3. Persons who make. These, in modern language, are usually called
manufacturers. Anciently they were called poets.
4. Persons who think. There seems to be no very distinct modern title
for this kind of person, anciently called philosophers; nevertheless we
have a few of them among us.
5. Persons who do: in modern language, called practical persons;
anciently, believers.
Of the first two classes I have only this to note,--that we ought
neither to say that a person sees, if he sees falsely, nor speaks, if he
speaks falsely. For seeing falsely is worse than blindness, and speaking
falsely, than silence. A man who is too dim-sighted to discern the road
from the ditch, may feel which is which;--but if the ditch appears
manifestly to him to be the road, and the road to be the ditch, what
shall become of him? False seeing is unseeing,--on the negative side of
blindness; and false speaking, unspeaking,--on the negative side of
silence.
To the persons who think, also, the same test applies very shrewdly.
Theirs is a dangerous profession; and from the time of the Aristophanes
thought-shop to the great German establishment, or thought-manufactory,
whose productions have, unhappily, taken in part the place of the older
and more serviceable commodities of Nuremberg toys and Berlin wool, it
has been often harmful enough to mankind. It should not be so, for a
false thought is more distinctly and visibly no thought than a false
saying is no saying. But it is touching the two great productive classes
of the doers and makers, that we have one or two important points to
note here.
§ 15. Has the reader ever considered, carefully, what is the meaning of
"doing" a thing?
Suppose a rock falls from a hill-side, crushes a group of cottages, and
kills a number of people. The stone has produced a great effect in the
world. If any one asks, respecting the broken roofs, "What did it?" you
say the stone did it. Yet you don't talk of the deed of the stone. If
you inquire farther, and find that a goat had been feeding beside the
rock, and had loosened it by gnawing the roots of the grasses beneath,
you find the goat to be the active cause of the calamity, and you say
the goat did it. Yet you don't call the goat the doer, nor talk of its
evil deed. But if you find any one went up to the rock, in the night,
and with deliberate purpose loosened it, that it might fall on the
cottages, you say in quite a different sense, "It is his deed: he is the
doer of it."
§ 16. It appears, then, that deliberate purpose and resolve are needed
to constitute a deed or doing, in the true sense of the word; and that
when, accidentally or mechanically, events take place without such
purpose, we have indeed effects or results, and agents or causes, but
neither deeds nor doers.
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