The physical sciences, shewing the composition and defects of soils, and the modes of remedying those defects—the natures and properties of minerals and vegetables—the modes in which different bodies affect each other—the mechanical powers—the structure of man's own frame, and the causes which benefit or injure it—the utility of these cannot escape any mind.
For books, and tracts, and oral lectures for the people, there will be no want of materials or models, or even of the actual fabrics themselves. The publications of the British and American Societies for the Diffusion of Knowledge, are mines, in which selection, compilation, and imitation, may work with the richest results to this great cause. Many of these productions, and still more eminently, the scientific writings of Dr. Franklin, afford most happy specimens of the style, suited to treatises for popular use: no parade of learning; no long word, where a short will serve the turn; no Latin or Greek derivative, where an Anglo-Saxon is at hand; no technical term, where a popular one can be used. By presenting, in a form thus brief, simple, and attractive, subjects which in their accustomed guise of learned and costly quartos or octavos, frighten away the common gaze, as from a Gorgon upon which none might look, and live, you may insinuate them into every dwelling, and every mind: the school urchin may find them neither incomprehensible, nor wearisome; and the laboring man be detained from the tippling house, and even for an hour, after the day's toil is over, from his pillow, to snatch a few morsels from the banquet of instruction.
Many will cavil at the attempt to disseminate generally, so extended a round of knowledge: and if, to escape the charge of impracticability, we say, that our aim is to impart merely a slight and general acquaintance with the proposed subjects,—then, sciolism, and smattering, will be imputed to the plan; and Pope's clever lines, so often misapplied, about the intoxicating effect of shallow draughts from the Pierian Spring, will be quoted upon us. Come the objection in prose or in verse, it is entirely fallacious.
Learning, either superficial or profound, intoxicates with vanity, only when it is confined to a few. It is by seeing or fancying himself wiser than those around him, that the pedant is puffed up. But now, all the community, male and female, are proposed to be made partakers of knowledge; and cannot be vain, of what all equally possess. Besides—the sort of knowledge that naturally engenders conceit and leads to error, is the partial knowledge of details; not a comprehensive acquaintance with outlines, and general principles. A quack can use the lancet, and knows it to have been successfully employed for severe contusions and excessive heat; but does not know the general fact, that under extreme exhaustion, indicated by a suspended pulse, stimulants, and not depletives, are proper. Seeing a man just fallen from a scaffold, or exhausted with heat and fatigue in the harvest field—his pulse gone—the quack bleeds him, and the patient dies. Again—a lounger at judicial trials, having picked up a few legal doctrines and phrases—perhaps being master of a "Hening's Justice"—conceives himself a profound jurisprudent; and besides tiring the ears of all his acquaintance with technical pedantry, he persuades a credulous neighbor, or plunges himself, into a long, expensive, and ruinous law-suit. The worthy Mr. Saddletree, and Poor Peter Peebles,13 are masterly pictures of such a personage: pictures, of which few experienced lawyers have not seen originals. The storm so lately (and perhaps even yet) impending from the north, and several other conspicuous ebullitions of fanaticism, are clearly traceable to the perversion of a text14 in our Declaration of Independence and Bills of Rights, detached from its natural connexion with kindred and qualifying truths, by minds uninstructed in the general principles of civil and political right. The mind which has been accustomed only to a microscopic observation of one subject, or one set of subjects, is necessarily contracted, fanatical, and intolerant: as the wrinkled crone, who, during a long life, has never passed the hills environing her cabin, or heard of any land besides her own province, believes her native hamlet the choicest abode of wisdom and goodness, and its humble church the grandest specimen of architectural magnificence, in the world; and hears with incredulity or horror, of distant countries, containing mountains, rivers, climates, and cities, such as her thoughts never conceived, and people with complexions, customs, language, and religion, different from all that she has ever known. But the intellect, that has surveyed the outlines and observed the relations of many various subjects (even though not thoroughly familiar with any,) resembles the man who by travelling, or even on a map, has traced the boundaries and marked the relative positions of different countries. Knowing that they exist, and are peopled, he readily forms distinct ideas of their surfaces, and their moral traits: their mountains, rivers, and cities, their arts, commerce, manners, institutions, and wars, rise before his imagination, or are grasped by his knowledge: and whatever he hears, he is prepared rationally to credit or reject, to approve or censure, as it comports well or ill with probability and with reason. Now, to counteract the one, and to promote the other, of these two conditions of mind, are precisely what is proposed by the advocates of popular instruction. They propose to teach outlines; and carefully to impress the fact, that only outlines are taught: so as to shew the learner, plainly, the precise extent of his knowledge, and (what is yet more important) of his ignorance. It is thus, that, being not "proud that he hath learned so much," but rather "humble that he knows no more," vanity and self-conceit will be most certainly prevented: that a wise doubt of his own infallibility will make him tolerant of dissent from his opinions: that he will be prepared at all times to extend his acquisitions easily and judiciously, and to connect them well with previous acquisitions—proving how truly Blackstone has said, in paraphrase of Cicero,15 "the sciences are social, and flourish best in the neighborhood of each other:" in short, that he will approach most nearly to that "healthful, well proportioned" expansion of intellect and liberality of character, which Locke16 terms a large, sound, roundabout sense. In this point of view, it will be found that "a little learning is" not "a dangerous thing."
13 In "The Heart of Mid Lothian," and "Redgauntlet."
14 "All men are created equal," &c. This principle is, in substance, asserted in the Bill of Rights or Constitution of almost every State in the Union.
15 ——"omnes artes, quae ad humanitatem pertinent, habent quoddam commune vinculum, et quasi cognatione quadam inter sese continentur." Orat. pro Arch. Poet.
16 Conduct of the Understanding.
I am deeply sensible, that I have left untouched many topics, even more important and more pertinent to the main theme of my remarks, than some which I have discussed. Indeed, so wide and so varied is that main theme, that I have found myself greatly embarrassed in selecting from the numerous particulars which solicited my regard on every hand. I have not presumed to offer any fully rounded plan, of that legislative action which is so imperiously demanded by the public weal, and soon will be, I trust, by the public voice. A few hints, are all that seemed to become me, or indeed that could well be crowded into my brief share of this day's time. For a plan, both in outline and in detail, I point to our sister states and to the European countries, that have taken the lead of us: and to the virtues and wisdom, by which our statesmen will be able to supply the defects, avoid the errors, and even, I trust, surpass the excellences, of those states and countries. That the Legislature may be wrought up to act, individual influence, and the more powerful influence of associations for the purpose—of whom I deem you, gentlemen, the chief, because the first—must be exerted. You must draw the minds of the constituent body forcibly to the subject. It must be held up in every light; supported by every argument; until the people shall be persuaded but to consider it. Then, half the work will have been done. And in its further progress towards consummation—when the illuminating process shall have fairly begun—still it will be for you, gentlemen, and for those whom your example shall call into this field of usefulness with and after you, to exert, with no slumbering energy, the endowments wherewith you and they, are entrusted. You, and they, must become authors, and the prompters of authors. Books, for use in the schools, and cheap, simplifying tracts as well as books for circulation among the people, must be composed, compiled, and selected. Lectures, plain and cheap, and suitably illustrated, must be delivered through town and country. After the example of the good Watts, and of our own many illustrious contemporaries in Britain and America, learned men must oblige Science to lay aside the starched dignity and grand attire, by which hitherto she has awed away the vulgar; and to render herself universally amiable, by being humbly useful: as the wisest17 of heathens is said to have "brought Philosophy down from the skies, placed her in human haunts, and made her discourse on the daily concerns of human life."
17 Socrates. "Primus ille Philosophiam devocavit e coelo, et in urbibus collocavit, et in domus introduxit; et coegit de vita et moribus, rebusque bonis et malis quærere." Cic. Tuscul. 5.