accordingly--they know that they know things, in respect of which,
therefore, they are no longer under grace, but under the law, and
they have yet so much 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 pleasant 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 photographs 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 them; then let him
go to the masterpieces of Greek and Italian art, the truest preachers
of the truest gospel of grace; let him look at the Venus of Milo, the