16.  This opinion we may reasonably suspect to have been propogated, by vanity, beyond the truth.  It is natural for those who have raised a reputation by any science, to exalt themselves as endowed by heaven with peculiar powers, or marked out by an extraordinary designation for their profession:  and to fright competitors away by representing the difficulties with which they must contend, and the necessity of qualities which are supposed to be not generally conferred, and which no man can know, but by experience, whether he enjoys.

17.  To this discouragement it may possibly be answered, that since a genius, whatever it may be, is like fire in the flint, only to be produced by collision with a proper subject, it is the business of every man to try whether his faculties may not happily co-operate with his desires; and since they whose proficiency he admires, knew their own force only by the event, he needs but engage in the same undertaking, with equal spirit, and may reasonably hope for equal success.

18.  There is another species of false intelligence, given by those who profess to shew the way to the summit of knowledge, of equal tendency to depress the mind with false distrust of itself, and weaken it by needless solicitude and dejection.  When a scholar whom they desire to animate, consults them at his entrance on some new study, it is common to make flattering representations of its pleasantness and facility.

19.  Thus they generally attain one of the two ends almost equally desirable; they either incite his industry by elevating his hopes, or produce a high opinion of their own abilities, since they are supposed to relate only what they have found, and to have proceeded with no less ease than they have promised to their followers.

20.  The student, enflamed by this encouragement, sets forward in the new path, and proceeds a few steps with great alacrity; but he soon finds asperities and intricacies of which he has not been forewarned, and imagining that none ever were so entangled or fatigued before him, sinks suddenly into despair, and desists as from an expedition in which fate opposes him.  Thus his terrors are multiplied by his hopes, and he is defeated without resistance, because he had no expectation of an enemy.

21.  Of these treacherous instructors, the one destroys industry, by declaring that industry is vain, the other by representing it as needless:  the one cuts away the root of hope, the other raises it only to be blasted.  The one confines his pupil to the shore, by telling him that his wreck is certain; the other sends him to sea without preparing him for tempests.

22.  False hopes and false terrors, are equally to be avoided.  Every man who proposes to grow eminent by learning, should carry in his mind, at once, the difficulty of excellence, and the force of industry; and remember that fame is not conferred but as the recommence of labour, and that labour, vigorously continued, has not often failed of its reward.