Anglo-India, Social, Moral and Political; A Collection of Papers from the Asiatic Journal

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1838 Excerpt: ... SOCIETY AND MANNERS. ENGLISH SOCIETY IN INDIA. Man is a mysterious compound of active and passive will. The former, unless in a few rare and enviable cases, it is seldom given him to exercise. By the latter, he is every hour, in this working-day world, influenced, modified, I might say, created. I hate all your metaphysical jargon, which seems only invented for the concealment of ignorance, and am, therefore, truly solicitous to avoid it. But shall I be misunderstood if I call active will the principle which, when in some solitary insulated instances it comes into operation, animates, exalts, and o'er-informs us with something akin to divine inspiration--that divinam particulam aurce, which bursts by its own inextinguishable energies beyond the fetters and impediments of the external circumstances which train and educate by far the greater part of mankind, and mould and fashion all the every-day specimens of humanity that walk or strut upon the habitable globe? It is, then, the passive will, that almost voluntary submission to extrinsic influences and over-ruling motives, which in the pride of our hearts we deem ourselves capable of withstanding, but which is even then the most irresistible at the moment we are most striving to resist it;--it is this which, in every philosophical survey of our genus, and in every precise investigation of our moral history, ought primarily to be regarded. For it is this that makes the individual, or, in other words, constitutes his idiosyncracy; and not of the individual only, but of the larger combinations as well as lesser platoons of human society. Of the few who, by the exercise of an active will, rise superior to all outward circumstances, standing like rocks amidst the waves and storms of motives that assail us, and ...