tive study of the contents of the
morning and evening papers. It is certainly remarkable that any person
who has nothing to get by it should destroy his eyesight and confuse his
brain by a conscientious attempt to master the dull and doubtful details
of the European diary daily transmitted to us by "Our Special
Correspondent." But it must be remembered that this is only a somewhat
unprofitable exercise of that disinterested love of knowledge which
moves men to penetrate the Polar snows, to build up systems of
philosophy, or to explore the secrets of the remotest heavens. It has in
it the rudiments of infinite and varied delights. It _can_ be turned,
and it _should_ be turned into a curiosity for which nothing that has
been done, or thought, or suffered, or believed, no law which governs
the world of matter or the world of mind, can be wholly alien or
uninteresting.

Truly it is a subject for astonishment that, instead of expanding to the
utmost the employment of this pleasure-giving faculty, so many persons
should set themselves to work to limit its exercise by all kinds of
arbitrary regulations. Some there are, for example, who tell us that the
acquisition of knowledge is all very well, but that it must be _useful_
knowledge; meaning usually thereby that it must enable a man to get on
in a profession, pass an examination, shine in conversation, or obtain a
reputation for learning. But even if they mean something higher than
this, even if they mean that knowledge to be worth anything must
subserve ultimately if not immediately the material or spiritual
interests of mankind, the doctrine is one which should be energetically
repudiated. I admit, of course, at once, that discoveries the most
apparently remote from human concerns have often proved themselves of
the utmost commercial or manufacturing value. But they require no such
justification for their existence, nor were they striven for with any
such object. Navigation is not the final cause of astronomy, nor
telegraphy of electro-dynamics, nor dye-works of chemistry. And if it be
true that the desire of knowledge for the sake of knowledge was the
animating motive of the great men who first wrested her secrets from
nature, why should it not also be enough for us, to whom it is not given
to discover, but only to learn as best we may what has been discovered
by others?

Another maxim, more plausible but equally pernicious, is that
superficial knowledge is worse than no