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the waste of solitary strength. Some of the most illustrious names 
even have suffered from the want of cotemporary corresponding 
genius. Witness Roger Bacon, Tycho Brahe, Landen. But this 
is not all. The injury which great men sustain from want of colli" 
sion is not half so blighting as that which they occasionally com- 
municate. It is the prerogative of a commanding intellect to create 
for itself a sort of worship, and this worship is the certain cause of 
the retardation of that branch of knowledge on which it has erected 
O 
itself. Take Newton. When his philosophy was once mastered by 
his countrymen, they felt themselves elevated with him to the 
highest pinnacle of excellence. Here was a system of reasoning 
which opened all the avenues of human knowledge. They naturally 
considered that, in order to advance, they had only to pursue the 
track which he had beaten down. Progress was in their eyes simply 
extension of what Newton had done, and as he had done it. On 
the Continent there was no such reverence for Newton’s name. Of 
his labours, it is true, men gladly availed themselves ; but whilst 
bowing to his conclusions, they yielded no obedience to his methods. 
In respect to the Differential Calculus, Leibnitz and his followers 
had adopted, from the first, an alphabetical notation capable of com- 
bining with the other characters which enter into analytical reason- 
ing, — a mode of representation as superior to that of Newton as the 
plain English of my pen is to the Egyptian hieroglyphics. And 
what followed ? Whilst the continental mathematicians pushed 
triumphantly through the thickets of science, opening up every- 
where districts rich in fertility, the English timidly followed them 
at a vast distance, contented now to clear away a stump, now 
to explore a secluded nook which the continental mathematicians 
in their hasty sweep over the country had passed by unnoticed. 
Is this to be accounted for by a difference in the genius of the 
people? I think not. For, since the abandonment of their old 
methods, since the introduction of improved processes by Peacock, 
Herschel, and Babbage, our island has produced mathematicians 
of the very highest stamp, inferior to none of their generation. 
The simple explanation seems to be, that our countrymen were 
bound hand and foot in the chains of the beautiful but inexpan- 
sible systems of Newton, and rapid progress was to them an im- 
possibility. Nor is Newton the only great man whose influence 
has been excessive, and to that extent injurious. The very same 
