Only with such a plan in hand would orderly building seem
possible. This is a common belief, but in my judgment an erroneous
one. Indeed the whole analogy of the architect and his mechanisms is
misleading. We rarely have in mind the total plan of our unrealized
being and rarely ought we to have. Our work begins at a different
point. We do not, like the architect, usually begin with a thought of
completion. Bather we are first stirred by a sense of weakness.
In my own education I find this to be true. After some years as a boy
in a Boston public school, I went to Phillips Academy in Andover, then
to Harvard College, and subsequently to a German university, and why
did I do all this? Did I have in mind the picture of myself as a
learned man? I will not deny that such a fancy drifted through my
brain. But it was indistinct and occasional. I did not even know what
it was to be a learned man. I do not know now. The driving force that
was on me was something quite different. I found myself disagreeably
ignorant. Reading books and newspapers, I continually found matters
referred to of which I knew nothing. Looking out on the universe, I
did not understand it; and looking into the yet more marvelous
universe within, I was still more grievously perplexed. I thought life
not worth living on such terms.
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