h it
should have the misfortune to be allied with a perverse or irritable
temper. On this consideration I would gladly have submitted to the
review of Mr. Ricardo, as indisputably the first of critics in this
department, rather than to any other person, my own review of himself.
That I have forfeited the opportunity of doing this--is a source of
some self-reproach to myself. I regret also that I have forfeited the
opportunity of perhaps giving pleasure to Mr. Ricardo by liberating
him from a few misrepresentations, and placing his vindication upon a
firmer basis even than that which he has chosen. In one respect I
enjoy an advantage for such a service, and in general for the polemic
part of Political Economy, which Mr. Ricardo did not. The course of my
studies has led me to cultivate the scholastic logic. Mr. Ricardo has
obviously neglected it. Confiding in his own conscious strength, and
no doubt participating in the common error of modern times as to the
value of artificial logic, he has taken for granted that the
Aristotelian forms and the exquisite science of distinctions matured
by the subtilty of the schoolmen can achieve nothing in substance
which is beyond the power of mere sound good sense and robust
faculties of reasoning; or at most can only attain the same end with a
little more speed and adroitness. But this is a great error: and it
was an ill day for the human understanding when Lord Bacon gave his
countenance to a notion, which his own exclusive study of one
department in philosophy could alone have suggested. Distinctions
previously examined--probed--and accurately bounded, together with a
terminology previously established, are the crutches on which all
minds--the weakest and the strongest--must alike depend in many cases
of perplexity: from pure neglect of such aids, which are to the
unassisted understanding what weapons are to the unarmed human
strength or tools and machinery to the naked hand of art, do many
branches of knowledge at this day languish amongst those which are
independent of experiment.

[Footnote 31: MR. J. R. MCCULLOCH in his _Literature of Political
Economy_ makes the following observations concerning DE QUINCEY'S
'Dialogues of Three Templars on Political Economy':--They are
unequalled, perhaps, for brevity, pungency, and force. They not only
bring the Ricardian theory of value into strong relief, but
triumphantly repel, or rather annihilate, the objections urged against
it by Malt