im back upon the searchings and the efforts of his own
mind; he will gain by being spared an entrance into your Babel. Few indeed
there are who can dispense with the stimulus and support of instructors,
or will do any thing 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 premiss 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.

Yet such is the better specimen of the fruit of that ambitious system
which has of late years been making way among us: for its result on
ordinary minds, and on the common run of students, is less satisfactory
still; they leave their place of education simply dissipated and relaxed
by the multiplicity of subjects, which they have never really mastered,
and so shallow as not even to know their shallowness. How much better, I
say, is it for the active and thoughtful intellect, where such i