is power, in that it is competent to
yield to all more than the delightful sense of conscious superiority,
which vulgar ambition may afford to a few of its successful votaries;
a store, from which each in taking does but multiply the remainder.

But to find it so one must look well, that he apprehend knowledge to be
a good of itself, independently of the distinction it confers. For a
vain ambition often takes this direction; and then it matters little to
one whether himself advance, or others be kept back--since, in either
case, the difference between him and them, the distinction chiefly
enjoyed, is the same.

Now, the love of knowledge is prior in time to the love of distinction;
it should seem then, that, with proper care, it might maintain the
mastery over its rival. The child is delighted with the acquisition of
new ideas, before it thinks of turning them to a vain-glorious account.
It deserves to be considered, whether our modes of education, offering
prizes and honors of scholarship, do not train into the ascendancy that
love of distinction, which education ought and might keep subordinate;
which in fact is one of the greatest hinderances to progress;--for when
one's immediate aim is not truth itself, but the glory which attends
the acquisition, he meets a thousand sidelong impulses from the
straightforward search.

That knowledge is a good which grows by being shared, is a truth more
fully apprehended, as the idea of knowledge is enlarged. It is
measurably so, while taken for eminence in common studies and the
received sciences. One's advance is facilitated by the advance of
others.

Much more does this hold, when the distinction between intellectual
culture and intellectual life is made, and the preference due to the
latter apprehended.

When the missionary enterprize was a new thing, in favor of the
missionary's being a married man was argued the advantage of having
children trained up in a Christian way before the eyes of the heathen.
But so completely has that expectation been disappointed, that now the
missionaries send home their children to be educated; alleging the
danger, lest their children become stumbling blocks, through the
apparent little difference between them and the heathen children.
And the difficulty is not, that they cannot there, as well as here, be
taught Latin, Greek, Mathematics--all the received sciences-the
branches of what is nominally education. It is not so much, that the