s to be
found, to eschew the College and the University altogether, than to submit
to a drudgery so ignoble, a mockery so contumelious! How much more
profitable for the independent mind, after the mere rudiments of
education, to range through a library at random, taking down books as they
meet him, and pursuing the trains of thought which his mother wit
suggests! How much healthier to wander into the fields, and there with the
exiled Prince to find "tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks!"
How much more genuine an education is that of the poor boy in the
Poem(21)--a Poem, whether in conception or in execution, one of the most
touching in our language--who, not in the wide world, but ranging day by
day around his widowed mother's home, "a dexterous gleaner" in a narrow
field, and with only such slender outfit

"as the village school and books a few
Supplied,"

contrived from the beach, and the quay, and the fisher's boat, and the
inn's fireside, and the tradesman's shop, and the shepherd's walk, and the
smuggler's hut, and the mossy moor, and the screaming gulls, and the
restless waves, to fashion for himself a philosophy and a poetry of his
own!

* * * * *

But in a large subject, I am exceeding my necessary limits. Gentlemen, I
must conclude abruptly; and postpone any summing up of my argument, should
that be necessary, to another day.

Discourse VII.

Knowledge Viewed In Relation To Professional Skill.

1.

I have been insisting, in my two preceding Discourses, first, on the
cultivation of the intellect, as an end which may reasonably be pursued
for its own sake; and next, on the nature of that cultivation, or what
that cultivation consists in. Truth of whatever kind is the proper object
of the intellect; its cultivation then lies in fitting it to apprehend and
contemplate truth. Now the intellect in its present state, with exceptions
which need not here be specified, does not discern truth intuitively, or
as a whole. We know, not by a direct and simple vision, not at a glance,
but, as it were, by piecemeal and accumulation, by a mental process, by
going round an object, by the comparison, the combination, the mutual
correction, the continual adaptation, of many partial notions, by the
employment, concentration, and joint action of many faculties and
exercises of mind. Such a union and concert of the intellectual power