will sober you. I must confess that
the danger which alarms these gentlemen never seemed to me very serious:
and my reason is this; that I never could prevail on any person who
pronounced superficial knowledge a curse, and profound knowledge a
blessing, to tell me what was his standard of profundity. The argument
proceeds on the supposition that there is some line between profound
and superficial knowledge similar to that which separates truth from
falsehood. I know of no such line. When we talk of men of deep science,
do we mean that they have got to the bottom or near the bottom of
science? Do we mean that they know all that is capable of being known?
Do we mean even that they know, in their own especial department, all
that the smatterers of the next generation will know? Why, if we compare
the little truth that we know with the infinite mass of truth which we
do not know, we are all shallow together; and the greatest philosophers
that ever lived would be the first to confess their shallowness. If we
could call up the first of human beings, if we could call up Newton,
and ask him whether, even in those sciences in which he had no rival, he
considered himself as profoundly knowing, he would have told us that he
was but a smatterer like ourselves, and that the difference between his
knowledge and ours vanished, when compared with the quantity of truth
still undiscovered, just as the distance between a person at the foot of
Ben Lomond and at the top of Ben Lomond vanishes when compared with the
distance of the fixed stars.

It is evident then that those who are afraid of superficial knowledge
do not mean by superficial knowledge knowledge which is superficial when
compared with the whole quantity of truth capable of being known. For,
in that sense, all human knowledge is, and always has been, and always
must be, superficial. What then is the standard? Is it the same two
years together in any country? Is it the same, at the same moment, in
any two countries? Is it not notorious that the profundity of one age
is the shallowness of the next; that the profundity of one nation is the
shallowness of a neighbouring nation? Ramohun Roy passed, among Hindoos,
for a man of profound Western learning; but he would have been but a
very superficial member of this Institute. Strabo was justly entitled
to be called a profound geographer eighteen hundred years ago. But
a teacher of geography, who had never heard of America, would now be