Their Yesterdays

by Harold Bell Wright

KNOWLEDGE

The green of the pastures and the gold of the fields was buried so deeply under banks of snow that no one could say: "Here the cattle fed and the buttercups grew; there the grain was harvested; here the corn stood in shocks; there the daisies and meadow grass sheltered the nest of the bobo-link." As death calls alike the least and the greatest back to the dust from which they came, so winter laid over the varied and changing scenes of summer a cold, white, shroud of wearisome sameness. The birds were hundreds of miles away in their sunny southland haunts. The bees, the butterflies, and many of the tiny wood folk, were all snugly tucked in their winter beds, dreaming, perhaps, as they slept, of the sunshiny summer days. In the garden the wind had heaped a great drift high against the hedge on the boy's side, and, on the little girl's side, the cherry tree in the corner stood shivering in its nakedness with bare arms uplifted as though praying for mercy to the stinging cold wind.

In the city the snow, as fast as it fell, was stained by soot and grime and lay in the streets a mass of filth. The breath of the laboring truck horses arose from their wide nostrils like clouds of steam and, in the icy air, covered their breasts and shoulders and sides with a coat of white frost. The newsboys and vendors of pencils and shoestrings shivered in nooks and corners and doorways and, as the people went with heads bent low before the freezing blast that swirled through the narrow canyons between the tall buildings, the snowy pavement squeaked loudly under their feet.

And the man who had found something to do, from his Occupation, began to acquire Knowledge. In doing things, he began to know things.

But the man had to gain first a knowledge of Knowledge. He first had to learn this: that a man might know all about a thing without ever knowing the thing itself. He had to understand that Knowledge is not knowing about a thing but knowing the thing. When first he had dreamed his manhood dreams, before he had found something to do, the man, quite modestly, thought that he knew a great deal. In his school days, he had exhausted many text books and had passed many creditable examinations upon many subjects and so he had thought that he knew a great deal. And he did. He knew a great deal about things. But when he had found something to do, and had tried to do it, he found also very quickly that, although he knew so much about the thing he had to do, he knew very, very, little of the thing itself and that only knowledge of the thing itself could ever help him to realize his dreams.

From his Occupation, he learned this also: that Knowledge is not what some other man knows and tells you but what the thing that you have found to do makes known to you. Knowledge is not told, cannot be told, to one by another, even though that other has it abundantly for, to the one to whom it is told, it remains ever what someone else knows. What the thing that a man finds to do makes known to him, that is Knowledge. So Knowledge is to be had not from books alone but rather from Life. So idleness is a vicious ignorance and those who do the most are wisest.

Before he had found something to do the man had called himself a thinker. But when he tried to do the thing that he had found to do, he quickly realized that he had only thought that he thought. He found that he was not at all a thinker but a listener—a receiver—a rememberer. In his school days, the thoughts of others were offered him and he, because he had accepted them, called them his own. He came, now, to understand that thinking is not accepting the thoughts of others but finding thoughts of your own in whatever it is that you have found to do.

Thinking the thoughts of others is a delightful pastime and profitable but it is not really thinking. Also, if one be blessed with a good memory, he may thus cheaply acquire a reputation for great wisdom; just as one, if he happens to be born with a nose of uncommon length or bigness, may attract the attention of the world. But no one should deceive himself. A man because he is able, better than the multitude, to repeat the thoughts of other men must not therefore think himself a better thinker than the crowd. No more should the one with the uncommon nose flatter himself that he is necessarily handsome or distinguished in appearance because the people notice him. He who attracts the attention of the world should inquire most carefully into the reason for the gathering of the crowd; for a crowd will gather as readily to listen to a mountebank as to hear an angel from heaven.

To repeat what others have thought is not at all evidence that he who remembers is thinking. Great thoughts are often repeated thoughtlessly. A man's Occupation betrays him or establishes his claim to Knowledge. That which a man does proclaims that which he thinks or in his thoughtlessness finds him out.

Of course, when the man had learned this, he said at first, quite wrongly, that his school days were wasted. He said that what he had called his education was all a mistake—that it was vanity only and wholly worthless. But, as he went on gaining ever more and more Knowledge from the thing that he was doing, and, through that thing, of many other things, he came to understand that his school days were not wasted but very well spent indeed. He came to see that what he had called education was not a mistake. He came to understand that what was wrong was this: he had considered his education complete, finished, when he had only been prepared to begin. He had considered his schooling as an end to be gained when it was only a means to the end. He had considered his learning as wealth to hold when it was capital to invest. He had mistaken the thoughts that he received from others for Knowledge when they were given him only to inspire and to help him in acquiring Knowledge.