It is little matter
whether the amount of learning be large or small; the brain is only
encumbered by it, unless it has taken it into its own texture, and made
it by Thought a part of itself. Some persons love facts as a miser loves
gold, merely because they are possessions; but without any desire to
make use of them. A fact or thought is just as valuable in itself as
a piece of money. Gold and silver are neither food, nor raiment, nor
shelter; but we value them because through their means we can obtain all
these. So facts and thoughts are neither rationality, nor wisdom, nor
virtue, and their value lies in their being mediums whereby we may
obtain them all.
Undigested learning is as useless and oppressive as undigested food; and
as in the dyspeptic patient the appetite for food often grows with the
inability to digest it, so in the unthinking patient an overweening
desire to know often accompanies the inability to know to any purpose.
Thought is to the brain what gastric juice is to the stomach,--a
solvent to reduce whatever is received to a condition in which all that
is wholesome and nutritive may be appropriated, and that alone. To learn
merely for the sake of learning, is like eating merely for the taste
of the food. The mind will wax fat and unwieldy, like the body of the
gormand. The stomach is to the frame what memory is to the mind; and it
is as unwise to cultivate the memory at the expense of the mind, as it
would be to enlarge the capacity of the stomach by eating more food than
the wants of the frame require, or food of a quality that it could not
appropriate.
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