No More Learning

The actual objects which one man will
see from a particular hilltop are just as different from those which
another will see as the beholders are different. The scarlet oak must,
in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth. We cannot see anything
until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our
heads,--and then we can hardly see anything else. In my botanical
rambles I find that, first, the idea, or image, of a plant occupies my
thoughts, though it may seem very foreign to this locality,--no nearer
than Hudson's Bay,--and for some weeks or months I go thinking of it,
and expecting it, unconsciously, and at length I surely see it. This
is the history of my finding a score or more of rare plants which I
could name. A man sees only what concerns him. A botanist absorbed in
the study of grasses does not distinguish the grandest pasture oaks.
He, as it were, tramples down oaks unwittingly in his walk, or at most
sees only their shadows. I have found that it required a different
intention of the eye, in the same locality, to see different plants,
even when they were closely allied, as _Juncaceae_ and _Gramineae_:
when I was looking for the former, I did not see the latter in the
midst of them. How much more, then, it requires different intentions
of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of
knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at
objects!

Take a New England selectman, and set him on the highest of our hills,
and tell him to look,--sharpening his sight to the utmost, and putting
on the glasses that suit him best (aye, using a spy-glass, if he
likes),--and make a full report. What, probably, will he _spy_? --what
will he _select_ to look at? Of course, he will see a Brocken spectre
of himself.
He will see several meeting-houses, at least, and,
perhaps, that somebody ought to be assessed higher than he is, since
he has so handsome a wood-lot. Now take Julius Caesar, or Emanuel
Swedenborg, or a Fiji-Islander, and set him up there. Or suppose all
together, and let them compare notes afterward. Will it appear that
they have enjoyed the same prospect? What they will see will be as
different as Rome was from heaven or hell, or the last from the Fiji
Islands. For aught we know, as strange a man as any of these is always
at our elbow.

Why, it takes a sharpshooter to bring down even such trivial game as
snipes and woodcocks; he must take very particular aim, and know what
he is aiming at. He would stand a very small chance, if he fired at
random into the sky, being told that snipes were flying there. And so
is it with him that shoots at beauty; though he wait till the sky
falls, he will not bag any, if he does not already know its seasons
and haunts, and the color of its wing,--if he has not dreamed of it,
so that he can _anticipate_ it; then, indeed, he flushes it at every
step, shoots double and on the wing, with both barrels, even in
corn-fields. The sportsman trains himself, dresses, and watches
unweariedly, and loads and primes for his particular game. He prays
for it, and offers sacrifices, and so he gets it. After due and long
preparation, schooling his eye and hand, dreaming awake and asleep,
with gun and paddle and boat, he goes out after meadow-hens, which
most of his townsmen never saw nor dreamed of, and paddles for miles
against a head wind, and wades in water up to his knees, being out all
day without his dinner, and _therefore_ he gets them. He had them
half-way into his bag when he started, and has only to shove them
down. The true sportsman can shoot you almost any of his game from his
windows: what else has he windows or eyes for? It comes and perches at
last on the barrel of his gun; but the rest of the world never see it
_with the feathers on_. The geese fly exactly under his zenith, and
honk when they get there, and he will keep himself supplied by firing
up his chimney; twenty musquash have the refusal of each one of his
traps before it is empty.