◆¹ But particular facts are more forcible than general facts. Let us consider the men who, as a matter of history, have achieved by their Ability the greatest discoveries and inventions, and let us see if it can be said of these men, on the whole, that their Ability has been due to any exceptional education or opportunity. Speaking generally, the very reverse is the case. If education means education in the branch of work or knowledge in which the Ability of the able man is manifested, the greatest inventors of the present century have had no advantages of educational opportunity at all. Dr. Smiles observes that our greatest mechanical inventors did not even have the advantage of being brought up as engineers. “Watt,” he writes, “was a mathematical instrument-maker; Arkwright was a barber; Cartwright, the inventor of the power-loom, was a clergyman; Bell, who afterwards invented the reaping-machine, was a Scotch minister; Armstrong, the inventor of the hydraulic engine, was a solicitor; and Wheatstone, inventor of the electric telegraph, was a maker of musical instruments.” That knowledge is necessary to mechanical invention is of course a self-evident truth; and the acquisition of knowledge, however acquired, is education: education, therefore, was necessary to the exercise of the Ability of all these men. But the point to observe is, that they had none of them any special educational opportunity; they were placed at no advantage as compared with any of their fellows; many of them, indeed, were at a very marked disadvantage; and though, when opportunity is present, Ability will no doubt profit by it, the above examples show, and the whole course of industrial history shows,[42] that Ability is so far from being the creature of opportunity, that it is, on the contrary, in most cases the creator of it. [Sidenote ◆1 The theory is still further refuted by the fact that moral Ability is a matter of character and temperament, rather than of intellect.] [Sidenote ◆2 A business started by Ability of intellect is maintained by Ability of character.]