COLLOQUY XV. THE CONCLUSION. MONTESINOS. HERE Sir Thomas is the opinion which I have attempted to maintain concerning the progress and tendency of society, placed in a proper position, and inexpugnably entrenched there according to the rules of art, by the ablest of all moral engineers. SIR THOMAS MORE. Who may this political Achilles be whom you have called in to your assistance? MONTESINOS. Whom Fortune rather has sent to my aid, for my reading has never been in such authors. I have endeavoured always to drink from the spring head, but never ventured out to fish in the deep waters. Thor, himself, when he had hooked the Great Serpent, was unable to draw from the abyss. him up SIR THOMAS MORE. The waters in which you have now been ang ling have been shallow enough, if the pamphlet in your hand is, as it appears to be, a magazine. 66 MONTESINOS. Ego sum is," said Scaliger,* " qui ab omnibus discere volo; neque tam malum librum esse puto, ex quo non aliquem fructum colligere possum." I think myself repaid, in a monkish legend, for examining a mass of inane fiction, if I discover a single passage which elucidates the real history or manners of its age. In old poets of the third and fourth order we are contented with a little ore, and a great deal of dross. And so in publications of this kind, prejudicial as they are to public taste and public feeling, and therefore deeply injurious to the real interests of literature, something may sometimes be found to compensate for the trash and tinsel and insolent flippancy, which are now become the staple commodities of such journals. This number contains Kant's idea of a Universal History on a Cosmo-Political plan; and that Kant is as profound a philosopher as his disciples have proclaimed him to be, this little treatise would fully convince me, if I had not already believed it, in reliance upon one of the very few men * Epist. 59. p. 172. who are capable of forming a judgement upon such a writer. The sum of his argument is this: that as deaths, births, and marriages, and the oscillations of the weather, irregular as they seem to be in themselves, are, nevertheless, reduceable upon the great scale to certain rules; so there may be discovered in the course of human history, a steady and continuous, though slow developement of certain great predispositions in human nature: and that although men neither act under the law of instinct like brute animals, nor under the law of a preconcerted plan like rational cosmopolites, the great current of human actions flows in a regular stream of tendency toward this developement: individuals and nations, while pursuing their own peculiar and often contradictory purposes, following the guidance of a great natural purpose, and thus promoting a process, which even if they perceived it, they would little regard. What that process is he states in the following series of propositions: 1st. All tendencies of any creature, to which it is predisposed by nature, are destined in the end to develope themselves perfectly, and agreeably to their final purpose. 2d. In man, as the sole rational creature upon earth, those tendencies which have the use of his reason for their object are destined to obtain their perfect developement in the species only, and not in the individual. 3d. It is the will of nature that man should owe to himself alone every thing which transcends the mere mechanic constitution of his animal existence, and that he should be susceptible of no other happiness or perfection than what he has created for himself, instinct apart, through his own reason. 4th. The means which nature employs to bring about the developement of all the tendencies she has laid in man, is the antagonism of those tendencies in the social state, .. no farther, however, than to that point at which this antagonism becomes the cause of social arrangements founded in law. 5th. The highest problem for the human species, to the solution of which it is irresistibly urged by natural impulses, is the establishment of a universal civil society, founded on the empire of political justice. 6th. This problem is, at the same time, the most difficult of all, and the one which is latest solved by man. 7th. The problem of the establishment of a perfect constitution of society depends upon the problem of a system of international relations, adjusted to law, and apart from this latter problem cannot be solved. 8th. The history of the human race, as a whole, may be regarded as the unravelling of a hidden plan of nature for accomplishing a perfect state of civil constitution for society in its internal relations, (and as the condition of that, by the last proposition, in its external relations also,) as the sole state of society in which the tendencies of human nature can be all and fully developed. SIR THOMAS MORE. This is indeed a master of the sentences, upon whose text it may be profitable to dwell. Let us look to his propositions. From the first this conclusion must follow; that as nature has given man all his faculties for use, any system of society in which the moral and intellectual powers of any portion of the people are left undeveloped for want of cultivation, or receive a perverse direction, is plainly opposed to the system of Nature, in other words, to the will of God. Is there any Government upon earth that will bear this test? MONTESINOS. I should rather ask of you,.. will there ever be one? |