ce of
narrowness of mind. If they are nothing more than well-read men, or men
of information, they have not what specially deserves the name of
culture of mind, or fulfils the type of liberal education.

In like manner, we sometimes fall in with persons who have seen much of
the world, and of the men who, in their day, have played a conspicuous
part in it, but who generalise, nothing, and have no observation, in the
true sense of the word. They abound in information in detail, curious
and entertaining, about men and things; and, having lived under the
influence of no very clear or settled principles, religious or
political, they speak of every one and every thing, only as so many
phenomena, which are complete in themselves, and lead to nothing, not
discussing them, or teaching any truth, or instructing the hearer, but
simply talking. No one would say that these persons, well informed as
they are, had attained to any great culture of intellect or to
philosophy.

The case is the same still more strikingly where the persons in question
are beyond dispute men of inferior powers and deficient education.
Perhaps they have been much in foreign countries, and they receive, in a
passive, otiose, unfruitful way, the various facts which are forced upon
them there. Seafaring men, for example, range from one end of the earth
to the other; but the multiplicity of external objects, which they have
encountered, forms no symmetrical and consistent picture upon their
imagination; they see the tapestry of human life, as it were on the
wrong side, and it tells no story. They sleep, and they rise up, and
they find themselves, now in Europe, now in Asia; they see visions of
great cities and wild regions; they are in the marts of commerce, or
amid the islands of the South; they gaze on Pompey's Pillar, or on the
Andes; and nothing which meets them carries them forward or backward, to
any idea beyond itself. Nothing has a drift or relation; nothing has a
history or a promise. Every thing stands by itself, and comes and goes
in its turn, like the shifting scenes of a show, which leave the
spectator where he was. Perhaps you are near such a man on a particular
occasion, and expect him to be shocked or perplexed at something which
occurs; but one thing is much the same to him as another, or, if he is
perplexed, it is as not knowing what to say, whether it is right to
admire, or to ridicule or to disapprove, while conscious that some
expression