what must be that quite perfect
state of the man who is whole-educated.

I fear that you must have adopted some conventional idea about
completeness of education, since you believe that there is any such
thing as completeness, and that education can be measured by fractions,
like the divisions of a two-foot rule.

Is not such an idea just a little arbitrary? It seems to be the idea of
a schoolmaster, with his little list of subjects and his professional
habit of estimating the progress of his boys by the good marks they are
likely to obtain from their examiners. The half-educated schoolboy would
be a schoolboy half-way towards his bachelor's degree--is that it?

In the estimates of school and college this may be so, and it may be
well to keep up the illusion, during boyhood, that there is such a thing
attainable as the complete education that you assume. But the wider
experience of manhood tends rather to convince us that no one can be
fully educated, and that the more rich and various the natural talents,
the greater will be the difficulty of educating the whole of them.
Indeed it does not appear that in a state of society so advanced in the
different specialities as ours is, men were ever intended to do more
than develop by education a few of their natural gifts. The only man who
came near to a complete education was Leonardo da Vinci, but such a
personage would be impossible to-day. No contemporary Leonardo could be
at the same time a leader in fine art, a great military and civil
engineer, and a discoverer in theoretical science; the specialists have
gone too far for him. Born in our day, Leonardo would have been either a
specialist or an amateur. Situated even as he was, in a time and country
so remarkably favorable to the general development of a variously gifted
man, he still fell short of the complete expansion of all his
extraordinary faculties. He was a great artist, and yet his artistic
power was never developed beyond the point of elaborately careful labor;
he never attained the assured manipulation of Titian and Paul Veronese,
not to mention the free facility of Velasquez, or the splendid audacity
of Rubens. His natural gifts were grand enough to have taken him to a
pitch of mastery that he never reached, but his mechanical and
scientific tendencies would have their development also, and withdrew so
much time from art that every renewal of his artistic labor was
accompanied by long and anxious reflection.