ge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for
what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we
know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?
What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our
negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of
the newspapers,--for what are the libraries of science but files of
newspapers?--a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his
memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad
into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a
horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to
the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes,--Go to
grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its
green crop. The very cows are driven to their country pastures before
the end of May; though I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept
his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the year round. So,
frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats
its cattle.

A man's ignorance some times is not only useful, but beautiful,--while
his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides
being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with,--he who knows nothing
about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows
nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he
knows all?

My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head
in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The
highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with
Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to
anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden
revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge
before,--a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth
than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the lighting up of the
mist by the sun. Man cannot _know_ in any higher sense than this, any
more than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the
sun: _Hos ti noon, ou cheinon noeseis_,--"You will not perceive that,
as perceiving a particular thing," say the Chaldean Oracles.

There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we
may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience,
but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfo