M.1RRIED LIFE. 195 



suggesting certain safeguards against the superficial 

 knowledge which puffeth up. Such are, the making 

 every acquisition of knowledge not an isolated effort, but 

 part of a total mental discipline ; the not resting in facts, 

 but striving to grasp the laws and generalizations by which 

 they are connected, to appropriate the ideas or theories 

 which bind them together and unite them into a body of 

 science ; the habit of combining study with that reflection, 

 divorced from which reading becomes mere cramming 

 a simple effort of memory or mechanical expertness ; the 

 habit of looking before and after back to the lives 

 and discoveries of the great thinkers of old, forward to 

 the time when all our borrowed learning shall have 

 disappeared, and all that posterity shall call his will 

 be that small residuum which each man by patient 

 thought has made really his own, and discovered for 

 himself and for mankind : lastly the cultivation not of 

 the mere intellect only, but of our whole moral as well 

 as mental nature. ' The discipline and education of the 

 moral sense/ the exercises of habitual piety, and the 

 sanctions of revealed religion are truly found, by dearly 

 bought experience, to be necessary for the temperate 

 and useful employment of the reasoning faculty/ The 

 whole discourse breathes the sobriety and truthfulness 

 of a man, who knew what it is to go out in some direc- 

 tions to the confines of the known ; who in thought was 

 at home there, and who had striven to carry the limits 

 of knowledge some steps forward into the unknown. 

 And as his experience, so his language about know- 

 ledge was altogether unlike that of the rhetorician who, 

 viewing knowledge merely from a distance, has his ima- 

 gination fired by the achievements of others, but knows 

 nothing of what it is to think out difficult problems for 

 himself, or to wrench from Nature her secrets by patient 

 inquiry. 



During the December of the session of 1848-9, Pro- 

 fessor and Mrs. Airy visited Forbes, and stayed for sunn- 

 time with him in his house in Park Place. The. Astro- 



O 2 



