only emanate from a profound scholar at
any time.

"To know and to think, to see the truth with the eye of the
mind, is always a joy. The older a man grows the greater is
the pleasure which it affords him, and the more he devotes
himself to the search after truth, the stronger grows his
desire of possessing it. As love is the life of the heart, so
is the endeavor after knowledge and truth the life of the
mind. In the midst of the movements of time, of the daily work
of life, of its perplexities and contradictions, we should
lift our gaze fearlessly to the clear vault of heaven, and
seek ever to obtain a firmer grasp of and a keener insight
into the origin of all goodness and beauty, the capacities of
our own hearts and minds, the intellectual fruits of mankind
throughout the centuries, and the wondrous works of nature
around us; at the same time remembering always that in
humility alone lies true greatness, and that knowledge and
wisdom are alone profitable in so far as our lives are
governed by them."

The career of Nicholas of Cusa is interesting, because it sums up so
many movements, and, above all, educational currents in the fifteenth
century. He was born in the first year of the century, and lived to be
sixty-four. He was the son of a wine grower, and attracted the attention
of his teachers because of his intellectual qualities. In spite of
comparatively straitened circumstances, then, he was afforded the best
opportunities of the time for education. He went first to the school of
the Brethren of the Common Life at Deventer, the intellectual cradle of
so many of the scholars of this century. Such men as Erasmus, Conrad
Mutianus, Johann Sintheim, Hermann von dem Busche, whom Strauss calls
"the missionary of human wisdom," and the teacher of most of these,
Alexander Hegius, who has been termed the schoolmaster of Germany, with
Nicholas of Cusa and Rudolph Agricola and others, who might readily be
mentioned, are the fruits of the teaching of these schools of the
Brethren of the Common Life, in one of which Thomas a Kempis, the author
of "The Imitation of Christ," was, for seventy years out of his long
life of ninety, a teacher.

Cusanus succeeded so well at school that he was later sent to the
University of Heidelberg, and subsequently to Padua, where he took up
the study of Roman law, receiving his doctorate at the age of
twen