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with the spoils of the past. Any single genius, if not an infinitesimal, counts at most but a digit in the vast notation of humanity. The great masters have been the greatest scholars. Many a bright mind has struggled alone, to beat the air. Behold in some national patent office a grand mummy pit of ignorant inventors.

Those men upon whom so much opprobrium has been heaped, the schoolmen, were unfortunate chiefly in the lack of material on which to expend their singular acuteness. Leibnitz was not ashamed to confess his obligations to them, nor South to avail himself of their subtle distinctions. Doubtless theology owes them a debt. Some of them have been well called, by Hallam, men "of extraordinary powers of discrimination and argument, strengthened in the long meditation of their cloister by the extinction of every other talent and the exclusion of every other pursuit. Their age and condition denied them the means of studying polite letters, of observing nature, or of knowing mankind. They were thus driven back upon themselves, cut off from all the material on which the mind could operate, and doomed to employ all their powers in defense of what they must never presume to examine." "If these schoolmen," says Bacon, "to their great thirst of truth and unwearied travel of wit had joined variety of reading and contemplation, they had proved great lights to the advancement of all learning and knowledge." And so, for lack of other timber, they split hairs. Hence the mass of ponderous trifling that has made their name a byword. A force, sometimes

Herculean, was spent in building and demolishing castles of moonshine.

A robust mental strength requires various and solid food. The best growth is symmetrical. There is a common bond quoddam commune vinculum in the circle of knowledge that cannot be overlooked. Men do not know best what they know only in its isolation. Even Kant offset his metaphysics by lecturing on geography; and Niebuhr, the historian, struggled hard and well to keep his equilibrium by throwing himself into the whole circle of natural science and of affairs. Such, also, are the interdependencies of scholarship, that ample knowledge without our specialty is needful to save us from blunders within. Olshausen was a brilliant commentator, and the slightest tinge of chemistry should have kept him from suggesting that the conversion of water into wine at Cana was but the acceleration of a natural process. A smattering of optics would have prevented Dr. Williams from repeating the old cavil of Voltaire, that light could not have been made before the sun. A moderate reflection upon the laws of speech and the method of Genesis would have restrained Huxley from sneering at the "marvelous flexibility" of the Hebrew tongue in the word "day," and a New York audience from laughing at the joke rather than the joker. Some tinge of ethical knowledge should have withheld Max Müller from finding the grand distinctive mark of humanity in the power of speech. The merest theorist needs some range of reality for the framework of his theories, and

the man of broad principles must have facts to generalize. Indeed a good memory is the indispensable servant of large thought, and, however deficient in certain directions, the great thinkers have had large stores. "The best heads that have ever existed," says an idealist," Pericles, Plato, Julius Cæsar, Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton, were well read, universally educated men, and quite too wise to undervalue letters. Their opinion has weight because they had the means of knowing the opposite opinion."

While every year increases the impossibility of what used to be called universal knowledge, it also emphasizes the necessity of a scholarship that has its outlook toward all the vast provinces of reading and thought. It cannot conquer them, but it can be on treaty relations with them. The tendency of modern science is of necessity steadily toward sectional lines and division of labor. It is a tendency whose cramping. influence is as steadily to be resisted even in later life, much more in early training. We are to form ourselves on the model of the integer rather than the fraction of humanity. The metaphysician cannot afford to be ignorant of the "chemistry of a candle" or the "history of a piece of chalk," nor the chemist of the laws of language, the theologian of astronomy and geology, nor the lawyer of the most ancient code and its history. Mill himself made complaint of Comte's "great aberration" in ignoring psychology and logic.

Intellectual fetichism is born of isolation, and dies hard. While in the great modern uprising we may

boast that the heathen idols have been swept away from three hundred dark islands of Polynesia, new "idols of the cave" stalk forth upon the world of civilized thought. We are just now much bewildered with brightness in streaks, which falls on us like the sunlight from a boy's bit of glass, and blinds our eyes instead of showing our path. Half-educated persons seize fragments of principles and snatch at half-truths. Crotchets infest the brains and hobbies career through the fields of thought. Polyphemus is after us, a burly Better if that were out.

wretch with one eye.

The remedy is to correct our narrowness by a clear We must come out of our

view of the wide expanse.

cave. We must link our pursuits to those of humanity. Breadth and robustness given to the mental constitution in its early training shall go far through life to save us from partial paralysis or monstrosity.

To ensure this result, however, we must add to that fullness of material the quality of mental equipoise or mastery, the power of grasping and managing it all. A man is to possess, and not to be "possessed with," his acquisitions. He wants an intellect decisive, incisive, and, if I might coin a word, concisive.

The power to unify and organize must go with all right acquisition. Knowledges must be changed to knowledge. It takes force to handle weight. Some men seem to know more than is healthy for them. It does not make muscle, but becomes plethoric, dropsical, adipose, or adipocere. Better to have thought more and acquired less. Frederick W. Robertson, in

his prime, wrote: "I will answer for it that there are few girls of eighteen who have not read more books than I have ;" and Mrs. Browning confessed: "I should be wiser if I had not read half as much;" while old Hobbes of Malmesbury caustically remarked: “If I had read as much as other men, I should know as little." It may serve as a hint to the omnivorous college student. Cardinal Mezzofanti knew, it is said, more than a hundred languages. What came of it all? A eulogy on one Emanuele da Ponte. He never said anything in all the languages he spoke! What constitutes the life of an intellectual jellyfish? Even the brilliancy of Macaulay was almost overweighted by the immensity of his acquisitions. The vivid glitter of details in his memory may sometimes have dazzled his perception of a tout ensemble, and for principles it was his manner to cite precedents. A multitude of lesser lights have been almost smothered by superabundance of fuel. A man knows Milton almost by heart, and Shakespeare too; can quote pages of Homer, has read Chrysostom for his recreation, is full of history, runs over with statistics right and left, and withal is strong in mother wit. But the mother wit proves not strong enough, perhaps, to push forth and show itself over the ponderous débris above it, the enormousness, or, if you please, the enormity, of his knowledge.

It requires a first-class mind to carry a vast load of scientific facts. Hence the many eminent observers who have been the most illogical of reasoners. What a contrast between Hugh Miller and his friend Francia;

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