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Updated: June 2, 2025
Thomas Browne has argued that death is one of the necessary conditions of human happiness; and he supports his argument with great force and eloquence. But when death comes into a household, we do not philosophise we only feel. The eyes that are full of tears do not see; though in course of time they come to see more clearly and brightly than those that have never known sorrow.
'Yes, as a parson I shall have to meditate much before I grasp the notion. 'Perhaps you have dropped your philosophical studies? said Godwin, with a smile of courteous interest. 'I don't know. Metaphysics have no great interest for me, but I philosophise in a way. I thought myself a student of human nature, at all events.
First he sighed; then he moved round on his stool; then he got up; then he peered at the muffin from a respectful distance; then he gradually approached, and walked round, and round, and round it his eyes getting bigger and bigger; then he peeped through the glass-door into the shop, and saw his father busily engaged with the old lady; then he began to calculate and philosophise, perhaps his father had done breakfast; perhaps he would not come back at all; if he came back, he would not miss one corner of the muffin; and if he did miss it, why should Tom be supposed to have taken it?
"The pains and penalties of life," Leah had said to him once, and he had thought the expression a strange one on the lips of so beautiful a woman; but he knew better now, and how such pains and penalties fall to the share of many men. "It is all in the day's work," he muttered as he rang the bell, for it was Malcolm's nature to philosophise even in trouble.
Ned Talbot looked across the table at the handsome youngster, and heaved a sigh to the memory of the good old days when he also was happy enough to invent troubles, and philosophise darkly concerning unknown woes.
By all but peddling narrow-thoughted bigots they are held in honour for their science, their matter-of-fact philosophy; not their puerile conceits about 'airy nothings, to which half crazed supernaturalists have assigned 'a local habitation and a name. Lord Bacon laid down principles so remote from pious, that no man can understand and philosophise in strict accordance with them, if he fears to embrace Atheism.
In the Comanche of the Llano Estacado, or the Pawnee of the Platte, he would have found an exact counterpart of the Ishmaelitish wanderer over the sandy plains of the Saara. He was allowed but scant time to philosophise upon these ethnological phenomena.
As a rule, we do not philosophise much about it, although we may recognise certain principles in our liking; it is those to whom our hearts naturally open that we invite in and have joy in their companionship, and we might surely follow our likings in the matter of colour, as well as in friendship, and thereby add much to our happiness.
The first-rate man seldom has any impulse to record and philosophise; his impulse is to act; life, to him, is an adventure, not a syllogism or an autopsy. Thus the writing of history is left to college professors, moralists, theorists, dunder-heads. Few historians, great or small, have shown any capacity for the affairs they presume to describe and interpret.
Renan, amongst the many thinkers on life’s mysteries, tells us that “Life is the result of a conflict between contrary forces.” But to philosophise is useless, and it is still more useless to question life’s seeming anomalies. We can only bow in silence before “what Time in mists confounds.”
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