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It has been a frequent practice of late years to celebrate the praises of Knowledge.  Many eloquent speakers have dilated on the happiness and the superiority of the enlightened and the cultivated man.  Now, the correlative or obverse must be equally true:  there must be a corresponding degradation and disqualification attaching to ignorance and the want of instruction.  This correlative and equally cogent statement is suppressed on certain occasions, and by persons that would not demur to the praises of knowledge:  as, when we are told of the native good sense, the untaught sagacity, the admirable instincts of the people,—­that is, of the ignorant or the uneducated.  Hence the great value of the expository device of following up every principle with its, counter-statement, the matter denied when the principle is affirmed.  If knowledge is a thing superlatively good, ignorance—­the opposite of knowledge—­is a thing superlatively bad.  There is no middle standing ground.

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In the way that people use the argument from Authority, there is often an unfelt contradiction from not adverting to the correlative implication.  If I lay stress upon some one’s authority as lending weight to my opinion, I ought to be equally moved in the opposite direction when the same authority is against me.  The common case, however, is to make a great flourish when the authority is one way, and to ignore it when it is the other way.  This is especially the fashion in dealing with the ancient philosophers.  Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are quoted with much complacency when they chime in with a modern view; but, in points where they contradict our cherished sentiments, we treat them with a kind of pity as half-informed pagans.  It is not seen that men liable to such gross errors as they are alleged to have committed—­say on Ethics—­are by that fact deprived of all weight in allied subjects, as, for example, Politics—­in which Aristotle is still quoted as an authority.

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[DIGNITY OF ALL LABOUR ABSURD.]

Many of the sins against Relativity can be traced to rhetorical exaggeration.  Some remarkable instances of this can be cited.

When a system of ranks and dignities has once been established, there are associations of dignity and of indignity with different conditions and occupations.  It is more dignified to serve in the army than to engage in trade; to be a surgeon is more honourable than to be a watchmaker.  In this state of things a fervid rhetorician, eager to redress the inequalities of mankind, starts forth to preach the dignity of all labour.  The device is a self-contradiction.  Make all labour alike dignified, and nothing is dignified; you simply abolish dignity by depriving it of the contrast that it subsists upon.

Pope’s lines—­

    Honour and shame from no condition rise;
    Act well your part; there all the honour lies—­