Moral Responsibility. 43 



knowledge and habits having entirely disappeared before 

 pious asceticism and intolerance, men seem to have found 

 the chief vent for their sympathies and antipathies in injur- 

 ing and torturing not only others but themselves. In the 

 previous democratic period, when dialectics and culture 

 rapidly developed the minds of men, they not only acquired an 

 enthusiastic activity, but first learned to subordinate their own 

 interest and happiness to those of others. Still this develop- 

 ment was morbid and exaggerated ; for the general interest 

 of the human race is as much injured by a narrow, greedy 

 patriotism, which seeks its own aggrandizement at the 

 expense of other nations, as the real interest of the indivi- 

 dual is damaged by the notion that it can be really served 

 by depredations upon others. But the subsequent age of 

 religious frenzy was infinitely worse. Men were wholly 

 possessed by an insane superstition, in which they preserved 

 no features of their former progress but that energy and 

 self- subordination which then misdirected them into the 

 wildest excesses ; and there appear to have been few of any 

 intellectual activity, whose pious rage could be satisfied with 

 less than either enduring the pangs of martyrdom themselves, 

 or of inflicting them on others, for the glory of God. At 

 last, fortunately, the paroxysm spent itself. Population had 

 gradually multiplied so much that in many places men were 

 driven by their increasing wants to agriculture and to 

 trade. These necessarily restored the sense of mutual depend- 

 ence, confidence, and reliance. The republican spirit revived. 

 The Reformation then for ever burst the bonds of authority, 

 to which the human mind can never again be submitted ; 

 for the invention of printing has secured the permanent 

 advance and wider dissemination of knowledge for the 

 future. The sympathies and antipathies of men are now 

 being gradually brought under the government of reason, 

 after the chastening of a salutary though dreadful experi- 

 ence ; while the superiority of the ratio of the increase of 

 population, to that of the means of subsistence, secures the 

 maintenance of an abundant and sustained energy. We 

 have, at last, arrived at an age of unfettered criticism ; at 

 a day of judgment. But fearful evidence of the severity 

 of the ordeal through which the human intellect has passed 

 is still everywhere perceptible, and it still exhibits symp- 

 toms of the panic by which it was lately transported. The 

 fancied belief in a sitper-natural in nature, — in a trans- 

 cendental moral faculty, in a theory of more than moral 



