In heaven, in some other aeon,
we shall find out what they really mean!
Thus knowledge is not permanent. It reels. It proceeds, it changes, it
is iridescent with new significance from day to day.
What is true of a word, and what we make of it, is true of every phase
of learning. The black-board is not all. Learning is not tied to it, or
to any one person, demonstration, interpretation, event, or epoch. No
wise man can keep his learning to himself, and yet he cannot, though he
teach a thousand years, transmit his deeper learning to another. The
atmosphere, the casual information, the spiritual magnetism of a great
man, will teach better than the text-books, the lecture courses, and
the formal resources of academic halls. Thus Mark Hopkins is in himself
a university, given a boy on the other end of the log on which he sits.
It is the relativity of knowledge that dances before the eye, that
bewilders, eludes, evades. Group-systems and electives seem like a
makeshift for the real thing. We cannot tie a fact to a pupil, because
to the tail of the fact is tied history itself. Until a pupil gets a
glimpse of that relation, that dependence of which we have just heard,
with all that has yet happened in connection with it, he is not yet
quite master of his fact.
Pages:
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176