THE SPIRIT AND METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY. 195 



breezes from an encircling landscape, come from the surrounding 

 friendship of the general world, to whose best interests the noble heart 

 is forever loyal. 



Another subject for serious reflection is the over-accumulation of 

 scientific information. To broach it before such an assembly may 

 seem to require some apology. Certainly the feeling prevails that the 

 world can not have too much science. But the science of learning and 

 the science of knowledge are not quite identical ; and learning has too 

 often, in the case of individuals, overwhelmed and smothered to death 

 knowledge. The average human mind, when overstocked with infor- 

 mation, acts like a general put in command of an army too large for 

 him to handle. Many a vaulting scientific ambition has been thus dis- 

 graced. Nor is this the only danger that we run ; for the accumula- 

 tion of facts in the treasury of the human brain has a natural tendency 

 to breed an intellectual avarice, a passion for the piling-up of masses 

 of facts, old and new, regardless of their uses. In the great game of 

 our spiritual existence, facts are mere counters with which to play the 

 game. A million of them are worth nothing, unless the player knows 

 how to play well the game ; and, when the game is over, the worthless 

 counters are swept back into the drawer. And the danger pursues us 

 to higher and higher planes of science. Not only the avarice of facts, 

 but of their explanations also, may end in a wealthy poverty of intel- 

 lect, for which there is no cure. Even the sacred fires of research may 

 be allowed to burn too long, until, in fact, they turn the investigator 

 into a mere miser of ideas. As for those who are not themselves origi- 

 nal investigators, but busy themselves incessantly in appropriating the 

 secretions of research at second hand, how often it happens that the 

 richest additions of reliable theories to the stock of their ideas, even to 

 a point where they suppose themselves, and are supposed by others, to 

 know all the conclusions arrived at by past and present inquirers, leave 

 them as thinkers just what they Wei-e at first — incompetents ; mere ill- 

 hung picture-galleries ; disarranged museums ; complicated inventions 

 which will not work ; costly expeditions for discovery, frozen fast and 

 abandoned in the polar ice ! 



A certain temperance in science is obligatory from another point 

 of view. As mere wealth of possessions can not guarantee happiness, 

 neither caJi a superfluity of learning insure wisdom. When the body 

 from overfeeding grows plethoric, its vital energies subside and its 

 life is endangered. The intellect may be mischievously crammed with 

 science. How much we know is not the best question, but how we 

 got what we know, and what we can do with it ; and, above all, what 

 it has made of us. The tendency of training now is to subordinate 

 the soul to that which should be merely its endowment and adorn- 

 ment ; to turn the thinker into a mere walking encyclopsedia, text- 

 book, or circle of the mechanic arts ; not to produce the highest type 

 of man. What ridiculous and pitiable creations are these ! — an author- 



