No one would say that these persons, well informed as
they are, had attained to any great culture of intellect or to
philosophy.
The case is the same still more strikingly where the persons in question
are beyond dispute men of inferior powers and deficient education.
Perhaps they have been much in foreign countries, and they receive, in a
passive, otiose, unfruitful way, the various facts which are forced upon
them there. Seafaring men, for example, range from one end of the earth
to the other; but the multiplicity of external objects, which they have
encountered, forms no symmetrical and consistent picture upon their
imagination; they see the tapestry of human life, as it were on the
wrong side, and it tells no story. They sleep, and they rise up, and
they find themselves, now in Europe, now in Asia; they see visions of
great cities and wild regions; they are in the marts of commerce, or
amid the islands of the South; they gaze on Pompey's Pillar, or on the
Andes; and nothing which meets them carries them forward or backward, to
any idea beyond itself.
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