For if there be no mind
Debating good and ill,
And if religion send
No challenge to the will,
If only greed be there
For some material feast,
How draw a line between
The man-beast and the beast?
One must have at disposal all valid results of scholarship, yet one must not be a scholar. For
Scholarship is less than sense;
Therefore seek intelligence.
One must command a wealth of detailed fact, ever alert to the deceptiveness of seeming fact, since oftentimes
The firefly seems a fire, the sky looks flat;
Yet sky and fly are neither this nor that.
One must understand that there is no substitute for judgment, and no end to the reward of discriminating judgment:
To know oneself is hard, to know
Wise effort, effort vain;
But accurate self-critics are
Secure in times of strain.
One must be ever conscious of the past, yet only as it offers material for wisdom, never as an object of brooding regret:
For lost and dead and past
The wise have no laments:
Between the wise and fools
Is just this difference.
