CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS KNOWERS. 37 



grace left as to be ashamed. So with the human 

 clever dog ; he may speak with the tongues of men 

 and angels, but so long as he knows that he knows, his 

 tail will droop. More especially does this hold in 

 the case of those who are born to wealth and of old 

 family. We must all feel that a rich young nobleman 

 with a taste for science and principles is rarely a plea- 

 sant object. We do not even like the rich young man 

 in the Bible who wanted to inherit eternal life, unless, 

 indeed, he merely wanted to know whether there was 

 not some way by which he could avoid dying, and 

 even so he is hardly worth considering. Principles 

 are like logic, which never yet made a good reasoner of 

 a bad one, but might still be occasionally useful if they 

 did not invariably contradict each other whenever there 

 is any temptation to appeal to them. They are like 

 fire, good servants but bad masters. As many people or 

 more have been wrecked on principle as from want of 

 principle. They are, as their name implies, of an 

 elementary character, suitable for beginners only, and 

 he who has so little mastered them as to have occasion 

 to refer to them consciously, is out of place in the 

 society of well-educated people. The truly scientific 

 invariably hate him, and, for the most part, the more 

 profoundly in proportion to the unconsciousness with 

 which they do so. 



If the reader hesitates, let him go down into the 

 streets and look in the shop-windows at the photo- 

 graphs of eminent men, whether literary, artistic, or 

 scientific, and note the work which the consciousness 

 of knowledge has wrought on nine out of every ten of 



