Improvement comes by comparison. One of the most profound observations
of Bacon is that in which he remarks upon the dwarfing and distorting
influence of solitariness upon the human faculties. The man who shuts
himself up in his own little circle of thought and action as in a cave,
having no consort with his fellows, evolving all his plans from his own
solitary cogitation, must be more than human if he does not become
one-sided, narrow, selfish, bigoted.
A like result, but not so aggravated, is produced, when a man limits his
range of thought and action to those of his own special calling or
profession; when the merchant mingles only with merchants and knows only
merchandise; when the teacher knows nothing but teaching and books; when
the medical man spends every waking hour and every active exercise of
thought upon his healing art; when any man forgets that, in the very
fact of his being a man at all, he is something greater and nobler than
he can possibly be in being merely a merchant, or teacher, or doctor, or
lawyer, or the possessor of any other one special art or faculty.
It is true, indeed, that in order to attain to eminence in any one
department, a man must bend his main energies to that one thing; and he
must give to it much solitary thought and study. But no department of
action is isolated. No interest is unconnected with other interests. No
truth stands alone, but forms a part in the great system of truth. Study
or action, therefore, which is entirely isolated, must needs be dwarfed
and distorted.
A man must go occasionally out of his own sphere in order fully to
understand those very things with which he is most familiar. A man must
study other languages, if he would hope fully to understand his own. A
man must study more than languages merely if he would become a perfect
linguist. The only way to understand arithmetic thoroughly is to study
algebra. A parent who has only one child, and who gives his entire and
exclusive attention to the study of that child, in order that he may, by
a thorough understanding of its nature and disposition, be better able
to teach and train it, will not be so likely to attain his object as he
would if he were to spend a portion of his time in mingling with other
children and in becoming acquainted with childhood generally. A teacher
who should shut himself up in his own school-room, giving to it every
moment of his waking hours, would not be likely to benefit so largely
his own pupils, as if he were to spend a portion of his time in
communing with other teachers and observing other methods besides his
own. A teacher even who should mingle freely with those of his own
profession, and get all the benefit to be derived from observation of
the views and methods of other teachers, but should stop there, would
not yet obtain that broad, comprehensive view, even of his own calling,
and of the duties of his own particular school-room that he might have
if he would travel occasionally beyond the walk of books and pedagogy,
and become acquainted with the views and methods of men in other spheres
of life, with merchants, lawyers, and doctors, with farmers, mechanics,
and artisans.
It is only by mingling with those outside of our own little specialty
that we are disenthralled from the bonds of prejudice. It is wonderful
to see the change produced in the minds of men of different religious
denominations, when by any means they are thrown much into the actual
fellowship of working together in some cause of common benevolence. How,
without any argument, merely by the fact of their being brought out to a
different point of view, the relative magnitude and importance of
certain truths change in their estimation! The points in which
Christians differ become so much smaller; the points in which they agree
become so much larger. The little stone at the mouth of the cave no
longer hides the mountain in the distance.
Let the teacher, the merchant, the mechanic, the banker, the lawyer, the
minister of religion even, still remember that he is a man, and that he
can never reach a full and just estimate of his own position without
sometimes going outside of it and placing himself in the position of
other men.