sort of problem set up for the wisdom of the wise to
solve, whether the urgent case can arise in which it shall be requisite
to have recourse to them.

The principles here laid down have the strongest tendency to prove to
us how little progress has yet been made in the art of turning human
creatures to the best account. Every man has his place, in which if
he can be fixed, the most fastidious judge cannot look upon him with
disdain. But, to effect this arrangement, an exact attention is required
to ascertain the pursuit in which he will best succeed. In India the
whole mass of the members of the community is divided into castes; and,
instead of a scrupulous attention being paid to the early intimations of
individual character, it is already decided upon each, before he comes
into the world, which child shall be a priest, and which a soldier, a
physician, a lawyer, a merchant, and an artisan. In Europe we do not
carry this so far, and are not so elaborately wrong. But the rudiments
of the same folly flourish among us; and the accident of birth for
the most part decides the method of life to which each individual with
whatever violence shall be dedicated. A very few only, by means of
energies that no tyranny can subdue, escape from the operation of this
murderous decree.

Nature never made a dunce. Imbecility of mind is as rare, as deformity
of the animal frame. If this position be true, we have only to bear it
in mind, feelingly to convince ourselves, how wholesale the error
is into which society has hitherto fallen in the destination of its
members, and how much yet remains to be done, before our common nature
can be vindicated from the basest of all libels, the most murderous of
all proscriptions.

There is a passage in Voltaire, in which he expresses himself to this
effect: "It is after all but a slight line of separation that divides
the man of genius from the man of ordinary mould." I remember the place
where, and the time when, I read this passage. But I have been unable to
find the expression. It is however but reasonable that I should refer
to it on this occasion, that I may hereby shew so eminent a modern
concurring with the venerable ancient in an early era of letters, whose
dictum I have prefixed to this Essay, to vouch to a certain extent for
the truth of the doctrine I have delivered.

ESSAY III. OF INTELLECTUAL ABORTION.

In the preceding Essay I have endeavoured to establish the proposition,
th