Page:Historical Lectures and Addresses.djvu/301

 best brain or the greatest amount of knowledge, but rather the man who has his knowledge in the most exact form, and who knows how to use it in the pursuit of a particular science. But it is well to seek for some central point around which any knowledge which we have acquired from time to time may be condensed, some subject which will always excite our curiosity and call forth our interest. For, after all, education consists simply in developing a perpetual curiosity, and education has been a failure when it has led a man to think that he really knows anything at all. Only when we are perpetually asking ourselves questions, only when we are struggling to get further and further on, are we really beginning to learn. From nothing can we learn so much as from the environment or surroundings of our life. There we find a subject round which our interest can readily gather, a subject, too, that cannot be artificially simplified. We cannot say, we should not be justified in saying, "I live in a particular place, and I have made up my mind which are the things that are going to interest and amuse me". If our minds are really always alert, wherever we are, new ideas must constantly be suggested to us, new points of view will be put before us, we shall find ourselves compelled to ask new questions; we shall be always considering how far the knowledge we already have will supply us with answers to these multitudinous questions. It is the attempt to answer these questions which I mean by "the study of a country". We may choose either a large or a small country, for the purpose of our study. No doubt it is to many at first difficult to study the thing