The Collected Writing of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. IIDe Quincey, Thomas
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The Collected Writing of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II
De Quincey, Thomas
De Quincey, Thomas, 1785-1859; English literature -- 19th century
by the interesting nature of the grievance. In a jesting way, this
grievance is obliquely noticed in the celebrated couplet--
"Had you seen but these roads before they were made,
You'd lift up your hands and bless Marshal Wade."
The pleasant bull here committed conceals a most melancholy truth,
and one of large extent. Innumerable are the services to truth, to
justice, or society, which never _can_ be adequately valued by those
who reap their benefits, simply because the transition from the early
and bad state to the final or improved state cannot be retraced or kept
alive before the eyes. The record perishes. The last point gained is
seen; but the starting point, the point _from_ which it was gained,
is forgotten. And the traveller never _can_ know the true amount of
his obligations to Marshal Wade, because, though seeing the roads
which the Marshal has created, he can only guess at those which he
superseded. Now, returning to this impenetrable passage of Kant, I will
briefly inform the reader that he may read it into sense by connecting
it with a part of Kant's system from which it is in his own delivery
entirely dislocated. Going forwards some thirty or forty pages, he
will find Kant's development of his own categories. And, by placing
in juxtaposition with that development this blind sentence, he will
find a reciprocal light arising. All philosophers, worthy of that
name, have found it necessary to allow of some great cardinal ideas
that transcended all the Lockian origination--ideas that were larger
in their compass than any possible notices of sense or any reflex
notices of the understanding; and those who have denied such ideas
will be found invariably to have supported their denial by a _vitium
subreptionis_, and to have deduced their pretended genealogies of
such ideas by means of a _petitio principii_--silently and stealthily
putting _into_ some step of their _leger-de-main_ process everything
that they would pretend to have extracted _from_ it. But, previously
to Kant, it is certain that all philosophers had left the origin of
these higher or transcendent ideas unexplained. Whence came they? In
the systems to which Locke replies they had been called _innate_ or
_connate._ These were the Cartesian systems. Cudworth, again, who
maintained certain "_immutable ideas_" of morality, had said nothing
about their origin; and Plato had supposed them to be reminiscences
from some higher mode of existence. Kant first attempted to assign them
an origin within the mind itself, though not in any Lockian fashion of
reflection upon sensible impressions. And this is doubtless what he
means by saying that he first had investigated the mind--that is, he
first for such a purpose.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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