ories so unlike as those
of Hercules and Jesus, can, by a fertile imagination and allegorical
interpretations, be brought to the same tally, no line of distinction
remains between fact and fancy. As this pithy morsel will not
overburthen the mail in passing and repassing between Quincy and
Monticello, I send it for your perusal. Perhaps it will satisfy you, as
it has me; and may save you the labor of reading twenty-four times its
volume. I have said to you that it was written by Tracy; and I had so
entered it on the title-page, as I usually do on anonymous works whose
authors are known to me. But Tracy requested me not to betray his
anonyme, for reasons which may not yet, perhaps, have ceased to weigh. I
am bound, then, to make the same reserve with you. Destutt-Tracy is, in
my judgment, the ablest writer living on intellectual subjects, or the
operations of the understanding. His three octavo volumes on Ideology,
which constitute the foundation of what he has since written, I have not
entirely read; because I am not fond of reading what is merely abstract,
and unapplied immediately to some useful science. Bonaparte, with his
repeated derisions of Ideologists (squinting at this author) has by
this time felt that true wisdom does not lie in mere practice without
principle. The next work Tracy wrote was the Commentary on Montesquieu,
never published in the original, because not safe; but translated and
published in Philadelphia, yet without the author's name. He has since
permitted his name to be mentioned. Although called a Commentary, it is,
in truth, an elementary work on the principles of government, comprised
in about three hundred pages octavo. He has lately published a third
work on Political Economy, comprising the whole subject within about
the same compass; in which all its principles are demonstrated with
the severity of Euclid, and, like him, without ever using a superfluous
word. I have procured this to be translated, and have been four years
endeavoring to get it printed: but, as yet, without success. In the mean
time, the author has published the original in France, which he thought
unsafe while Bonaparte was in power. No printed copy, I believe, has yet
reached this country. He has his fourth and last work now in the press
at Paris, closing, as he conceives, the circle of metaphysical sciences.
This work, which is on Ethics, I have not seen, but suspect I shall
differ from it in its foundation, although not