with the views and statements respecting him,
contained in this article and in my book on witchcraft, the answer is:
that mankind is not divided into two absolutely distinct and entirely
separated portions--one good and the other evil. The good are liable to,
and the bad are capable of, each receiving much into their own lives and
characters, that belongs to the other. This interfusion universally
occurs. The great errors and the great wrongs imputable to Cotton Mather
do not make it impracticable to discern what was commendable in him.
They may be accounted for without throwing him out of the pale of
humanity or our having to shut our eyes to traits and merits other ways
exhibited.

The extraordinary precocity of his intellect--itself always a peril,
often a life-long misfortune--awakened vanity and subjected him to the
flattery by which it is fed. All ancestral associations and family
influences pampered it. Such a speech as that made to him, at his
graduation, by President Oakes, could not have failed to have inflated
it to exaggerated dimensions. Clerical and political ambition was
natural, all but instinctive, to one, whose father, and both whose
grandfathers, had been powers, in the State as well as Church. The
religious ideas, if they can be so called, in which he had been trained
from childhood, in a form bearing upon him with more weight than upon
any other person in all history, inasmuch, as they constituted the
prominent feature of his father's reading, talk, thoughts, and writings,
gave a rapid and overshadowing growth to credulity and superstition. A
defect in his education, perhaps, in part, a natural defect, left him
without any true logical culture, so that he seems, in his productions
and conduct, not to discern the sequences of statements, the coherence
of propositions, nor the consistency of actions, thereby entangling him
in expressions and declarations that have the aspect of
untruthfulness--his language often actually bearing that character,
without his discerning it. His writings present many instances of this
infirmity. Some have already been incidentally adduced. In his _Life of
Phips_, avowing himself the author of the document known as the _Advice
of the Ministers_, he uses this language: "By Mr. Mather the younger, as
I have been informed." He had, in fact, never been _so informed_. He
knew it by consciousness. Of course he had no thought of deceiving; but
merely followed a habit he had got,