sparing readers. Brindley and Stephenson did not learn to read and write until they reached manhood and yet they did great works and lived manly, lives; John Hunter could barely read or write when he was twenty years old, though he could make tables and chairs with any carpenter in the trade. "I never read," said the great physiologist when lecturing before his class; "this"—pointing to some part of the subject before him—"this is the work that you must study if you wish to become eminent in your profession." When told that one of his contemporaries had charged him with being ignorant of the dead languages, he said, "I would undertake to teach him that on the dead body which he never knew in any language, dead or living."
It is not, then, how much a man may know that is of importance, but the end and purpose for which he knows it. The object of knowledge should be to mature wisdom and improve character, to render us better, happier, and more useful; more benevolent, more energetic, and more efficient in the pursuit of every high purpose in life. "When people once fall into the habit of admiring and encouraging ability as such, without reference to moral character—and religious and political opinions are the concrete form of moral character—they are on the highway to all sorts of degradation."[1] We must ourselves be and do, and not rest satisfied merely with reading and meditating over what other men have been and done. Our best light must be made life, and our best thought action. At least we ought to be able to say, as Richter did, "I have made as much out of myself as could be
- ↑ Saturday Review.
