Note 70 — MEMOIRS OF THE LIFE OF DAVID RITTENHOUSE; ANTERIOR TO HIS SETTLEMENT IN PHILADELPHIA.
Reading edition
“There is,” says a late ingenious writer,[70a] “a strong propensity in the human mind to trace up our ancestry to as high and as remote a source as possible.” “This principle of our nature,” he observes, “although liable to great perversion; and frequently the source of well-founded ridicule, may, if rightly directed, become the parent of great actions. The origin and progress of individuals, of families, and of nations, constitute Biography and History, two of the most interesting departments of human knowledge.”
The pride of ancestry is, indeed, “liable to great perversion,” and is too frequently “the source of well-founded ridicule:” yet the experience and the history of mankind, in every age and country, have shewn, that it is connected with and derived from principles of our nature, which are not only laudable in themselves, but such as, if “rightly directed” and properly applied, become eminently useful to society.