No More Learning

As the names of the
Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they
had been named by the child's rigmarole, _Iery wiery ichery van,
tittle-tol-tan_. I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming
over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous
sound in his own dialect. The names of men are, of course, as cheap
and meaningless as _Bose_ and _Tray_, the names of dogs.

Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy if men were named
merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to
know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the
individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier
in a Roman army had a name of his own,--because we have not supposed
that he had a character of his own.

At present our only true names are nicknames. I knew a boy who, from
his peculiar energy, was called "Buster" by his playmates, and this
rightly supplanted his Christian name. Some travelers tell us that an
Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was
his fame; and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new
exploit. It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely,
who has earned neither name nor fame.

I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see
men in herds for all them. A familiar name cannot make a man less
strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his
own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a
savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours.
I see that my
neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William or Edwin, takes it
off with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or in
anger, or aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear
pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his original wild name in
some jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue.

* * * * *

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all
around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the
leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to
that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,--a
sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English
nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

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.