This country has never long needed such a despotism. Germany, too,
though hardly yet freed from a political despotism, has through a large
portion of its area long thrown off the despotism of Rome, and embraced
the more elevating and life-giving doctrines of the Reformation. In
those provinces where this blessed change has taken place, Germany is
starting rapidly into that career of intellectuality which England
commenced three hundred years ago. The Germans and the English are
preeminently deep-thinking nations; and in both of them is the Nose more
decidedly and more generally of a Cogitative form than in any other
Gothic nations.
The Cogitative may therefore, perhaps, be said to be one of the
characteristic forms of the Noses of those Gothic branches, and might be
expressed thus, (I + II)/III. Nevertheless, various degrees of education
and various pursuits, with (in England) free institutions, have so
diversified their features that they exhibit a much less uniform
character than the features of most other nations.
The Anglo-Americans afford a further corroborative proof that the
Cogitative Nose is dependent on the cultivation of a Cogitative mind.
They present a striking contrast to their puritan forefathers,—men who
abandoned home, country and friends for the sake of religious and
political opinions; men to whom conscience was dearer than life, and
freedom more precious than worldly advantage; men of the strictest
integrity, the most scrupulous honesty, and the sternest firmness,
sullied only by an excess of over-wrought feeling—fanaticism. All these
virtues, and this vice (itself a virtue gone mad) are wanting to the
American character. That there are happy exceptions, it is true; but a
nation which boasts _smartness_ as its most prominent virtue, must not
complain if it is accused of want of principle. The circumstances of
young America have contributed to render hers an unthinking people. The
wild life to which so large a portion have been subjected, cut off from
all neighbourhood, debarred from communication with cultivated minds,
thrown entirely on the active business of the day for mental food, they
have necessarily degenerated from the thinking men to whom they are
indebted for their origin.
So far from the American Nose inheriting the Cogitative form of their
ancestors’, it is thin and sharp; and, as a national nose, the most
unthinking of any of the Gothic stock. America is, however, a
fast-growing nation; it has had no infancy, but started at once into
life, a full-grown youth. There is hope, therefore—of which already some
assurance has been given—that it will yet furnish its quota of thinkers
to the history of the human mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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