Those
who have been taught to consider the institutions of the schools, as
giving the last perfection to human abilities, are surprised to see men
wrinkled with study, yet wanting to be instructed in the minute
circumstances of propriety, or the necessary forms of daily transaction;
and quickly shake off their reverence for modes of education, which they
find to produce no ability above the rest of mankind.
"Books," says Bacon, "can never teach the use of books." The student
must learn by commerce with mankind to reduce his speculations to
practice, and accommodate his knowledge to the purposes of life.
It is too common for those who have been bred to scholastick
professions, and passed much of their time in academies where nothing
but learning confers honours, to disregard every other qualification,
and to imagine that they shall find mankind ready to pay homage to their
knowledge, and to crowd about them for instruction. They therefore step
out from their cells into the open world with all the confidence of
authority and dignity of importance; they look round about them at once
with ignorance and scorn on a race of beings to whom they are equally
unknown and equally contemptible, but whose manners they must imitate,
and with whose opinions they must comply, if they desire to pass their
time happily among them.
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