Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 439

Edinburgh Journal, No. 439, by
Various

Project Gutenberg's Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439, by
Various This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and
with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 Volume 17, New Series,
May 29, 1852
Author: Various
Editor: Robert Chambers and William Chambers
Release Date: September 5, 2006 [EBook #19181]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
EDINBURGH JOURNAL ***

Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Richard J. Shiffer and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.

CHAMBERS' EDINBURGH JOURNAL

CONDUCTED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS,
EDITORS OF 'CHAMBERS'S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE,'
'CHAMBERS'S EDUCATIONAL COURSE,' &c.
No. 439. NEW SERIES. SATURDAY, MAY 29, 1852. PRICE 1-1/2d.

THEREFORE AND BECAUSE.
A distinguished general-officer being appointed to a command in
which he would be called on to discharge judicial as well as military
duties, expressed to Lord Mansfield his apprehensions, that he would
execute his office but ill in the former respect, and that his inexperience
and ignorance of technical jurisprudence would prove a serious
impediment to his efficient administration of justice. 'Make your mind
perfectly easy,' said the great judge; 'trust to your native good sense in
forming your opinions, but beware of attempting to state the grounds of
your judgments. The judgment will probably be right--the argument
infallibly wrong.'
This is a common case, especially with practical men, who rarely have
either leisure or inclination to recall the workings of their own minds,
or observe the intellectual process by which they have been conducted
to any conclusion. By what they are prone to consider as a kind of
instinct--if by chance they are philosophers, and delight in what old
Wilson, the essayist, calls 'inkhorn terms,' they designate it
'intuition'--they arrive at a truth, but have no recollection whatever of
the road they travelled to reach it, and are able neither to retrace their
own steps nor indicate to another the way they came. The poet, in
describing and contrasting the intellectual characteristics of the two
sexes, attributes to the softer something of this instinct as a
distinguishing mental peculiarity, and seems to consider it as somewhat
analogous in its constitution to those animal senses by means of which
the mind becomes cognisant of external objects, of their existence, their
qualities, and their relations. In his view, the reasoning process is
vitally and essentially distinct, as it is exercised by men and by
women--

'Her rapid mind decides while his debates; She feels a truth which he
but calculates.'
And certainly this is a very pretty, very poetical, and very convenient
way of accounting for a phenomenon that, if examined with common
care, suggests a solution more accurate and complete, if not exactly so
complimentary. In sober truth, a positive incapacity clearly to point out
the precise manner in which a conviction has been formed, is one of the
commonest of logical deficiencies, and no more to be ascribed
exclusively to the softer sex, than it is an attribute of intellectual
excellency in either.
When, in Euripides's beautiful play, the untranslatable Hippolylus,
Phædra's nurse is made to conclude that certain men she refers to
cannot be otherwise than lax in their morals, because they have
finished the roofs of their houses in a very imperfect manner, her
reasoning is inconsequential enough; but not more so than that of the
renowned French chancellor, Michael L'Hôpital, who, when employed
in negotiating a treaty between Charles IX. and our Elizabeth, insisted
on the well-known line of the Latin poet--
'Et penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos,'
as a reason that Calais should not be returned to the English. The
connection between the premises and the conclusion was not more real
in one case than in the other. A learned member of the medical
profession, in an elaborate work on the climate and the people of Malta,
enjoins on the invalid a participation in the amusements of cheerful
society; and the propriety of his injunction few will be disposed to
dispute: they may well, however, marvel at the reason he assigns for
such sensible advice--that, so far as invalids are concerned, society has
a direct tendency to promote cutaneous perspiration!
Cardinal de Retz severely reprehends the historians of his time for their
pedantic affectation of explaining and accounting for every event they
record--the motives that actuated this statesman, the reasons which
prompted that policy, the wherefore it was this enterprise miscarried, or
that undertaking brought to a successful issue. It would not be difficult

to furnish a lengthy catalogue of the blunders historical writers have
perpetrated through their overweening addiction to this folly.