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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
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