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r- - - - ' <•¦ ¦ SOME CONSIDERATIONS RESPECTING THE COMPARATIVE INFLtJ ^ NCES OF ANCIENT AND MODERN TIMES ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF GENIUS .
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It would not be easy , we think , to name a subject better deserving a patient and full inquiry , than the one which we now select . To Carry our thoughts back over some of the fairest fields of history , reaping , as we go , golden harvests of moral truth , — -to follow the mind of man through a few stages of its varied , broken , but on the whole , onward march from darkness and impotence to light and freedom , —to learn the secret of its multiplied victories and
discomfitures , —to investigate the processes which have elicited the vigour of our infant race , that we may know what to look for from the more matured labours of our manhood , — -in fine , to read the future in the past and the present , is a sort of undertaking which , to a reflective mind , brings with it its own reward . It cannot but be good for us , ' on whom the ends of the world are come / occasionally to reconnoitre our ground ;—to look around , and behind ,
and before us ; to see how and where we stand . To those who cannot contentedly give up their minds to be moulded they know not how , and led they know not whither , by the casual influences of the day or place , but will know something of the path they are treading , the comparison adverted to in our title yields rich
materials for thought . We all feel , more or less , the power of the world without us , over that within which we regard as most intiir aately and individually our own . Daily and hourly , from the cradle to the tomb , we are wrought on by an infinity of forces , some swaying this way , some that , but all operating mightily on our intellectual and moral frame . Now , to ascertain which of
these are for us , which against us , —which are to be obeyed , cherished , and extended , which to be narrowed , modified , or resisted , - —which are to be matter of cheerful and energetic improvement , which of distrustful apprehe ^ nsioh , or of active ^ unceasing warfare , - *—iSj surely , a primary obligation on all such as have time and thoughts to spare from the ministry of their physical wants .
A notion is not uncommonly entertained respecting the age we live in , which , were it true , would , in our judgment , constitute a solitary exception to the great axiom that all truth is useful , —a notion , the prevalence of which , true or false , would strike us with dismay;—but a notion , we will add , which we are deeply convinced is as false and feeble in theory as it would be destructive in practice . We mean the notion , that the present age is singularly
hostile to genius ;—that we are fust settling down to a dead level of intellect ; a tolerably high level perhaps , but still a level;—that the mind cannot grow and thrive on the unnumbered medicaments which modern civilization drugs it with;—that with all our schools , and schoolmasters , and mechanics institutes , —with all our
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1832, page 556, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1818/page/52/
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