t him from suggesting that the conversion of
water into wine at Cana was but the acceleration of a natural process.
A smattering of optics would have prevented Dr. Williams from
repeating the old cavil of Voltaire, that light could not have been
made before the sun. A moderate reflection upon the laws of speech and
the method of Genesis would have restrained Huxley from sneering at
the 'marvelous flexibility' of the Hebrew tongue in the word 'day,'
and a New York audience from laughing at the joke rather than the
joker. Some tinge of ethical knowledge should have withheld Max Muller
from finding the grand distinctive mark of humanity in the power of
speech. The merest theorist needs some range of reality for the
framework of his theories, and the man of broad principles must have
facts to generalize. Indeed, a good memory is the indispensable
servant of large thought, and however deficient in certain directions,
the great thinkers have had large stores. 'The best heads that have
ever existed,' says an idealist,--'Pericles, Plato, Julius Caesar,
Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton,--were well read, universally educated
men, and quite too wise to undervalue letters. Their opinion has
weight, because they had the means of knowing the opposite opinion.'

"While every year increases the impossibility of what used to be
called universal knowledge, it also emphasizes the necessity of a
scholarship that has its outlook toward all the vast provinces of
reading and thought. It cannot conquer them, but it can be on treaty
relations with them. The tendency of modern science is, of necessity,
steadily toward sectional lines and division of labor. It is a
tendency whose cramping influence is as steadily to be resisted, even
in later life, much more in early training. We are to form ourselves
on the model of the integer rather than the fraction of humanity. The
metaphysician cannot afford to be ignorant of the 'chemistry of a
candle' or the 'history of a piece of chalk,' nor the chemist of the
laws of language, the theologian of astronomy and geology, nor the
lawyer of the most ancient code and its history. Mill himself made
complaint of Comte's 'great aberration' in ignoring psychology and
logic.

"Intellectual fetichism is born of isolation, and dies hard. While in
the great modern uprising we may boast that the heathen idols have
been swept away from three hundred dark islands of Polynesia, new
'idols of the cave' stalk forth upon the wo