genius; in Rollin's method of studying and teaching the Belles Lettres, and in the Abbe Du' Bos's reflections' on poetry and painting; you will find a great deal of good criticism perspicuously and elegantly expressed. My last remark on this subject is, that taste is greatly improved by cultivating all the generous, benevolent, and pious affections, and repressing pride, malice, envy, and every other selfish and wicked passion. Virtue is the perfection of beauty; and the love of virtue might have been, and perhaps ought to have been, mentioned as essential to true taste.

238. It cannot be denied, that some unskilful writers have obtained considerable reputation, and that inelegant modes of writing have frequently been fashionable. There have been men, who could prefer Pliny to Cicero, Lucan to Virgil, Waller to Spenser, and Cowley and Blackmore to Milton. But from this we must not infer, as some have done, that taste is a variable thing. Its principles are real and permanent, though men may occasionally be ignorant of them. Very different systems of philosophy have appeared; yet nature and truth are always the same. Fashions in dress and furniture are perpetually changing; and yet, in both, that is often allowed to be elegant which is not fashionable: which could not be, if there were not, in both, certain principles of elegance, which derive their charm, neither from

caprice, nor from custom, but from the very nature of the thing.

239. In the fine arts, the standard of excellence may be presumed to be still more permanent. There are now extant, statues, carvings, and remains of ancient buildings, which were the admiration of antiquity, and are as much admired now as ever. And there are authors, Homer and Virgil for example, whom, for these two thousand years, all who understood them have considered as the greatest of poets. When an author, or when a work of art, has been long in possession of the public esteem, and has been admired by the most candid and enlightened minds, it must be taken as a proof of extraordinary merit; and the dissatisfaction of a few cavillers may not unreasonably be imputed to ignorance or affectation.

240. To be pleased with novelty and imitation, to prefer good pictures to bad, harmony to harshness, and regular shape to distortion; to be gratified with accurate representations of human manners; to be interested in a detail of human adventures, and more or less, according to the degree of probability to look with delight on the sun, moon, and stars; the expanse of heaven; grand and regular buildings; human features expressive of health, sagacity, cheerfulness, and good nature; colours, and shapes, and sizes, of plants

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and animals, that betoken perfection and usefulness; the scenery of groves and rivers, of mountains and the ocean; the verdure of spring, the flowers of summer, and even the pure splendour of winter snow; is surely natural to every rational being, who has leisure to attend to such things, and is in any degree enlightened by contemplation.

241. If this be denied, I would ask, whence it comes, that the poetry of all nations, which was certainly intended to give pleasure to those for whom it was made, should abound in descriptions of these and the like objects; and why the fine arts should have been a matter of general attention in all civilized countries? And if this is not denied, a standard of taste is acknowledged; and it must be admitted further, that, whatever temporary infatuations may take place in the world of letters, simplicity and nature sooner or later gain the ascendant, and prove their rectitude by their permanency. Opinionum commenta delet dies; naturæ judicia confirmat.

CHAPTER II.

OF MAN'S ACTIVE POWERs.

SECTION I.

Of Free Agency.

242. ACTION implies motion; but there may be motion, as in a clock, where, properly speaking, there is no agent. Many motions necessary to life are continually going on in the human body; as those of the heart, lungs, and arteries: but these are not human actions, because man is not the cause of them. For the same reason, breathing, and the motion of the eye-lids, are not actions; because, though we may act for a little time in suspending them, for the purpose of seeing or hearing more accurately, they commonly go on without any care of ours; and, while they do so, we are, in regard to them, not active, but passive.

243. In like manner, the casual train of thought, which passes through the mind in a reverie (see § 140) is not action; but when we interrupt it, in

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order to fix our view upon a particular object, that interruption, and the attention consequent upon it, are mental actions. Recollection is another, and investigation a third; but a remembrance occurring to us, without any exertion on our part, is not action, and our minds in receiving it, or becoming conscious of it, are as really passive, as the eye is in receiving the images of those visible things that pass before it when it is open. Nor is the mere perception of truth or falsehood a mental action, any more than the mere perception of hardness: the stone, which we feel, we must feel while it presses upon us; and the proposition, which our judgment declares to be true, we must, while we attend to it and its evidence, perceive to be true. But to exert our reason in endeavouring to find out the truth, or to be wilfully inattentive to evidence, are actions of the mind; the one laudable, and becoming our rational nature, the other unmanly and immoral.

244. All action is the work of an agent, that is, of a being who acts; and every being who acts is the beginner of that motion which constitutes the action. The bullet that kills a man, the explosion that makes it fly, the sparkles from the flint which produce the explosion, and the collision of the flint and steel whereby the sparkles are struck out, are none of them agents, all being passive and equally so; nor is it the finger operating upon the triger that begins the motion, for that is in like manner a K

VOL. I.