special department,
creates externally a beneficial composure which is very favorable to
internal progress. We must distinguish from the professional the amateur
and the self-taught man. The amateur busies himself with an art, a
science, or a trade, without having gone through any strict training in
it. As a rule, he dispenses with elementary thoroughness, and hastens
towards the pleasure which the joy of production gives. The conscious
amateur confesses this himself, makes no pretension to mastership, and
calls himself--in distinction from the professional, who subjects
himself to rules--an unlearned person. But sometimes the amateur, on the
contrary, covers over his weakness, cherishes in himself the
self-conceit that he is equal to the heroes of his art or science,
constitutes himself the first admirer of his own performances, seeks for
their want of recognition in external motives, never in their own want
of excellence; and, if he has money, or edits a paper, is intoxicated
with being the patron of talent which produces such works as he would
willingly produce or pretends to produce. The self-taught man has often
true talent, or even genius, to whose development nevertheless the
inherited culture has been denied, and who by good fortune has through
his own strength worked his way into a field of effort. The self-taught
man is distinguished from the amateur by the thoroughness and the
industry with which he acts; he is not only equally unfortunate with him
in the absence of school-training, but is much less endowed. Even if the
self-taught man has for years studied and practised much, he is still
haunted by a feeling of uncertainty as to whether he has yet reached the
stand-point at which a science, an art, or a trade, will receive him
publicly--of so very great consequence is it that man should be
comprehended and recognized by man. The self-taught man therefore
remains embarrassed, and does not free himself from the apprehension
that he may expose some weak point to a professional, or he falls into
the other extreme--he becomes presumptuous, steps forth as a reformer,
and, if he accomplishes nothing, or earns only ridicule, he sets himself
down as an unrecognized martyr by an unappreciative and unjust world.

--It is possible that the amateur may transcend the stage of
superficiality and subject himself to a thorough training; then he
ceases to be an amateur. It is also possible that the self-taught man
may be on t