ON TRUE HAPPINESS.

From the Pennsylvania Gazette, No. 363, Nov. 20, 1735.

THE desire of happiness in general is so natural to us, that all the world are in pursuit of it; all have this one end in view, though they take such different methods to attain it, and are so much divided in their notions of it.

Evil, as evil, can never be chosen; and though evil is often the effect of our own choice, yet we never desire it, but under the appearance of an imaginary good.

Many things we indulge ourselves in may be considered by us as evils, and yet be desirable; but then they are only considered as evils in their effects and consequences, not as evils at present, and attended with immediate misery.

Reason represents things to us, not only as they are at present, but as they are in their whole nature and tendency; passion only regards them in their former light: when this governs us, we are regardless of the future, and are only affected with the present.

It is impossible ever to enjoy ourselves rightly, if our conduct be not such as to preserve the harmony and order of our faculties, and the original frame and constitution of our minds; all true happiness, as all that is truly beautiful, can only result from order.

Whilst there is a conflict betwixt the two principles of passion and reason, we must be miserable in proportion to the struggle; and when the victory is gained, and reason so far subdued as seldom to trouble us with its remonstrances, the happiness we have then, is not the happiness of our rational nature, but the happiness only of the inferior and sensual part of us, and consequently a very low and imperfect happiness, to what the other would have afforded us.

If we reflect upon any one passion and disposition of mind, abstract from virtue, we shall soon see the disconnexion between that and true solid happiness. It is of the very essence, for instance, of envy to be uneasy and disquieted. Pride meets with provocations and disturbances upon almost every occasion. Covetousness is ever attended with solicitude and anxiety. Ambition has its disappointments to sour us, but never the good fortune to satisfy us; its appetite grows the keener by indulgence, and all we can gratify it with at present serves but the more to inflame its insatiable desires.

The passions, by being too much conversant with earthly objects, can never fix in us a proper composure and acquiescence of mind. Nothing but an indifference to the things of this world, an entire submission to the will of Providence here, and a well-grounded expectation of happiness hereafter, can give us a true satisfactory enjoyment of ourselves. Virtue is the best guard against the many unavoidable evils incident to us; nothing better alleviates the weight of the afflictions, or gives a truer relish of the blessings of human life.

What is without us has not the least connexion with happiness, only so far as the preservation of our lives and health depends upon it. Health of body, though so far necessary that we cannot be perfectly happy without it, is not sufficient to make us happy of itself. Happiness Happiness springs immediately from the mind; health is but to be considered as a candidate or circumstance, without which this happiness cannot be tasted pure and unabated.

Virtue is the best preservative of health, as it prescribes temperance, and such a regulation of our passions as is most conducive to the well-being of the animal economy, so that it is, at the same time, the only true happiness of the mind and the best means of preserving the health of the body.

If our desires are to the things of this world, they are never to be satisfied: if our great view is upon those of the next, the expectation of them is an infinitely higher satisfaction than the enjoyment of those of the present.

There is no happiness, then, but in a virtuous and self-approving conduct; unless our actions will bear the test of our sober judgments, and reflections upon them, they are not the actions, and consequently not the happiness of a rational being.

ON DISCOVERIES.

From the Pennsylvania Gazette, No. 409, Oct. 14, 1736.

THE world but a few ages since, was in a very poor condition, as to trade and navigation; nor indeed, were they much better in other matters of useful knowledge. It was a green-headed time; every useful improvement was hid from them; they had neither looked into heaven, nor earth, into the sea, nor land, as has been done since. They had philosophy without experiments, mathematics without instruments, geometry without scale, astronomy without demonstration.

They made war without powder, shot, cannon, or mortars; nay, the mob made their bonfires without squibs or crackers. They went to sea without compass, and sailed without the needle. They viewed the stars without telescopes, and measured latitudes without observation. Learning had no printingpress, writing no paper, and paper no ink: the lover was forced to send his mistress a deal board for a love-letter, and a billet-doux might be about the size of an ordinary trencher. They were clothed without manufacture, and their richest robes were the skins of the most formidable monsters: they carried on trade without books, and correspondence without posts: their merchants kept no accounts, their shop-keepers no cash-books; they had surgery without anatomy, and physicians without the materia medica: they gave emetics without ipecacuanha, drew blisters without cantharides, and cured agues without the bark.

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As for geographical discoveries, they had neither seen the North Cape, nor the Cape of Good Hope south. All the discovered inhabited world, which they knew and conversed with, was circumscribed within very narrow limits, viz. France, Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Greece; the lesser Asia, the west part of Persia, Arabia, the north parts of Africa, and the islands of the Mediterranean sea, and this was the whole world to them; not that even these countries were fully known either, and several parts of them not inquired into at all. Germany was known little further than the banks of the Elbe; Poland as little beyond the Vistula, or Hungary as little beyond the Danube; Muscovy or Russia perfectly unknown, as much as China beyond it; and India only by a little commerce upon the coast, about Surat and Malabar; Africa had been more unknown, but by the ruin of the Carthaginians; all the western. coast of it was sunk out of knowledge again, and forgotten; the northern coast of Africa, in the Mediterranean, remained known, and that was all; for the Saracens over-running the nations which were planted there, ruined commerce, as well as religion; the Baltic sea was not discovered, nor even the navigation of it known; for the Teutonic knights came not thither till the 13th century.

America was not heard of, nor so much as a suggestion in the minds of men that any part of the world lay that way. The coasts of Greenland, or Spitsbergen, and the whale fishing, not known; the best navigators in the world, at that time, would have fled from a whale, with much more fright and horror, than from the devil, in the most terrible shapes they had been told he appeared in.

The coasts of Angola, Congo, the Gold and the Grain coasts, on the west side of Africa, whence, since that time, such immense wealth has been drawn, not discovered, nor the least inquiry made after them. All the EastIndia and China trade, not only undiscovered, but out of the reach of expectation! Coffee and tea, (those modern blessings of mankind) had never been heard of: all the unbounded ocean, we now call the South Sea, was hid, and unknown: all the Atlantic ocean beyond the mouth of the Straits, was frightful and terrible in the distant prospect, nor durst any one peep into it, otherwise than as they might creep along the coast of Africa, towards Sallee, or Santa Cruz. The North Sea was hid in a veil of impenetrable darkness; the White Sea, or Archangel, was a very modern discovery; not found out till Sir Hugh Willoughby doubled the North Cape, and paid dear for the adventure, being frozen to death with all his crew, on the coast of Lapland; while his companions' ship, with the famous Mr. Chancellor, went on to the Gulf of Russia, called the White Sea, where no Christian strangers had ever been before him.

In these narrow circumstances stood the world's knowledge at the beginning of the 15th century, when men of genius began to look abroad, and about them. Now, as it was wonderful to see a world so full of people, and people so capable of improving, yet so stupid and so blind, so ignorant and so perfectly unimproved, it was wonderful to see, with what a general alacrity they took the alarm, almost all together, preparing themselves as it were on a sudden, by a general inspiration, to spread knowledge through the earth, and to search into every thing that it was impossible to uncover.

How surprising is it to look back, so little a way behind us, and see, that even in less than two hundred years, all this (now so self-wise) part of the world did not so much as know whether there was any such place as a Russia, a China, a Guinea, a Greenland, or a North Cape? That as to America, it was never supposed there was any such place;' neither had the world, though they stood upon the shoulders of four thousand years' experience, the least thought, so much as that there was any land that way!

As they were ignorant of places, so of things also; so vast are the improvements of science, that all our knowledge of mathematics, of nature, of the

'It is now supposed that America was actually discovered in the eleventh century by the Icelanders,-8ee Mallet's Northern Antiquities, Vol. I., and Franklin's PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE, Part I. 8vo. Third Edition.

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brightest part of human wisdom, had their admission among us within these two last centuries.

What was the world, then, before? And to what were the heads and hands of mankind applied? The rich had no commerce, the poor no employment; war and the sword was the great field of honor, the stage of preferment; and you have scarce a man eminent in the world, for any thing before that time, but for a furious outrageous falling upon his fellow-creatures, like Nimrod, and his successors of modern memory.

The world is now daily increasing in experimental knowledge; and let no man flatter the age, with pretending we have arrived at a perfection of discoveries.

What's now discovered, only serves to show,
That nothing's known, to what is yet to know.

THE WASTE OF LIFE.

From the Pennsylvania Gazette, No. 404, Nov. 18, 1736.

ANERGUS was a gentleman of a good estate; he was bred to no business, and could not contrive how to waste his hours agreeably; he had no relish for any of the proper works of life, nor any taste at all for the improvements of the mind; he spent generally ten hours of the four-and-twenty in his bed; he dozed away two or three more on his couch, and as many were dissolved in good liquor every evening, if he met with company of his own humor. Five or six of the rest he sauntered away with much indolence: the chief business of them was to contrive his meals, and to feed his fancy before-hand with the promise of a dinner and supper; not that he was so absolute a glutton, or so entirely devoted to appetite; but chiefly because he knew not how to employ his thoughts better, he let them rove about the sustenance of his body. Thus he had made a shift to wear off ten years since the paternal estate fell into his hands: and yet, according to the abuse of words in our day, he was called a man of virtue, because he was scarce ever known to be quite drunk, nor was his nature much inclined to lewdness.

One evening, as he was musing alone, his thoughts happened to take a most unusual turn, for they cast a glance backward, and began to reflect on his manner of life. He bethought himself what a number of living beings had been made a sacrifice to support his carcase, and how much corn and wine had