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Untitled Article
g , nd sympathies of their inhabitants , to rival each other in the arts of peace , and in social happiness , and in free institutions which are essential to both . Nor is this goodwill limited to those two great nations . It subsists also among the people of the continental despotisms , who wait only the day of their not distant independence to join themselves to the solemn
league and covenant of the liberal and the free . And the oppressors are conscious of the spirit that is abroad ; they see the gathering storm , they are uneasy and anxious ; they are striving to stifle opinion and command the progress of knowledge . Idiots ! Would they rule the wind , or stay the march of the thunder cloud ? Yet as well might they strive to do these things as to sway the thoughts of men , or to build up a barrier against the onward movement of the human mind .
A remarkable characteristic of the times is the direction which its mind has taken . The stern reality has usurped the place of the false pictures of the imagination . The disputes of scholars and antiquaries no longer attract the attention which is now devoted to the welfare of nations . The sweetest strains of the poet are unheeded , unless he sings the evils of the corn laws , and novels themselves are neglected , unless they
illustrate political economy or treat of the utilitarian philosophy . Government has assumed the form of a science , and its vast importance to every individual in the state has given to it such a preponderance in public estimation that all other sciences and polite literature itself have bowed before it . This setting of the tide of public taste cannot be mistaken . It is evident in every periodical . Archbishops treat of it in penny papers for
the people ; ladies write books upon it for children ; the newspapers teem with it ; and those magazines enjoy the greatest patronage which present the most of it . We may anticipate one good effect from this , whatever may be its attendant evils , it will teach the people to think , which they have seldom , and for themselves , which they have never done .
An ingenious writer in the Edinburgh Review , a short time ago treated of this peculiar aspect of the times , in a paper the object of which was to prove that an inquiring age was an unhappy one ; that , in fact , ignorance is bliss , and an implicit faith in rulers and teachers the highest state of earthly felicity . It was a strange theory , and most strangely enforced , but if his arguments failed to satisfy the reason , they suggested many
novel and serious thoughts . The fallacy which all who read that article felt that it involved , though they could not at once discover it , seems to have lurked in a doubtful definition of happiness , he conceiving it consists in a kind of mental torpor , void alike of pleasure and pain , whereas it lies rather in the proper activity and employment of all the mental and bodily faculties with which we $ re gifted . He assumed that a man
Untitled Article
22 O The Signs of the Times .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1836, page 220, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2656/page/28/
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