Wisdom & Empowerment: The Orison Swett Marden Edition (18 Books in One Volume). Orison Swett Marden
a man, not shrink to a manikin, nor dwindle to a brute. But if he is not properly educated, if he has merely been crammed and stuffed through college, if he has merely a broken-down memory from trying to hold crammed facts enough to pass the examination, he will continue to shrink and shrivel and dwindle, often below his original proportions, for he will lose both his confidence and self-respect, as his crammed facts, which never became a part of himself, evaporate from his distended memory. Many a youth has made his greatest effort in his graduating essay. But, alas! the beautiful flowers of rhetoric blossomed only to exhaust the parent stock, which blossoms no more forever.
In Strasburg geese are crammed with food several times a day by opening their mouths and forcing the pabulum down the throat with the finger. The geese are shut up in boxes just large enough to hold them, and are not allowed to take any exercise. This is done in order to increase enormously the liver for pâté de fois gras. So are our youth sometimes stuffed with education. What are the chances for success of students who "cut" recitations or lectures, and gad, lounge about, and dissipate in the cities at night until the last two or three weeks, sometimes the last few days, before examination, when they employ tutors at exorbitant prices with the money often earned by hard-working parents, to stuff their idle brains with the pabulum of knowledge; not to increase their grasp or power of brain, not to discipline it, not for assimilation into the mental tissue to develop personal power, but to fatten the memory, the liver of the brain; to fatten it with crammed facts until it is sufficiently expanded to insure fifty per cent. in the examination.
True teaching will create a thirst for knowledge, and the desire to quench this thirst will lead the eager student to the Pierian spring. "Man might be so educated that all his prepossessions would be truth, and all his feelings virtues."
Every bit of education or culture is of great advantage in the struggle for existence. The microscope does not create anything new, but it reveals marvels. To educate the eye adds to its magnifying power until it sees beauty where before it saw only ugliness. It reveals a world we never suspected, and finds the greatest beauty even in the commonest things. The eye of an Agassiz could see worlds which the uneducated eye never dreamed of. The cultured hand can do a thousand things the uneducated hand cannot do. It becomes graceful, steady of nerve, strong, skillful, indeed it almost seems to think, so animated is it with intelligence. The cultured will can seize, grasp, and hold the possessor, with irresistible power and nerve, to almost superhuman effort. The educated touch can almost perform miracles. The educated taste can achieve wonders almost past belief. What a contrast this, between the cultured, logical, profound, masterly reason of a Gladstone and that of the hod-carrier who has never developed or educated his reason beyond what is necessary to enable him to mix mortar and carry brick.
"Culture comes from the constant choice of the best within our reach," says Bulwer. "Continue to cultivate the mind, to sharpen by exercise the genius, to attempt to delight or instruct your race; and, even supposing you fall short of every model you set before you, supposing your name moulder with your dust, still you will have passed life more nobly than the unlaborious herd. Grant that you win not that glorious accident, 'a name below,' how can you tell but that you may have fitted yourself for high destiny and employ, not in the world of men, but of spirits? The powers of the mind cannot be less immortal than the mere sense of identity; their acquisitions accompany us through the Eternal Progress, and we may obtain a lower or a higher grade hereafter, in proportion as we are more or less fitted by the exercise of our intellect to comprehend and execute the solemn agencies of God."
But be careful to avoid that over-intellectual culture which is purchased at the expense of moral vigor. An observant professor of one of our colleges has remarked that "the mind may be so rounded and polished by education, so well balanced, as not to be energetic in any one faculty. In other men not thus trained, the sense of deficiency and of the sharp, jagged corners of their knowledge leads to efforts to fill up the chasms, rendering them at last far better educated men than the polished, easy-going graduate who has just knowledge enough to prevent consciousness of his ignorance. While all the faculties of the mind should be cultivated, it is yet desirable that it should have two or three rough-hewn features of massive strength. Young men are too apt to forget the great end of life which is to be and do, not to read and brood over what other men have been and done."
In a gymnasium you tug, you expand your chest, you push, pull, strike, run, in order to develop your physical self; so you can develop your moral and intellectual nature only by continued effort.
"I repeat that my object is not to give him knowledge but to teach him how to acquire it at need," said Rousseau.
All learning is self-teaching. It is upon the working of the pupil's own mind that his progress in knowledge depends. The great business of the master is to teach the pupil to teach himself.
"Thinking, not growth, makes manhood," says Isaac Taylor. "Accustom yourself, therefore, to thinking. Set yourself to understand whatever you see or read. To join thinking with reading is one of the first maxims, and one of the easiest operations."
"How few think justly of the thinking few:
How many never think who think they do."
CHAPTER IX.
WORK AND WAIT.
What we do upon some great occasion will probably depend on what we already are; and what we are will be the result of previous years of self-discipline.—H. P. LIDDON.
In all matters, before beginning, a diligent preparation should be made.—CICERO.
I consider a human soul without education like marble in a quarry which shows none of its inherent beauties until the skill of the polisher sketches out the colors, makes the surface shine, and discovers every ornamental cloud, spot, and vein that runs throughout the body of it.—ADDISON.
Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed.—GEORGE HENRY LEWES.
Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.—ARNOLD.
All good abides with him who waiteth wisely.—THOREAU.
The more haste, ever the worse speed.—CHURCHILL.
Haste trips up its own heels, fetters and stops itself.—SENECA.
"Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast."
How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had the seed-time of character?—THOREAU.
I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both public and private, of peace and war.—MILTON.
The safe path to excellence and success, in every calling, is that of appropriate preliminary education, diligent application to learn the art and assiduity in practicing it.—EDWARD EVERETT.
The more you know, the more you can save yourself and that which belongs to you, and do more work with less effort.—CHARLES KINGSLEY.
"I was a mere cipher in that vast sea of human enterprise," said Henry Bessemer, speaking of his arrival in London in 1831. Although but eighteen years old, and without an acquaintance in the city, he soon made work for himself by inventing a process of copying bas-reliefs on cardboard. His method was so simple that one could learn in ten minutes how to make a die from an embossed stamp for a penny. Having ascertained later that in this way the raised stamps on all official papers in England could easily be forged, he set to work and invented a perforated stamp which could not be forged nor removed from a document. At the public stamp office he was told by the chief that the government was losing 100,000 pounds a year through the custom of removing stamps from old parchments and using them again. The chief also appreciated the new danger of easy counterfeiting. So he offered Bessemer a definite sum for his process of perforation, or an office for life at eight hundred pounds a year. Bessemer chose the office, and hastened