PRELIMINARY DISCOURSE. Our life is turned Out of her course, wherever man is made Or implement, a passive thing employed THE object of works like the Utopia is very commonly misunderstood. People are apt to imagine, because the form in which the principles appear has been created by the author, that the principles themselves likewise partake of a visionary character, and have no reference to society as it actually exists. The attempt to exhibit them in action seems fatal to their vitality. They are supposed to be adapted to the use of no community, because the community in whose social condition the author has chosen to exemplify their necessary operation, is disguised by a fanciful name, or perhaps has no existence. But this is an unphilosophical mode of judging. In most cases men who create imaginary common wealths are careful to introduce no institution, which has not somewhere been put in practice, and received the sanction of experience. They proceed exactly according to the system of landscapepainters, who, from various picturesque features actually observed in nature, compose an ideal scene, more beautiful, perhaps, than any combination of the elements they ever witnessed; or, at least, more complete when artificially isolated, and viewed apart; which is almost impossible in nature itself. Precisely so is it with ethic delineators. They study society in its history and progressive developement, and from among the rules which it has prescribed itself in different circumstances, select what appear to them the wisest, and linking them together by an imaginary vinculum, give birth to a state, a form of government, a code of laws, and a system of manners, such as in their totality never existed, though not necessarily repugnant to the human constitution or the regular dispensations of Providence. This is preeminently true in the case of Sir Thomas More. He has nowhere, I think, imagined a law which was not really enacted and found to work well in some ancient community; he has conceived no form of manners, even where he departs from established customs most widely, for which he could not, or for which I cannot, adduce historical or philosophical authority; he recommends no practices which have not already prevailed, advocates no maxims which have not, in some country or other, been adopted as principles of action, ad tipe ourne PRELIMINARY DISCOURSE. vances no opinions which would require more than a very moderate portion of ability to defend. Not that I by any means pretend he is always right. Far from it. I disagree with him in many places, as they who read my notes will perceive. Yet even where he errs, his errors, I think, are those of a great man, intent on promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number; and with this view venturing daringly on the adoption or revival of practices shrunk from by the timid, or made the object of sneer and sarcasm by the vulgar. His opportunities, however, for acquiring correct notions, and testing theory by experience, were such as fall to the lot of few. Engaged for many years in public business, initiated in all the mysteries of state-craft, he was enabled to observe closely and narrowly the operation of those principles, by which contemporary politicians were guided; and his large acquaintance with history, rendered easy the comparison between existing institutions, and those which society had made experiment of and laid aside, whether from fickleness, or because its wants required the change. For this reason the opinion of Sir Thomas More, preserved in the UTOPIA, will always appear worthy of consideration to persons above the puerile habit of judging all things by the prejudice current in their particular coterie. Historians, however, little acquainted with his works, but re-echoing the remarks of some strainer after originality, affect to form a mean estimate of his intellect. They lose sight altogether of the times in which he ap |