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Unit 14: Hazlitt-On Genius And Common Sense-Introduction

Education Notes
Hazlitt was educated at home and at a local school until 1793, when his father sent him to a
Unitarian seminary on what was then the outskirts of London, the Unitarian New College at
Hackney (commonly referred to as Hackney College). Although Hazlitt stayed there for only

about two years, its impact was enormous.

The curriculum at Hackney was very broad, including a grounding in the Greek and Latin classics,
mathematics, history, government, science, and, of course, religion.Much of this was traditional;
however, the tutelage having been strongly influenced by eminent Dissenting thinkers of the day
like Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, there was also much that was nonconformist. Priestley,
whom Hazlitt had read and who was also one of his teachers, was an impassioned commentator
on political issues of the day. This, along with the turmoil in the wake of the French Revolution,
sparked in Hazlitt and his classmates lively debates on these issues, as they saw their world being
transformed around them.
Changes were taking place within the young Hazlitt as well. While, out of respect for his father,
Hazlitt never openly broke with his religion, he suffered a loss of faith, and left Hackney before
completing his preparation for the ministry.
Although he rejected the Unitarian theology, Hazlitt’s time at Hackney left him with much more
than religious scepticism. He had read widely and formed habits of independent thought and
respect for the truth that remained with him for life.He had thoroughly absorbed a belief in liberty
and the rights of man, and of the mind as an active force which, by disseminating knowledge,
through both the sciences and the arts, could reinforce the natural tendency in humanity toward
the good. He had had impressed upon him the ability of the individual, working both alone and
within a mutually supportive community, to effect beneficial change by adhering to strongly held
principles. The belief of many Unitarian thinkers in the natural disinterestedness of the human
mind had also laid a foundation for the young Hazlitt’s own philosophical explorations along
those lines. And, though harsh experience and disillusionment later compelled him to qualify
some of his early ideas about human nature, he was left with a hatred of tyranny and persecution
that he retained to his last days.

The young philosopher
Returning home, around 1795, his thoughts were directed in more secular channels, encompassing
not only politics but, increasingly, modern philosophy, which he had begun to read with fascination
at Hackney. He spent much of his time in intensive study of English, Scottish, and Irish thinkers
like John Locke, David Hartley, George Berkeley, and David Hume, and French thinkers like
Claude Adrien Helvétius, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, the Marquis de Condorcet, and Baron
d’Holbach. From then on Hazlitt’s goal was to become a philosopher. His thoughts were focused

on man as a social and political animal, and, even more intensely, on the philosophy of mind,
what would later be called psychology.
In this period he discovered Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who became one of the most important
influences on the budding philosopher’s thought, and Edmund Burke, whose writing style
impressed him enormously. He was painstakingly working out a treatise on the “natural
disinterestedness of the human mind”, meant to disprove the idea that man is naturally selfish, a
fundamental concept in most of the philosophy of the day. Hazlitt’s treatise would not be published
for a number of years, after further reading, and after other changes had occurred to alter the
course of his career, but to the end of his life he would think of himself as a philosopher.
Besides residing with his father while trying to find his voice and work out his thoughts as a
philosopher, he often in these years stayed with his older brother John, who had studied under
Joshua Reynolds and was following a career as a portrait painter. He also spent delighted evenings
at the theatre in London, but did not yet know how this too would be important to his later

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