Reflections upon the conduct of HUMAN LIFE; With reference to learning and knowledge. Extracted from Mr. NORRIS. The PREFACE. SINCE _the great happiness or misery of human life depends wholly upon the right or wrong conduct of it, he that shall point out any of its irregularities or mistakes, is a universal friend, a promoter of the public happiness. And the more severe his censure is, provided it be just, the more serviceable it may be._ _Especially, if the irregularities he points out are not only important, frequent and inveterate, but such as lie secret and unobserved, and have all along passed under the notion of excellencies. He that reflects upon such misconducts as these, obliges by his discovery as well as reproof._ _This consideration has occasioned the following reflections upon the study of learning and knowledge; the greatest faults of which, by a kind of unaccountable superstition are canonized ♦for virtues._ ♦ inserted word “for” per Errata _The truth is, the light that divulges other miscarriages will be sure to hide these. For beside that they are visible only to a few (since none can judge of the faults of the learned without learning) those few that do discern them, have seldom ingenuity enough to acknowledge them. For either they are so proud as not to be willing to own themselves to have been so long under a mistake; or so ill-natured that they don’t care others should be directed to a better way than they themselves have travelled in._ _In the following reflections I have endeavoured to mark out some of these less observed misconducts, wherewith I myself have been too long imposed on, and which after all my conviction (so deep are the impressions of early prejudice) I can hardly yet find power to correct. For education is the great bias of human life, and there is this double witchcraft in it, that ’tis a long time before a man can see any thing amiss in a way he is used to, and when he does, ’tis not very easy to change it._ _I can easily divine how these reflections will be received by some of the rigid votaries of old learning. But if they are of service here and there to an ingenuous and unenslaved spirit, I shall not much regard the magisterial censures of those, whose great and long study has had no better effect upon them, than to make them too wise for conviction._ The First REFLECTION. _Wherein the general conduct of human life is taxed, for placing learning in such things as are little or nothing perfective of the understanding._