Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe With His Vision of the Angelick World

SERIOUS REFLECTIONS DURING THE LIFE...

need not study to increase the disadvantages we lie under on that score. Vice and intemperance, not as a crime only, that I should speak of by itself, but even as a distemper, unfit us for conversation; they help to make us cynical, morose, surly, and rude. Vicious people boast of their polite carriage and their nice behaviour, how gay, how good-humoured, how agreeable! For a while it may be so; but trace them as men of vice, follow them till they come to years, and observe, while you live, you never see the humour last, but they grow fiery, morose, positive, and petulant. An ancient drunkard is a thing indeed not often seen, because the vice has one good faculty with it, viz., that it seldom hands them on to old age; but an ancient and good-humoured drunkard I think I never knew.

It seems strange that men should affect unfitting themselves for society, and study to make themselves unconversable, whereas their being truly sociable as men is the thing which would most recommend them, and that to the best of men, and best answers to the highest felicity of life. Let no man value himself upon being morose and cynical, sour and unconversable – ‘tis the reverse of a good man; a truly religious man follows the rule of the apostle – “Be affable, be courteous, be humble; in meekness esteeming every man better than ourselves; “ whereas conversation now is the reverse of the Christian rule; ‘tis interrupted with conceitedness and affectation – a pride, esteeming ourselves better than every man; and that which is worse still, this happens generally when indeed the justice of the case is against us,

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for where is the man who, thus overruling himself, is not evidently inferior in merit to all about him? Nay, and frequently those who put most value upon themselves, have the least merit to support it. Self-conceit is the bane of human society, and, generally speaking, is the peculiar of those who have the least to recommend them: ‘tis the ruin of conversation, and the destruction of all improvement; for how should any man receive any advantage from the conversation of others, who believes himself qualified to teach them, and not to have occasion to learn anything from them?

Nay, as the fool is generally the man that is conceited most of his own wit, so that very conceit is the ruin of him; it confirms him a fool all the days of his life, for he that thinks himself a wise man is a fool, and knows it not; nay, ‘tis impossible he should continue to be a fool if he was but once convinced of his folly:

If fools could their own ignorance discern, They’d be no longer fools, because they’d learn.

It will be objected here, indeed, that folly and conceit may be hurtful to conversation, may rob men of the advantage of it, unfit one side for conversing, and make it unprofitable, as well as unpleasant to the other; but that this is nothing to the immorality of conversation; that ignorance and conceit may be an infirmity, but is not always a crime; that the mischief of men’s being fools is generally their own, but the mischief of their being knaves is to other people; and this

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is very true. But certainly egregious folly merits one paragraph of rebuke; perhaps it may touch the senses of some weak brethren one time or other, and the labour may not be lost.

I never saw a more simple, or yet a more furious irreconcilable quarrel, than once between two of the most empty, conceited people that ever I knew in the world; and it was upon one calling the other fool, which, on both sides, was unhappily very true. They fought upon the spot, but were parted “by the company; they challenged, and could not meet, their friends getting notice of it; in short, it ruined them both; they made new appointments, and at last deceived their friends and fought again; they were both wounded, and one died; the other fled the country, and never returned. The first owned he was a fool, which was indeed some diminution of his folly. I say he knew himself to be a fool, but could not bear the other to tell him so, who was more a fool than himself. The other boldly asserted his own capacities to be infinitely greater than they were, and despised the first to the last degree, who indeed, if he had not more wit, had more modesty than the other; but both, like fools, fought about nothing, for such, indeed, the question about their wit might very well have been called.

But it is true, after all, the want of a conversable temper, if from a want or defect of sense, may be an infirmity, not an immorality; that is to say, the cause is not so in itself, but it may be so in its consequences that way also, for the con-

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versation of fools is vanity in the abstract. I might here, indeed, find subject for a large tract upon the infinite diversity of fools, and by consequence the wondrous beauty of their conversation. I have on this occasion reckoned up a list of about seven and thirty several sorts of fools, besides Solomon’s fool, whom I take to be the wicked fool only; these I have diversified by their tempers and humours, and in the infinite variety of their follies of several sorts, in every one of which they rob themselves, and all that keep them company, of the felicity of conversation, there being nothing in them but emptiness, or a fulness of what is ridiculous, and only qualified to be laughed at or found fault with.

I have likewise described some of their conversation, their vain repetitions, their catchwords, their laughings and gestures, and adapted them to make the world merry. I have thoughts of running it on into foreign characters, and describe French, Spanish, Portuguese fools, and fools of Russia, China, and the East Indies; but as this is something remote from the design in hand, which is more serious, and done on a much better view, and likewise of an unmeasurable length, like the weighty subject it is upon (for folly is a large field), so I refer it to another opportunity.

The truth is, that part of conversation which I am now to speak of, or which I mean by what I have said upon this subject, is the weighty and serious part, and is not the mere common talk, or a conversation which fools are capable of; ‘tis exercised in a solid and well-tempered frame, and when

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regulated, as it ought to be, by virtue and good morals, is qualified to make mankind happy in the enjoyment of the best things and of the best company; and therefore the evils that creep into and corrupt this part of our conversation are of the more fatal quality, and worth our exposing, that people may see and shun them, and that conversation may be restored among us to what it should be.

I. Of the Immorality of Conversation in General.

Some may object against the term, the immorality of conversation, and think the word improper to the subject; but to save any critic the dearly beloved labour of cavilling in favour of ill manners and unbecoming behaviour, I shall explain myself before I go any farther.

I call conversation immoral where the discourse is indecent, where ‘tis irreligious or profane, where ‘tis immodest or scandalous, or where ‘tis slanderous and abusive. In these and such cases, logui est agere; thus talking lewdly, or talking profanely, is an immodest action. Such is the power of words, that mankind is able

to act as much evil by their tongues as by their hands; the ideas that are formed in the mind from what we hear are most piercing and permanent, and the force of example in this case is not more powerful than the force of argument.

Some of the worst sins are not to be committed but by the tongue, as the sin of blasphemy, speaking treason against

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the majesty of God, cursings and imprecations among men, lies, slanders, and a vast variety of petty excursions, which are grown modish by custom, and seem too small to be reproved.

We are here in England, after many years’ degeneracy, arrived to a time wherein vice is in general discountenanced by authority; God in mercy to the age has inspired our government with a resolution to discourage it; the king, now his wars are over, and his foreign enemies allow him some rest, will, we hope, declare war against this domestic enemy.

The late Queen Mary, of heavenly memory for her piety and blessed example, appeared in her time gallantly in the cause of virtue; magistrates were encouraged to punish vice, new laws made to restrain it, and justice seemed to be at work to reclaim it. But what can kings, or queens, or parliaments do? Laws and proclamations are weak and useless things, unless some secret influence can affect the practices of those whom no laws can reach.

To make laws against words would be as fruitless as to make a shelter against the lightning. There are so many inlets to the breach that the informers would be as numerous as the criminals, and the trespass as frequent as the minutes we live in.

Conversation has received a general taint, and the disease is become a charm. The way to cure it is not by forc-

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ible restraints on particulars, but by some general influence on the public practice. When a distemper becomes pleasant to a patient he is the harder to be cured; he has a sort of aversion to the remedy because he has none to the disease. Our modern people have such a passion for the mode, that if it be but the fashion to be lewd, they will scandalise their honour, debauch their bodies, and damn their souls to be genteel. If the beaux talk blasphemy, the rest will set up for atheists, and deny their Maker, to be counted witty in the defence of it; when our tradesmen would be thought wise, and make themselves appear nice and learned in their conversation, nothing will satisfy them but to criticise upon things sacred, run up to discuss the inscrutables of religion, search the arcana even of heaven itself. The divinity of the Son of God, the hypostatic union, the rational description of the state everlasting, nay, the demonstrations of undemonstrable things, are the common subject of their fancied affected capacities.

Hence come heresies and delusions. Men affecting to search into what is impossible they should clearly discover, learn to doubt because they cannot describe, and deny the existence because they cannot explain the manner of what they inquire after; as if a thorough impossibility of their acting by their sense upon objects beyond its reach was an evidence against their being. Thus, because the Trinity cannot appear to their reasoning, they oppose their reasoning to its reality; they will divest the Son of God of His divinity, and of the hypostatic union of the Godhead in the person

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of Christ, because they cannot distinguish between the actions done by Him in His mediatorial capacity, in virtue of His office, and those actions which He did in virtue of His omnipotence and Godhead.

This is not an immorality and error in conversation only, or not so much so as I think it is a judgment upon it, a blast from Heaven upon the arrogance of the tongue. When proud men give themselves a loose to talk blasphemously to be thought witty, their Maker gives them up to suggest damnable errors till they begin to believe them, and to broach their own wicked hints, till they by custom learn to espouse and defend them, as children tell feigned stories till they believe them to be true. If our town fopperies were visible only in the little excursions of dress and behaviour, it would be satisfaction enough for a wise man either to pity or laugh at them; but when wit is set on worlc, and invention racked to find out methods how they may be more than superlatively wicked, when all the endowments of the mind and helps of art, with the accomplishments of education, are ranged in battle against Heaven, and joined in confederacy to make mankind more wicked than ever the devil had the impudence to desire of them, this calls out aloud for the help of all the powers of government, and all the strength of wit and virtue, to detect and expose it.

Indeed I had some thoughts to leave upon record a melancholy kind of genealogy of this horrid perfection of vice, which so increases in our age, I mean as it respects this nation, in which ‘tis too ancient, indeed, to trace it back to its

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original; yet since its visible increase has been within the reach of our own memory, and it is, as I may say, the adopted child of our age, we may judge of the extent of its influence, and may take a short view of it in miniature. None, indeed, can judge of the extent of its influence but such as have conversed with all sorts of people, from the court to the ploughtail, where you may too sadly see the effect of it in the general debauching both the principles and practice of all sorts and degrees of this nation; but it will be an ungrateful task; it would lead me to the characters of persons, and to write satires upon the times, as well those past as those present, which, indeed, is not my business in this work, and therefore I throw by some keen observations which I had made upon this subject, my business here, or at least my design, being rather to instruct the age than to reproach it; and as for the dead, they are gone to their place.

St. Augustine observes, De civitate Dei, that the ancients justified their liberty in all excesses of vice which they practised in those times from the patterns of their gods; that the stories of the rapes and incest of Jupiter, the lewdness of Venus and Mars, and the like, made those crimes appear less heinous, since people had them frequently in the histories of the deities they worshipped, and that they must of necessity be lawful, seeing they were practised by those famous persons whom they had placed above the skies, and thought fit to adore.

If modern times have received unhappy impressions from vicious courts, and princes have not taken the need-

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ful caution not to guide to evil by their example, instead of turning this into satire upon those that are past, I choose to give it another turn, which our kings, and people too, in time to come may make good use of, and I hope will not be offended at supposing that they will do so.

1)To kings or sovereigns in future reigns; for I am not in this intending the present reign: It may without offence be said, that they have a glorious advantage put into their hands to honour their Maker, and advantage their people, to the immortal glory of their own memory, by prompting virtue and discouraging vice by their happy examples; by removing the vicious habits of conversation from the court-modes, and making vice unfashionable as it is unseemly. Why may not the royal example go as far to reform a nation as it has formerly done to debauch and ruin it? But as this respects the heads 1 of the people, I desire to speak it with the deference of a subject, and close this discourse with only saying, that I pray and wish it may be so.

2)To the people, with more freedom, I apply it thus: Let past examples be what they will, the present reign encourages no crime; why then should our modern conversation receive this taint? Why should we be volunteers in the devil’s service while the power we are under gives us neither precept or example? If we are guilty, ‘tis by mere choice; the crime is all our own, and we are patterns to ourselves.

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