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The Adventures of Hugh Trevor
by
Thomas Holcroft
Every man of determined inquiry, who will ask, without the dread ofdiscovering more than he dares believe, what is divinity? what is law?what is physic? what is war? and what is trade? will have great reasonto doubt at some times of the virtue, and at others of the utility, ofeach of these different employments. What profession should a man ofprinciple, who is anxiously desirous to promote individual and generalhappiness, chuse for his son? The question has perplexed many parents,and certainly deserves a serious examination. Is a novel a good modefor discussing it, or a proper vehicle for moral truth? Of this someperhaps will be inclined to doubt. Others, whose intellectual powerswere indubitably of the first order, have considered the art of novelwriting as very essentially connected with moral instruction. Of thisopinion was the famous Turgot, who we are told affirmed that moregrand moral truths had been promulgated by novel writers than by anyother class of men.
But, though I consider the choice of a profession as the interestingquestion agitated in the following work, I have endeavoured to keepanother important inquiry continually in view. This inquiry is, thegrowth of intellect. Philosophers have lately paid much attentionto the progress of mind; the subject is with good reason become afavourite with them, and the more the individual and the generalhistory of man is examined the more proofs do they discover insupport of his perfectability. Man is continually impelled, by thevicissitudes of life, to great vicissitudes of opinion and conduct. Heis a being necessarily subject to change; and the inquiry of wisdomought continually to be, how may he change for the better? Fromindividual facts, and from them alone, can general knowledge beobtained.
Two men of different opinions were once conversing. The one scoffed atinnate ideas, instinctive principles, and occult causes: the other wasa believer in natural gifts, and an active fabricator of suppositions.Suggest but the slightest hint and he would erect a hypothesis whichno argument, at least none that he would listen to, could overthrow.So convinced was he of the force of intuitive powers, and naturalpropensities, as existing in himself, that, having proposed to writea treatise to prove that apple trees might bear oysters, or somethingequally true and equally important, he was determined he said toseek for no exterior aid or communication, from books, or things, ormen; being convinced that the activity of his own mind would affordintuitive argument, of more worth than all the adulterated andsuspicious facts that experience could afford.
To this his antagonist replied, he knew but of one mode of obtainingknowledge; which was by the senses. Whether this knowledge enteredat the eye, the ear, the papillary nerves, the olfactory, or by thatmore general sense which we call feeling, was, he argued, of littleconsequence; but at some or all of these it must enter, for he hadnever discovered any other inlet. If however the system of hisopponent were true, he could only say that, in all probability, hisintended treatise would have been written in the highest perfectionhad he begun and ended it before he had be