“On the Past and Future”
Apposite metaphors and believable intertextuality dominate “On the Past and Future.” To illustrate, Rousseau incarnates the prominence of the extraordinary past: “What to me constitutes the great charm of the Confessions of Rousseau is their turning so much upon this feeling. He seems to gather up the past moments of his being like drops of honey-dew to distil a precious liquor from them; his alternate pleasures and pains are the bead-roll that he tells over and piously worships; he makes a rosary of the flowers of hope and fancy that strewed his earliest years.” Rousseau’s deliberations in Confessions magnify Hazlitt’s contentions regarding the substantiality of ancient commemorations. The rhetorical honey-dew is characteristic of the pleasantness of the past that cannot be eclipsed by unsubstantiated misconceptions regarding the future. The course of ‘distilling liquor’ embodies the utility that one derives from reminiscing. Notably, Rousseau does not disregard ancient pains for they are solid modules of ‘the bead-roll’ that recapitulates his incredible history. Accordingly, Rousseau formulates a all-inclusive bundle of his lifespan that can be paralleled to the ‘bird in hand’ which he has had the prospect to embrace. Comparatively, the future is equal to ‘two birds in the bush” that one cannot be guaranteed of clasping.
The future is unquestionably disguised; thus, there is no contract that pledges its actuality: “The future is like a dead wall or a thick mist hiding all objects from our view; the past is alive and stirring with objects, bright or solemn, and of unfading interest. What is it in fact that we recur to oftenest? What subjects do we think or talk of? Not the ignorant future, but the well-stored past.” The figurative ‘dead wall or thick mist” suppositions that mortals are devoid of capability to seamlessly detect the future incidences. Comparatively, there is no wall that obfuscates the past, and even waning recollections are ample to resuscitate the past. The disparity between the future and the past suppositions that snubbing the past is patent witlessness that cannot intensify the future’s hypothetical significance.
"On The Ignorance of the Learned"
Peripheral knowledge, principally that which is derivative books, is overpoweringly disingenuous: “The habit of supplying our ideas from foreign sources 'enfeebles all internal strength of thought,' as a course of dram-drinking destroys the tone of the stomach. The faculties of the mind, when not exerted, or when cramped by custom and authority, become listless, torpid, and unfit for the purposes of thought or action.” Hazlitt’s viewpoint alludes that grasping the capacious content which is delineated in books is crippling because it impedes one from cogitating unconventionally. Learnedness is typically appraised using academic credentials that are subject to the knowledge abounding in books. Some learned persons may flop when deliberating beyond the knowledge that they have chronicled in their mentalities. Accordingly, such learned individuals may be unmindful of rudimentary questions that are not amalgamated in books. Therefore, infatuation with books is a lethal habit for perceptive self-sufficiency and progress.
Scholastic learning is corresponding to transliterating fabricated notions: “The learned author differs from the learned student in this, that the one transcribes what the other reads. The learned are mere literary drudges. If you set them upon original composition, their heads turn, they don't know where they are. The indefatigable readers of books are like the everlasting copiers of pictures, who, when they attempt to do anything of their own, find they want an eye quick enough, a hand steady enough, and colours bright enough, to trace the living forms of nature.” Learning that is principally endorsed through books is affiliated to a cycle that results in the chronological conquering of foreign ideas or weaning of the brain with alien philosophies. Accordingly, disproportionate engrossing in books extinguishes the enticements to institute pioneering conceptions as the readers must depend on bookish principles when reasoning. Books do not nurture distinctive learning; they promote the mastery of famed philosophies at the expense of automatic intelligence.
