mity. All men of great
achievements have had to know what others achieved. The highest
monuments are always built with the spoils of the past. Any single
genius, if not an infinitesimal, counts at most but a digit in the
vast notation of humanity. The great masters have been the greatest
scholars. Many a bright mind has struggled alone to beat the air.
Behold in some national patent-office a grand mummy-pit of ignorant
inventors.

"Those men upon whom so much opprobrium has been heaped, the
Schoolmen, were unfortunate chiefly in the lack of material on which
to expend their singular acuteness. Leibnitz was not ashamed to
confess his obligations to them, nor South to avail himself of their
subtle distinctions. Doubtless theology owes them a debt. Some of them
have been well called, by Hallam, men 'of extraordinary powers of
discrimination and argument, strengthened in the long meditation of
their cloister by the extinction of every other talent and the
exclusion of every other pursuit. Their age and condition denied them
the means of studying polite letters, of observing nature, or of
knowing mankind. They were thus driven back upon themselves, cut off
from all the material on which the mind could operate, and doomed to
employ all their powers in defense of what they must never presume to
examine.' 'If these Schoolmen,' says Bacon, 'to their great thirst of
truth and unwearied travel of wit had joined variety of reading and
contemplation, they had proved great lights to the advancement of all
learning and knowledge.' And so, for lack of other timber, they split
hairs. Hence the mass of ponderous trifling that has made their name a
by-word. A force, sometimes Herculean, was spent in building and
demolishing castles of moonshine.

"A robust mental strength requires various and solid food. The best
growth is symmetrical. There is a common bond--_quoddam commune
vinculum_--in the circle of knowledge, that cannot be overlooked. Men
do not know best what they know only in its isolation. Even Kant
offset his metaphysics by lecturing on geography; and Niebuhr, the
historian, struggled hard and well to keep his equilibrium by throwing
himself into the whole circle of natural science and of affairs. Such,
also, are the interdependencies of scholarship, that ample knowledge
without our specialty is needful to save us from blunders within.
Olshausen was a brilliant commentator, and the slightest tinge of
chemistry should have kep