Page 179 - DENG502_PROSE

Unit 17: Hazlitt - On The Ignorance of The Learned

turn a Greek ode into English, or a Latin epigram into Greek verse; but whether either is worth the Notes
trouble he leaves to the critics. Does he understand ‘the act and practique part of life’ better than
‘the theorique’? No. He knows no liberal or mechanic art, no trade or occupation, no game of skill
or chance. Learning ‘has no skill in surgery’, in agriculture, in building, or in working in wood or
in iron; it cannot make any instrument of labour, or use it when made; it cannot handle the plough
or the spade, or the chisel or the hammer; it knows nothing of hunting or hawking, fishing or
shooting, of horses or dogs, of fencing or dancing, or cudgel-playing, or bowls or cards, or tennis,
or anything else. The learned professor of all arts and sciences cannot reduce any one of them to
practice, though he may contribute an account of them to an Encyclopedia. He has not the use of
his hands or of his feet; he can neither run, nor walk, nor swim; and he considers all those who
actually understand and can exercise any of these arts of body or mind as vulgar and mechanical
men,—though to know almost any one of them in perfection requires long time and practice, with
powers originally fitted, and a turn of mind particularly devoted to them. It does not require more
than this to enable the learned candidate to arrive, by painful study, at a doctor’s degree and a
fellowship, and to eat, drink and sleep the rest of his life!
The thing is plain. All that men really understand is confined to a very small compass; to their
daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know and motives to study or
practise. The rest is affectation and imposture. The common people have the use of their limbs; for
they live by their labour or skill. They understand their own business and the characters of those
they have to deal with; for it is necessary that they should. They have eloquence to express their
passions, and wit at will to express their contempt and provoke laughter. Their natural use of
speech is not hung up in monumental mockery, in an obsolete language; nor is there sense of what
is ludicrous, or readiness at finding out allusions to express it, buried in collections of Anas. You
will hear more good things on the outside of a stage-coach from London to Oxford than if you
were to pass a twelve month with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous
university; and more home truths are to be learnt from listening to a noisy debate in a an ale house
than from attending to a formal one in the House of Commons. An elderly country gentlewoman
will often know more of character, and be able to illustrate it by more amusing anecdotes taken
from the history of what has been said, done, and gossiped in a country town for the last fifty
years, than the best blue-stocking of the age will be able to glean from that sort of learning which
consists in an acquaintance with all the novels and satirical poems published in the same period.
People in towns, indeed are woefully deficient in a knowledge of character, which they see only
in the bust, not as a whole-length. People in the country not only know all that has happened to a
man, but trace his virtues or vices, as they do his features, in their descent through several
generations, and solve some contradiction in his behaviour by a cross in the breed half a century
ago. The learned know nothing of the matter, either in town or country. Above all, the mass of
society have common sense, which the learned in all ages want. The vulgar are in the right when
they judge for themselves; they are wrong when they trust to their blind guides. The celebrated
nonconformist divine, Baxter, was almost stoned to death by the good women of Kidderminster,
for asserting from the pulpit that ‘hell was paved with infants’ skulls’; but, by the force of argument,
and of learned quotations from the Fathers, the reverend preacher at length prevailed over the
scruples of his congregation, and over reason and humanity.
Such is the use which has been made of human learning. The labourers in this vineyard seem as
if it was their object to confound all common sense, and the distinctions of good and evil, by
means of traditional maxims and preconceived notions taken upon trust, and increasing in absurdity
with increase of age. They pile hypotheses on hypotheses, mountain high, till it is impossible to
come to the plain truth on any question. They see things, not as they are, but as they find them in
books, and ‘wink and shut their apprehension up’, in order that they may discover nothing to
interfere with their prejudices or convince them of their absurdity. It might be supposed that the
height of human wisdom consisted in maintaining contradictions and rendering nonsense sacred.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 173