Now, the love of knowledge is prior in time to the love of distinction; it should seem then, that, with proper care, it might maintain the mastery over its rival.  The child is delighted with the acquisition of new ideas, before it thinks of turning them to a vain-glorious account.  It deserves to be considered, whether our modes of education, offering prizes and honors of scholarship, do not train into the ascendancy that love of distinction, which education ought and might keep subordinate; which in fact is one of the greatest hinderances to progress;—­for when one’s immediate aim is not truth itself, but the glory which attends the acquisition, he meets a thousand sidelong impulses from the straightforward search.

That knowledge is a good which grows by being shared, is a truth more fully apprehended, as the idea of knowledge is enlarged.  It is measurably so, while taken for eminence in common studies and the received sciences.  One’s advance is facilitated by the advance of others.

Much more does this hold, when the distinction between intellectual culture and intellectual life is made, and the preference due to the latter apprehended.

When the missionary enterprize was a new thing, in favor of the missionary’s being a married man was argued the advantage of having children trained up in a Christian way before the eyes of the heathen.  But so completely has that expectation been disappointed, that now the missionaries send home their children to be educated; alleging the danger, lest their children become stumbling blocks, through the apparent little difference between them and the heathen children.  And the difficulty is not, that they cannot there, as well as here, be taught Latin, Greek, Mathematics—­all the received sciences-the branches of what is nominally education.  It is not so much, that they cannot there be shielded from evil influences abroad; as that their children there want, what our children enjoy—­the sight of magnificent enterprises; a spirit of inquiry and freedom breathing all around them; and the healthful contact and stimulus of multitudes of young minds, in the like process of intellectual and moral training.  It is such nameless imperceptible influences, that awaken intellectual life, from the mind, and determine the future man more than the teaching, which is nominally education.  Why else does the acknowledged excellence of the teaching in the Prussian schools do so little to quicken intellectual life—­to form men of progressive thoughts?

We should be repaid the whole cost of the missionary enterprize, were it only in the clearness and importance of the lesson thus taught us, as otherwise we should hardly have suspected—­the doctrine of our mutual dependencies and tendencies to a common average—­how our intellectual life is subject to the law, “Whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.”