Ancient Pistol swore that
the scars which he had received from the cudgel of Fluellen were got
in the Gallia wars. We, however, did not think it desirable to mix up
political questions, about which the public mind is violently agitated,
with a great problem in moral philosophy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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