s the chance
that the greater number of objects occurring to attract his honourable
passions may be worthy of them. But we have seen that the whole power of
circumstances is collected to gather round him such objects and
influences as will bend his high passions to unworthy enjoyment. He
engages in it with a heart and understanding unspoiled: but they cannot
long be misapplied with impunity. They are drawn gradually into closer
sympathy with the falsehoods they have adopted, till, his very nature
seeming to change under the corruption, there disappears from it the
capacity of those higher perceptions and pleasures to which he was born:
and he is cast off from the communion of exalted minds, to live and to
perish with the age to which he has surrendered himself.

If minds under these circumstances of danger are preserved from decay
and overthrow, it can seldom, I think, be to themselves that they owe
their deliverance. It must be to a fortunate chance which places them
under the influence of some more enlightened mind, from which they may
first gain suspicion and afterwards wisdom. There is a philosophy,
which, leading them by the light of their best emotions to the
principles which should give life to thought and law to genius, will
discover to them, in clear and perfect evidence, the falsehood of the
errors that have misled them, and restore them to themselves. And this
philosophy they will be willing to hear and wise to understand; but they
must be led into its mysteries by some guiding hand; for they want the
impulse or the power to penetrate of themselves the recesses.

If a superior mind should assume the protection of others just beginning
to move among the dangers I have described, it would probably be found,
that delusions springing from their own virtuous activity were not the
only difficulties to be encountered. Even after suspicion is awakened,
the subjection to falsehood may be prolonged and deepened by many
weaknesses both of the intellectual and moral nature; weaknesses that
will sometimes shake the authority of acknowledged truth. There may be
intellectual indolence; an indisposition in the mind to the effort of
combining the ideas it actually possesses, and bringing into distinct
form the knowledge, which in its elements is already its own: there may
be, where the heart resists the sway of opinion, misgivings and modest
self-mistrust in him who sees that, if he trusts his heart, he must
slight the judgm