NOTES

To the Essay on Feelings.

In describing the operations of the mind, the greatest accuracy of ideas and language is required; without the first, we are confused ourselves; without the latter, we must confuse our readers; and yet even the first rate philosophers have confounded three things which are in their nature totally distinct, viz. feelings, passions, and sentiments. The two first are the most nearly allied, and are therefore frequently mistaken for each other. Passions are only feelings in excess, but sentiments are the result of deliberate reflection. Sorrow is a feeling, but grief is a passion; resentment ripens into revenge, dislike becomes hatred, preference rises into love, and emulation begets envy, malice, and jealousy.-Dr. Adam Smith, in the first page of his Theory of Moral Sentiments, has fallen into a wonderful error in expressing himself on the nature of pity or compassion. "How selfish soever," says he, " man may be supposed, there is evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, tho' he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion; the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of

others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means limited to the virtuous and humane, tho' perhaps they may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility.”Now here are four things confounded together, which are all essentially different. Pity is not a principle, but a feeling, for principles are the effect of deliberate judgment, and feelings are the sudden result of perceptions. He was right in calling pity an emotion, for emotion and feeling are nearly synonimous terms; but he is wrong again in calling it a sentiment, and more so in calling it a passion, for the reasons above mentioned. When such men as Adam Smith are deceived by popular language, it is not to be wondered that the vulgar do not always express themselves accurately.

David Hume, who was not a man of sensibility or feeling, has an essay on Delicacy of Taste and Passion. The title of the essay is faulty, therefore we are not to expect much from the contents. It is, indeed, a subject on which, of all others, he was least qualified to write, because he was required to express those feelings which he did not possess. "Some people," says he, "are subject to a certain delicacy of passion." The word subject is most unhappily chosen, for it rather gives us the idea of a disease than a disposition; and such, indeed, he considered it, for, a little after, he says that "men of cool and sedate tempers are more to be envied than those who possess lively sensibility." He calls joy and resentment passions, whereas they "Delicacy of passion" we should

are only feelings.

certainly read "Delicacy of feeling," for none of the passions are very gentle or delicate; tho' he afterwards confesses that this delicacy of passion enlarges the sphere of our happiness or misery, and makes us sensible to pains, as well as pleasures, which never touch the rest of mankind; and yet he says again, that this delicacy of passion is to be lamented, and remedied if possible.— He then proposes delicacy of taste as a cure for delicacy of passion; but he corrects himself, and says, “it rather improves our sensibility for all the tender and agreeable passions," which is downright nonsense. "Susceptibility" might have answered the purpose, for passions we should read emotions, and for emotions we should substitute the word passions, when he says, that, "delicacy of taste renders the mind incapable of the rougher and more boisterous emotions." How delicacy of taste or sentiment are compatible "with the gaiety or frolic of a bottle companion," Mr Hume probably well understood, but they are not generally found together. Sentiments, feelings, and passions, are all different movements of the mind, which are frequently confounded by inaccurate writers. An attention to this distinction, will induce an accuracy of thinking and language which is of infinite importance to the happiness of society; for nothing has caused so much confusion, as calling things by wrong

names.

P. 159. "Rough language,"

"Lacrymas dedit hæc nostri pars optima sensus.

P. 166.

Juvenal, sat. xvi. v. 133.

"Refuse like the poet."

Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modis

P. 172.

Tam chari capitis?

Horace, Od. lib. i. 24.

"Old women." The hapless fate of these poor women is pathetically lamented by our modern Theocritus, Allan Ramsay, whose Doric dialect unfortunately conceals many of his beauties.

Mause. Hard luck alack when poverty and eild,
Weeds out o' fashion, and a lonely bield,

Wie a sma' cast o' wiles, should in a twitch
Gie ane the hatefu' name, " A wrinkled witch."

Vide Gentle Shepherd, Act 2d, sc. 3d. P. 174. "In a well regulated country." Colonel Symes, in his interesting account of the embassy to Ava, tells us, that in the Birmin nation "a common beggar is no where to be seen; every individual is certain of receiving sustenance, which, if he cannot procure by his own labor, is provided for him by others."

P. 175.

Vol. ii. p. 389.

"Instances, &c." Tacitus, in the 13th book of his Annals, gives a remarkable instance of the effects of timely severity, in restoring the discipline of an army. Corbulo had been sent to take the command of troops who had grown indolent by a long peace and continued residence in the enervating country of Syria. "Nec enim ut in aliis exercitibus, primum alterumque delictum venia prosequebatur; sed qui signa reliquerat statim capite pœnas luebat, idque usu salubre et misericordiâ melius apparuit. Quippe pauciores illa castra deseruere quam ea in quibus ignoscebatur."

Cap. 35.

P. 180. «Public sensations." I remember some years

ago, when a great flood threatened to destroy half the property of a fen country, the people of a certain village stood in crowds upon their banks, with anxious expectation, to watch the course of the water, and when they found it was taking an opposite direction to theirs, and destroying the dykes of another village, they set up a shout of joy, rang the bells of the church, and had their houses illuminated. The story was related in the papers, and they were stigmatized as savages; yet they were not more savages than those who rejoice at a victory, in which thousands of innocent men lose their lives.

The world, perhaps, never produced an occasion on which public demonstrations of joy and sensibility were more generally, more properly, or more temperately expressed, than at the conclusion of that peace by which the Americans established their independence. The overflowings of gratitude to their great deliverer, Washington, were unbounded, yet unalloyed by a single instance of excess or intemperance; all ranks and ages joined in the general exultation, and tears of sensibility flowed from the eyes of thousands, as an involuntary tribute of their feelings. When the general accepted the office of President, the same scene was renewed, and the historian tells us, that, on his landing at New York, "universal joy diffused itself through every rank of people ;" but when he took the oath of office in the presence of the multitude, he says, "asolemn silence prevailed among thespectators at this part of the ceremony; it was a minute of the most sublime political joy." For the whole account, I refer to Ramsay's History of the American Revolution, in 2 vols. 8vo. the best which has yet been published.