Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/205

Rh breezes from an encircling landscape, come from the surrounding friendship of the general world, to whose best interests the noble heart is forever loyal.

Another subject for serious reflection is the over-accumulation of scientific information. To broach it before such an assembly may seem to require some apology. Certainly the feeling prevails that the world can not have too much science. But the science of learning and the science of knowledge are not quite identical; and learning has too often, in the case of individuals, overwhelmed and smothered to death knowledge. The average human mind, when overstocked with information, acts like a general put in command of an army too large for him to handle. Many a vaulting scientific ambition has been thus disgraced. Nor is this the only danger that we run; for the accumulation of facts in the treasury of the human brain has a natural tendency to breed an intellectual avarice, a passion for the piling-up of masses of facts, old and new, regardless of their uses. In the great game of our spiritual existence, facts are mere counters with which to play the game. A million of them are worth nothing, unless the player knows how to play well the game; and, when the game is over, the worthless counters are swept back into the drawer. And the danger pursues us to higher and higher planes of science. Not only the avarice of facts, but of their explanations also, may end in a wealthy poverty of intellect, for which there is no cure. Even the sacred fires of research may be allowed to burn too long, until, in fact, they turn the investigator into a mere miser of ideas. As for those who are not themselves original investigators, but busy themselves incessantly in appropriating the secretions of research at second band, how often it happens that the richest additions of reliable theories to the stock of their ideas, even to a point where they suppose themselves, and are supposed by others, to know all the conclusions arrived at by past and present inquirers, leave them as thinkers just what they were at first—incompetents; mere ill hung picture-galleries; disarranged museums; complicated inventions which will not work; costly expeditions for discovery, frozen fast and abandoned in the polar ice!

A certain temperance in science is obligatory from another point of view. As mere wealth of possessions can not guarantee happiness, neither ca« a superfluity of learning insure wisdom. When the body from overfeeding grows plethoric, its vital energies subside and its life is endangered. The intellect may be mischievously crammed with science. How much we know is not the best question, but how we got what we know, and what we can do with it; and, above all, what it has made of us. The tendency of training now is to subordinate the soul to that which should be merely its endowment and adornment; to turn the thinker into a mere walking encyclopædia, textbook, or circle of the mechanic arts; not to produce the highest type of man. What ridiculous and pitiable creations are these!—an