Passion: “On the Past and Future”
Hazlitt’s outlook of passion is utterly ironic: “The passions contract and warp the natural progress of life. They paralyse all of it that is not devoted to their tyranny and caprice. This makes the difference between the laughing innocence of childhood, the pleasantness of youth, and the crabbedness of age. A load of cares lies like a weight of guilt upon the mind: so that a man of business often has all the air, the distraction and restlessness and hurry of feeling of a criminal. A knowledge of the world takes away the freedom and simplicity of thought as effectually as the contagion of its example.” Routinely, passion is the dynamic potency that arouses the drive to partake an exact course. For example, a fanatical lover would not endorse Hazlitt’s contention that “that passions contract and warp the natural progress of life.” For a zealous lover, love is what would animate and underwrite to the blissful headway of survival. Nevertheless, Hazlitt consciously makes use of irony to accentuate that some fanatical conducts may be inauspicious to other domains of survival; therefore, thrilling passion, especially with the future, should be tolerably qualified.
The Irony of “On The Ignorance Of The Learned”
Hazlitt elucidates that academic individuals are habitually ignorant whereas the unschooled people are appropriately liberal: “The description of persons who have the fewest ideas of all others are mere authors and readers. It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else. A lounger who is ordinarily seen with a book in his hand is (we may be almost sure) equally without the power or inclination to attend either to what passes around him or in his own mind. Such a one may be said to carry his understanding about with him in his pocket, or to leave it at home on his library shelves.” Routinely, being learned and ignorance are wholly mutually exclusive because it is through learning that ignorance expires. Nonetheless, Hazlitt critiques the irony of the title by illuminating how bookish scholarship enslaves the learners to artificial notions that do not embolden naturalistic erudition. Hazlitt employs irony to affirm that the philosophies included in books could be hollow, especially those which sponsor unqualified veracities which may be unseemly.
