An address on American literature, delivered before the Philomathean Society of Indiana University, at its annual commencement, September 25th, 1839 / by James Conquest Cross.

  • Cross, James Conquest
Date:
1839
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An address on American literature, delivered before the Philomathean Society of Indiana University, at its annual commencement, September 25th, 1839 / by James Conquest Cross. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    t 19] not the capacity to think deeply, and education cannot give it to them. What nature has made barren, instruc- tion cannot make blossom like the rose. Whatever efforts, therefore, may be made to instruct those three numerous classes of individuals, must end in rendering them superficial and inadequate. Lock the wide world over, and you will discover that no course of policy is so unfavorable to morality, so hostile to religion, and so destructive to government as that which fills a country with superficial thinkers. They ridicule morality, be- cause they would be considered above vulgar prejudice; they sneer at religion, because they would be thought too smart to be gulled by an idle and stale superstition, and they would overthrow government, because they cherish an ever vacillating and unmingled hatred of the personal aggrandizement of all but themselves. Public opinion, which rules tyrannically in a republic, can assume a sound character only under the auspices of an elevated literature. The truth of this we have already vindicated, and if it be a postulate no longer open to controversy, the question may be asked, Is the general diffusion of learning favorable to high efforts of genius, or to originality of thought ? Startling and par- adoxical as may appear the reply which much reflection on the subject constrains me to give, I must respond in the negative. What is to be understood by the hourly enunciated phrases; diffusion of knowledge—gen- eral education. To compress the results of the expe- rience and investigation of all past generations into such a form as to make it the familiar elementary knowledge of the present, and to place it within the reach of every human being in the republic. This will certainly save those who are in the pursuit of learning much labor, but its effects appear to us, and we say so with great defer- ence to the sentiments of those with whom we differ, to be, in every other respect, prejudicial. The goal is reached without that feverish excitement which grows out of the pursuit having been experienced, and that