Page:A Life of Matthew Fontaine Maury.pdf/157

Rh view around, above, and below to the utmost verge. But as we study the laws of nature, and begin to understand about our own ignorance, we find light breaking through, the horizon expanding, and self getting smaller and smaller.

"It is like climbing a mountain: every fact or fresh discovery is a step upward with an enlargement of the view, until the unknown and the mysterious become boundless—self infinitely small; and then the conviction comes upon us with a mighty force, that we know nothing—that human knowledge is only a longing desire.

"The impression is very common, that when a young man leaves college he has finished his education; but do not, when you return home, crowned with the honours of these schools though you be, give in to this notion even for a moment; it is another of those mischievous popular fallacies that you should guard against. Here you have been disciplining the mind, training the thoughts, and laying off the fields in which they may be usefully employed. You have finished nothing here; you have only been clearing away rubbish and preparing the foundations; and notwithstanding that you have been under the eyes of the best masters, and have laid your foundations of the best materials and in the most scholarly manner, yet, like the foundations for any other superstructure, unless built upon, they will soon grow weak and be frittered away.

"If you cease to study now, you will soon forget all you have learned here.

"Movement, progress, is a law of the physical world; here rest and decay are correlative terms. The stars cannot stand still and keep their places; a planet by going back would be hurled into destruction, and even the plant of the earth that ceases to grow straightway withers and dies. And so it is in the moral world: the progress of man must be upwards and onward, or downward and backward. His mind cannot