426 



Memoir on the Indian Surveys. 



[April 



In taking a cursory review of the progress of the most interesting 

 and important departments of knowledge, it seems difficult to account 

 on any rational principles for those singular contemporaneous fits, 

 those widelj^-difFused impulses which circumstances absolutely un- 

 connected with each other concur to produce in the minds of indivi- 

 duals, directing and instigating them to occupations and researches in 

 extension of the most valuable objects and pursuits which have 

 engaged the attention of the civilized world. Neither is the question 

 satisfied on the ordinary plea of necessity. Take what department you 

 will, though necessity shall be clearly shown to have been equally 

 imperative, and the times proportionately fertile in expedients at the 

 periods when such inquiries were instituted, there is a ripeness of 

 season at which every project that is started, every effort in aid of in- 

 dividual sagacity or industry can alone be productive of fruit. Nov 

 are the advances to such state, although unobserved, less subordinate 

 to this remarkable principle. Like the return of suspended animation, 

 the first symptoms of change are almost imperceptible, but at length 

 the new accessions of vitality and strength are visibly increased, and 

 the struggles of life go on with a marked and characteristic rapidity 

 till the recovery is perfect. And it is thus, more probably, with that 

 unnatural state of ignorance which has hitherto supervened for many 

 ages, than to any progressive advance of the mind, whether intuitive 

 or produced by external causes, that we should rightly apprehend the 

 present strides of science. From a state of inanimation the moral 

 and intellectual pulsation has been at first comparatively slow, and 

 indistinctly perceived. The exhibition of every successive effort is a 

 characteristic harbinger of higher and more rapid degrees of improve- 

 ment, — an improvement which will eventually lead to every desirable 

 approach to perfection. 



Whatever may be the most rational account of this remarkable and 

 simultaneous concurrence of events, many people are content to dis- 

 miss the difficulty, by referring it either to the particular occasions 

 which call forth individual talent, or to the influence of certain .master- 

 spirits on the subsisting state and character of society. And doubt- 

 less it is on tliis showing, tliat War or Peace, Freedom or Servitude, 

 commercial enterprise or despotic tyranny, are presumed by one or 

 other of us to operate as so many spurs or checks to the further pro- 

 gress of the human race in the chief desiderata of science and art. 

 Without going at any length into the proofs of this assertion, we 

 might advert to the remarkable literary inquiries and establishments 

 in the eighth and ninth centuries, instituted or fostered at one and the 



