THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY 1;5 



practice, the results are quite at variance with it. Not simply does 

 the amount of service performed fail to increase in proportion to the 

 number of servants, but frequently it decreases : fewer servants do 

 more work and do it better. 



Take, again, the relation of books to knowledge. The natural 

 assumption is, that one who has stores of information at hand will be- 

 come well informed. And yet, very generally, when a man begins to 

 accumulate books he ceases to make much use of them. The fillino; 

 of his shelves with volumes, and the filling of his brain with facts, are 

 processes apt to go on with inverse rapidities. It is a trite remark 

 that those who have become distinguished for their learning have 

 often been those who had great difficulties in getting books. Here, 

 too, the results are quite out of proportion to the appliances. 



Similarly, if we go a step further in the same direction not think- 

 ing of books as aids to information, but thinking of information as an 

 aid to guidance. Do we find that the quantity of acquirement meas- 

 ures the quantity of insight ? Is the amount of cardinal truth reached 

 to be inferred from the mass of collected facts that serve as appliances 

 for reaching it ? By no means. Wisdom and information do not vary 

 together. Though there must be data before there can be generaliza- 

 tion, yet ungeneralized data, accumulated in excess, are impediments 

 to generalization. When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more 

 of it he has the greater will be his confusion of thought. When facts 

 are not organized into faculty, the greater the mass of them the more 

 will the mind stagger along under its burden, hampered instead of 

 helped by its acquisitions. A student may become a very Daniel Lam- 

 bert of learning, and remain utterly useless to himself and all others. 

 Neither in this case, then, are results proportionate to appliances. 



It is so, too, with discipline, and with the agencies established for 

 discipline. Take, as an instance, the use of language. From his early 

 days, the boy whose father can afford to give him the fashionable edu- 

 cation, is drilled in grammar, practised in parsing, tested in detecting 

 errors of speech. After his public-school career, during which words, 

 their meanings, and their right applications, almost exclusively occupy 

 him, he passes through a university where a large, and often the larger, 

 part of his attention is still given to literary culture models of style 

 in prose and poetry being daily before him. So much for the prepa- 

 ration ; now for the performance. It is notorious that commentators 

 on the classics are among the most slovenly writers of English. Read- 

 ers of Punch will remember how, years ago, the Provost ,and Head- 

 master of Eton were made to furnish food for laughter by quotations 

 from a letter they had published. Recently the Head-master of Win- 

 chester has given us, in entire unconsciousness of its gross defects, a 

 sample of the English which long study of language produces. If from 

 these teachers, who are literally the select of the select, we turn to men 

 otherwise selected, mostly out of the same highly-disciplined class 



