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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Untitled Article
article which gave occasion to the present letter , Yo # 9 . rg | ie ^ throughout , on the obstacles whiph oppose the growth and manifestation of genius , as if the future discoverer h < ad to travel to the extreme verge of the ground already rescued from the dominion of doubt and mystery , before he caji find any scope for the faculty thereafter to be developed in him , —as if he had first to learn all
that has already been known , and then to commence an entirely new series of intellectual operations in order to enlarge the field of human knowledge . Now I conceive , on the contrary , that the career of the discoverer is only the career of the learner , carried on into untrodden ground ; and that he has only to continue to do exactly what he ought to have been doing from the first , what he has been doing if he be really qualified to be a discoverer . You might , therefore , have spared yourself the inquiry , whether new
truths , in as great abundance as ever , are within reach , and whether the approach to them is longer and more difficult than heretofore . According to my view , genius stands not in need of access to new truths , but is always where knowledge is , being itself nothing but a mind with capacity to know . There will be as much room and as much necessity for genius when mankind shall have found out everything attainable by their faculties , as there is now ; it will still remain to distinguish the man who knows from the man who
takes upon trust—the man who can feel and understand truth , from the man who merely assents to it , the active from the merely passive mind . Nor needs genius be a rare gift bestowed on few . By the aid of suitable culture all might possess it , although in unequal degrees . The question , then , of ' the comparative influence of ancient and modern times on the development of genius , ' is a simpler , yet
a larger and more commanding question , than you seem to have supposed . It is no other than this : have the moderns , or the ancients , made most use of the faculty of thoqght , and which of the two have cultivated it the most highly ? Did the ancients think and find out for themselves what they ought to believe and to do , taking nothing for granted ?—and do the moderns , in comparison ,
merely remember and imitate , believing either nothing , or what is told them , and doing either nothing , or what is set down for them ? To this great question I am hardly able to determine whether you have said aye or no . You are pleading for the moderns against those who place the ancients above them , for civilization and refinement against the charge of being impediments to genius ;
yet you seem incidentally to admit that inferiority in the higher endowments , which it appeared to be your object to disprove . Your only salvo for the admission is , that , if the fact be so , it must be our own fault . Assuredl y it is always * our own fault . It isjust as possible to be a great man now as it ever was , would but apy ope try . But that does not explain why we do not try , and why pthers , were men ljikp ourselves , did any more tjiatt we caji
Untitled Article
6 & 4 On Genius ,
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1832, page 654, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1822/page/6/
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