The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties

Abstract

Some distinguished scholars, no doubt, have been bad men; but the people do not know how much worse they might have been, but for their love of learning, which, to the extent it did operate upon their characters, could not have been otherwise than beneficial. Among the highest orders of society, the very cheapness of literary pleasures has probably had the effect of making them to be less in fashion than others of which wealth can command a more exclusive enjoyment. The business of philosophic experiment, it may be well to observe, is not a mere random expenditure of tests and applications. The true disciple of the inductive philosophy, on the contrary, has always in his contemplation, while conducting his experiments, an idea or end which he aims at realizing, and which, in fact, directs him to every experiment to which he resorts.

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