Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/177

 wisdom would be once more brought into open day by the solution of this problem," to wit, "a thorough recasting of the moulds in which the minds of our gentry, the characters of our future land-owners, magistrates, and senators, are to receive their shape and fashion. Suffice it for the present to hint the master-thought. The first man, on whom the light of an dawned, did in that same moment receive the spirit and the credentials of a Lawgiver; and as long as man shall exist, so long will the possession of that antecedent knowledge which exists only in the power of an idea, be the one lawful qualification for all dominion in the world of the senses," p. 52. Now we do think this a shorter cut towards the undermining of the rotten boroughs, and ousting the present ministry, than any we have yet heard of. One of the most extraordinary ideas in this work is where the Author proves the doctrine of free will from the existence of property; and again, where he recommends the study of the Scriptures, from the example of Heraclitus and Horace. To conclude this most inconclusive piece of work, we find the distant hopes and doubtful expectations of the writer's mind summed up in the following rare rhapsody. "Oh what a mine of undiscovered treasures, what a new world of power and truth would the Bible promise to our future meditation, if in some gracious moment one solitary text of all its inspired contents should but dawn upon us in the pure untroubled brightness of an, that most glorious birth of the godlike within us, which even as the light, its material symbol, reflects itself from a thousand surfaces, and flies homeward to its parent mind, enriched with a thousand forms, itself above form, and still retaining in its own simplicity and identity! O for a flash of that same light, in which the first position of geometric science that ever loosed itself from the generalizations of a groping and insecure experience, did for the first time reveal itself to a human intellect in all its evidence and in all its fruitfulness. Transparence without Vacuum, and Plenitude without Opacity! O! that a single gleam of our own inward experience would make comprehensible to us the rapturous