194 T1JE LIFE OF JAMES D. FORBES. [CHAP. 



knowledge of geography, and it produced the effects of 

 profound and well-directed knowledge, it was a know- 

 ledge ever increasing, yet ever tempered by the conviction 

 of ignorance ; a knowledge which taught his contem- 

 poraries to enlarge their acquaintance with the common 

 family of man, to extend commerce, and to preserve 

 human life. Whereas the knowledge of the boarding- 

 school, unless it be tempered with more humility than 

 can be possibly looked for whilst such comparisons are 

 uttered by men of talent on such occasions, will begin in 

 ostentatious displays of memory, and end in pedantry 

 and conceit.' 



Again he says, ' The empiric who has acquired a sort 

 of sleight-of-hand acquaintance with a parcel of facts, and 

 uses them ingeniously, may outshine for a time the more 

 profound and practical student, and the latter may even 

 be unable to cope with him in his own narrow field of 

 display. But for the production of fresh knowledge or 

 substantive additions to the capital of the human mind, 

 our superficial aspirant is incapacitated by the very habits 

 which have gained him a popular reputation. We have 

 it on the authority of Newton himself, that if he was in 

 anything superior to other men, it was in the faculty of 

 patient and concentrated thought. " I keep the subject 

 constantly before me," he said, " and wait till the first 

 dawning opens slowly, by little and little, into a clear 

 light ;" a sentence which speaks to the experience of all 

 who have accustomed themselves to habits of patient 

 study. But the superficial thinker has no such dawn. 

 Facts are things which admit of no degrees. He knows 

 them or he does not. He is in a blaze of what he calls 

 light, or else he is in total darkness. He evidently never 

 thought in the way that Newton thought ; his knowledge, 

 if knowledge it be, comes to him through some different 

 avenue. Facts are not knowledge, any more than books 

 possess understanding/ 



By these and such like arguments, less sparkling but 

 more solid than those of the brilliant essayist, Forbes 

 combated Macaulay's paradox. He then concludes by 



