thought in spite of the amplest concessions of the hearer, or wandering
from it in endless digression in spite of his remonstrances. Now, if, as
is very certain, no one would envy the madman the glow and originality of
his conceptions, why must we extol the cultivation of that intellect,
which is the prey, not indeed of barren fancies but of barren facts, of
random intrusions from without, though not of morbid imaginations from
within? And in thus speaking, I am not denying that a strong and ready
memory is in itself a real treasure; I am not disparaging a well-stored
mind, though it be nothing besides, provided it be sober, any more than I
would despise a bookseller's shop:--it is of great value to others, even
when not so to the owner. Nor am I banishing, far from it, the possessors
of deep and multifarious learning from my ideal University; they adorn it
in the eyes of men; I do but say that they constitute no type of the
results at which it aims; that it is no great gain to the intellect to
have enlarged the memory at the expense of faculties which are
indisputably higher.

8.

Nor indeed am I supposing that there is any great danger, at least in this
day, of over-education; the danger is on the other side. I will tell you,
Gentlemen, what has been the practical error of the last twenty years,--not
to load the memory of the student with a mass of undigested knowledge, but
to force upon him so much that he has rejected all. It has been the error
of distracting and enfeebling the mind by an unmeaning profusion of
subjects; of implying that a smattering in a dozen branches of study is
not shallowness, which it really is, but enlargement, which it is not; of
considering an acquaintance with the learned names of things and persons,
and the possession of clever duodecimos, and attendance on eloquent
lecturers, and membership with scientific institutions, and the sight of
the experiments of a platform and the specimens of a museum, that all this
was not dissipation of mind, but progress. All things now are to be
learned at once, not first one thing, then another, not one well, but many
badly. Learning is to be without exertion, without attention, without
toil; without grounding, without advance, without finishing. There is to
be nothing individual in it; and this, forsooth, is the wonder of the age.
What the steam engine does with matter, the printing press is to do with
mind; it is to act mechanically, and the popu