A young man wrote to me the other day lamenting his ignorance and
requesting me to tell him what books to read and what to do in order to
become learned and wise. I sent him a civil answer and such advice as
occurred to me. But I confess that the more I thought of the matter
the less assured I felt of my competence for the task. I ceased to be
flattered by the implied tribute to my omniscience, and felt rather
like a person who gives up a third-class ticket after he has ridden in
a first-class carriage might feel. I surveyed my title to this
reputation for learning, and was shocked at the poverty of my estate.
As I contrasted the mountain of things I didn't know with the molehill
of things I did know, my self-esteem sank to zero. Why, my dear young
sir, thought I, I cannot pay twopence in the pound. I am nothing but
the possessor of a wide-spread ignorance. Why should you come to me
for a loan?
I begin with myself--this body of me that is carried about on a pair of
cunningly-devised stilts and waves a couple of branches with five
flexible twigs at the end of each, and is surmounted by a large round
knob with wonderful little orifices, and glittering jewels, and a sort
of mat for a covering, and which utters strange noises and speaks and
sings and laughs and cries. Bless me, said I, what do I know about it?
I am a mere bundle of mysteries in coat and breeches. I couldn't tell
you where my epiglottis is or what it does without looking in a
dictionary. I have been told, but I always forget. I am little better
than the boy in the class. "Where is the diaphragm?" asked the
teacher. "Please sir, in North Staffordshire." said the boy. I may
laugh at the boy, but any young medical student would laugh just as
much at me if I told him honestly what I do not know about the
diaphragm. And when it comes to the ultimate mysteries of this
aggregation of atoms which we call the human body the medical student
and, indeed, the whole Medical Faculty would be found to be nearly as
ignorant as the boy was about the diaphragm.
From myself I pass to all the phenomena of life, and wherever I turn I
find myself exploring what Carlyle calls the "great, deep sea of
Nescience on which we float like exhalations that are and then are
not." I see Orion striding across the southern heavens, and feel the
wonder and the majesty of that stupendous spectacle, but if I ask
myself what I know about it I have no answer. And even the knowledge
of the most learned astronomer only touches the fringe of the
immensity. What is beyond--beyond---beyond? His mind is balked, as
mine is, almost at the threshold of the mighty paradox of a universe
which we can conceive neither as finite nor as infinite, which is
unthinkable as having limits and unthinkable as having no limits. As
the flowers come on in summer I always learn their names, but I know
that I shall have to learn them again next year. And as to the mystery
of their being, by what miracle they grow and transmute the secretions
of the earth and air into life and beauty--why, my dear young sir, I am
no more communicative than the needy knife-grinder. "Story? God bless
you, I have none to tell, sir."
I cannot put my hand to anything outside my little routine without
finding myself meddling with things I don't understand. I was digging
in the garden just now and came upon a patch of ground with roots deep
down. Some villainous pest, said I, some enemy of my carrots and
potatoes. Have at them! I felt like a knight charging to the rescue
of innocence. I plunged the fork deeper and deeper and tore at the
roots, and grew breathless and perspiring. Even now I ache with the
agonies of that titanic combat. And the more I fought the more
infinite became the ramifications of those roots. And so I called for
the expert advice of the young person who was giving some candy to her
bees in the orchard. She came, took a glance into the depths, and
said: "Yes, you are pulling up that tree." And she pointed to an
ivy-grown tree in the hedge a dozen yards away. Did I feel foolish,
young sir? Of course I felt foolish, but not more foolish than I have
felt on a thousand other occasions. And you ask me for advice.
I recall one among many of these occasions for my chastening. When I
was young I was being driven one day through a woodland country by an
old fellow who kept an inn and let out a pony and chaise for hire. As
we went along I made some remark about a tree by the wayside and he
spoke of it as a poplar. "Not a poplar," said I with the easy
assurance of youth, and I described to him for his information the
characters of what I conceived to be the poplar. "Ah," he said "you
are thinking of the Lombardy poplar. That tree is the Egyptian
poplar." And then he went on to tell me of a score of other
poplars--their appearance, their habits, and their origins--quite
kindly and without any knowledge of the withering blight that had
fallen upon my cocksure ignorance. I found that he had spent his life
in tree culture and had been forester to a Scotch duke. And I had
explained to him what a poplar was like! But I think he did me good,
and I often recall him to mind when I feel disposed to give other
people information that they possibly do not need.
And the books I haven't read, and the sciences I don't know, and the
languages I don't speak, and the things I can't do--young man, if you
knew all this you would be amazed. But it does not make me unhappy.
On the contrary I find myself growing cheerful in the contemplation of
these vast undeveloped estates. I feel like a fellow who has inherited
a continent and, so far, has only had time to cultivate a tiny corner
of the inheritance. The rest I just wander through like a boy in
wonderland. Some day I will know about all these things. I will
develop all these immensities. I will search out all these mysteries.
In my heart I know I shall do nothing of the sort. I know that when
the curtain rings down I shall be digging the same tiny plot. But it
is pleasant to dream of future conquests that you won't make.
And, after all, aren't we all allotment holders of the mind,
cultivating our own little patch and surrounded by the wonderland of
the unknown? Even the most learned of us is ignorant when his
knowledge is measured by the infinite sum of things. And the riches of
knowledge themselves are much more widely diffused than we are apt to
think. There are few people who are not better informed about
something than we are, who have not gathered their own peculiar sheaf
of wisdom or knowledge in this vast harvest field of experience. That
is at once a comfortable and a humbling thought. It checks a too
soaring vanity on the one hand and a too tragic abasement on the other.
The fund of knowledge is a collective sum. No one has all the items,
nor a fraction of the items, and there are few of us so poor as not to
have some. If I were to walk out into the street now I fancy I should
not meet a soul, man or woman, who could not fill in some blank of my
mind. And I think--for I must not let humility go too far--I think I
could fill some blank in theirs. Our carrying capacity varies
infinitely, but we all carry something, and it differs from the store
of any one else on earth. And, moreover, the mere knowledge of things
is not necessary to their enjoyment, nor necessary even to wisdom.
There are things that every ploughboy knows to-day which were hidden
from Plato and Caesar and Dante, but the ploughboy is not wiser than
they. Sir Thomas Browne, in his book on "Vulgar Errors," declared that
the idea that the earth went round the sun was too foolish to be
controverted. I know better, but that doesn't make me a wiser man than
Browne. Wisdom does not depend on these things. I suppose that, on
the whole, Lincoln was the wisest and most fundamentally sane man who
ever took a great part in the affairs of this planet. Yet compared
with the average undergraduate he was utterly unlearned.
Do not, my young friend, suppose I am decrying your eagerness to know.
Learn all you can, my boy, about this wonderful caravan on which we
make our annual tour round the sun, and on which we quarrel and fight
with such crazy ferocity as we go. But at the end of all your learning
you will be astonished at how little you know, and will rejoice that
the pleasure of living is in healthy feeling rather than in the
accumulation of facts. There was a good deal of truth in that saying
of Savonarola that "a little old woman who kept the faith knew more
than Plato or Aristotle."