The present joys of life we doubly taste,
By looking back with pleasure to the past.

The last method which I proposed in my Saturday's paper, for filing
up those empty spaces of life which are so tedious and burthensome
to idle people, is the employing ourselves in the pursuit of
knowledge. I remember Mr. Boyle, speaking of a certain mineral,
tells us that a man may consume his whole life in the study of it
without arriving at the knowledge of all its qualities. The truth
of it is, there is not a single science, or any branch of it, that
might not furnish a man with business for life, though it were much
longer than it is.

I shall not here engage on those beaten subjects of the usefulness
of knowledge, nor of the pleasure and perfection it gives the mind,
nor on the methods of attaining it, nor recommend any particular
branch of it; all which have been the topics of many other writers;
but shall indulge myself in a speculation that is more uncommon, and
may therefore, perhaps, be more entertaining.

I have before shown how the unemployed parts of life appear long and
tedious, and shall here endeavour to show how those parts of life
which are exercised in study, reading, and the pursuits of
knowledge, are long, but not tedious, and by that means discover a
method of lengthening our lives, and at the same time of turning all
the parts of them to our advantage.

Mr. Locke observes, "That we get the idea of time or duration, by
reflecting on that train of ideas which succeed one another in our