Excerpt from Selections From the Edinburgh Review, 1833, Vol. 2 of 4: Comprising the Best Articles in That Journal, From Its Commencement to the Present Time; With a Preliminary Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes
Warburton, we think, was the last of our great divines - the last, perhaps, of any profession - who united profound learning with great powers of understanding, and, long with vast and varied stores of acquired knowledge, possessed energy of mind enough to wield them with ease and activity. The days of the Cudworths and Barrows - the Hookers and Taylors, are gone by. Among the other divisions of intellectual labour to which the progress of society has given birth, the business of reasoning, and the business of collecting knowledge, have been, in a great measure, put into separate hands. Our scholars are now little else than pedants, and antiquaries, and grammarians, - who have never exercised any faculty but memory; and our reasoners are, for the most part, but slenderly provided with learning; or, at any rate, make but a slender use of it in their reasoning. Of the two, the reasoners are by far the best off; and, upon many subjects, have really profited by the separation. Argument from authority is, in general, the weakest and the most tedious of all arguments; and learning, we are inclined to believe, has more frequently played the part of a bully than of a fair auxiliary; and been oftener used to frighten people than to convince them, - to dazzle and overawe, rather than to guide and enlighten. A modern writer would not, if he could, reason as Barrow and Cudworth often reason; and every reader, even of Warburton, must have felt that his learning often encumbers rather than assists his progress, and, like shining armour, adds more to his terrors than to his strength. The true theory of this separation may be, therefore, that scholars who are capable of reasoning, have ceased to make a parade of their scholarship; while those who have nothing else, must continue to set it forward - just as gentlemen now-a-days keep their gold in their pockets, instead of wearing it on their clothes - while the fashion of laced suits still prevails among their domestics. There are individuals, however, who think that a man of rank looks most dignified in cut velvet and embroidery; and that one who is not a gentleman can now counterfeit that appearance a little too easily. We do not presume to settle so weighty a dispute; - we only take the liberty of observing, that Warburton lived to see the fashion go out; and was almost the last native gentleman who appeared in a full trimmed coat.
He was not only the last of our reasoning scholars, but the last also, we think, of our powerful polemics.
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