St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Letters or Essays Addressed to Alexander Pope, Esq.

London

1754

"Such they may be called, for though foreign ideas divert the attention of the mind, when they break in unsought and by violence, they help it often when they have been sought and are admitted by choice."

But besides the use which poets make with some profusion, as they have a right to do, and orators make, or should make more sparingly, of this art of the mind, which, transferring ideas from one subject to another, makes that becomes graceful and reasonable, and thereby useful when the application is judicious, which would be monstrous and absurd, and thereby hurtful without it; there is another use, which the severest philosophical writers may and do make of it in their meditations, as well as in their discourses; an use that if it does not serve to increase, serves most certainly to facilitate and propagate knowledge. They who meditate (for every man, and probably every animal thinks) must have observed that the mind employs all its forces, and memory and imagination among the rest, not only to form opinions, or to arrive at knowledge, but to set the objects of opinion, or knowledge, in the fullest and clearest light for its own satisfaction, and for the ease of communicating these thoughts to other minds in the same order, and with the same energy as they are contemplated by it. Not only judgment compares in a steady train, ideas and notions that are present to it and those that are intermediate, those that sagacity discovers to help the process of comparing; but memory and the faculty of imagining are employed to bring in adventitious helps. Such they may be called, for though foreign ideas divert the attention of the mind, when they break in unsought and by violence, they help it often when they have been sought and are admitted by choice. They lead the mind, indirectly and round about, as it were, in many cases, to such truths, or such evidence of truth, as could not have been attained so easily, nor so fully, without them.
(Essay I, §5; vol. iii, pp. 445-6)

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Reading

At least 5 entries in ESTC (1754, 1777, 1793).

See "Letters or Essays Addressed to Alexander Pope, Esq." in the third volume of David Mallet's The Works of the Late Right Honorable Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, 5 vols. (London : [s.n.], Printed in the Year 1754). <Link to ESTC><Link to ESTC>

Text from the third volume of The Works of the Late Right Honorable Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, 5 vols. (Dublin: Printed by P. Byrne: 1793). <Link to Google Books>

Reading also in the 1967 reprint of The Works of Lord Bolingbroke, 4 vols. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1844).

03/14/2014