constant and exclusive operation on the mind, acquire such an influence in forming the intellectual habits, that every deviation from them not only produces surprise, but is apt to excite sentiments of contempt and of ridicule.1 A person who has never extended his views beyond that society of which he himself is a member, is apt to consider many peculiarities in the manners and customs of his countrymen as founded on the universal principles of the human constitution; and when he hears of other nations whose practices in similar cases are different, he is apt to censure them as unnatural, and to despise them as absurd. There are two classes of men who have more particularly been charged with this weakness,-those who are placed at the bottom, and those who have reached the summit of the scale of refinement; the former from ignorance, and the latter from national vanity.

For curing this class of prejudices, the obvious expedient which nature points out to us, is to extend our acquaintance with human affairs, either by means of books or of personal observation. The effects of travelling, in enlarging and in enlightening the mind, are obvious to our daily experience; and similar advantages may be derived (although, perhaps, not in an equal degree) from a careful study of the manners of past ages or of distant nations, as they are described by the historian. In making, however, these attempts for our intellectual improvement, it is of the utmost consequence to us to vary, to a considerable degree, the objects of our attention, in order to prevent any danger of our acquiring an exclusive preference for the caprices of any one people, whose political situation, or whose moral character, may attach us to them as faultless models for our imitation. The same weakness and versatility of mind, the same facility of association, which, in the case of a person who has never extended his views beyond his own community, is a source of national prejudice and of national bigotry, renders the mind, when forced into new situa

1 ["Nous nous accoutumons à tout ce auroit autant surpris que nous nous que nous voions; et je ne sçais si le consulat du Cheval de Caligula, nous

l'imaginons."-Cardinal de Retz.]

tions, easily susceptible of other prejudices no less capricious, and frequently prevents the time, which is devoted to travelling or to study, from being subservient to any better purpose than an importation of foreign fashions, or a still more ludicrous imitation of ancient follies.

The philosopher whose thoughts dwell habitually, not merely upon what is or what has been, but upon what is best and most expedient for mankind; who, to the study of books and the observation of manners, has added a careful examination of the principles of the human constitution, and of those which ought to regulate the social order, is the only person who is effectually secured against both the weaknesses which I have described. By learning to separate what is essential to morality and to happiness, from those adventitious trifles which it is the province of fashion to direct, he is equally guarded against the follies of national prejudice, and a weak deviation, in matters of indifference, from established ideas. Upon his mind, thus occupied with important subjects of reflection, the fluctuating caprices and fashions of the times lose their influence; while accustomed to avoid the slavery of local and arbitrary habits, he possesses, in his own genuine simplicity of character, the same power of accommodation to external circumstances, which men of the world derive from the pliability of their taste and the versatility of their manners. As the order, too, of his ideas is accommodated, not to what is casually presented from without, but to his own systematical principles, his associations are subject only to those slow and pleasing changes which arise from his growing light and improving reason; and, in such a period of the world as the present, when the press not only excludes the possibility of a permanent retrogradation in human affairs, but operates with an irresistible though gradual progress, in undermining prejudices and in extending the triumphs of philosophy, he may reasonably indulge the hope that society will every day approach nearer and nearer to what he wishes it to be. A man of such a character, instead of looking back on the past with regret, finds himself (if I may use the expression) more at home in the world, and more satisfied with its

order, the longer he lives in it. The melancholy contrasts which old men are sometimes disposed to state, between its condition, when they are about to leave it, and that in which they found it at the commencement of their career, arises in most cases from the unlimited influence which in their early years they had allowed to the fashions of the times, in the formation of their characters. How different from those sentiments and prospects which dignified the retreat of Turgot, and brightened the declining years of Franklin!

The querulous temper, however, which is incident to old men, although it renders their manners disagreeable in the intercourse of social life, is by no means the most contemptible form in which the prejudices I have now been describing may display their influence. Such a temper indicates at least a certain degree of observation, in marking the vicissitudes of human affairs, and a certain degree of sensibility in early life, which has connected pleasing ideas with the scenes of infancy and youth. A very great proportion of mankind are, in a great measure, incapable either of the one or of the other; and, suffering themselves to be carried quietly along with the stream of fashion, and finding their opinions and their feelings always in the same relative situation to the fleeting objects around them, are perfectly unconscious of any progress in their own ideas, or of any change in the manners of their age. In vain the philosopher reminds them of the opinions they yesterday held, and forewarns them, from the spirit of the times, of those which they are to hold to-morrow. The opinions of the present moment seem to them to be inseparable from their constitution, and when the prospects are realized, which they lately treated as chimerical, their minds are so gradually prepared for the event, that they behold it without any emotions of wonder or curiosity, and it is to the philosopher alone, by whom it was predicted, that it appears to furnish a subject worthy of future reflection.1

1 [Some reflections similar to the above are subjoined by Gibbon to his account of the fable of the Seven Sleepers of

Ephesus." The story of the Seven Sleepers has been adopted and adorned by the nations from Bengal to Africa,

The prejudices to which the last observations relate, have their origin in that disposition of our nature, which accommodates the order of our ideas, and our various intellectual habits, to whatever appearances have been long and familiarly presented to the mind. But there are other prejudices, which, by being intimately associated with the essential principles of our constitution, or with the original and universal laws of our belief, are incomparably more inveterate in their nature, and have a far more extensive influence on human character and happiness.

III. The manner in which the association of ideas operates in producing this third class of our speculative errors, may be conceived in part, from what was formerly said concerning the superstitious observances, which are mixed with the practice of medicine among rude nations. As all the different circumstances which accompanied the first administration of a remedy, come to be considered as essential to its future success, and are blended together in our conceptions, without any discrimination of their relative importance; so, whatever tenets and ceremonies we have been taught to connect with the religious creed of our infancy, become almost a part of our constitution, by being indissolubly united with truths which are essential to happiness, and which we are led to reverence and to love, by

who profess the Mahometan religion; and some vestiges of a similar tradition have been discovered in the remote extremities of Scandinavia. This casy and universal belief, so expressive of the sense of mankind, may be ascribed to the genuine merit of the fable itself. We imperceptibly advance from youth to age, without observing the gradual but incessant change of human affairs; and even in our larger experience of history, the imagination is accustomed, by a perpetual series of causes and effects, to unite the most distant revolutions. But if the interval between two memorable eras could be instantly annihilated; if it were possible, after a momentary slumber of two hundred

years, to display the new world to the eyes of a spectator, who still retained a lively and recent impression of the old, his surprise and his reflections would furnish the pleasing subject of a philo sophical romance."-Decline and Fall, vol. vi. pp. 35, 36.

To these observations may be added a remark of Lord Bacon's, to the truth of which our daily experience bears testimony. "Levitas hominum atque inconstantia hinc optime perspici potest, qui donec res aliqua perfecta sit, eam mirantur fieri posse; postquam facta semel est, iterum mirantur eam jampridem factam non fuisse.”—De Aug. Scient, lib. i.]

all the best dispositions of the heart. The astonishment which the peasant feels, when he sees the rites of a religion different from his own, is not less great than if he saw some flagrant breach of the moral duties, or some direct act of impiety to God; nor is it easy for him to conceive, that there can be any thing worthy in a mind which treats with indifference, what awakens in his own breast all its best and sublimest emotions. "Is it possible," says the old and expiring Bramin, in one of Marmontel's tales, to the young English officer who had saved the life of his daughter, " is it possible, that he to whose compassion I owe the preservation of my child, and who now soothes my last moments with the consolations of piety, should not believe in the god Vistnou, and his nine metamorphoses!"

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What has now been said on the nature of religious superstition, may be applied to many other subjects. In particular, it may be applied to those political prejudices which bias the judgment even of enlightened men in all countries of the world.

How deeply rooted in the human frame are those important principles which interest the good man in the prosperity of the world, and more especially in the prosperity of that beloved community to which he belongs! How small, at the same time, is the number of individuals who, accustomed to contemplate one modification alone of the social order, are able to distinguish the circumstances which are essential to human happiness, from those which are indifferent or hurtful! In such a situation how natural is it for a man of benevolence to acquire an indiscriminate and superstitious veneration for all the institutions under which he has been educated; as these institutions, however capricious and absurd in themselves, are not only familiarized by habit to all his thoughts and feelings, but are consecrated in his mind by an indissoluble association with duties which nature recommends to his affections, and which reason commands him to fulfil. It is on these accounts that a superstitious zeal against innovation, both in religion and politics, where it is evidently grafted on piety to God and good-will to mankind, however it may excite the sorrow of the