THE SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS 



scientific world had he not fortified them with a vast 

 accumulation of facts. All the logicality of his mind 

 would have availed him nothing, had he not found 

 the material with which to work, such material con- 

 sisting in this case of an encyclopaedic knowledge of 

 the facts of natural history in all its departments. 

 Similarly, Jenner's opinion as to the preventive powers 

 of vaccination would have received scant credence, 

 had it not been supported by a large array of experi- 

 mental evidence. It was a skein of facts which his 

 logical brain wove into a fabric of truth ; without these 

 facts no powers of mind could have availed. 



The first practical lesson of all this seems to be that 

 the mind, in order to become an efficient thinking- 

 machine, must be properly fed. No man is wider than 

 his experiences; but, fortunately, the word experi- 

 ences in this sense includes not merely the practicalities 

 of life, but our contact with the larger world, through 

 the medium of books. Until man learned to store his 

 thoughts through the aid of the art of writing and to 

 transmit them down the ages through the medium of 

 books, each generation must have been obliged, for the 

 most part, to live in the present, and the progress that 

 comes of cumulative experiences was much restricted. 

 Historical investigators are agreed that the mere mem- 

 ory of man, unaided by written documents, scarcely 

 transmits a record of events with any considerable 

 measure of historical accuracy beyond a period of two 

 or three generations. That is why the early history of 

 Greece and of Rome, as of all other civilised nations, 

 remains so vague and mythical; and why uncivilised 



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