An Address Delivered Before the Students of Amherst College, and the Citizens of the Town Nov. 17, 1852 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1853 Excerpt: ... principle, and they are glad therefore to give it over into hands gifted with inventive skill. But what is true in the affairs of State, is equally true in other departments of human thought and action. We do not need many of what may be called great thinkers or great scholars in ordinary circumstances. We take our opinions and our arguments as we do our coin, from the common circulating currency, and while the supply is sufficient, and the stamp unquestioned, we feel no necessity for recurring to the mint where it received its impression, or the mine out of whose rich depths the ore Avas extracted. Every day men are using, all over the land or even the Avorld--using happily and usefully--perhaps scarcely doubting that they themselves are the authors of them, or calling them their own because they do not know who has a better right to claim them as original--thoughts, which once came forth fresh and new--from the brain of some great master of mental, moral, or theological science. Even our common-places, those truths which nobody claims, because they are so obvious and familiar, were, in many instances the result of painful birth-throes, on the part of mighty thinkers, in days of doubt and perplexity. In ordinary times, by aid of these, men of common abilities will occupy the pulpit or the teacher's chair, or go through the routine of a profession quite as well as the original thinker. But let a crisis arise, let new forms of disease show themselves in the medical department, new heresies in the theological, or cases setting at defiance old precedents and familiar analogies in the law, and then the resort must be to minds capable of dealing with first principles, and comprehending in one view a complicated system of thought. There is moreover, a diffused i...