dge of human souls is itself the method of acquiring all other
knowledge and of combining and utilising it, makes narrow and trivial
and impotent scholars as a matter of course.

Knowledge of human nature and of one's self is the nervous system of
knowledge, the flash and culmination, the final thoroughness of all the
knowledge that is worth knowing and of all ways of knowing it.

It is all a theory, I suppose. I cannot prove anything with it. I dare
say it is true that neither I nor any one else can get, by reading in
this way, what I like to think I am getting, slowly, a cross-section of
the universe. But it is something to get as time goes on a cross-section
of all the human life that is being lived in it. It is something to take
each knowledge that comes, strike all the keys of one's friends on
it--clear the keyboard of space on it. When one really does this,
nothing can happen to one which does not or cannot happen to one in the
way one likes. Events and topics in this world are determined to a large
degree by circumstances--dandelions, stars, politics, bob-whites, acids,
Kant, and domestic science--but personalities, a man's means of seeing
things, are determined only by the limits of his imagination. One's
knowledge of pictures, or of Kant, of bob-whites or acids, cannot be
applied to every conceivable occasion, but nothing can happen in all the
world that one cannot see or feel or delight in, or suffer in, through
Charles Lamb's soul if one has really acquired it. One can be a Charles
Lamb almost anywhere toward almost anything that happens along, or a
Robert Burns or a Socrates or a Heine, or an Amiel or a Dickens or Hugo
or any one, or one can hush one's soul one eternal moment and be the Son
of God. To know a few men, to turn them into one's books, to turn them
into one another, into one's self, to study history with their hearts,
to know all men that live with them, to put them all together and guess
at God with them--it seems to me that knowledge that is as convenient
and penetrating, as easily turned on and off, as much like a light as
this, is well worth having. It would be like taking away a whole world,
if it were taken away from me--the little row of people I do my reading
with. And some of them are supposed to be dead--hundreds of years.

* * * * *

But the dramatic principle in education strikes both ways. While it is
true that one does not need a very large outfit of