“Not so much so as at first we might imagine,” answered Mordaunt: “the few smooth all paths for the many. The precepts of knowledge it is difficult to extricate from error but, once discovered, they gradually pass into maxims; and thus what the sage’s life was consumed in acquiring becomes the acquisition of a moment to posterity. Knowledge is like the atmosphere: in order to dispel the vapour and dislodge the frost, our ancestors felled the forest, drained the marsh, and cultivated the waste, and we now breathe without an effort, in the purified air and the chastened climate, the result of the labour of generations and the progress of ages! As to-day, the common mechanic may equal in science, however inferior in genius, the friar [Roger Bacon] whom his contemporaries feared as a magician, so the opinions which now startle as well as astonish may be received hereafter as acknowledged axioms, and pass into ordinary practice. We cannot even tell how far the sanguine theories of certain philosophers [See Condorcet “On the Progress of the Human Mind,” written some years after the supposed date of this conversation, but in which there is a slight, but eloquent and affecting, view of the philosophy to which Mordaunt refers.] deceive them when they anticipate, for future ages, a knowledge which shall bring perfection to the mind, baffle the diseases of the body, and even protract to a date now utterly unknown the final destination of life: for Wisdom is a palace of which only the vestibule has been entered; nor can we guess what treasures are hid in those chambers of which the experience of the past can afford us neither analogy nor clew.” “It was, then,” said Clarence, who wished to draw his companion into speaking of himself, “it was, then, from your addiction to studies not ordinarily made the subject of acquisition that you date (pardon me) your generosity, your devotedness, your feeling for others, and your indifference to self?” “You flatter me,” said Mordaunt, modestly (and we may be permitted to crave attention to his reply, since it unfolds the secret springs of a character so singularly good and pure), “you flatter me: but I will answer you as if you had put the question without the compliment; nor, perhaps, will it be wholly uninstructive, as it will certainly be new, to sketch, without recurrence to events or what I may call exterior facts, a brief and progressive History of One Human Mind.”