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Letter to Foster Petersburgh
Dear Sir
A few years ago you may remember
I used to talk with you about a project I had
formed of trying to penetrate into the interior
parts of South America: thinking hoping that what little
I had picked up of Botany and Chymistry and
other branches of natural knowledge might enable
me to perhaps be of some little service to mankind by
exploring the production of those fertile and unknown untrodden
regions. If I recollect aright it was partly (the consciousness
of the weakness of my constitution, partly
that it was the instruction I gathered from Helvetius, that gradually
weaned me from that idea. From him I got a
standard to measure the relative importance of the
several pursuits a man might be engaged in: &
the result of it was that the way of all others in
which a man might be of most service to his fellow creatures was by
making improvements in the science which I
had been engaged to study by profession. I had indeed
gone but a little way in (that study) it before I
began to take more pleasure in the thoughts idea of
seeing its imperfections remedied, than in that of converting
them to profit: for the defects of the science are you know the
patrimony of the profession. That good illustrious philosopher
(whose principles however I am very far
from adopting without destruction) at the same time that he
afforded suggested
Identifier: | JB/169/104/001 "JB/" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 169.
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letter to foster petersburgh |
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correspondence |
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jeremy bentham |
[[watermarks::l v g propatria [britannia motif]]] |
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caroline vernon |
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letter 248, vol. 2 |
56924 |
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