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Updated: May 21, 2025
It is hardly necessary to point out that the doctrine just laid down is what is commonly called materialism. In fact, I am not sure that the adjective "crass," which appears to have a special charm for rhetorical sciolists, would not be applied to it. But it is, nevertheless, true that the doctrine contains nothing inconsistent with the purest idealism.
The last-named dish is one which Sciolists are perpetually calling filet
Hence the value of tradition; and hence, as the first man could not instruct himself, Christian theologians, with a deeper philosophy than is dreamed of by the sciolists of the age, maintain that God himself was man's first teacher, or that he created Adam a full-grown man, with all his faculties developed, complete, and in full activity.
But in the works of Herodotus, who, in spite of the shallow and ungenerous attempts of modem sciolists to verify his history, may justly be called the "Father of Lies"; in the published speeches of Cicero and the biographies of Suetonius; in Tacitus at his best; in Pliny's Natural History; in Hanno's Periplus; in all the early chronicles; in the Lives of the Saints; in Froissart and Sir Thomas Malory; in the travels of Marco Polo; in Olaus Magnus, and Aldrovandus, and Conrad Lycosthenes, with his magnificent Prodigiorum et Ostentorum Chronicon; in the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini; in the memoirs of Casanova; in Defoe's History of the Plague; in Boswell's Life of Johnson; in Napoleon's despatches, and in the works of our own Carlyle, whose French Revolution is one of the most fascinating historical novels ever written, facts are either kept in their proper subordinate position, or else entirely excluded on the general ground of dulness.
On the other hand, much of the commonplace, shallow fashionable talk about hereditary genius I don't mean, of course, the talk of our Darwins and Galtons, but the cheap drawing-room philosophy of easy sciolists who can't understand them is itself fully as absurd in its own way as the idea that something can come out of nothing.
The diffusion of literature, though it has rendered the acquirement of general knowledge impossible, and tends inevitably to diminish the number of sound scholars, while it increases the multitude of sciolists, carries with it a beneficial influence to the lower classes.
Boswell was perfectly aware what he was doing, nor did he awake to find himself famous for a method into which the sciolists pretend he only unconsciously blundered.
Since the days of Smith and Montesquieu, no more valuable addition has been made to moral science; and though the good taste and modesty of its author, has induced her to put, in the least obtrusive form, the wisdom and erudition the least fragment of which would have furnished forth a host of modern Sciolists with the most ostentatious paragraphs the deep thought and nervous eloquence by which almost every page of the volume before us is illustrated, sufficiently establish her title to rank among the most distinguished writers of this age and country.
In this they proved themselves statesmen, and their work survives; and the republic, laugh as sciolists may, is, for the present and future, the model republic as much so as was Rome in her day; and it is not simply national pride nor American self-conceit that pronounces its establishment the beginning of a new and more advanced order of civilization; such is really the fact.
To take no account of this attribution would be to show myself as shamelessly as shamefully deficient in that respect and gratitude which all genuine and thankful students will always be as ready to offer as all thankless and insolent sciolists can ever be to disclaim, to the venerable scholar who since I was first engaged on these notes has added yet another obligation to the many under which he had already laid all younger and lesser labourers in the same field of study, by the issue in a form fitly ennobled and enriched of his great historical work on our early stage.
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