Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers, vol 2 | Page 4

had really been dozing a little on this occasion; or, agreeably to his own illustration elsewhere, that he had realized the pleasant picture of one learned doctor trying to milk a he-goat, whilst another doctor, equally learned, holds the milk-pail below. [Footnote: Kant applied this illustration to the case where one worshipful scholar proposes some impossible problem, (as the squaring of the circle, or the perpetual motion,) which another worshipful scholar sits down to solve. The reference was of course to Virgil's line,--'Atque idem jungat vulpes, et mulgeat hircos.'] And there is apparently this two- edged embarrassment pressing upon the case--that, if our dear excellent mother the Earth could be persuaded to tell us her exact age in Julian years, still that would leave us all as much in the dark as ever: since, if the answer were, 'Why, children, at my next birth-day I shall count a matter of some million centuries,' we should still be at a loss to value her age: would it mean that she was a mere chicken, or that she was 'getting up in years?' On the other hand, if (declining to state any odious circumstantialities,) she were to reply,--'No matter, children, for my precise years, which are disagreeable remembrances; I confess generally to being a lady of a certain age,'--here, in the inverse order, given the valuation of the age, we should yet be at a loss for the absolute years numerically: would a 'certain age,' mean that 'mamma' was a million, be the same more or less, or perhaps not much above seventy thousand?
Every way, you see, reader, there are difficulties. But two things used to strike me, as unaccountably overlooked by Kant; who, to say the truth, was profound--yet at no time very agile--in the character of his understanding. First, what age now might we take our brother and sister planets to be? For that determination as to a point in their constitution, will do something to illustrate our own. We are as good as they, I hope, any day: perhaps in a growl, one might modestly insinuate--better. It's not at all likely that there can be any great disproportion of age amongst children of the same household: and therefore, since Kant always countenanced the idea that Jupiter had not quite finished the upholstery of his extensive premises, as a comfortable residence for a man, Jupiter having, in fact, a fine family of mammoths, but no family at all of 'humans,' (as brother Jonathan calls them,) Kant was bound, ex analogo, to hold that any little precedency in the trade of living, on the part of our own mother Earth, could not count for much in the long run. At Newmarket, or Doncaster, the start is seldom mathematically true: trifling advantages will survive all human trials after abstract equity; and the logic of this case argues, that any few thousands of years by which Tellus may have got ahead of Jupiter, such as the having finished her Roman Empire, finished her Crusades, and finished her French Revolution, virtually amounts to little or nothing; indicates no higher proportion to the total scale upon which she has to run, than the few tickings of a watch by which one horse at the start for the Leger is in advance of another. When checked in our chronology by each other, it transpires that, in effect, we are but executing the nice manoeuvre of a start; and that the small matter of six thousand years, by which we may have advanced our own position beyond some of our planetary rivals, is but the outstretched neck of an uneasy horse at Doncaster. This is one of the data overlooked by Kant; and the less excusably overlooked, because it was his own peculiar doctrine,-- that uncle Jupiter ought to be considered a greenhorn. Jupiter may be a younger brother of our mamma; but, if he is a brother at all, he cannot be so very wide of our own chronology; and therefore the first datum overlooked by Kant was--the analogy of our whole planetary system. A second datum, as it always occurred to myself, might reasonably enough be derived from the intellectual vigor of us men. If our mother could, with any show of reason, be considered an old decayed lady, snoring stentorously in her arm-chair, there would naturally be some aroma of phthisis, or apoplexy, beginning to form about us, that are her children. But is there? If ever Dr. Johnson said a true word, it was when he replied to the Scottish judge Burnett, so well known to the world as Lord Monboddo. The judge, a learned man, but obstinate as a mule in certain prejudices, had said plaintively, querulously, piteously,--'Ah, Doctor, we are poor creatures, we men of the eighteenth century, by comparison with