1827.] 



Domestic and Foreign. 



421 



We have considerable respect for Mr. 

 Stewart ; but really his demands, when he 

 does come forth with a quarto, are some- 

 what too exacting. He writes a great deal 

 too much like a gentleman at ease, per- 

 fectly disengaged, and expecting his readers to 

 be fully as much at leisure as himself. His 

 are illustrated works; and, as it is with 

 other illustrated works, the ornaments are 

 more attractive than the matter, and as often 

 usurp or distract the attention as they inform 

 or direct it. It is agreeable enough, often 

 very agreeable, in an idle hour, to be thus 

 reminded of persons and opinions long gone 

 by of opinions too, in their author's own 

 phraseology, and to which, otherwise, in this 

 short life of ours, we should have little 

 chance of ever voluntarily recurring again ; 

 but these are not what the student wants 

 the maximum of knowledge real, substan- 

 tial knowledge in the minimum of space 

 he himself caring little from what quarter 

 that knowledge comes; while Mr. Stewart 

 piques himself upon scrupulously observing 

 the principle of literary justice, and would, 

 if he could, trace and record the most obvious 

 maxims, significant or insignificant, of 

 science or morals, to the far-off originator. 



Mr. Stewart's object, those who are ac- 

 quainted with his former volumes will re- 

 member or, if they have forgotten, they 

 may very well be excused was a review of 

 our " Intellectual Powers," according to a 

 separation and analysis of his own. This 

 review the present volume completes not 

 that he is confident he has exhausted them, 

 and indeed on the principle of his divisions, 

 there really could be no ground for such 

 confidence, that principle consistently lead- 

 ing interminably to scores of other powers. 

 Some might reasonably doubt, whether there 

 be any grounds for making any such insu- 

 lations as he has made ; but he has no doubt 

 at all upon that point, and assumes the foun- 

 dation of his analysis to be indisputable in- 

 controvertible. Taking him then as we find 

 him, the volume before us closes the list of 

 powers or faculties discussed in his former 

 volumes, with an examination of what he 

 terms auxiliary faculties, and principles 

 these are LANGUAGE and IMITATION. This 

 examination exhausting the list of intellec- 

 tual powers, supreme and subordinate, he 

 proceeds to consider some varieties of intel- 

 lectual character, resulting from different 

 combinations of these same faculties before 

 defined ; and concludes the whole mass of his 

 subject with a brief comparison between the 

 faculties of man, and those of animals. At 

 the end of the volume follows a reprint of 

 all the information he had before published 

 relative to Mitchell, the blind, deaf, and 

 dumb boy, to which are added the latest 

 accounts he had received of him. 



These are the general contents, and we 

 can only glance at particulars. The faculty 

 of LANGUAGE is the first topic, occupying 

 with all that seemed more or less to concern 

 the subject 150 pages. Language is either 



natural or artificial. The natural consists 

 of expressions of countenance, gestures of 

 body, and tones of voice. The interpretation 

 of this language has been commonly attri- 

 buted particularly by Priestley, and men of 

 his school to experience solely. Mr. Stewart 

 ascribes it mainly to an instinctive intelli- 

 gence, and he is neither without facts nor rea- 

 sons tor his opinion. The establishment of 

 artificial language must be the effect of con- 

 vention ; and convention implies a previous 

 understanding, and whence can come that 

 understanding, but from an instinctive per- 

 ception of natural signs? Then follows the 

 origin and history of language which 

 amounts to nothing more than a few re- 

 marks, of no weight or even propriety, relative 

 to Adam Smith's and Home Tooke's specula- 

 tions with the information, that Smith has 

 made a mistake or two, and that Tooke was 

 a better grammarian than philosopher. 



Language, considered as an instrument of 

 thought, comes next ; but this topic, some- 

 what strangely, had been anticipated by Mr. 

 Stewart, and he now therefore only refers to 

 several passages dispersed over his former 

 volumes, hither and thither. He drops, how- 

 ever, upon Michaelis's Essay on the In- 

 fluence of Opinion on Language, and of 

 Language on Opinion. The illustrations fur- 

 nished by Michaelis, he finds are confined to 

 the abuse of words in the science of botany, 

 <fec., a circumstance which Mr. Stewart is at 

 first disposed to regret, but presently consoles 

 himself with the recollection that the effects 

 on discussions upon mental phenomena must 

 be analogous, and of course will be more or 

 less observable by every reader. He him- 

 self, on this point, also, specifically, in other 

 places, has scattered divers remarks ; and he 

 once thought, it seems, of bringing them now 

 all together, but he contents himself, and we 

 are thankful, with one long self -quotation 

 on the perils of metaphor. 



In the rear of these chapters follow sundry 

 miscellaneous considerations one relative to 

 the practicability of tracing the origin and 

 migration of nations by the aid of etymo- 

 logy. The more languages are understood, 

 and the greater the number too, the more 

 resemblances affinities are discovered, 

 and affinities have already been exhibited to 

 a " miraculous, or next to a miraculous ex- 

 tent," by Adelung and some of his successors ; 

 and Mr. Stewart knows not what may be 

 done by-and-by, by following up the grow- 

 ing scent from nation to nation, and tribe to 

 tribe coupling this profession of ignorance, 

 in his way, with a warning, nevertheless, 

 against aiming at what is beyond the compre- 

 hension of our limited faculties. But how are 

 we to know where these limits are till we try ? 

 Another of the miscellaneous discussions, 

 relative to language, concerns the original 

 imposition of names on surrounding objects. 

 This, it has been supposed, was determined 

 by the qualities of these objects. As usual 

 with Mr. Stewart, this opinion seems not al- 

 together unfounded, but still little progress 



