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of superiority , in judging of the intellects of others , would be peculiarly unbecoming in a mind of Mr . Blakey ' s calibre \ and he cannot be accused of those faults ; he mostly treats with due respect all who by their speculations have deserved any . To the liberal appreciation of merit which he commonly evinces , there are indeed exceptions ; and , unfortunately , in the very cases in which there is most merit to appreciate . But this is a very different thing from arrogance . It is not because an author differs from Mr . Blakey ,
that Mr . Blakey deems scornfully of him ; but because , in addition to differing from Mr . Blakey , he has been cried down by the world—that is to say , the English world . Over-reliance on our own judgment is one thing , over-reliance on the judgment of the world when in unison with our own , is another . The latter is the failing of a weaker , but certainly of a more modest mind . The misfortune is , that the contempt of those who have confidence
enough to be scornful only when they are backed by a crowd , is aptest to fall upon those who are most in advance of their age . Mr . Blakey ' s strongest expressions of disdain are divided between the association-philosophy as taught by Hartley , and the metaphysics of the German school . In other words , the only metaphysical doctrines which he utterly despises , are the two systems between which , and which only , almost every metaphysician ,
deserving the name , in all Europe , is now beginning to be convinced that it is necessary to choose : the two most perfect forms of the only two theories of the human mind which are ,, strictly speaking , possible . Both are alike worthless in Mr . Blakey ' s eyes , because it has been the fashion among English writers to treat both with disrespect , and because he himself understands neither of them . The difference is , he pronounces the one unintelligible , because it is so to him ; the other he flatters himself that he sees through
and through , and can discern that there is nothing in it . So little does Mr . Blakey comprehend of the theory which resolves all the phenomena of the mind into ideas of sensation connected together by the law of association , that he does not even see any thing peculiar in the doctrine . Association itself , he will
not allow to be a distinct principle or fact in human nature . It is nothing more , he says , than remembrance ; it has been known in all ages , as the faculty of memory . Just so we may conceive , on the appearance of Newton ' s Principia , some mind of the same character objecting to the theory of gravitation , that there was nothing in it but the ancient and familiar fact of weight .
4 person / says Mr . Blakey , * will take the first volume of the treatise " On Man , " and read it carefully over , and whenever he finds the words association , asxociatts , associating , &c . let him replace them with the words memory , remembered * remembrance , connected in his mind , and he will find that the sense of the various passages in which the former class of words are used , will remain as comp letely the same , when words descriptive of memory are thus employed . —vol . ii . p , 124 ,
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Blakey 9 History of Moral Science . 663
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3 B 2
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1833, page 663, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2624/page/3/
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