To understand this more accurately, let us apply it to the case of rewards, which has always been a favourite topic with the advocates of an improved legislation. How often have we been told 'that talents and virtues would spring up spontaneously in a country, one of the objects of whose constitution should be to secure to them an adequate reward'? Now, to judge of the propriety of this aphorism, we should begin with recollecting that the discerning of merit is an individual, not a social capacity. What can be more reasonable than that each man, for himself, should estimate the merits of his neighbour?
To endeavour to institute a general judgement in the name of the whole, and to melt down the different opinions of mankind into one common opinion, appears, at first sight, so monstrous an attempt that it is impossible to augur well of its consequences. Will this judgement be wise, reasonable or just? Wherever each man is accustomed to decide for himself, and the appeal of merit is immediately to the opinion of its contemporaries, there, were it not for the false bias of some positive institution, we might expect a genuine ardour in him who aspired to excellence, creating and receiving impressions in the preference of an impartial audience. We might expect the judgement of the auditors to ripen by perpetual exercise, and mind, ever curious and awake, continually to approach nearer to its genuine standard.
What do we gain in compensation for this, by setting up authority as the oracle, from which the active mind is to inform itself what sort of excellence it should seek to acquire, and the public at large what judgement they should pronounce upon the efforts of their contemporaries? What should we think of an act of parliament appointing some individual president of the court of criticism, and judge in the last resort of the literary merit of dramatic compositions? Is there any solid reason why we should expect better things from authority usurping the examination of moral or political excellence?
Nothing can be more unreasonable than the attempt to retain men in one common opinion by the dictate of authority. The opinion thus obtruded upon the minds of the public is not their real opinion; it is only a project by which they are rendered incapable of forming an opinion. Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are torpor and imbecility. This point was perhaps sufficiently elucidated when we had occasion directly to investigate the principle of the right of private judgement.
We shall be still more completely aware of the pernicious tendency of positive institutions if we proceed explicitly to contrast the nature of mind, and the nature of government. One of the most unquestionable characteristics of the human mind has appeared to be its progressive nature. Now, on the other hand, it is the express tendency of positive institution to retain that with which it is conversant for ever in the same state. Is then the perfectibility of understanding an attribute of trivial importance? Can we recollect, with coldness and indifference, the advantages with which this quality seems pregnant to the latest posterity? And how are these advantages to be secured? By incessant industry, by a curiosity never to be disheartened or fatigued, by a spirit of enquiry to which a philanthropic mind will allow no pause. The circumstance most indispensably necessary is that we should never stand still, that everything most interesting to the general welfare, wholly delivered from restraint, should be in a state of change, moderate and as it were imperceptible, but continual. Is there anything that can look with a more malignant aspect upon the general welfare than an institution tending to give permanence to certain systems and opinions?
Such institutions are two ways pernicious; first, which is most material, because they render the future advances of mind inexpressibly tedious and operose; secondly because, by violently confining the stream of reflection and holding it for a time in an unnatural state, they compel it at last to rush forward with impetuosity, and thus occasion calamities which, were it free from restraint, would be found extremely foreign to its nature.
If the interference of positive institution had been out of the question, would the progress of intellect, in past ages, have been so slow as to have struck the majority of ingenuous observers with despair? The science of Greece and Rome upon the subject of politics was, in many respects, extremely imperfect: yet could we have been so long in appropriating their discoveries, had not the allurements of reward, and the menace of persecution, united to induce us not to trust to the direct and fair verdict of our own understandings?
The just conclusion from the above reasonings is nothing more than a confirmation, with some difference in the mode of application, of the fundamental principle that government is little capable of affording benefit of the first importance to mankind. It is calculated to induce us to lament, not the apathy and indifference, but the inauspicious activity of government.
It incites us to look for the moral improvement of the species, not in the multiplying of regulations, but in their repeal. It teaches us that truth and virtue, like commerce, will then flourish most when least subjected to the mistaken guardianship of authority and laws. This maxim will rise upon us in its importance in proportion as we connect it with the numerous departments of political justice to which it will be found to have relation.
As fast as it shall be adopted into the practice of mankind, it may be expected to deliver us from a weight, intolerable to mind, and, in the highest degree, hostile to the progress of truth.