al and
true relations; knowledge, not merely considered as acquirement, but as
philosophy.

Accordingly, when this analytical, distributive, harmonizing process is
away, the mind experiences no enlargement, and is not reckoned as
enlightened or comprehensive, whatever it may add to its knowledge. For
instance, a great memory, as I have already said, does not make a
philosopher, any more than a dictionary can be called a grammar. There are
men who embrace in their minds a vast multitude of ideas, but with little
sensibility about their real relations towards each other. These may be
antiquarians, annalists, naturalists; they may be learned in the law; they
may be versed in statistics; they are most useful in their own place; I
should shrink from speaking disrespectfully of them; still, there is
nothing in such attainments to guarantee the absence of narrowness of
mind. If they are nothing more than well-read men, or men of information,
they have not what specially deserves the name of culture of mind, or
fulfils the type of Liberal Education.

In like manner, we sometimes fall in with persons who have seen much of
the world, and of the men who, in their day, have played a conspicuous
part in it, but who generalize nothing, and have no observation, in the
true sense of the word. They abound in information in detail, curious and
entertaining, about men and things; and, having lived under the influence
of no very clear or settled principles, religious or political, they speak
of every one and every thing, only as so many phenomena, which are
complete in themselves, and lead to nothing, not discussing them, or
teaching any truth, or instructing the hearer, but simply talking. No one
would say that these persons, well informed as they are, had attained to
any great culture of intellect or to philosophy.

The case is the same still more strikingly where the persons in question
are beyond dispute men of inferior powers and deficient education. Perhaps
they have been much in foreign countries, and they receive, in a passive,
otiose, unfruitful way, the various facts which are forced upon them
there. Seafaring men, for example, range from one end of the earth to the
other; but the multiplicity of external objects, which they have
encountered, forms no symmetrical and consistent picture upon their
imagination; they see the tapestry of human life, as it were on the wrong
side, and it tells no story. They sleep, and they rise up,