Few
indeed there are who can dispense with the stimulus and support of
instructors, or will do anything at all, if left to themselves. And
fewer still (though such great minds are to be found), who will not,
from such unassisted attempts, contract a self-reliance and a
self-esteem, which are not only moral evils, but serious hindrances to
the attainment of truth. And next to none, perhaps, or none, who will
not be reminded from time to time of the disadvantage under which they
lie, by their imperfect grounding, by the breaks, deficiencies, and
irregularities of their knowledge, by the eccentricity of opinion and
the confusion of principle which they exhibit. They will be too often
ignorant of what every one knows and takes for granted, of that
multitude of small truths which fall upon the mind like dust, impalpable
and ever accumulating; they may be unable to converse, they may argue
perversely, they may pride themselves on their worst paradoxes or their
grossest truisms, they may be full of their own mode of viewing things,
unwilling to be put out of their way, slow to enter into the minds of
others;--but, with these and whatever other liabilities upon their
heads, they are likely to have more thought, more mind, more philosophy,
more true enlargement, than those earnest but ill-used persons who are
forced to load their minds with a score of subjects against an
examination, who have too much on their hands to indulge themselves in
thinking or investigation, who devour premise and conclusion together
with indiscriminate greediness, who hold whole sciences on faith, and
commit demonstrations to memory, and who too often, as might be
expected, when their period of education is passed, throw up all they
have learned in disgust, having gained nothing really by their anxious
labours, except perhaps the habit of application.
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