enced young mothers for thousands of years--experienced out of
their wits--piled up with experiences they don't know anything about;
but, in the meantime, the most important contribution to the bringing-up
of children in the world that has ever been known--the kindergarten--was
thought of in the first place by a man who was never a mother, and has
been developed entirely in the years that have followed since by maiden
aunts.

The spiritual power and manifoldness and largeness which is the most
informing quality of a really cultivated man comes from a certain
refinement in him, a gift of knowing by tasting. He seems to have
touched the spirits of a thousand experiences we know he never has had,
and they seem to have left the souls of sorrows and joys in him. He
lives in a kind of beautiful magnetic fellowship with all real life in
the world. This is only possible by a sort of unconscious economy in the
man's nature, a gift of not having to experience things.

Avoiding experience is one of the great creative arts of life. We shall
have enough before we die. It is forced upon us. We cannot even select
it, most of it. But, in so far as we can select it,--in one's reading,
for instance,--it behooves a man to avoid experience. He at least wants
to avoid experience enough to have time to stop and think about the
experience he has; to be sure he is getting as much out of his
experience as it is worth.

III

On Having One's Experience Done Out

"But how can one avoid an experience?"

By heading it off with a principle. Principles are a lot of other
people's experiences, in a convenient form a man can carry around with
him, to keep off his own experiences with.

No other rule for economising knowledge can quite take the place, it
seems to me, of reading for principles. It economises for a man both
ways at once. It not only makes it possible for a man to have the whole
human race working out his life for him, instead of having to do it all
himself, but it makes it possible for him to read anything he likes, to
get something out of almost anything he does not like, which he is
obliged to read. If a man has a habit of reading for principles, for the
law behind everything, he cannot miss it. He cannot help learning
things, even from people who don't know them.

The other evening when The P. G. S. of M. came into my study, he saw the
morning paper lying unopened on the settle by the fireplace.

"Haven't you read this yet?