I believe I should
have ventured on his own abridgment of the work, in one octavo volume,
had it ever come to my hands; but the marrow of it in Tracy has
satisfied my appetite: and even in that, the preliminary discourse of
the analyzer himself, and his conclusion, are worth more in my eye than
the body of the work. For the object of that seems to be to smother all
history under the mantle of allegory. If histories so unlike as those
of Hercules and Jesus, can, by a fertile imagination and allegorical
interpretations, be brought to the same tally, no line of distinction
remains between fact and fancy. As this pithy morsel will not
overburthen the mail in passing and repassing between Quincy and
Monticello, I send it for your perusal. Perhaps it will satisfy you, as
it has me; and may save you the labor of reading twenty-four times its
volume. I have said to you that it was written by Tracy; and I had so
entered it on the title-page, as I usually do on anonymous works whose
authors are known to me. But Tracy requested me not to betray his
anonyme, for reasons which may not yet, perhaps, have ceased to weigh. I
am bound, then, to make the same reserve with you. Destutt-Tracy is, in
my judgment, the ablest writer living on intellectual subjects, or the
operations of the understanding. His three octavo volumes on Ideology,
which constitute the foundation of what he has since written, I have not
entirely read; because I am not fond of reading what is merely abstract,
and unapplied immediately to some useful science.
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