SAYINGS OF LORD MONBODDO.
The science of metaphysics must always keep, with the enlightened few, a rank above all those that treat of inferior subjects, to that greatest one of all, the operations of mind and spirit. He who has never studied the philosophy of his own mind, is as much inferior to him who understands it, as the lubberly passenger in a ship is to the enlightened navigator; neither, it is true, can control the winds, nor clear away clouds from the stars; but without any such visionary powers as these, there remains an immense difference between being driven through one's course ignorantly and incuriously by impulses of whose nature and limits we have no conception, and profiting by our intelligence of the same impulses, and when we cannot suit them to our purposes, accommodating our purposes to them—what matters it, so they are effected. Most of us walk in the dark in regard to every thing that concerns our own powers and better natures. We are lost in absolute fogs of ignorance, to the extent of not believing in the existence of knowledge, and of not appreciating it when others discover it. Yet the search should be made for its own sake, for the improvement and exercise it is fitted to give our perceptive faculties and reasoning powers, even if the benefit ended there. It would be easy to cite many examples of this effect. We shall content ourselves with one, which will put this matter in a striking point of view, as showing how one man's mind at least, has arrived at a pitch of acuteness, which most or all of our readers probably must be content to admire, and can scarcely hope to reach. We mean Lord Monboddo—from whose work, on the origin and progress of language, book 1, ch. 8, we take the following extract:—
"Plato said that the subject of opinion was neither the το ον, or the thing itself, nor was it the το μη ον or nothing, but something betwixt these two. This may appear, at first sight, a little mysterious and hard to be understood; but like other things of that kind in Plato, when examined to the bottom, it has a very clear meaning, and explains the nature of opinion very well. For, as he says, every man that opines must opine something. The subject of opinion, therefore, is not nothing—at the same time it is not the thing itself, but something betwixt the two."
Lord Monboddo says, he knows a man who would spend days together in reading music, without applying to it either voice or instrument, and took great delight in it. The music, Monboddo says, was intellectual.
