William Godwin: Man

“It has an unhappy effect upon the human understanding and temper, for a man to be compelled in his gravest investigation of an argument, to consider, not what is true, but what is convenient.”

William Godwin

Context: It has an unhappy effect upon the human understanding and temper, for a man to be compelled in his gravest investigation of an argument, to consider, not what is true, but what is convenient. The lawyer never yet existed who has not boldly urged an objection which he knew to be fallacious, or endeavoured to pass off a weak reason for a strong one. Intellect is the greatest and most sacred of all endowments; and no man ever trifled with it, defending an action to-day which he had arraigned yesterday, or extenuating an offence on one occasion, which, soon after, he painted in the most atrocious colours, with absolute impunity. Above all, the poet, whose judgment should be clear, whose feelings should be uniform and sound, whose sense should be alive to every impression and hardened to none, who is the legislator of generations and the moral instructor of the world, ought never to have been a practising lawyer, or ought speedily to have quitted so dangerous an engagement.

The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer vol. 1, p. 370 (1803)

Understanding

“I did not hate the author of my misfortunes — truth and justice acquit me of that; I rather pitied the hard destiny to which he seemed condemned. But I thought with unspeakable loathing of those errors, in consequence of which every man is fated to be, more or less, the tyrant or the slave. I was astonished at the folly of my species, that they did not rise up as one man, and shake off chains so ignominious, and misery so insupportable. So far as related to myself, I resolved — and this resolution has never been entirety forgotten by me — to hold myself disengaged from this odious scene, and never fill the part either of the oppressor or the sufferer.”

William Godwin book Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams

Caleb Williams (1794)

Hate , Fate , Truth , Justice

“The proper method for hastening the decay of error is not by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavour to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself.”

William Godwin

Vol. 2, bk. 8, ch. 6
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Men , Error , Thinking

“Mankind will never be, in an eminent degree, virtuous and happy till each man shall possess that portion of finstino and no more, to which he is entitled by his personal merits. The dissolution of aristocracy is equally the interest of the oppressor and the oppressed. The one will be delivered from the listlessness of tyranny, and the other from the brutalizing operation of servitude.”

William Godwin

Book V, Chapter 11, "Moral Effects of Aristocracy"
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Personality , Happiness

“The man that does not know himself not to be at the mercy of other men, that does not feel that he is invulnerable to all the vicissitudes of fortune, is incapable of a constant and inflexible virtue.”

William Godwin

Book V, "Of Education"
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Feeling , Men

“The reason a man lives under any particular government is partly a necessity; he cannot easily avoid living under some government, and it is often scarcely in his power to abandon the country in which he was born: it is also partly, a choice of evil; no man can be said, in this case, to enjoy that freedom which is essential to the forming a contract unless it could be shown that he had a power of instituting, somewhere, a government adapted to his own conceptions.”

William Godwin

Book III, "Of Obedience"
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Freedom , Evil , Country

“No man must encroach upon my province nor I upon his. He may advise me, moderately and without perniciousness, but he must not expect to dictate to me. He may censure me freely and without reserve but he should remember that I am to act by my deliberation and not his. He may exercise a republican boldness in judging, but he must not be peremptory and imperious in prescribing. Force may never be resorted to but, in the most extraordinary and imperious emergency.”

William Godwin

Book II, "Of Rights"
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Exercises

“Democracy is a system of government according to which every member of society is considered as a man and nothing more.”

William Godwin

Book V, Chapter 13, "General Features of Democracy"

Massacre is the too possible attendant upon revolution , and massacre is perhaps the most hateful scene, alllowing for its omentary duration, that any imagination can suggest, The fearful, hopeless, expectation of the defeated, and the blood-hound fury of their conquerors, is a complication of mischief that all which has been told of internal regions can scarcely surpass. The cold-blooded massacres that are perpetrated under the naem of criminal justice fall short of these in some of their most frightful aggravations. The ministers and instruments of law have by perform, and often bear their parts in the most shocking enormities without being sensible to the passions allied murders with the rudeness of an insulting triumph ; and, as the conduct themselves , in a certain sort, by known principles of injustice, the evil we have reason to apprehend has its limits. But the instruments of massacre are discharged from every restraint.

Book VIII, Ch.
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Democracy