life. He consults by the aid of memory the books he has read, and
projects others for the future instruction and delight of mankind. If he
observe the passengers, he reads their countenances, conjectures their
past history, and forms a superficial notion of their wisdom or folly,
their virtue or vice, their satisfaction or misery. If he observe the
scenes that occur, it is with the eye of a connoisseur or an artist.
Every object is capable of suggesting to him a volume of reflections.
The time of these two persons in one respect resembles; it has brought
them both to Hyde-Park-Corner. In almost every other respect it is
dissimilar;(14)."

(14) Enquirer, Part 1, Essay V.

This passage undoubtedly contains a true description of what may happen,
and has happened.

But there lurks in this statement a considerable error.

It has appeared in the second Essay of this volume, that there is not
that broad and strong line of distinction between the wise man and the
dull that has often been supposed. We are all of us by turns both the
one and the other. Or, at least, the wisest man that ever existed
spends a portion of his time in vacancy and dulness; and the man, whose
faculties are seemingly the most obtuse, might, under proper management
from the hour of his birth, barring those rare exceptions from the
ordinary standard of mind which do not deserve to be taken into the
account, have proved apt, adroit, intelligent and acute, in the walk for
which his organisation especially fitted him(15).

(15) See above, Essay 3.

Many men without question, in a walk of the same duration as that above
described between Temple-Bar and Hyde-Park-Corner, have passed their
time in as much activity, and amidst as strong and various excitements,
as those enumerated in the passage above quoted.

But the lives of all men, the wise, and those whom by way of contrast
we are accustomed to call the dull, are divided between animation and
comparative vacancy; and many a man, who by the bursts of his genius has
astonished the world, and commanded the veneration of successive
ages, has spent a period of time equal to that occupied by a walk from
Temple-Bar to Hyde-Park-Corner, in a state of mind as idle, and as
little affording materials for recollection, as the dullest man that
ever breathed the vital air.

The two states of man which are here attempted to be distinguished, are,
first, that in which reason is said to fill her throne