The preparation for career--apart from its entitling endowments--should be education; but education, he held, even in its prescientific days, often started with a vital mistake. It proceeded on words, grammars, and systems. It should proceed on a knowledge of predisposition; others should know a man before he is called upon to know himself. “What we want is to discover the character of a man at his birth, and _found his education upon his nature_.... All is an affair of organisation.... Among men there are some points of similarity and sympathy. There are few alike; there are some totally unlike the mass.... Until we know more of ourselves, of what use are our systems?... We speculate upon the character of man; we divide and we subdivide. We have our generals, our sages, our statesmen. There is not a modification of mind that is not mapped out in our great atlas of intelligence. We cannot be wrong, because we have mapped out the past; and we are famous for discovering the future when it has taken place. Napoleon is First Consul, and would found a dynasty.... But what use is the discovery, when the Consul is already tearing off his republican robe and snatching the imperial diadem? And suppose, which has happened, and may and will happen again--suppose a being of a different organisation from Napoleon or Cromwell placed in the same situation--a being gifted with a combination of intelligence hitherto unknown--where, then, is our moral philosophy? How are we to speculate upon results which are to be produced by unknown causes?... The whole system of moral philosophy is a delusion, fit only for the play of sophists in an age of physiological ignorance.” So, too, he had reason to think of some physicians “who decide by precedents which have no resemblance, and never busy themselves about the idiosyncrasies of their patients.”[182] “Until,” he wrote again, “men are educated with reference to their nature, there will be no end of domestic fracas.” He remembered his grandfather’s misconstruction of his father’s temperament, and his uncle’s of his own. Even illness he considered “as much a part of necessary education as travel or study.” And his constant idea, that national literature ought to be native and not imported, allied itself to his educational ideas also. “The duty of education is to give ideas. When our limited intelligence was confined to the literature of two dead languages, it was necessary to acquire them.... But now each nation has its literature.... Let education, then, be confined to the national literature, and we should soon perceive the beneficial effects upon the mind of the student. Study would then be a profitable delight. I pity the poor Gothic victim of the grammar and the lexicon. The Greeks, who were masters of composition, were ignorant of all languages but their own. They concentrated the genius of the study of expression upon one tongue. _To this they owe that blended simplicity and strength