By dint of stubborn dedication to hard work, in the midst of a very
dissolute way of life, I had obtained a measure of success which
had set me apart from my fellow students, and had given my father
expectations concerning my future prospects that were probably
greatly exaggerated.^66Of Constant’s reading during the period we have no record. Strangely he
did not once borrow a book from the University Library, although almost
all his fellow students did.^67 On the other hand he donated a copy of
Descartes’s Meditations in Latin to the Speculative Society library,
inscribed on the fly leaf in his own hand ‘To the Speculative Society from
B.Constant’.
68
We must assume that he was able to buy or borrow from
friends all the books he needed. Wilde, meanwhile, when he was not
immersed in those parts of James Burnett’s Antient Metaphysics (1779–
- that had so far appeared, was reading Pindar’s Odes ‘Graece et Latine’
at the end of August 1783 and in September and October of that year the
Italian Davila’s seventeenth-century History of the Civil Wars of France,
an enormously popular account of the religious wars in which Constant’s
Huguenot ancestors may have taken part.^69
It is worth considering, for a moment, John Wilde’s own curious intellectual obsession
with man’s primitive origins, given the closeness of his friendship with Constant. The
titles of two of the essays Wilde read to the Speculative Society before Constant’s arrival
in Edinburgh, ‘The Savage State’ and the ‘Origin and Rise of Figurative Language’,^70
indicate not, as one might expect, a Rousseauistic bent, but rather the early influence of
James Burnett, Lord Monboddo’s anthropological disquisitions. Burnett believed—and
he was mocked for it—that man could be descended from monkeys. In The Origin and
Progress of Language (1773–92) he went as far as suggesting that man belonged to the
same species as the orangoutang. However man had gradually risen above his fellow
animals, and his mind which had originally been subjected to his material body had, little
by little, freed itself from matter and was capable of acting independently of his body.
The development of human language resulted purely from the development of human
society. From John Wilde’s comments on Constant’s paganism in the Character of
H.B.Constant it would appear that Wilde was still, at least vestigially, a Christian at heart.
Such views as Burnett’s about man’s descending from the apes must indeed have caused
Wilde to ‘brood perpetually’ on his book. The anxiety Darwin’s Origin of Species caused
to orthodox believers several decades later is well documented. But for Burnett man’s
real triumph is in the mind’s long, upward struggle to free itself from subjection to the
body and to matter. The cultivation of our capacity for thought and the pursuit of
knowledge are proper to man. And that at least was Wilde’s consolation during his
endless hours of study. Did the fear that Burnett might be right about our brutish origins
contribute to the eventual unbalancing of his mind? Was the effort involved in
intellectual self-perfection too much for him? Both hypotheses are plausible.^71 Constant
gives no hint in Ma Vie or elsewhere that there was any sign of Wilde’s impending lapse
Benjamin constant 60Benjamin constant 60