4 ON THE STUDY OF 



many ages have been allowed to pass by, before 

 science had shed its full lustre on the intellectual 

 world. But experience has taught us it was 

 intended, that human acquirements should be 

 slow and progressive ; that we should be the 

 better prepared for the exercise of faculties 

 through the agency of which, in a future and 

 more elevated condition, we should be rendered 

 worthy of those divine attributes, which, we are 

 taught to believe, are to form the chief sources of 

 our ultimate happiness ; and that in the physical 

 as in the moral world, the operations should be at 

 one time advancing, and at another, retrograding; 

 until such an order of things was produced, as 

 should complete and render perfect the noble 

 purposes for which the universe was created. 



Hence man, unlike the other branches of ani- 

 mate nature in which the physical powers were 

 principally to be called into action, came into 

 the world a weak and helpless creature, entirely 

 dependent on others for the immediate preserva- 

 tion of his life, and ultimately, upon his own 

 labour and ingenuity for its continuance ; and 

 hence, human knowledge was in the beginning 

 confined to the wants and necessities of the 

 species, and made but little progress until man- 

 kind had begun to feel the comforts of social life, 

 and by a more frequent communication of ideas, 

 had acquired the habit of collecting and record- 

 ing facts, and eventually of reasoning upon their 

 phenomena and causes. 



