Page 176 - DENG502_PROSE

Prose

Notes 17.2 Text-On the Ignorance of the Learned

“For the more languages a man can speak,
His talent has but sprung the greater leak;
And, of the industry he has spent upon’t,
Must full as much some other way discount.
The Hebrew, Chaldee, and the Syriac
Do, like their letters, set men’s reason back,
And turn their wits that strive to understand it
(Like those that write the characters) left-handed.
Yet he that is but able to express
No sense at all in several languages,
Will pass for learneder than he that’s known
To speak the strongest reason in his own”. Butler (Samuel)

The description of persons who have the fewest ideas of all others are mere authors and readers.
It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else. A lounger who
is ordinarily seen with a book in his hand is (we may be almost sure) equally without the power
or inclination to attend either to what passes around him or in his own mind. Such a one may be
said to carry his understanding about with him in his pocket, or to leave it at home on his library
shelves. He is afraid of venturing on any train of reasoning, or of striking out any observation that
is not mechanically suggested to him by passing his eyes over certain legible characters; shrinks
from the fatigue of thought, which, for want of practice, becomes insupportable to him; and sits
down contented with an endless, wearisome succession of words and half-formed images, which
fill the void of the mind, and continually efface one another. Learning is, in too many cases, but a
foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as ‘spectacles’
to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak
eyes and indolent dispositions. The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities,
and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others Nature puts
him out. The impressions of real objects, stripped of the disguises of words and voluminous
roundabout descriptions, are blows that stagger him; their variety distracts, their rapidity exhausts
him; and he turns from the bustle, the noise, and glare, and whirling motion of the world about
him (which he has not an eye to follow in his fantastic changes, nor an understanding to reduce
to fixed principles), to the quite monotony of the dead languages, and the less startling and more
intelligible combinations of the letters of the alphabet. It is well, it is perfectly well. ‘Leave me to
my repose’, is the motto of the sleeping and dead. You might as well ask the paralytic to leap from
his chair and throw away his crutch, or, without a miracle, to ‘take up his bed and walk’, as expect
the learned reader to thrown down his book and think for himself. He clings to it for his intellectual
support; and his dread of being left to himself is like the horror of a vacuum. He can only breathe
a learned atmosphere, as other men breath common air. He is a borrower of sense. He has no ideas
of his own, and must live on those of other people. The habit of supplying our ideas from foreign
sources ‘enfeebles all internal strength of thought’ as a course of dram drinking destroys the tone
of the stomach. The faculties of the mind, when not exerted, or when cramped by custom and
authority, become listless, torpid, and unfit for the purposes of thought or action. Can we wonder
at the languor and lassitude which is thus produced by a life of learned sloth and ignorance; by
poring over lines and syllables that excite little more idea or interest than if they were the characters
of an unknown tongue, till the eye closes on vacancy, and the book drops from the feeble hand! I
would rather be a wood-cutter, or the meanest hind, that all day ‘sweats in the eye of Phoebus,

170 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY