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Untitled Article
tion rendered alterations of belief easier to him than to others ; his feelings were not adhesive ; they could without violence be transferred from one class of sentiments to another ; and accordingly , even to the period of life when old impressions become indurated ) and the emotions tardy of change , he was continually modifying his convictions , adopting new views with a facility truly
wonderful , quickening them with life , and carrying them out to their remoter consequences with energy and fearlessness . His defence of the doctrine of phlogiston , when discarded by all other philosophers , is the solitary instance in his life of prejudiced tenacity of opinion ; and this was evinced in the decline of life , when even to him the difficulty must have been great of admitting a new theory , and applying it to the solution of facts which had
been regarded as otherwise explained , and when , moreover , his attention had ceased to be actively directed to chemical inquiries . Any one who is aware how much the very memory of facts by the mind is dependent on the hypothesis which has been employed as the principle of their arrangement , or even as the guide to their discovery , will be disposed to treat this error rather as interesting to the mental philosopher , than as justifying the
severity of the critic . The spirit of freedom and of faith which conducted him through his private inquiries , he carried out into his publication of their results . Ingenuous to himself , he was equally ingenuous to the world . He saw through the contemptible fallacies by which worldliness and imbecility would defend the suppression of opinions ; ease , popularity , sectarian prosperity , he
held to be baubles compared with the duty of individual thought and speech , and sins if purchased at its expense . Not even could he think his task to society performed when he had stated and recommended the truths which he seemed to have reached ; he lays before the world the whole process of his own mind ; tells his difficulties , his failures , his false inferences , the hypotheses which misled as well as those which aided him ; so that if his
thoughts had fallen into type as they arose , they could scarcely have been more distinct . Hence he excelled much more in analytical than in synthetical composition , and seldom attempted the latter without sliding continually into the former . And whatever may be thought of their relative merits , regarded as methods of
direct instruction , it cannot be doubted that the successful investigator , who has the honesty to write analytically , bequeaths in this picture of his own intellect an invaluable guide to future inquirers in the same field , and a most interesting study to the observer of the human mind .
In nothing did Dr . Priestley ' s mental and moral freedom more nobly manifest itself than in his well-proportioned love of truth . With all his diversity of pursuit , he did not think all truth of equal importance , or deem the diffusion of useful knowledge an excuse for withholding the more useful . With all his ardour of
Untitled Article
388 On thu Life , Character , md Writing of Dr . PrieMey .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1833, page 238, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2612/page/22/
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