ic to their scholars and acquaintances.

14. One study is inconsistent with a lively imagination, another with a
solid judgment; one is improper in the early parts of life, another
requires so much time, that it is not to be attempted at an advanced
age; one is dry and contracts the sentiments, another is diffuse and
over-burdens the memory; one is insufferable to taste and delicacy, and
another wears out life in the study of words, and is useless to a wise
man, who desires only the knowledge of things.

15. But of all the bugbears by which the _infantes barbati_, boys both
young and old, have been hitherto frighted from digressing into new
tracts of learning, none has been more mischievously efficacious than an
opinion that every kind of knowledge requires a peculiar genius, or
mental constitution, framed for the reception of some ideas and the
exclusion of others; and that to him whose genius is not adapted to the
study which he prosecutes, all labour shall be vain and fruitless; vain
as an endeavour to mingle oil and water, or, in the language of
chemistry, to amalgamate bodies of heterogeneous principles.

16. This opinion we may reasonably suspect to have been propogated, by
vanity, beyond the truth. It is natural for those who have raised a
reputation by any science, to exalt themselves as endowed by heaven with
peculiar powers, or marked out by an extraordinary designation for their
profession: and to fright competitors away by representing the
difficulties with which they must contend, and the necessity of
qualities which are supposed to be not generally conferred, and which no
man can know, but by experience, whether he enjoys.

17. To this discouragement it may possibly be answered, that since a
genius, whatever it may be, is like fire in the flint, only to be
produced by collision with a proper subject, it is the business of every
man to try whether his faculties may not happily co-operate with his
desires; and since they whose proficiency he admires, knew their own
force only by the event, he needs but engage in the same undertaking,
with equal spirit, and may reasonably hope for equal success.

18. There is another species of false intelligence, given by those who
profess to shew the way to the summit of knowledge, of equal tendency to
depress the mind with false distrust of itself, and weaken it by
needless solicitude and dejection. When a scholar whom they desire to
animate, consults them at his entra