nding breathed into him with the breath of
life, and in the participation and improvement of which alone he is
raised above the brute creation and his own physical nature!"--The
overstrained and ridiculous pretensions of monks and ascetics were never
thought to justify a return to unbridled licence of manners, or the
throwing aside of all decency. The hypocrisy, cruelty, and fanaticism,
often attendant on peculiar professions of sanctity, have not banished
the name of religion from the world. Neither can "the unreasonableness
of the reason" of some modern sciolists "so unreason our reason," as to
debar us of the benefit of this principle in future, or to disfranchise
us of the highest privilege of our nature. In the second place, if it is
admitted that Reason alone is not the sole and self-sufficient ground of
morals, it is to Mr. Godwin that we are indebted for having settled the
point. No one denied or distrusted this principle (before his time) as
the absolute judge and interpreter in all questions of difficulty;
and if this is no longer the case, it is because he has taken this
principle, and followed it into its remotest consequences with more
keenness of eye and steadiness of hand than any other expounder of
ethics. His grand work is (at least) an _experimentum crucis_ to shew
the weak sides and imperfections of human reason as the sole law of
human action. By overshooting the mark, or by "flying an eagle flight,
forth and right on," he has pointed out the limit or line of separation,
between what is practicable and what is barely conceivable--by imposing
impossible tasks on the naked strength of the will, he has discovered
how far it is or is not in our power to dispense with the illusions of
sense, to resist the calls of affection, to emancipate ourselves from
the force of habit; and thus, though he has not said it himself, has
enabled others to say to the towering aspirations after good, and to the
over-bearing pride of human intellect--"Thus far shalt thou come, and no
farther!" Captain Parry would be thought to have rendered a service
to navigation and his country, no less by proving that there is no
North-West Passage, than if he had ascertained that there is one: so Mr.
Godwin has rendered an essential service to moral science, by attempting
(in vain) to pass the Arctic Circle and Frozen Regions, where the
understanding is no longer warmed by the affections, nor fanned by the
breeze of fancy! This is the effe