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Untitled Article
indistinguishabl e and reciprocate their energies , like the waters of the Northern and the Southern seas , whose currents flow and whose billows roll together , irrespective of the artificial limits of science . In the spiritual , however , as in the material world , nature gives notice of our approach to her impalpable boundaries ; she
has her realms of transition ; the traveller , nearing the earth's other half , finds a more copious vegetation , and warmer suns , and loftier skies , and bluer hills ; and the explorer of the soul , passing from the intellect to the morality of man , will find an intermediate region , adorned with a more exuberant foliage of thought , invested with a more glowing atmosphere of emotion . It is in no trifling sense that the poetical faculties , the perception and the love of
beauty , whether physical or moral , may be said to lie between the thinking and the motive departments of the mind ; it cannot be identified with either , yet it pervades both ; it belongs exclusively to neither , yet sheds an influence on both , kindling with new tints both truth and goodness : like the constellations of the equatorial heavens , it has its stars in both hemispheres , and cannot be cut off from either , without extinguishing some of its essential lights .
But perhaps we are making a longer pilgrimage than was needful from Dr . Priestley ' s intellectual to his moral character ; for in fact very little lay between . With him duty was a portion of truth , a series of inferences from his philosophy ; clear and strong conviction , rather than warm affection , characterised his notions of right . Never was there a mind over which moral principle
exercised a more paramount sway ; but his was no blind and superstitious obedience ; with , him conscience could not be moved without being , convinced ; but show him on evidence the reasonableness of any habit or train of feelings , and he would set himself to its cultivation without further demur ; he would no more have
thought of not doing what was right , than of not believing what was true . No one can be surprised that Dr . Priestley repudiated as an absurdity the doctrine of an instinctive moral sense ; for he was singularly free from those mental qualities which lead to this illusion . This error is the natural creed of those whose intellects
are slow , in comparison with the quickness of their feelings , whose moral judgment possesses a speed too fast for their mental eye to trace , flashing on them with such velocity and intensity that , like the lightning , they seem to dart from heaven to earth , without traversing the space between . Dr . Priestley ' s mind was the reverse
of this ; his emotions were never so intense as to dazzle his reason ; and his intellect was rapid enough to keep pace with them and mark their course . His sentiments of moral approbation and disapprobation , sufficiently resembled the processes of assent and dissent to enable him to recognise their common origih in the association of ideas . It is instructive to compare the corresponding parts of such dif-
Untitled Article
23 $ On the Life , Character \ and Writings of Dr . Priestley .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1833, page 232, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2612/page/16/
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