The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1856-1888, 1857-11-05
THE PACIFIC
Commercial Advertiser.
THURSDAY. 5.

The world has always abounded with "a class of
men who aim to be known as philosophers and
reformers. They are confined to no place, but
are found in every country, State and island.
They talk and write as if the destinies of nations
were in their hands. and as if the progress and
welfare of the country depended upon the due
administration of such nostrums to the body poll
tic as they in their supreme selfconceit may
please to prescribe. Vanity and self-conceit are
the motives which inspire them. The blacksmith
who undertakes to mend a watch, the farmer who
is sure he can navigate a ship in a stormy sea,
the shoemaker who thinks he can construct a
steam. engine, or the missionary who ~imagines
himself called to discuss politics and reforms of the
age, are each illustrations of the self-conceited
characters who are continually floating about
and making a great noise on the surface of pub
lie affairs.
"Two orders of IDEAS" says a leading N. Y.
journal abiding to this subject, s'co-exista at every
epoch. There are two sets of principles intertwin-
ed. The one are fixed, eternal, and Interchangeable.
Such are the laws of faith, and of natural morals.
The other are forever huctuating. They are made
up of the customs, maxims and modes of thought
among men of a given time. These change, i'm
perceptibly, but constantly. The men who per-
ceive the tendency of the times, and move with,
or direct, the inevitable change, are the men of
the advance. Those who brandish their handful
of rushes on the shore they happen to stand on,
and think Herewith to sweep back the rising tide
of the ocean, are the dreamers, the men of routine,
of mere forms, the red-tape eompany-the class
of men sometimes called old fogies.
SIT is not age so much as the order of ideas or
of forms that possess them, that render people old
fogies. The bookish young man, who has been
clever in his college lessons, smart in his school
debates, and his first lessons of real manhood vet
to learn in practical life, is invariably, and by
necessity, an old fogy. He has swallowed the
ideas of his masters. He has been crammed with
forms of words belonging to the particular school
he has attended, and finding that these hang to-
gether, and form a system, he jumps to the con-
clusion that they contain the sum of what may
lawfully be known. If his mind has breadth,
and if he he favored by opportunity of contact
with living men, he may survive his fogyism and
come out a man of advance but his first lesson
must be that he has learned not nearly all on the
benches of his class-rooms. Till he learns how
little he knows from such sources, he continues,
by prescription, an old fogy. Truth, that It may
lOAu AtIDg bhaBNC ltcNA w VIZ A'Abo vi blfidti
thought. As these forms grow Anticipated, truth
is ready to accept the forms that succeed them.
But the 90 old fogy'' insists that truth cannot
survive, except in the forms of the past.
"The dangers springing from the two schools
are of different characters. 1t might seem at first
sight, that the men who stick to the forms that
have passed are safe men. And, so far as their
own persons go, they may be safe. But it is appa-
for the public veal, if they succeed in making it
appear that truth abides with them alone. they
may easily acquire the selfsanctifed conviction
that the world is going to ruin, and that it is
their personal wisdom which preserves it-but
this may be at the expense of the world, and
many evils may happen, which might have been
avoided. On the other hand the men who strive
to preserve all that is u~nchanging, but whose
minds are OF the future, may make ~blunders, but,
as what they do, from the fact OF its novelty, will
be criticised, and as in discussion truth is
stronger than error, the loss by their error is most
ly PERSONAL---VERY. own sacrifce-and the public
reap little except the advantage.
"Minds are differently constituted, and habits
are differently formed. What is perfect, is to
hold, always, completely, the truths that are I'M
changing, and to drop and change ideas and
usages that belong only to policy or economy,
just in the proportion that they wear out. But
perfection is a thing to be aimed at, not, in this
life, to be reached. What we can do. is to ap-
proximate to it."
On our first page we publish a letter, filed
with politics, religion, morals and Oahu College,
written to. San Francisco by Rev. J. Green of
Makawao, and copied from the Pacifc. Mr..
Green, as is well known here, wishes himself to
be considered a reformer, and writes from time to
time hioideas ON politics, menand things, which
he prefers to have published where he is not 50
we'll known q, at home. His ideas are generally