Excerpt from A Discourse Occasioned by the Death of John Quincy Adams: Delivered at the Melodeon in Boston, March 5, 1848

In nature we find individuals, not orders and genera: but for our own convenience in understanding and recollecting, we do a little violence to nature and put the individuals into classes. In this way we understand better both the whole and each of its parts. Human Nature furnishes us with indi vidual great men; for convenience we put them into several classes, corresponding to their several modes or forms of great ness. It is well to look at these classes before we examine any one great man; this will render it easier to see where he belongs and what he is worth. Actual service is the test of actual greatness; he who renders, of himself, the great est actual service to mankind, is actually the greatest man. There may be other tests for determining the potential great ness of men, or the essential; this is the Christian rule for determining the actual greatness. Let us arrange these men in the natural order of their work.

First of all, there are great men who discover general truths, great ideas, universal laws, or invent methods of thought and action. In this class the vastness of a man's genius may be measured, and his relative rank ascertained by the tran scendency of his ideas, by the newness of his truth, by its practical value, and the difficulty of attaining it in his time, and under his peculiar circumstances. In Literature it is such men who originate thoughts, and put them into original forms, - they are the great men of letters. In Philosophy we meet with such, - and they are the great men of science. Thus Socrates discovered the philosophical method of minute analysis which distinguished his school, and led to the rapid advance of knowledge in the various and even conflicting Academies, which held this method in common, but applied it in various ways, well or ill, and to various departments of human inquiry; thus Newton discovered the law of gravitation, universal in Na ture, and by the discovery did immense service to mankind. In Politics we find similar, or analogous men, who discover yet other Laws of God, which bear the same relation to men in society that Gravitation bears to the orbs in heaven, or to the dust and stones in the street; men that discover the First Truths of Politics, and teach the true Method of Human Society. Such are the great men in Politics.

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