The moment we set bounds to wisdom, we find that we have shut something out. Wisdom is the free, active life of a growing and attaching soul. We must not only attach information to ourselves, we must assimilate it. Else we are like a crab which should drag about Descartes, or as an ocean sucker which should hug a copy of Thucydides.
Education is the taking to one's self, so far as one may in a lifetime, all that the race has learned through these six thousand years. Education is not a thing of books alone, or schools; it is a process of intellectual assimilation of what is about us, or what we put about ourselves. At every step we have a choice. This is the real difference between students at the same school or university. One puts away Greek, and the other lays up football and college societies. A third gets all three, being a little more swift and alert. One stows away insubordination—another, order and obedience. One does quiet, original work of reading and research; the other stows away schemes for getting through recitations and examinations. No two students ever come out of the same school, college, or shop with the same education. Their training may have been measurably alike, but the result is immeasurably unlike. Education, in the last analysis, is getting the highest intellectual value out of one's environment and opportunities. There is a cow-boy philosopher, a kitchen-philosopher, as truly as there is a philosopher of the academic halls.
Conduct is the pons asinorum of life. Wise men somehow cross it, though stumblingly, and with tears. Fools, usurers, oppressors, and spendthrifts of life are left gaping and wrangling on the hellward side. Thinkers have always been climbing up on each other's shoulders to look over into the Beyond. What they have seen, they have told. Some men climb so high into the ethereal places of the Ideal, that they do not get down again. They are the impractical men. An impractical man is not necessarily the educated man; he is the man at the top of some intellectual fence, who wishes to come down, but has absent-mindedly forgotten that he has legs. The legs are not absent, but his wit is. So with the impractical man in every sphere. Education has not really removed his common-sense, as some say, his power to connect passing events with their causes, and to act reasonably; but it has set his thought on some other thought for the time being, and the dinner-bell, we will say, does not detach him from his inquiry. His necktie rides up! He goes out into the street without a hat! Let him alone till he proves the worth of what he is about. The practical man, who hears the dinner-bell and prides himself upon this fact, may not hear sounds far-off and clear, that ring in the impractical man's ear, and that may sometime tell him how to make a better dinner-bell, or provide a better dinner—a great social philosophy—for the race!
The really impractical man is not he who reaches out to the intellectual and ideal aspects of life; it is he who lives as if this life were all. There are women who make pets of their clothes, as men make pets of horse or dog. They have just time enough in life to dress themselves up. Looking back over their years, they can only say, I have had clothes! In the same number of years, with no greater advantages or opportunities, other women have become the queenly women of the race. Some women are girt with centuries, instead of gold or gems. Whenever they appear, the event becomes historic; what they do adds new lustre to life.
We are all prodigals. We throw away time and strength, and years, and gold, and then weep that we are ignorant, and embeggared at the last. Who shall teach us wisdom, and in what manner may we be wise?
What say the sages of the vast possibilities of the race? With one voice they say: Be brave! Do not cower, shrink, or whine. Throw out upon the world a free fearlessness of thought and word and deed. Courage, freedom, heroism, faith, exactness, honor, justice, and mercy—these traits have been handed down as the traditional learning of the heart of man.
Another ideal of the race is Law. We have given up a chaos-philosophy—the haphazard continuity of events—a cometary orbit, for the world. There are fixed relations everywhere existent: the succession of cycles is orderly and prearranged.
Another ideal is Progress. We are moving, not toward the bottom, but toward the top of possibility. We reject annihilation, because then there is nothing left. And there must always be something left—progress—a bigger something, a better something. Should annihilation be the truth of things, and all the race mortal, then some day there would be a Last Man. And after the Last Man, what? He would die, and then all that any of the other stars could view of the vast panorama of our earthly generations would be an unburied corpse, with not even a vulture hovering to pick it to freshness in the air!
A Last Man? No. Instead, the seers have shown us a great multitude in a heavenly country, praising God, and singing forth His Name forever. Immortality broods over the great thought of the race. All great minds look upward to it: it is the final consummation of our dreams.
Another ideal is social adjustment, and social service. We must do something for some one, or we cast current sagacity behind the back. People crowd each other to the wall. The weak of communities and nations are too often crushed. Redress is in the air. The longed-for wisdom of to-day shows a kaleidoscopic front, in which are turning the slum-dweller and the millionaire; the white man, the yellow, and the black; the town and the territorial possession. The slave-colony, garbage-laws, magistrates, and murderers are mixed in motley, and there are whirling vacant-lot schemes abroad, potato-patches, wood-yards, organized charity, Wayfarers' Lodges, resounding cries of municipal reform, and various other interests of the wisdom-scale.