re is less risk, therefore, of our declining to avail
ourselves of our opportunities than there is of our misusing or
abusing them; that there is less likelihood of our refusing to grasp
the treasures spread out before us, than of our laying upon them rash
and irreverent hands, and neglecting to cultivate those habits of
patient investigation, humility, and moral self-control, without which
we have no sufficient security that even the possession of knowledge
itself will be a blessing to us. I was much struck by a passage I met
with the other day in reading the life of one of the greatest men of
his age and country--Watt--which seemed to me to illustrate very
forcibly the nature of the danger to which I am now referring as well
as its remedy. It is stated in the passage to which I allude, that
Watt took great delight in reading over the specifications of
inventions for which patent rights were obtained. He observed that of
those inventions a large proportion turned out to be entirely
worthless, and a source of ruin and disappointment to their authors.
And it is further stated that he discovered that, among these abortive
inventions, many were but the embodiment of ideas which had suggested
themselves to his own mind--which, probably, when they first presented
themselves, he had welcomed as great discoveries, likely to contribute
to his own fame and to the advantage of mankind, but which, after
having subjected them to that rigid and unsparing criticism which he
felt it his bounden duty to apply to the offspring of his own brain,
he had found to be worthless, and rejected. Now, unquestionably, the
powerful intellect of Watt went for much in this matter:
unquestionably his keen and practised glance enabled him to detect
flaws and errors in many cases where an eye equally honest, but less
acute, would have failed to discover them; but can we doubt that a
moral element was largely involved in the composition of that quality
of mind which enabled Watt to shun the sunken rocks on which so many
around him were making shipwreck--that it was his unselfish devotion
to truth, his humility, and the practice of self-control, which
enabled him to rebuke the suggestions of vanity and self-interest,
and, with the sternness of an impartial judge, to condemn to silence
and oblivion even the offspring of his