Almost all that is ostensible submits to that
legislature created by the general representation of the past
feelings of mankind--imperfect as it is from a variety of causes,
as it exists in the government, the religion, and domestic habits.
Those who do not nominally, yet actually, submit to the same power.
The external features of their conduct, indeed, can no more escape
it, than the clouds can escape from the stream of the wind; and
his opinion, which he often hopes he has dispassionately secured
from all contagion of prejudice and vulgarity, would be found, on
examination, to be the inevitable excrescence of the very usages
from which he vehemently dissents. Internally all is conducted
otherwise; the efficiency, the essence, the vitality of actions,
derives its colour from what is no ways contributed to from any
external source. Like the plant which while it derives the accident
of its size and shape from the soil in which it springs, and is
cankered, or distorted, or inflated, yet retains those qualities
which essentially divide it from all others; so that hemlock
continues to be poison, and the violet does not cease to emit its
odour in whatever soil it may grow.
We consider our own nature too superficially. We look on all that
in ourselves with which we can discover a resemblance in others;
and consider those resemblances as the materials of moral knowledge.
It is in the differences that it actually consists.
[1815; publ. 1840]
ESSAY ON THE LITERATURE, THE ARTS, AND THE MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS
A FRAGMENT
The period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the
death of Aristotle, is undoubtedly, whether considered in itself,
or with reference to the effects which it has produced upon
the subsequent destinies of civilized man, the most memorable in
the history of the world.
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