Improvement comes by comparison. One of the most profound observations of Bacon is that in which he remarks upon the dwarfing and distorting influence of solitariness upon the human faculties. The man who shuts himself up in his own little circle of thought and action as in a cave, having no consort with his fellows, evolving all his plans from his own solitary cogitation, must be more than human if he does not become one-sided, narrow, selfish, bigoted.
A like result, but not so aggravated, is produced, when a man limits his range of thought and action to those of his own special calling or profession; when the merchant mingles only with merchants and knows only merchandise; when the teacher knows nothing but teaching and books; when the medical man spends every waking hour and every active exercise of thought upon his healing art; when any man forgets that, in the very fact of his being a man at all, he is something greater and nobler than he can possibly be in being merely a merchant, or teacher, or doctor, or lawyer, or the possessor of any other one special art or faculty.
It is true, indeed, that in order to attain to eminence in any one department, a man must bend his main energies to that one thing; and he must give to it much solitary thought and study. But no department of action is isolated. No interest is unconnected with other interests. No truth stands alone, but forms a part in the great system of truth. Study or action, therefore, which is entirely isolated, must needs be dwarfed and distorted.
A man must go occasionally out of his own sphere in order fully to understand those very things with which he is most familiar. A man must study other languages, if he would hope fully to understand his own. A man must study more than languages merely if he would become a perfect linguist. The only way to understand arithmetic thoroughly is to study algebra. A parent who has only one child, and who gives his entire and exclusive attention to the study of that child, in order that he may, by a thorough understanding of its nature and disposition, be better able to teach and train it, will not be so likely to attain his object as he would if he were to spend a portion of his time in mingling with other children and in becoming acquainted with childhood generally. A teacher who should shut himself up in his own school-room, giving to it every moment of his waking hours, would not be likely to benefit so largely his own pupils, as if he were to spend a portion of his time in communing with other teachers and observing other methods besides his own. A teacher even who should mingle freely with those of his own profession, and get all the benefit to be derived from observation of the views and methods of other teachers, but should stop there, would not yet obtain that broad, comprehensive view, even of his own calling, and of the duties of his own particular school-room that he might have if he would travel occasionally beyond the walk of books and pedagogy, and become acquainted with the views and methods of men in other spheres of life, with merchants, lawyers, and doctors, with farmers, mechanics, and artisans.
It is only by mingling with those outside of our own little specialty that we are disenthralled from the bonds of prejudice. It is wonderful to see the change produced in the minds of men of different religious denominations, when by any means they are thrown much into the actual fellowship of working together in some cause of common benevolence. How, without any argument, merely by the fact of their being brought out to a different point of view, the relative magnitude and importance of certain truths change in their estimation! The points in which Christians differ become so much smaller; the points in which they agree become so much larger. The little stone at the mouth of the cave no longer hides the mountain in the distance.
Let the teacher, the merchant, the mechanic, the banker, the lawyer, the minister of religion even, still remember that he is a man, and that he can never reach a full and just estimate of his own position without sometimes going outside of it and placing himself in the position of other men.
XIV.
MEN OF ONE IDEA.
There is between the teacher and other operatives one obvious difference, arising from the difference in the materials upon which their labor is bestowed. That class of laborers whose toil and skill are exerted in modifying the forms of matter, succeed generally in proportion to the narrowness of the range to which each individual's attention is confined. It is possible (the writer has known it to be a fact) for the same person to sow the flax, to pull and rot it, to break it, hatchel it, spin it, warp it, weave it, dye or bleach it, and finally make it into clothes. I say this is possible, for I have seen it done, and I dare say many of my readers have seen the same. But how coarse and expensive is such a product, compared with that in which every step in the progress of production is made the subject of one individual's entire and undivided attention.
If we were to go into the factories of Lowell, or into any of the thousand workshops which are converting Philadelphia into a great manufacturing centre, we would find the manufacture of an article approaching perfection just in proportion to the imperfection (in one sense) of the individual workmen employed in its production. The man who can make a pin-head better and cheaper than any one else, must give his attention to making pin-heads only. He need not know how to point a pin, or polish it, or cut the wire. On the contrary his skill in that one operation increases ordinarily in proportion to his want of skill in others. His perfection as a workman is in the direct ratio to his imperfection as a man. He operates upon matter, and the more nearly he can bring his muscles and his volitions to the uniformity and the precision of a mere machine—the more confined, monotonous, and undeviating are his operations—the higher is the price set upon his work, the better is he fitted for his task.