Page:An account of a voyage to establish a colony at Port Philip in Bass's Strait.djvu/120

( 95 ) their situations;" but by placing ourselves thus, we do not judge of their feelings but of our own, and assume for granted what is contrary to nature, that man is every where the same. We do not consider that what to our constitutional energies and cultivated minds would appear the acmé of misery, may, to others of a different temperament, be a state of comparative enjoyment; for the perceptions of every individual being, create a standard of happiness in his own mind, and nature has given to no two the same capacity of enjoyment. If the negro inherited from nature the intellectual capacity of the European, why have we not seen him improve in the arts of civilization, by the force of natural, ingenuity, or, at least, by the adoption of some of the knowledge of the latter. Here it may