But where shall wisdom be found? (Job xxviii. 12).
If the writer of these words meant exactly what he said, he had so little
wisdom that he might well seek more. He should have known that wisdom
spends most of her time crying in the streets and public-houses, and he
should have gone thither to look for her. It is written:
“Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets:
“She crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the
gates: in the city she uttereth her words” (Prov. i. 20, 21.)
If however he meant rather “Where shall wisdom be regarded?” this, again,
is not a very sensible question. People have had wisdom before them for
some time, and they may be presumed to be the best judges of their own
affairs, yet they do not generally show much regard for wisdom. We may
conclude, therefore, that they have found her less profitable than by her
own estimate she would appear to be. This indeed is what one of the
wisest men who ever lived—the author of the Book of
Ecclesiastes—definitely concludes to be the case, when he tells his
readers that they had better not overdo either their virtue or their
wisdom. They must not, on the other hand, overdo their wickedness nor,
presumably, their ignorance, still the writer evidently thinks that error
is safer on the side of too little than of too much. {203}
Reflection will show that this must always have been true, and must
always remain so, for this is the side on which error is both least
disastrous and offers most place for repentance. He who finds himself
inconvenienced by knowing too little can go to the British Museum, or to
the Working Men’s College, and learn more; but when a thing is once well
learnt it is even harder to unlearn it than it was to learn it. Would it
be possible to unlearn the art of speech or the arts of reading and
writing even if we wished to do so? Wisdom and knowledge are, like a bad
reputation, more easily won than lost; we got on fairly well without
knowing that the earth went round the sun; we thought the sun went round
the earth until we found it made us uncomfortable to think so any longer,
then we altered our opinion; it was not very easy to alter it, but it was
easier than it would be to alter it back again. _Vestigia nulla
retrorsum_; the earth itself does not pursue its course more steadily
than mind does when it has once committed itself, and if we could see the
movements of the stars in slow time we should probably find that there
was much more throb and tremor in detail than we can take note of.
How, I wonder, will it be if in our pursuit of knowledge we stumble upon
some awkward fact as disturbing for the human race as an enquiry into the
state of his own finances may sometimes prove to the individual? The
pursuit of knowledge can never be anything but a leap in the dark, and a
leap in the dark is a very uncomfortable thing. I have sometimes thought
that if the human race ever loses its ascendancy it will not be through
plague, famine or cataclysm, but by getting to know some little microbe,
as it were, of knowledge which shall get into its system and breed there
till it makes an end of us. {204} It is well, therefore, that there
should be a substratum of mankind who cannot by any inducement be
persuaded to know anything whatever at all, and who are resolutely
determined to know nothing among us but what the parson tells them, and
not to be too sure even about that.
Whence then cometh wisdom and where is the place of understanding? How
does Job solve his problem?
“Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom: and to depart from evil is
understanding.”
The answer is all very well as far as it goes, but it only amounts to
saying that wisdom is wisdom. We know no better what the fear of the
Lord is than what wisdom is, and we often do not depart from evil simply
because we do not know that what we are cleaving to is evil.