virtue we arrive at honour, so let us believe that only through
knowledge can we arrive at virtue!"

"And yet," said Clarence, "that seems a melancholy truth for the mass
of the people, who have no time for the researches of wisdom."

"Not so much so as at first we might imagine," answered Mordaunt: "the
few smooth all paths for the many. The precepts of knowledge it is
difficult to extricate from error but, once discovered, they gradually
pass into maxims; and thus what the sage's life was consumed in
acquiring becomes the acquisition of a moment to posterity. Knowledge
is like the atmosphere: in order to dispel the vapour and dislodge the
frost, our ancestors felled the forest, drained the marsh, and
cultivated the waste, and we now breathe without an effort, in the
purified air and the chastened climate, the result of the labour of
generations and the progress of ages! As to-day, the common mechanic
may equal in science, however inferior in genius, the friar [Roger
Bacon] whom his contemporaries feared as a magician, so the opinions
which now startle as well as astonish may be received hereafter as
acknowledged axioms, and pass into ordinary practice. We cannot even
tell how far the sanguine theories of certain philosophers [See
Condorcet "On the Progress of the Human Mind," written some years
after the supposed date of this conversation, but in which there is a
slight, but eloquent and affecting, view of the philosophy to which
Mordaunt refers.] deceive them when they anticipate, for future ages,
a knowledge which shall bring perfection to the mind, baffle the
diseases of the body, and even protract to a date now utterly unknown
the final destination of life: for Wisdom is a palace of which only
the vestibule has been entered; nor can we guess what treasures are
hid in those chambers of which the experience of the past can afford