Theory and Practice
My friends, I am not arguing that you and I must drink the dregs of defeat, or that our lives must fill up with poverty or sorrow, or become wrecks. But I am insisting upon what I see written all around me in the affairs of everyday life, that none of us will ever know real success in any line of human endeavor until that success flows from the fullness of our experience just as the songs came from the life of Carrie Jacobs-Bond.
The world is full of theorists, dreamers, uplifters, reformers, who have worthy visions but are not able to translate them into practical realities. They go around with their heads in the clouds, looking upward, and half the time their feet are in the flower-beds or trampling upon their fellow men they dream of helping. Their ideas must be forged into usefulness available for this day upon the anvil of experience.
Many of the most brilliant theorists have been the greatest failures in practice.
There are a thousand who can tell you what is the matter with things to one person who can give you a practical way to fix them.
I used to have respect amounting to reverence for great readers and book men. I used to know a man who could tell in what book almost anything you could think of was discussed, and perhaps the page. He was a walking library index. I thought him a most wonderful man. Indeed, in my childhood I thought he was the greatest man in the world.
He was a remarkable man—a great reader and with a memory that retained it all. That man could recite chapters and volumes. He could give you almost any date. He could finish almost any quotation. His conversation was largely made up of classical quotations.
But he was one of the most helpless men I have ever seen in practical life. He seemed to be unable to think and reason for himself. He could quote a page of John Locke, but somehow the page didn't supply the one sentence needed for the occasion. The man was a misfit on earth. He was liable to put the gravy in his coffee and the gasoline in the fire. He seemed never to have digested any of the things in his memory. Since I have grown up I always think of that man as an intellectual cold storage plant.
The greatest book is the textbook of the University of Hard Knocks, the Book of Human Experience the "sermons in stones" and the "books in running brooks." Most fortunate is he who has learned to read understandingly from it.
Note the sweeping, positive statements of the young person.
Note the cautious, specific statements of the person who has lived long in this world.
Our education is our progress from the sweeping, positive, wholesale statements we have not proved, to the cautious, specific statements we have proved.