"But impulse and activity may move blindly. Another cardinal quality of such a culture, therefore, must be precision—the close, clean working of the faculties. A memory trained to clear recollection, what a saving of reiterated labor and of annoying helplessness. A discrimination sharpened to the nicest discernment of things that differ, though always a shining mark for the arrow of the satirist, will outlive all shots with his gray-goose shaft; for it shines with the gleam of tempered steel. An exactness of knowledge that defines all its landmarks, how is it master of the situation. A precision of speech, born of clear thinking, what controversial battlefields of sulphurous smoke and scattering fire might it prevent. He has been called a public benefactor who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before. He is as great a benefactor, who in an age of verbiage makes one word perform the function of two. Wonderful is the precision with which this mental mechanism may be made to work. Some men can even think their best on their feet in the presence of a great assembly. There are others whose spontaneous thoughts move by informal syllogisms. Emmons sometimes laid off his common utterances like the heads of a discourse. Johnson's retorts exploded like a musket, and often struck like a musket-ball. John Hunter fairly compared his own mind to a bee-hive, all in a hum, but the hum of industry and order and achievement. It reminds us, by contrast, of other minds formed upon the model of the wasp's nest, with a superabundance of hum and sting without, and no honey within. It was of the voluminous works of a distinguished author that Robert Hall remarked,—'They are a continent of mud, sir.' Nuisances of literature are the men who fill the air with smoke, relieved by no clear blaze of light. There have been schools of thought that were as smoky as Pittsburg. We have had 'seers' who made others see nothing, men of 'insight' with no outlook, scientists who in every critical argument jumped the track of true science, and preachers whose hazy thoughts and utterances flickered between truth and error. Pity there were not some intellectual Sing-Sing for the culprit!
"How refreshing, on the other hand, to follow the clear unfolding of the silken threads of thought that lie side by side, single and in knots and skeins, but never tangled. What a beautiful process was an investigation by Faraday in electro-magnetism, as he combined his apparatus, manipulated his material, narrowed his search, eliminated his sources of error, and drew his careful conclusions. With similar persistent acuteness, in the field of Biblical investigation, how does Zumpt, by an exhaustive exclusion and combination, at length make the annals of Tacitus shake hands with the gospel of Luke over the taxing of Cyrenius. In metaphysics, how matchless the razor-like acuteness with which Hamilton could distinguish, divide, and clear up the questions that lay piled in confused heaps over the subject of perception. What can be more admirable than the workings of the trained legal or rather judicial mind, as it walks firmly through labyrinths of statute and precedent and principle, holding fast its strong but tenuous thread, till it stands forth in the bright light of day;—it may be some Sir John Jervis, unraveling in a criminal case the web of sophistries with which a clever counsel has bewildered a jury; or it may be Marshall or Story, in our own college case, shredding away, one by one, its intricacies, entanglements, and accretions, till all is delightfully, restfully clear.
"It is a trait all the more to be insisted on in these very times, because there is so strong a drift toward a seeming clearness which is a real confusion. By two opposite methods do men now seek to reach that underlying order and majestic simplicity which more and more appear to mark this universe. The one distinguishes, the other confounds, things that certainly differ. The one system belongs to the reality and grandeur of nature, the other to the pettiness and perverseness of man. Not a few seem bent on seeing simplicity and uniformity by the short process of shutting their eyes upon actual diversity. They proceed not by analytical incision, but by summary excision. They work with the cleaver and not with the scalpel. What singular denials of the intuitive facts of universal consciousness, what summary identifications of most palpable diversities, and what kangaroo-leaps beyond the high wall of their facts, mark many of the deliverances of those who loudly warn us off from 'the unknowable!' What shall we say of the steady confusion, in some arguments, of structure and function, and of force with material? When men, however eminent, openly propose to identify the force which screws together two plates of metal with the agency which corrodes or dissolves both in an acid, or to identify the affinity that forms chemical combinations with the vitality that so steadily overrides, suspends, and counteracts those affinities, is this an ascent into the pure ether, or a plunge in the Cimmerian dark? When, in opposition to every possible criterion, a man claims that there is but 'one ultimate form of matter out of which successively the more complex forms of matter are built up,' is this the advance march of chemistry, or the retrograde to alchemy? When a writer, in a style however lucid and taking, firmly assumes that there is no essential difference in objects alike in material elements, but separated by that mighty and mysterious thing, life, is that the height of wisdom, or the depth of folly? And how such a central paralysis of the mental retina spreads its darkness, as, for example, in the affirmation that as oxygen and hydrogen are reciprocally convertible with water, so are water, ammonia, and carbolic acid convertible into and resolvable from living protoplasm!—a statement said to be as false in chemistry as it certainly is in physiology. An ordinary merchant's accountant will, if need be, work a week to correct in his trial balance the variation of a cent. But when he listens to Sir John Lubbock calmly reckoning the age of the human implements in the valley of the Somme at from one hundred thousand up to two hundred and forty thousand years; when he sees Croll, in dating the close of the glacial age, leap down from the height of near eight hundred thousand to eighty thousand years; when he finds Darwin and Lyell claiming for the period of life on the earth more than three hundred millions of years, while Tait and Thompson pronounce it 'utterly impossible' to grant more than ten, or, at most, fifteen millions,—this poor, benighted clerk is bound to sit and hearken to his masters in all outward solemnity, but he must be excused for a prolonged inward smile. Who are these, he says, that reckon with a lee-way of hundreds of thousands of years, and fling the hundreds of millions of years right and left, like pebbles and straws?
"Brilliancy, so-called, is no equivalent or substitute for precision. It is often its worst enemy. A man may mould himself to think in curves and zig-zags, and not in right lines. He sends never an arrow, but a boomerang. Or he thinks in poetry instead of prose, deals in analogy where it should be analysis, puts rhetoric for logic, scatters and not concentrates, and while he radiates never irradiates. A late divine was suspected of heresy, partly because of his poetic bias; and one of his volumes was unfortunate for him and his readers, in that for his central position he planted himself on a figure of speech, and not on a logical proposition. The well-known story se non vero e ben trovato, of that keenest of lawyers, listening to a lecture of which every sentence was a gem and every paragraph rich with the spoils of literature, and replying to the question, "Do you understand all that?" "No, but my daughters do." It was as beautiful and iridescent as the Staubbach, and as impalpable.
"The more is the pity when a vigorous mind, in the outset of some great discussion, heads for a fog-bank or a wind-mill. When a man proposes to chronicle a 'Conflict between Religion and Science,' and makes religion stand indiscriminately for Romanism, Mohammedanism, superstition, malignant passion, obstinate prejudice, and what not, also confounding Christianity with so-called Christians, and those often most unrepresentative,—at the same time appropriating to 'Science' all intellectual activity whatever, though found in good Christian men, and though fostered and made irrepressible by the fire of that very religion, it is easy to see what must be the outcome of such a sweepstakes race. There will be a deification of science, and not even a whited sepulchre erected over the measureless Golgothas of its slaughtered theories. There will be, on the other hand, the steady suppressio veri concerning books, systems, men, and events, the occasional though unintended assertio falsi, the eager conversion of theories into facts, constructions unfair and uncandid and, throughout, with much that is bright and just, that 'admixture of a lie that doth ever add pleasure' to its author and grief to the judicious. Such confusions are no doubt often the outgrowth of the will. But a main end of a true culture is to prevent or expose all such bewilderments, whether helpless or crafty.
"The great predominance of the disciplinary process was what once characterized the English university system even more than now. It consisted in the exact and exhaustive mastery of certain limited sections of knowledge and thought, as the gymnastic for all other spheres and toils. At Oxford, not long ago, four years were spent in mastering some fourteen books. Whatever may be our criticism of the process, we may not deny its singular effect. In its best estate it forged many a trenchant blade. To the man who asks for its monument, it can point to British thought, law, statesmanship. Bacon and Burke, Coke and Eldon, Hooker and Butler, Pitt and Canning, shall make answer. The whole massive literature of England shall respond.
"But to this precision of working must be furnished material with which to work. Mental fullness is, therefore, another prime quality of a manly culture. To what degree it should be sought in the curriculum has been in dispute. It is the American theory, and a growing belief of the English nation, that the British universities have been defective here. Their men of mark have traveled later over the broader field.
"Provincialism of intellect is a calamity. All men of great achievements have had to know what others achieved. The highest monuments are always built with the spoils of the past. Any single genius, if not an infinitesimal, counts at most but a digit in the vast notation of humanity. The great masters have been the greatest scholars. Many a bright mind has struggled alone to beat the air. Behold in some national patent-office a grand mummy-pit of ignorant inventors.
"Those men upon whom so much opprobrium has been heaped, the Schoolmen, were unfortunate chiefly in the lack of material on which to expend their singular acuteness. Leibnitz was not ashamed to confess his obligations to them, nor South to avail himself of their subtle distinctions. Doubtless theology owes them a debt. Some of them have been well called, by Hallam, men 'of extraordinary powers of discrimination and argument, strengthened in the long meditation of their cloister by the extinction of every other talent and the exclusion of every other pursuit. Their age and condition denied them the means of studying polite letters, of observing nature, or of knowing mankind. They were thus driven back upon themselves, cut off from all the material on which the mind could operate, and doomed to employ all their powers in defense of what they must never presume to examine.' 'If these Schoolmen,' says Bacon, 'to their great thirst of truth and unwearied travel of wit had joined variety of reading and contemplation, they had proved great lights to the advancement of all learning and knowledge.' And so, for lack of other timber, they split hairs. Hence the mass of ponderous trifling that has made their name a by-word. A force, sometimes Herculean, was spent in building and demolishing castles of moonshine.
"A robust mental strength requires various and solid food. The best growth is symmetrical. There is a common bond—quoddam commune vinculum—in the circle of knowledge, that cannot be overlooked. Men do not know best what they know only in its isolation. Even Kant offset his metaphysics by lecturing on geography; and Niebuhr, the historian, struggled hard and well to keep his equilibrium by throwing himself into the whole circle of natural science and of affairs. Such, also, are the interdependencies of scholarship, that ample knowledge without our specialty is needful to save us from blunders within. Olshausen was a brilliant commentator, and the slightest tinge of chemistry should have kept him from suggesting that the conversion of water into wine at Cana was but the acceleration of a natural process. A smattering of optics would have prevented Dr. Williams from repeating the old cavil of Voltaire, that light could not have been made before the sun. A moderate reflection upon the laws of speech and the method of Genesis would have restrained Huxley from sneering at the 'marvelous flexibility' of the Hebrew tongue in the word 'day,' and a New York audience from laughing at the joke rather than the joker. Some tinge of ethical knowledge should have withheld Max Müller from finding the grand distinctive mark of humanity in the power of speech. The merest theorist needs some range of reality for the framework of his theories, and the man of broad principles must have facts to generalize. Indeed, a good memory is the indispensable servant of large thought, and however deficient in certain directions, the great thinkers have had large stores. 'The best heads that have ever existed,' says an idealist,—'Pericles, Plato, Julius Cæsar, Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton,—were well read, universally educated men, and quite too wise to undervalue letters. Their opinion has weight, because they had the means of knowing the opposite opinion.'