ternal structure of the human species, however delicate, and to the
touch of the bystander evanescent, which may give to each individual a
predisposition to rise to a supreme degree of excellence in some certain
art or attainment, over a million of competitors.

(2) Papers between Clarke and Leibnitz, p. 95.

It has been said that all these distinctions and anticipations are
idle, because man is born without innate ideas. Whatever is the
incomprehensible and inexplicable power, which we call nature, to which
he is indebted for his formation, it is groundless to suppose, that
that power is cognisant of, and guides itself in its operations by, the
infinite divisibleness of human pursuits in civilised society. A child
is not designed by his original formation to be a manufacturer of shoes,
for he may be born among a people by whom shoes are not worn, and
still less is he destined by his structure to be a metaphysician, an
astronomer, or a lawyer, a rope-dancer, a fortune-teller, or a juggler.

It is true that we cannot suppose nature to be guided in her operations
by the infinite divisibleness of human pursuits in civilised society.
But it is not the less true that one man is by his structure best fitted
to excel in some one in particular of these multifarious pursuits,
however fortuitously his individual structure and that pursuit may be
brought into contact. Thus a certain calmness and steadiness of purpose,
much flexibility, and a very accurate proportion of the various limbs of
the body, are of great advantage in rope-dancing; while lightness of the
fingers, and a readiness to direct our thoughts to the rapid execution
of a purpose, joined with a steadiness of countenance adapted to what is
figuratively called throwing dust in the eyes of the bystander, are of
the utmost importance to the juggler: and so of the rest.

It is as much the temper of the individual, as any particular subtlety
of organ or capacity, that prepares him to excel in one pursuit rather
than a thousand others. And he must have been a very inattentive
observer of the indications of temper in an infant in the first
months of his existence, who does not confess that there are various
peculiarities in that respect which the child brings into the world with
him.

There is excellent sense in the fable of Achilles in the island of
Scyros. He was placed there by his mother in female attire among the
daughters of Lycomedes, that he might not be s