# An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe/Chapter 14

CHAP. XIV.
The CONCLUSION.
Every subject acquires an adventitious importance to him who considers it with application. He finds it more closely connected with human happiness, than the rest of mankind are apt to allow; he sees consequences resulting from it, which do not strike others with equal conviction, and still pursuing speculation beyond the bounds of reason, too frequently becomes ridiculously earnest in trifles, or absurdity.
It will, perhaps, be incurring this imputation, to deduce an universal degeneracy of manners, from so slight an origin as the ​depravation of taste; to assert, that as a nation grows dull, it sinks into debauchery. Yet such, probably, may be the consequence of literary decay; or, not to stretch the thought beyond what it will bear, vice and stupidity are always mutually productive of each other.
Life at the greatest and best, has been compared to a froward child, that must be humoured, and play'd with, till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over. Our few years are laboured away in varying its pleasures; new amusements are pursued with studious attention; the most childish vanities are dignified with titles of importance; and the proudest boast of the most aspiring philosopher is no more than that he provides his little playfellows the greatest pastime with the greatest innocence.
​Thus the mind ever wandering after amusement, when abridged of happiness on one part, endeavours to find it on another, when intellectual pleasures are disagreeable, those of sense will take the lead. The man, who, in this age, is enamoured of the tranquil joys of study and retirement, may, in the next, should learning be fashionable no longer, feel an ambition of being foremost at an horse-course; or if such could be the absurdity of the times, of being himself a jockey. Reason and appetite are therefore masters of our revels in turn; and as we incline to the one, or pursue the other, we rival angels, or imitate the brutes. In the pursuit of intellectual pleasure, lies every virtue; of sensual, every vice.
It is this difference of pursuit, which marks the morals and characters of man​kind; which lays the line between the enlightened philosopher, and the half-taught citizen; between the civil citizen and the illiterate peasant; between the law-obeying peasant, and the wandering savage of Africa, an animal less mischievous indeed, than the tyger, because endued with fewer powers of doing mischief. The man, the nation, must therefore be good, whose chiefest luxuries consist in the refinement of reason; and reason can never be universally cultivated unless guided by Taste, which may be considered as the link between science and common sense, the medium through which learning should ever be seen by society.
Taste will, therefore, often be a proper standard, when others fail, to judge of a nation's improvement, or degeneracy ​in morals. We have often no permanent characteristics by which to compare the virtues or the vices of our ancestors with our own; a generation may rise and pass away, without leaving any traces of what it really was, and all complaints of our deterioration, may be only topics of declamation, or the cavillings of disappointment: but in taste, we have standing evidence, we can, with precision, compare the literary performances of our fathers with our own, and from their excellence, or defects, determine the moral, as well as the literary merits of either.
If then, there ever comes a time, when taste is so far depraved among us, that critics shall load every work of genius with unnecessary comment, and quarter their empty performances, with the substantial merit of an author, both for sub​sistence and applause; if there comes a time, when censure shall speak in storms, but praise be whispered in the breeze, while real excellence often finds shipwreck in either; if there be a time, when the muse shall seldom be heard, except in plaintive elegy, as if she wept her own decline, while lazy compilations supply the place of original thinking; should there ever be such a time, may succeeding critics, both for the honour of our morals as well as our learning, say, that such a period bears no resemblance to the present age.
FINIS.