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206 but although I regretted my lost opportunities I determined to know something. With this view I tried to acquire knowledge in various ways, but in all of them knowledge was too impalpable for me to get hold of it. And I would earnestly urge all students to make to acquire haste in acquiring real knowledge while they are in the way with those that can impart it; and not rush on too quickly, thinking that they can get knowledge afterwards. For out in the world knowledge is hard to find.

At length I came to find that the only thing I could know was of this kind. If, for instance, there were several people in a room, I could not know them themselves, for they were too infinitely complicated for my mind to grasp; but I could know if they were at right or left hand of one another, close together, or far apart. And the same of, to take another instance, botanical specimens in a book. I could not grasp the specimens—each was too infinitely complicated, and each part too infinitely complex—but I could tell which specimen was which.

Accordingly, being desirous to learn something thoroughly, and since, in the arrangement of any different objects, there was such a lot of ignorance introduced by the objects being different—each bringing in its own ignorance and feeling of bewilderment—I determined to learn an arrangement of a number of objects as much alike as possible.

Accordingly I took a number of cubes, which were as simple objects as I could get, arranged them in a large block, and proceeded to learn how they were placed with regard to each other. In order to learn them I gave each of them a name. The name meant the particular cube the particular position.

Thus, taking any three names, I could say, about the three cubes denoted, hov they were placed with regard