682 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



not by explanations and reasonings, but by either the fear of penalties 

 or the experience of penalties that is, by the emotions awakened in 

 them ? When we turn from domestic life to the life of the outer world, 

 do not like disproofs everywhere meet us ? Are not fraudulent bank- 

 rupts educated people, and getters-up of bubble-companies, and makers 

 of adulterated goods, and users of false trade-marks, and retailers who 

 have light weights, and owners of unseaworthy ships, and those who 

 cheat insurance-companies, and those who carry on turf-chicaneries, 

 and the great majority of gamblers ? Or, to take a more extreme 

 form of turpitude is there not, among those who have committed 

 murder by poison within our memories, a considerable number of the 

 educated a number bearing as large a ratio to the educated classes 

 as does the total number of murderers to the total population ? 



This belief in the moralizing effects of intellectual culture, flatly 

 contradicted by facts, is absurd a priori. What imaginable connection 

 is there between the learning that certain clusters of marks on paper 

 stand for certain words and the getting a higher sense of duty ? What 

 possible effect can acquirement of facility in making written signs of 

 sounds have in strengthening the desire to do right ? How does 

 knowledge of the multiplication-table, or quickness in adding and 

 dividing, so increase the sympathies as to restrain the tendency to 

 trespass against fellow-creatures ? In what way can the attainment 

 of accuracy in spelling and parsing, etc., make the sentiment of justice 

 more powerful than it was ; or why from stores of geographical in- 

 formation, perseveringly gained, is there likely to come increased re- 

 gard for truth? The irrelation between such causes and such effects 

 is almost as great as that between exercise of the fingers and strength- 

 ening of the legs. One who should by lessons in Latin hope to give 

 a knowledge of geometry, or one who should expect practice in draw- 

 ing to be followed by expressive rendering of a sonata, would be 

 thought fit for an asylum ; and yet he would be scarcely more irra- 

 tional than are those who by discipline of the intellectual faculties ex- 

 pect to produce better feelings. 



This faith in lesson-books and readings is one of the superstitions 

 of the age. Even as appliances to intellectual culture, books are 

 greatly over-estimated. Instead of second-hand knowledge being re- 

 garded as of less value than first-hand knowledge, and as a knowledge 

 to be sought only where first-hand knowledge cannot be had, it is 

 actually regarded as of greater value. Something gathered from 

 printed pages is supposed to enter into a course of education ; but, 

 if gathered by observation of Life and Nature, is supposed not thus 

 to enter. Reading is seeing by proxy is learning indirectly through 

 another man's faculties, instead of directly through one's own facul- 

 ties ; and such is the prevailing bias that the indirect learning is 

 thought preferable to the direct learning, and usurps the name of 

 cultivation ! We smile when told that savages consider writing as 



