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Of his character, some faint idea may be formed from our sketch and extracts; but of the beauty of his thoughts, his soundness, sagacity, the perfect simplicity of his whole style of character, a large acquaintance with his free outpourings to his friends can alone give an adequate notion.
When in his addresses to them, appealing to their intelligence, education, and enlightened justice, he would declare that the property of his clients was perfectly safe in their hands, he looked to be such an advocate as a litigant would fain possess when dreading the soundness of his own cause.
Nay, more, he degrades men to the level of the brute creation. In his view, there is nothing admirable beyond this pleasure no sensation or emotion of the mind, no soundness or health of body. And what is this pleasure which he makes of such high account? How short-lived while it lasts! how ignoble when we recall it afterwards!
The development of the common sense of the people has given security to a vast horde of follies, which would be destroyed in the unchecked competition of life. It is the soundness of our age which has made what we call its decadence possible. It is the undercurrent of science which has given security to human life, a security which obtains for fools as well as for sages.
So Isaiah commences his prophecies: "The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment."
Good sense is an instinctive insight into all the bearings of act or thought, an intuitive discernment of the relations and consequences of conduct or purpose, a soundness of judgment, resulting from the soundness of, and equilibrium among, the upper powers of reason and sensibility. The moral side is at least the half of it: Napoleon's moral endowment was but fractional.
The Anglo-Saxon soundness of understanding has shown itself in nothing more clearly than in allowing institutions to be formulated gradually by custom, convenience, or necessity, and in preferring the practical comfort of a system that works, to the French method of a scientific machinery of perpetual motion, demonstrably perfect in all its parts, and yet refusing to go.
Thus much soundness and right principle there is at least, in what some superfine persons call the 'common' folk, the folk whose innermost sense of truth and straightforwardness, not even the proudest statesman dare outrage.
Let them retrace their steps and first prove the truth, soundness and validity of their psychological and sexual theories and cease pressing on to pastures new, as Dr. Coriat has done here in the case of stuttering.
Goddard's findings as regards feeble-mindedness fit in perfectly with this scheme. That Goddard was unaware of it when his conclusions were reached is all the more evidence of their soundness because it shows that they were reached independently.
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