Note 16 — Part III. System of the Particular Arts.

In this connection, permit me, dear friend, to mention a discovery which I made concerning my son Isaac, now three years old. Just imagine my surprise when I found that every book in my possession—Webster’s Spelling-book not excepted—is a perfect riddle to him, and mystifies him as completely as ever the works of Goethe, Hegel, Emerson, or any other thinking man, do or did the learned critics. But my parental pride, so much elated by the discovery of this remarkable precocity in my son—a precocity which, at the age of three years, (!) shows him possessed of all the incapacity of such “learned men”—was shocked, nay, mortified, by the utter want of appreciation which the little fellow showed of this, his exalted condition!