Education Quote by Matthew Simpson

Knowledge, Simpson implies, is mostly secondhand - and that’s not a scandal but a design feature of being human. The line opens with a deceptively humble gesture (“if we look”), then tightens into a lopsided comparison: what we personally verify through the senses is “exceedingly small,” while what comes “from other sources” is “wide.” The rhetoric works because it doesn’t merely praise learning; it pressures the reader to admit a quiet dependency they’d rather deny. Even the phrasing stacks the deck: “small and limited” versus “wide” makes self-reliance sound not heroic but naive.

As a 19th-century American clergyman, Simpson is writing in a culture balancing democratic confidence with rapid expansion of print, science, and institutions. Ordinary people were gaining access to more information than ever, yet that access depended on trust: sermons, newspapers, textbooks, testimony. A minister’s authority lives or dies on that same mechanism. Beneath the surface, Simpson is defending mediated knowledge - not just the legitimacy of tradition and scholarship, but the credibility of religious teaching. If most of what you “know” arrives through others, then faith is not an alien category; it’s an intensified version of daily life.

The quote also gently reframes skepticism. It doesn’t attack doubt outright; it relocates it. The real question becomes not “Do you rely on others?” (you do) but “Which sources deserve your reliance?” In a world crowded with voices, Simpson is arguing for a disciplined, morally anchored hierarchy of trust - one that leaves room for revelation alongside reason.