This is the difference between social and individual man.  Not that this distinction is to be considered definite, or characteristic of one human being as compared with another; it denotes rather two classes of agency, common in a degree to every human being.  None is exempt, indeed, from that species of influence which affects, as it were, the surface of his being, and gives the specific outline to his conduct.  Almost all that is ostensible submits to that legislature created by the general representation of the past feelings of mankind—­imperfect as it is from a variety of causes, as it exists in the government, the religion, and domestic habits.  Those who do not nominally, yet actually, submit to the same power.  The external features of their conduct, indeed, can no more escape it, than the clouds can escape from the stream of the wind; and his opinion, which he often hopes he has dispassionately secured from all contagion of prejudice and vulgarity, would be found, on examination, to be the inevitable excrescence of the very usages from which he vehemently dissents.  Internally all is conducted otherwise; the efficiency, the essence, the vitality of actions, derives its colour from what is no ways contributed to from any external source.  Like the plant which while it derives the accident of its size and shape from the soil in which it springs, and is cankered, or distorted, or inflated, yet retains those qualities which essentially divide it from all others; so that hemlock continues to be poison, and the violet does not cease to emit its odour in whatever soil it may grow.

We consider our own nature too superficially.  We look on all that in ourselves with which we can discover a resemblance in others; and consider those resemblances as the materials of moral knowledge.  It is in the differences that it actually consists.

[1815; publ. 1840]

ESSAY ON THE LITERATURE, THE ARTS, AND THE MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS

A FRAGMENT

The period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the death of Aristotle, is undoubtedly, whether considered in itself, or with reference to the effects which it has produced upon the subsequent destinies of civilized man, the most memorable in the history of the world.  What was the combination of moral and political circumstances which produced so unparalleled a progress during that period in literature and the arts;—­why that progress, so rapid and so sustained, so soon received a check, and became retrograde,—­are problems left to the wonder and conjecture of posterity.  The wrecks and fragments of those subtle and profound minds, like the ruins of a fine statue, obscurely suggest to us the grandeur and perfection of the whole.  Their very language—­a type of the understandings of which it was the creation and the image—­in variety, in simplicity, in flexibility, and in copiousness, excels every other language of the western world.