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Untitled Article
bility to use them . The extent to which this dejecting view of things is based on truth , together with its actual falsity as an unqualified statement , demands for it our serious attention . The amazingly extended and varied intercourse , which so
strongly marks modern times , between men of all ranks , opinions , habits , nations and languages , tending , like the tumbling ' and tossing of the pebbles on the sea beach , to round off those rough * nesses of mental organization which constitute originality , to cast all in one mould , and sink the distinctive features of the individual
in the common qualities of the species , —the high pressure , so to speak , of foreign thought and feeling , encompassing and overlaying every intellect that does not selfishly and ^ oldly refuse itself to the natural influences of social life , a pressure which calls for skill to adjustj elasticity and vigour of nerve to sustain and repel , -r ~ -the infinite facilities we have for reaping delight and instruction from the recorded thoughts of others , working as a potent
dissuasive from the ungrateful toil of thinking for ourselves , —the heartless and imbeeile artificialness which deeply taints many of our social usages and modes of feeling ,- —the restless , fidgety feverishness generated by the mixed fermentation of so many and so jarring elements ,- —all these things are , it were vain to deny it , very real , very active , and very determined foes to mental strength and freedom .
We know not a more touching moral spectacle than that of a young mind , ingenuous , active , ardent , hungering and thirsting for a ceaseless growth and expansion , —yet harassed , torn , beaten to and fro , by the never-ending multiplicity of objects of pursuit and models for imitation which show themselves to it on every side . Few things more mournful than the distraction and per plexedness of intellect induced by the changeful contemplation
of opposite forms and varying degrees of the Great and the Good . We know on how nice a point it often turns , whether a fine mind shall cast off this ypke of bondage , or rivet its fetters more closely and firmly ;—whether it shall vindicate its high prerogative of in- > dividualijty , or give itself up , bound hand and foot , to be the passive recipient and the servile organ of other men ' s thoughts and
feelings . And we know that the struggle is often despairingly declined , often timorously abandoned . We know that there are tens of thousands who have not literally a single point of character that Jhey can call their own ; who are not what God has made them , or what they have made themselves , but what they have tamely suffered some one or more of their fellow-men to make them .
Here it is then , in the intense and unintermitted rapidity , with which outward forces and influences assail us , to an extent to threaten the extinction of our own intellectual and moral vitality , that , in our apprehension , Jies the great difficulty and the great danger which modern genius has to strive with . Hither is it then
Untitled Article
On the Development of Qmw * . > 83
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1832, page 563, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1818/page/59/
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