To manners unpolished and abrupt, he join ed gross habits ; he was fond of wine, of which be. drank to excess; in short, with a character in itself unamiable, he seemed, by his conduct, sometimes to take pains to render his services of no use, and his virtues of no account. No thing can give a better idea of him than• what he says of himself: "The sagacious reader will dis cover by my writings,• that I have been especially called to serve the• cause of truth and humanity, in following a path hitherto unknown. My opinions have succeeded one another, as has been seen. I have been at different time. Lutheran, sceptic, in fidel, a friend to natural religion, a convert to Christianity, a Christian with paradoxical sentiments,, and more and more heterodox. In me has been 'Men a thinker tormented within by his own reflections, and a writer tormented from without, because he has been at one time hated, at another misunder stood. Bold and enterprising in my actions, I have &park seen, with a &altering heart) the dangers me, and from which Providence has saved. me in part. I have made little account of domestic happiness, of friendship, or society. I have suffered the penalty. Occupied in curing others,I have neglected the health of my own mind. Esteem. is due to the sincerity of my opinions, rather than to my conduct. I desired ardently to- make it perfect, but this world have required more perseverance and more attention than the meditation of abstract truths ; accordingly, I have oftener been dissatisfied with my self than with ethers, with whom, however, for the same reason, I have been rarely satisfied. My heart has had little enjoyment of the consolations of reli gion, because every occasion led me into difficult re searches, and thus weakened the force of sentiment. I regard myself as a man and a Christian, such as there are but few in the world, and such as it is not desirable that there should be many." This frank nese, without• affectation• and without pride, induces us to honour the character of a man who has ren dered some services to his country and his age. His work On the e Princes destined to the Throne has been translated into French by Boer. joing. A list of his writings may be seen in Meiners Lexicon of German Writers, from 1750 to 1800, and a farther account of his life in Schlichtegroll's Necrology for 1790. Geethe tells an anecdote of going a journey in company with him and Lavater, who fell into a violent dispute about the Trinity. Basedow consoled hiinself with the hope of getting some beer and a pipe of tobacco at an inn which he saw before them on the road. When they came to it, Goethe made the coachman drive on to the great chagrin of %Bedew, to whom he excused himself by saying, that the sign of the inn was tteo triangles, and as he had such an eversion to one triangle (the scholastic emblem of the Trinity), he was afraid the sight of two might overcome him. This conceit, ac cording to Goethe, pacified our anti-trinitarian di vine.
Basedowb in his general writings, endeavoured to apply philosophy to practical purposes, and to give a more polar air to his reasonings than had been usual with his countrymen before his time.
He held truth to be of little value without practice, and, indeed, he held Ito essence to depend chiefly on its utility. He considered external or speculative truth to be a very vague and doubtful thing; and that it is principally the consequences of things to the mind itself, that is, a moral necessity, which deter mines it to believe strongly and consistently on any point, so that that is true to each individual which makes the most lasting impression on his mind, and which feels- to be necessary to his happiness. Thus he regarded practical good as the test of spe culative truth. He gave great weight to the prin ciple of analogy, and founded the doctrine of' a • Providence on this principle. He considered corn.
- mon sense as one ingredient in philosophical rea loping, and rejected all systems which appear ed to him to exclude it ; such as idealism, the doc trine of monads, and a pre-established harmony. His favourite adage in his system of education, was to follow Nature. He wished the mind to be led to knowledge, virtue, end by gentle means, in. 'teed of those of constraint and terror. Indeed, his principles on this, subject are very nearly the same as those of Locke and Roinneen.; and he seems, to have done little else than to have given currency in Germany to the same reasonings which those philo sophers had taught before him in England and France. He insisted on the disuse of the preposte rous and unhealthy dresses used by children and their parents, such as stays, swaddling-clothes, tight bandages -round the neck, the knees, &a He re commended exercise and hardy sports as necessary to the health and activity of the. body. He ed to exercise the judgment by teaching a know ledge of things, and not merely to load the memory with words. He preferred the practical sciences to the speculative, the living to the dead• languages, modern to ancient history, things which are more near to those which are more remote. In fine, most of his principles were in themselves sound and good, and have in fact exerted their influence on the ac tual progress of civilization ; they were only errone ous from the excess to which he sometimes appears to have carried them; partly from the natural vehe mence of his mind, partly from the natural tendency to paradox on the side of new opinions. Paradox, by exciting attention, and enlisting the passions, is perhaps necessary to contend against common sense and reason are lost sight of by both parties during the combat ; but in the end they pre vail, if they have fair play allowed them. Thus, in the present instance, it is now generally admitted, that something besides the classics is necessary to a liberal education ; nor is it thought requisite to ar rive at this conclusion through the antithesis to the vulgar opinion of his day set up by Basedow, viz. that the classics are of no use at all in a rational system of education. (&)