e highly than others of our own abilities, but allow ourselves
to form hopes which we never communicate, and please our thoughts with
employments which none ever will allot us, and with elevations to which
we are never expected to rise; and when our days and years have passed
away in common business or common amusements, and we find at last that
we have suffered our purposes to sleep till the time of action is past,
we are reproached only by our own reflections; neither our friends nor
our enemies wonder that we live and die like the rest of mankind; that
we live without notice, and die without memorial; they know not what
task we had proposed, and, therefore, cannot discern whether it is
finished.

He that compares what he has done with what he has left undone, will
feel the effect which must always follow the comparison of imagination
with reality; he will look with contempt on his own unimportance, and
wonder to what purpose he came into the world; he will repine that he
shall leave behind him no evidence of his having been, that he has added
nothing to the system of life, but has glided from youth to age among
the crowd, without any effort for distinction.

Man is seldom willing to let fall the opinion of his own dignity, or to
believe that he does little only because every individual is a very
little being. He is better content to want diligence than power, and
sooner confesses the depravity of his will than the imbecility of his
nature.

From this mistaken notion of human greatness it proceeds, that many who
pretend to have made great advances in wisdom so loudly declare that
they despise themselves. If I had ever found any of the self-contemners
much irritated or pained by the consciousness of their meanness, I
should have given them consolation by observing, that a little more than
nothing is as much as can be expected from a being, who, with respect to
the multitudes about him, is himself little more than nothing. Every man
is obliged by the Supreme Master of the universe to improve all the
opportunities of good which are afforded him, and to keep in continual
activity such abilities as are bestowed upon him. But he has no reason
to repine, though his abilities are small and his opportunities few. He
that has improved the virtue, or advanced the happiness of one
fellow-creature, he that has ascertained a single moral proposition, or
added one useful experiment to natural knowledge, may be contented with
his