Sedgwick is a different, and, as a whole, an inferior man; but a _man_ every inch of him, and an Englishman too, in his thoughts, and in his fine mother wit and tongue. He has, in the midst of all his confusion and passionateness, the true instinct of philosophy--the true venatic sense of objective truth. We know nothing better in the main, than his demolition of what is untrue, and his reduction of what is absurd, and his taking the wind out of what is tympanitic, in the notorious _Vestiges_; we don't say he always does justice to what is really good in it; his mission is to execute justice _upon it_, and that he does. His remarks on Oken and Owen, and his quotations from Dr. Clarke's admirable paper on the _Development of the Foetus_, in the _Cambridge Philosophical Transactions_, we would recommend to our medical friends. The very confusion of Sedgwick is the free outcome of a deep and racy nature; it puts us in mind of what happened, when an Englishman was looking with astonishment and disgust at a Scotchman eating a singed sheep's head, and was asked by the eater what he thought of that dish? "_Dish_, sir, do you call that a dish?" "Dish or no dish," rejoined the Caledonian, "there's a deal o' fine confused feedin' aboot it, let me tell you."
We conclude these rambling remarks with a quotation from Arnauld, the friend of Pascal, and the intrepid antagonist of the Vatican and the Grand Monarque; one of the noblest, freest, most untiring and honest intellects, our world has ever seen. "Why don't you rest sometimes?" said his friend Nicole to him. "Rest! why should I rest here? haven't I an eternity to rest in?" The following sentence from his "_Port-Royal Logic_," so well introduced and translated by Mr. Baynes, contains the gist of all we have been trying to say. It should be engraven on the tablets of every young student's heart--for the heart has to do with study as well as the head.
"There is nothing more desirable than _good sense and justness of mind_,--all other qualities of mind are of limited use, but exactness of judgment is of general utility in every part and in all employments of life.
"_We are too apt to employ reason merely as an instrument for acquiring the sciences, whereas we ought to avail ourselves of the sciences, as an instrument for perfecting our reason_; justness of mind being infinitely more important than all the speculative knowledge which we can obtain by means of sciences the most solid. This ought to lead wise men to make their sciences _the exercise and not the occupation of their mental powers_. Men are not born to employ all their time in measuring lines, in considering the various movements of matter: their minds are too great, and their life too short, their time too precious, to be so engrossed; but they are born to be just, equitable, and prudent, in all their thoughts, their actions, their business; to these things they ought especially to train and discipline themselves."