Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/596

578 a truism if it means merely that all knowledge is valuable; the old maxim, that in the knowledge of God is life, loses all its grandeur if it is interpreted to mean merely that the more things you know the more dangers you will be in a condition to avoid. Can we not, then, give more precision, more definiteness, to the notion of the knowledge of God?

The notion is to be limited in two ways, one of which has been partially indicated already. The scientific school themselves save us the trouble of explaining the first of these limitations; it is they who, in this age, have made clear to every one the difference between the study of the universe and mere universal study. When they tell us in the very language of theology that all hope and all happiness lies in the knowledge of Nature, that this is a treasure to be valued above rubies and precious stones, how do they limit the word Nature? They mean it certainly to include the whole universe. What is it, then, that they exclude? One would fancy at first sight that they are merely praising knowledge in general, and that they are not particular about kinds of knowledge. Yet we know that they are remarkably exclusive in their notions of knowledge, and that they are as vehement in condemning some sorts as in recommending others. What is there, then, that can possibly be studied besides the universe?

There is something which sets itself up as a just reflection of the universe, and which it is possible to study as if it were the universe itself; that is, the multitude of traditional unscientific opinions about the universe. These opinions are, in one sense, part of the universe; to study them from the historic point of view is to study the universe; but when they are assumed as an accurate reflection of it so as to divert attention from the original, as they are by all the votaries of authority or tradition, then they may be regarded as a spurious universe outside and apart from the real one, and such students of opinion may be said to study and yet not to study the universe.

This spurious universe is almost as great as the genuine one. There are many profoundly learned men whose whole learning relates to it, and has no concern whatever with reality. The simplest peasant who, from living much in the open air, has found for himself, unconsciously, some rules to guide him in divining the weather, knows something about the real universe; but an indefatigable student, who has stored a prodigious memory with what the schoolmen have thought, what the philosophers have thought, what the Fathers have thought, may yet have no real knowledge; he may have been busy only with the reflected universe. Not that the thoughts of dead thinkers stored up in books are not part of the universe as well as wind and rain; not that they may not repay study quite as well; they are deposits of the human mind, and by studying them much may be discovered about the human mind, the ways of its operation, the stages of its development.