d 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. He recites glibly the date of Thermopylae, and
does not know that all Greece is trailing behind his desk. When, after
subsequent research, he knows something of Greece, he discovers Greece
to be dovetailed into Rome and Egypt, and they lay hold upon the plain
of Shinar and Eden, and the immemorial, prehistoric years.

Ah, no! We never really know. Every fact recedes from us, as might an
ebbing wave, and leaves us stranded upon an unhorizoned beach, more
despairing than before. Education does not solve the problems of
life--it deepens the mystery. What, then, may the sage know? Are there
no sages? And have we all been misinformed?

A sage is one who knows what, in his position of life, is most necessary
for him to know. The larger sage, the great Sage, is the one who knows
what is necessary for the race to know.

It is a wrong idea of wisdom, that we must necessarily know what some
one else knows. Wisdom is single-track for each man. There are in the
world those who know how to build aqueducts, and to bake _charlotte
russe_, and to sew trousers. Aqueducts and tailor work may be alike out
of my individual and personal knowledge, yet I may not necessarily be an
ignorant man. The primitive hunter stood in the forest. For him to be a
hunting-sage, was to know the weather, traps, weapons, the times, and
the lairs and ways of beasts. He knew lions and monkeys, the coiled
serpent and the serpe