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    ing feelings , have doubtles 3 attained to a most earnest sincerity in the person , but they as certainly have attained to little that is true in the thing . In their case , and in the case of all persons who , in different degrees and on different subjects , may be said

    to live in a world of their own , it is a great advance towards truth for them to be led out of themselves and away from their own conceptions , and to be made aware of the existence of , and to be called to attend to , the properties of a world with which their imaginations and feelings can have little or nothing to do ; of a world which is the same to them and to others , and about which

    there can be very little distortion , even by means of the media through which its objects are received . There are thousands of men who think , —not perhaps of thinking men , —who have no idea of any more sure and precise truth than is to be found in the theological and political chimeras on which their imaginations and feelings have been at work ; chimeras

    which may have been conceived in perfect sincerity of person , but which , for all that , are very far from being true in the thing . These persons may be said to shoot out of the magic-lanterns of their own conceptions into the real world around them , pictures coloured by their feelings and magnified by their imaginations ; and then they set themselves to observe these shadows , perverting the realities of life with their forms and colours , as if they were the only real objects . If we would draw such men out of their

    world of imagination and feeling into the real world , we must , by drawing their attention to physical objects which they may look at and handle , discipline their minds , by a sort of evidence they have hitherto too much neglected , into a conviction that there is a truth in things ; a truth altogether independent of their imagination and feelings . Let them , I say , pass on from morals to physics , in order that they may return with better-disciplined minds from physics to morals .

    Indeed it is not more necessary to resort to a discipline of physics in order to correct superstitious errors which have been diffused through the whole science of causation , namely , by letting in upon it the workings of imagination and feeling unchecked by facts and principles , than it is necessary to resort to the

    same discipline of physics " in order to re-establish truths respecting causation which have been shaken to their very foundation , namely , by having been rested on imagination and feeling , instead of being grounded in real and satisfactory evidences . I have already said that Plato found the minds of his countrymen

    hurrying forward into a reckless scepticism , * and that Wesley * The unsparing ridicule of Aristophanes and Lucian , of Voltaire and , in his worit writing * , Lord Byron , is calculated to foster a spirit of reckletis levity mixed with better contempt . Contrast this spirit with that of Socrates and Shakspeare , whose wit was not less acute , and whose humour was even broader , and the difference iq moral effect it obvious *

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    272 The Diffusion of Knowledge amongU the People .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1834, page 272, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2632/page/40/