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seem to be ambassadors from other, richer, brighter worlds. Jefferson believed Williamsburg “the finest school of manners and morals that ever existed in America.”
    The man who put him on the path toward that hyperbolic but heartfelt conclusion was Dr. William Small, a Scottish layman and professor who brought an Enlightenment worldview to Williamsburg. It was fortuitous that Jefferson encountered Small at all, for Small’s stay on the faculty at William and Mary lasted only six years, from 1758 to 1764—the right period to overlap with Jefferson, who revered him. “It was my great good fortune, and what probably fixed the destinies of my life, that Dr. William Small of Scotland, was then professor of mathematics, a man profound in most of the useful branches of science, with a happy talent of communication, correct and gentlemanly manners, and an enlarged and liberal mind,” Jefferson said.
    Born in Scotland in 1734—he was less than a decade older than Jefferson—Small was, in addition to professor of mathematics at the college, the interim professor of moral philosophy. Described by a contemporary in Virginia as a “polite, well-bred man,” Small lived in two rooms in the college. The accommodations, it was said, were “by no means elegant,” but Small and his colleagues were “very well satisfied with the homeliness of their appearance, though at first sight [they were] rather disgusting.” Small furnished his rooms with six chairs, a table, a grate, and a bed and bedstead. A bit more care seems to have been taken with clothing than with interior decoration. Faculty were expected to have a suit of “handsome full-dressed silk clothes to wear on the King’s birthday at the Governor’s,” where it was “expected that all English gentlemen attend and pay their respects.”
    Small taught ethics, rhetoric, and belles lettres as well as natural philosophy—what we think of as the sciences—and mathematics, lecturing in the mornings and holding seminar-like sessions in the afternoons in which the professor and his students discussed the material. Conversant with the thought of Bacon, Locke, Newton, Adam Smith, and the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Small introduced Jefferson to the key insight of the new intellectual age: that reason, not revelation or unquestioned tradition or superstition, deserved pride of place in human affairs.
    Under Small’s influence Jefferson came to share Immanuel Kant’s 1784 definition of the spirit of the era: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” Kant wrote. “Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.”
    This was Small’s message to his charges at William and Mary. Jefferson was entranced, later giving Small the noblest of accolades when he recalled that Small was “to me … a father.”
    I t was said that Jefferson studied fifteen hours a day, rising at dawn and reading until two o’clock each morning. At twilight in Williamsburg he exercised by running to a stone a mile from town; at Shadwell, he rowed a small canoe of his own across the Rivanna River and climbed the mountain he was to call Monticello. For Jefferson laziness was a sin. “Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so silent, yet so baneful, a tooth, as indolence,” he told one of his daughters. Time spent at study was never wasted. “Knowledge,” Jefferson said, is “indeed is a desirable, a lovely possession.”
    Like his father, he believed in the virtues of riding and of walking, holding that a vigorous body helped create a vigorous mind. “Not less than two hours a day should be devoted to