Page:Essay on the First Principles of Government 2nd Ed.djvu/300

 and pursuing those discoveries. It is the thought of publication, and the prospect of fame which is, generally, the great incentive to men of genius to exert their faculties, in attempting the untrodden paths of speculation.

In those unhappy circumstances, writers would entertain a dread of every new subject. No man could safely indulge himself in any thing bold, enterprizing, and out of the vulgar road; and in all publications we should see a timidity incompatible with the spirit of discovery. If any towering genius should arise in those unfavourable circumstances, a Newton in the natural world, or a Locke, a Hutcheson, a Clarke, or a Hartley in the moral, the only effectual method to prevent their diffusing a spirit of enterprise and innovation, which is natural to such great souls, could be no other than that which Tarquin so significantly expressed, by taking off the heads of all those poppies which overlooked the rest. Such men could not but be dangerous, and give umbrage in a country where it was the