as no relish for
intellectual pursuits, and no conception of the pleasures they afford;
and he sets no value on knowledge but in so far as it may increase his
riches and his sensual gratifications. He has no desire for making
improvements in his trade or domestic arrangements, and gives no
countenance to those useful inventions and public improvements which are
devised by others. He sets himself against every innovation, whether
religious, political, mechanical, or agricultural, and is determined to
abide by the "good old customs" of his forefathers, even though they
compel him to carry his grist to mill in one end of a bag, with a stone
in the other to balance it. Were it dependent upon him, the moral world
would stand still, as the material world was supposed to in former
times; all useful inventions would cease; existing evils would never be
remedied; ignorance and superstition would universally prevail; the
human mind would be arrested in its progress to perfection, and man
would never arrive at the true dignity of his intellectual nature.

It is evident that such an individual--and the world contains thousands
and millions of such characters--can never have his mind elevated to
those sublime objects and contemplations which enrapture the man of
science, nor feel those pure and exquisite pleasures which cultivated
minds so frequently experience; nor can he form those lofty and
expansive conceptions of the Deity which the grandeur and magnificence
of his works are calculated to inspire. He is left as a prey to all
those foolish notions and vain alarms which are engendered by ignorance
and superstition; and he swallows, without the least hesitation, all the
absurdities and childish tales respecting witches, hobgoblins, specters,
and apparitions, which have been handed down to him by his forefathers.

While the ignorant man thus gorges his mind with fooleries and
absurdities, he spurns at the discoveries of science as impositions on
the credulity of mankind, and contrary to reason and common sense. That
the sun is a million of times larger than the earth; that light flies
from his body at the rate of a hundred thousand miles in the hundredth
part of a second; and that the earth is whirling round its axis from day
to day with a velocity of a thousand miles every hour, are regarded by
him as notions far more improbable and extravagant than the story of the
"Wonderful Lamp," and all the other tales of the "Arabian Night's