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    Untitled Article

    would remove one disease of the mind—for instance , apathy and inertness—without riak of producing the opposite disease , —excitability and restlessness , I would have proposed it . But in roedi- * curing the mind , as in medicining the body , little good can be expected from the employment of those innocent remedies which , to use a common expression , cannot possibly do any harm .

    Were we obliged to choose between the orthodox innocent specifics , which were being prescribed in churcfi and chapel before Wesley ' time , and the violent intellectual and moral medicines he boldly administered , * we should not hesitate to prefer the latter : but there is no necessity to adopt either of these extremes .

    If the discipline we have proposed incline somewhat more to imaginativeness than to apathy , we say , in the first place , that we desire it to be so , in order to secure a moving power for « ftrr discipline ; and , secondly , that for admitted , and , we insist , unavoidable defects in our plan , there is a gulficieiit temedj to be found .

    Let us suppose that in establishing a Mechanics * Institution in a small country town , we hare succeeded in our first object , namely , in drawing audiences to our readings of Shakspeare and Scott , Edgeworth and Martineau , and that we hare also sneceeded in exciting an interest in our readings ; all whkti cook not have been effected , had we commenced with the comparatively dry facts of history , and the abstract reasonings of

    philosophy . I am now supposing the mind ready to pass on to a dryer discipline of facts and reasonings ; and I assert , that m order to accomplish this most effectually , we mast advance from subjects of the imagination and feelings , which hare been ttsefnl in rousing the spirit which is within us , to objects of the senses , wfiich may exercise us in observing and reasoning , without

    letting in upon the operations of our intellect any of those imaginations and feelings , which have , if we may use the metaphor , coloured and heated our thoughts . It is by means of objects external to ourselves , which we may look at and handle , taste and smell , that we can proceed to an apprehension of trhat may be called truth in things . For in subjects internal to ouisclres ,

    about which our imaginations get excited , and our feelings become roused , we are too often in danger of attaining to Kttle more than sincerity in the person . Thus , for example , religious and political fanatics , who conceive a Millennium or a Utopia which cannot exist out of their own vivid imaginations and burn

    * I am . not aware that the objects of Wesley and Whitfield hare tan efimrfy < 8 » - t inguished . The object of Wesley was to attain a superhuman purity , that of Whitfield to escape from au infrahuman corruption . The key-fttonn oc that * Qfimima mAy he seen in their conversions more especially , but also through the whefetoMft mi Iror preaching . Each brought the force of hi * imagination , to boar ,, tfc * « m upon ~** t ** ii grace * , and the other upou human winfulniMw » It warn am piMliiiiim mt fearen and of boll , rather than of human nature , human dufcu mmk 1 mm * fcn >»

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    The Diffusion of Knowledge , amongsi the Pt&ple . 97 t

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1834, page 271, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2632/page/39/