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cation of the mind, like moral discipline, must go on, with or without our intent and conscious cooperation. The Deity has in part taken this charge upon himself, and placed us under the tuition of his own laws in the great free-school of Nature. Earth and sky teem with instruction. Sun, moon and stars are lectures which all can hear. Day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night showeth knowledge. Labor, too, is instruction. If not idle, we are always learning. Our daily tasks are so many private lessons without charges. Every calling and craft is a course of instruction, in one or more of the sciences. The farmer, while operating on his lands, has no thought of any system of self-education which he is carrying on, yet does he not till the soil year after year, without reaping other and better fruits than his market crops. The best produce of his farm is the knowledge which he gains of those facts and laws which the philosopher, by a different method, is also exploring. He learns something of botany, and something of zoology. His barn is his hortus siccus, and his barn-yard his zoological garden. He is a practical chemist too, experimenting on a large scale, with whole acres for his laboratory. The mechanic in his workshop, is teaching himself, without book, the application of geometry to the arts. The lawyer, in his office, learns more of mankind and their crafts than is set down in his statute books. The merchant is an industrious student of political economy, and so is the banker, and so the broker. Every calling is a Lyceum of practical instruction, and the great mart, where all

these callings centre, may be termed a university in the strictest sense; a university where all are professors and all students; where not merely the learned professions, as they are called, but every trade under heaven has its college, its faculty and its degrees. We undervalue, I think, this sort of knowledge. We measure learning, not absolutely, but comparatively. We reckon from the common stock of general information, and call a man learned in proportion as his private accumulations exceed that stock. If we would take our departure from the point of absolute privation-if any such point there befrom the rasa tabula of the metaphysicians, we should find the difference less considerable, I imagine, between the profound scholar and the wellinformed man of the world, just as the elevation of the highest mountains above the level of the earth vanishes into nothing if we measure altitude from the centre of the globe. That general information, which the scholar shares in common with all who have received the benefits of an ordinary schooleducation, or enjoyed the more instructive discipline of practical life, constitutes the greater part of all our knowledge, and the basis of the rest. The difference between the learned and the unlearned, and the great advantage which the one possesses over the other, consists in the different arrangement of the knowledge common to both. I do not deny a considerable difference in degree, but I believe there is a far greater difference in kind. The learning of the scholar is systematically arranged and reduced to proper order, so that he has a com

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plete view and command of the whole, and can apply all he knows, at any moment, to any given question. The learning of the practical man is loose and confused, an incoherent jumble of facts, without method or classification. They differ as the materials of a building, thrown into an irregular heap, differ from the well ordered and finished structure. The knowledge of the practical man is a knowledge of facts merely, the knowledge of the scholar is a knowledge of principles, obtained by a systematic generalization of those facts. The advantage, which the scholar possesses over the practical man, by means of this method, is, doubtless, great, still it is an advantage which consists rather in the form than the amount of their respective acquirements. The master or mate of a vessel possesses practical knowledge enough to find his way from one hemisphere to another, across the trackless and unwritten deep. But he knows nothing, perhaps, of the mathematical principles, involved in the table of meridional parts, by which he works up his daily reckoning, nor does he understand the trigonometry of projection on which his charts are planned. He finds the altitude of the sun, or the distance of the moon from that body, and deduces thence the true time of his position. Comparing this with the time of the first meridian, as indicated by his chronometer, he ascertains his longitude. But he knows neither the horological principle, by which the accuracy of his timepiece is secured, nor the optical laws, by which the lenses are arranged in his sextant. He is unacquainted with most of the principles

which he applies in determining his course, as principles, that is, as scientific deductions; but he understands them as practical rules, and knows how to apply them. And the leading facts, too, (particularly those of Geography and Astronomy) from which those principles have been deduced, are mostly known to him. Thus the knowledge, acquired by the practical seaman, is of a different sort from the philosopher's, the one is mechanical, the other scientific. Yet no one will think lightly of this mechanical learning, when he con siders how, by means of it, the practical navigator traverses the open sea, where, for weeks and months, the heavens and his tables are the only guides, with as much confidence as he would traverse a settled country, intersected with roads, and is able, not only to determine the parallel, or rhumb, on which he is sailing, but to point to the chart, and mark the precise spot which his vessel occupies, at any given moment, on the surface of the globe.

Another advantage, resulting from this method, the philosopher has over the common observer, in the parallelism, if I may so call it, of his observations, by which he refers one fact to another, and ascertains the causes of phenomena. He reduces the facts, observed by him, into different classes, ranging those which relate to the same subject under one head. By this means he is enabled, with ease, to compare facts of one class with those of another, and to explain the more unintelligible by parallel and analagous ones which are more familiar. Thus he observes a fact in astronomy,

for example, the difference between the true and apparent place of a star near the horizon. In order to explain this fact, which at first seems unaccountable, he searches for a parallel under some other head. He has before observed, under the head of optics, the looming of distant objects through a hazy atmosphere. Between these two facts, the one in astronomy and the one in optics, he perceives an analogy. The latter, he has already learned to account for by the refraction of light, passing from a rarer to a denser medium, he applies this account to the former, and concludes that the difference between the true and apparent place of a star is owing to refraction. In this manner, all assigning of causes is only referring one fact to another. Philosophy may be divided into two functions, the one consists in observing and accumulating facts, the other in classifying and comparing them. The first, and by far the most important of these functions, is practiced by the common man as well as the learned, the latter, constitutes the philosopher. The common man, then, possesses the essential rudiments of learning in his knowledge of facts. He requires, indeed, a greater number of facts than his circumstances and opportunities have enabled him to observe, but he requires still more the aid of method, and a perception of the relation between different phenomena, to give meaning and form to his knowledge, and to place him on the vantage ground of the scholar, whence he may obtain a clear and consistent view of the world in which he lives, and know it no longer as a world of phenomena, but as

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