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mind , he did not look at an object till he saw nothing else , and it became his universe . He made his estimate deliberately ; and he was not to be dazzled , or flattered , or laughed out of it . In his laboratory , he thought no better of chemistry than in his pulpit f and in the drawing-rooms of the French academicians ^ no worse
of Christianity than by the firesides of his own flock . He was never anxious to appear in either less or more than his real character . Even at the time when his name was most illustrious , and his associations the most close with the atheistical philosophers of the continent ; when he was courted by the revolutionists of
England , when by the persecution and desertion of all others , he was more especially thrown upon the sympathy of those men , and a noble and fascinating sympathy it was ; when they urged him to quit the ' unfruitful fields of polemical divinity , and cultivate the philosophy of which he was the father , ' and promised him thus an eternal fame , he assures them that he esteems his
theology greatly superior in importance to mankind to his science , and risks his reputation at its height , by making it the vehicle to carry the great principles of religion before the almost inaccessible mind of the sceptics of France ; perceiving the affinities and analogies which subsisted between the different departments of human knowledge , he did not desire to divorce them in his own mind , and derive a separate character from each . His philosophy is
replete with faith , and his faith with philosophy ; his conceptions of the Creator aid him in deciphering the creation ; and every discovery in creation contributes a new element to his ideas of the Creator . The changes of the universe are the movements of God ; and he that contemplates them without reference to the mind of which they are expressive , might as well study the laws of human action in the gestures of an automaton .
It is impossible to make human character a study without being tempted to speculate on the causes of the marvellous varieties which it exhibits . That those causes are not all external to the mind , scarcely admits of a doubt ; and so difficult is it to define , or even to conjecture those which are inherent in the mental constitution , that the philosophy of individual character can hardly be said to have any existence . All the phenomena of mind , whether intellectual or moral , have , we think , been successof of
fully resolved into cas ^ s the law association ; but why this law , operating on the ideas furnished by sensation , should produce results so much more widely divergent from each other than are the external circumstances of mankind , is a problem not less embarrassing than it is interesting . Perhaps more may
be explained by original differences of sensibility than is commonly imagined . Let it be admitted that the affections are the results of pleasurable and painful associations , that desire is simply the idea of a pleasure , and aversion the idea of a pain , and it follows that the vividness of the affections , the strength of
Untitled Article
On th * Lifts Ch * raotet , and Writing * of Dr . Priestlty . 239
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1833, page 239, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2612/page/23/
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