CHAPTER V. 337 advantage is abundant, though your boók yields less money to your executors. III. As you proceed both in learning and in life, snake a wise observation what are the ideas, what the discourses and the parts of knowledge that have been more or less useful to yourself ór others. In your younger years, while we are fur- nishing our minds with a treasure of ideas, our experience is but small, and our judgment weak ; it is therefore impossible at that age to determine aright concerning the real advantage and use - fulness of many things we learn. But when age and experience have matured your judgment, then you will gradually drop the more useless part of your younger furniture, and be more soli - citous to retain that which is most necessary for your welfare in this life, or a better. Hereby you will come to make the same complaint that almost every learned man has done after long experience in a study, and in the affairs of human life and ieli-, gion : Alas! how many hours, and days, and months, have I lost in pursuing some parts of learning, and in reading some authors, which have turned to no otherr account, but to inform me that they were not worth my labour and pursuit ! Happy the man who has a wise tutor to conduct him through all the sciences in the first years of his study ; and who has a prudent friend always at hand to point out to him, from experience, how much of every science is worth his pursuit ! And happy the student that is so wise as to follow such advice. IV. Learn to acquire a government over your ideas and your thoughts, that .they may corne when they are called, and depart when they are bidden. There are some thoughts that arise and intrude upon us while we shun them ; there are others that fly from us, when we would hold and fix them. If the ideas which you would willingly make the matter of your present meditation are ready to fly from you, you must be obstinate in the pursuit of them by an habit of fixed meditation you must keep your soul to the work, when it is ready to start aside every moment, unless you will abandon yourself to be a slave to every wild imagination. It is a common, but it is an unhappy and a shameful thing, that every trifle that comes across the senses or fancy should divert us, that a buzzing fly should teaze our spirits and scatter our best ideas : but we Must learn to be deaf to and regardless of other things, besides that which we make the present subject of our meditation : and in order * Note, This advice of writing, marking, and reviewing your remarks, refers chiefly to those " occasional notions" you meet with either in read rug or in con- versation ç but when you are directly and professedly,pursuieg any subject of knowledge in a good system in your younger years, the system itself ie your Common -place -book, and most be entirely reviewed. The same may be said con- cerning any treatise which closely, auccintly, and accurately handles any partito. lar theme. z3
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