Learning, either superficial or profound, intoxicates with vanity, only when it is confined to a few. It is by seeing or fancying himself wiser than those around him, that the pedant is puffed up. But now, all the community, male and female, are proposed to be made partakers of knowledge; and cannot be vain, of what all equally possess. Besides--the sort of knowledge that naturally engenders conceit and leads to error, is the _partial_ knowledge of _details_; not a comprehensive acquaintance with _outlines_, and _general principles_. A quack can use the lancet, and knows it to have been successfully employed for severe contusions and excessive heat; but does not know the _general_ fact, that under extreme exhaustion, indicated by a suspended pulse, stimulants, and not depletives, are proper. Seeing a man just fallen from a scaffold, or exhausted with heat and fatigue in the harvest field--his pulse gone--the quack bleeds him, and the patient dies. Again--a lounger at judicial trials, having picked up a few legal doctrines and phrases--perhaps being master of a "Hening's Justice"--conceives himself a profound jurisprudent; and besides tiring the ears of all his acquaintance with technical pedantry, he persuades a credulous neighbor, or plunges himself, into a long, expensive, and ruinous law-suit. The worthy Mr. Saddletree, and Poor Peter Peebles,[13] are masterly pictures of such a personage: pictures, of which few experienced lawyers have not seen originals. The storm so lately (and perhaps even yet) impending from the north, and several other conspicuous ebullitions of fanaticism, are clearly traceable to the perversion of a text[14] in our Declaration of Independence and Bills of Rights, detached from its natural connexion with kindred and qualifying truths, by minds uninstructed in the _general principles_ of civil and political right. The mind which has been accustomed only to a microscopic observation of one subject, or one set of subjects, is necessarily contracted, fanatical, and intolerant: as the wrinkled crone, who, during a long life, has never passed the hills environing her cabin, or heard of any land besides her own province, believes her native hamlet the choicest abode of wisdom and goodness, and its humble church the grandest specimen of architectural magnificence, in the world; and hears with incredulity or horror, of distant countries, containing mountains, rivers, climates, and cities, such as her thoughts never conceived, and people with complexions, customs, language, and religion, different from all that she has ever known. But the intellect, that has surveyed the outlines and observed the relations of many various subjects (even though not thoroughly familiar with any,) resembles the man who by travelling, or even on a map, has traced the boundaries and marked the relative positions of different countries. Knowing that _they exist_,