Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers, vol 2 | Page 4

treasonable to
insinuate the possibility of an error against so great a swell as
Immanuel Kant, one would be inclined to fancy that Mr. Kant 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