g;
and he acknowledged with truth that he was wholly destitute of it;
that he had never produced any effect which could not be clearly
accounted for, or altered any judgment except by distinct reasons. As
a writer, his style, though wholly without grace, was admirable in its
lucidity. He had a singular felicity of illustration, and especially
of metaphor, and a rare power of throwing his thoughts into terse and
pithy sentences; but his many books, though full of original thinking
and in a high degree suggestive to other writers, had always a certain
fragmentary and occasional character, which prevented them from taking
a place in standard literature. He was conscious of it himself, and
was accustomed to say that it was the mission of his life to make up
cartridges for others to fire. The little volume of 'Miscellanies,'
including his commonplace book and his notes for his books, which was
published by his daughter, exhibits with great clearness the character
of his mind. Though a very candid and, in the best sense of the word,
a very tolerant man, and an excellent scholar, he had, I think, little
power of reproducing the modes of thought of men whose mental
structure was widely different from his own, or of entering into the
intellectual conditions of other ages; but he touched a large circle
of subjects, social, political, and even scientific, as well as moral
and religious, with an original and most independent judgment; and he
raised greatly the moral standard of love of truth and the
intellectual standard of severe reasoning wherever his influence
extended. He delighted in that fine saying of Hobbes that, 'words are
the counters of the wise man, but the money of the fool'; he believed
that most controversies might be resolved into verbal ambiguities; and
his hatred of vagueness, grandiloquence, affected obscurity, and
rhetorical exaggeration exercised a very useful influence over young
men. He was also a most attentive and sagacious observer of human
nature, and few modern writers have written so wisely on the
diversities and the management of character and on the science of
life. In this respect he had a strong affinity to Bacon--the Bacon not
of the 'Organon,' but of the 'Essays'--and perhaps still more to
Benjamin Franklin. In theology he challenged the severest inquiry, and
believed that if honestly pursued it would lead only to orthodox
belief. 'A good man,' he once wrote, 'will indeed wish to find the
evidence