they are
themselves warped and crippled by what they do. The habit of looking at
a single order of facts, coldly and always from the same point of view,
takes from the mind flexibility, weakens the imagination, and puts
fetters on the soul; and hence though it is important that there be
specialists, the kind of education by which they are formed, while it is
suited to make a geologist, a chemist, a mathematician, or a botanist,
is not suited to call forth the free and harmonious play of all man's
powers. We do not live on facts alone, much less on facts of a single
kind. Religion and poetry, love, hope, and imagination are as essential
to our well-being as science. Human life is knowledge, is faith, is
conduct, is beauty, is manners; it unfolds itself in many directions and
shoots its roots into infinitude; and for the general purposes of
education, science is learned to best advantage when it is embodied in
literature, and its methods and results, rather than the details of its
work, are presented to us. Whatever it is able to do, to improve the
mind, to widen the range of thought, to give true notions of the
workings of Nature,--it will do for whoever learns accurately its
general conceptions and results; and these cannot remain unknown to him
whose aim is culture, for such an one is, as Plato says, "A lover not of
a part of wisdom, but of the whole, and has a taste for every sort of
knowledge, and is curious to learn, and is never satisfied; and though
he will not know medicine like a physician, or the heavens like an
astronomer, or the vegetable kingdom like a botanist, his mind will play
over all these realms with freedom, and he will know how to relate the
principles and facts of all the sciences to our sense for beauty, for
conduct, for life and religion in a way which a mere specialist can
never find." And his view will not only be wider and less impeded, it
will also be deeper than that of the man of science; for he who sees but
one order of things sees only their surfaces, just as he who sees but
one thing sees nothing at all.

It would be a mistake to imagine that the ideal here commended, means
superficial accomplishments, an excessive love of style and the
ornaments of poetry and eloquence, or preoccupation in favor of aught
external or frivolous. It is the very opposite of dilettantism, and if
it mean anything, means thoroughness, and a thoroughness which can come
only of untiring labor carried on through