No More Learning

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a
certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are
already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from
the meadows, and deepens the soil,--not that which trusts to heating
manures, and improved implements and modes of culture only!

Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster,
both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very
late, he honestly slumbered a fool's allowance.

There may be an excess even of informing light. Niepce, a Frenchman,
discovered "actinism," that power in the sun's rays which produces a
chemical effect; that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues
of metal "are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of
sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would
soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the
agencies of the universe. " But he observed that "those bodies which
underwent this change during the daylight possessed the power of
restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of
night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them. " Hence it
has been inferred that "the hours of darkness are as necessary to the
inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic
kingdom. " Not even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to
darkness.

I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any
more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be
tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only
serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant
future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus
invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and
dusky knowledge, _Gramatica parda_, tawny grammar, a kind of
mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It
is said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal
need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will
call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for
what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we
know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual
ignorance?
What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance;
ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry
and reading of the newspapers,--for what are the libraries of science
but files of newspapers? --a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them
up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters
abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass
like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would
say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,
sometimes,--Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring
has come with its green crop. The very cows are driven to their
country pastures before the end of May; though I have heard of one
unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all
the year round. So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.

A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful,--while
his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides
being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with,--he who knows nothing
about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows
nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he
knows all?

My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head
in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest
that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.
I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more
definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the
insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before,--a discovery that
there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our
philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot
_know_ in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look serenely
and with impunity in the face of the sun: ? ?