reason to think the _Advancement_ was a hurried book, at least in the
later part, and it is defective in arrangement and proportion of parts.
Two of the great divisions of knowledge--history and poetry--are
despatched in comparatively short chapters; while in the division on
"Civil Knowledge," human knowledge as it respects society, he inserts a
long essay, obviously complete in itself and clumsily thrust in here, on
the ways of getting on in the world, the means by which a man may be
"_Faber fortunae suae_"--the architect of his own success; too lively a
picture to be pleasant of the arts with which he had become acquainted
in the process of rising. The book, too, has the blemishes of its own
time; its want of simplicity, its inevitable though very often amusing
and curious pedantries. But the _Advancement_ was the first of a long
line of books which have attempted to teach English readers how to think
of knowledge; to make it really and intelligently the interest, not of
the school or the study or the laboratory only, but of society at large.
It was a book with a purpose, new then, but of which we have seen the
fulfilment. He wanted to impress on his generation, as a very practical
matter, all that knowledge might do in wise hands, all that knowledge
had lost by the faults and errors of men and the misfortunes of time,
all that knowledge might be pushed to in all directions by faithful and
patient industry and well-planned methods for the elevation and benefit
of man in his highest capacities as well as in his humblest. And he
further sought to teach them _how_ to know; to make them understand that
difficult achievement of self-knowledge, to know _what it is_ to know;
to give the first attempted chart to guide them among the shallows and
rocks and whirlpools which beset the course and action of thought and
inquiry; to reveal to them the "idols" which unconsciously haunt the
minds of the strongest as well as the weakest, and interpose their
delusions when we are least aware--"the fallacies and false appearances
inseparable from our nature and our condition of life." To induce men to
believe not only that there was much to know that was not yet dreamed
of, but that the way of knowing needed real and thorough improvement;
that the knowing mind bore along with it all kinds of snares and
disqualifications of which it is unconscious; and that it needed
training quite as much as materials to work on, was the object of the
_Adv