The Wisdom of the Child
IT may not be an original idea, but never mind, if it be a true one, that the proper result of intellectual cultivation is to restore the mind to that state of wonder and interest with which it looks on everything in childhood. Thus Jean Jacques Rousseau, couched on the grass by the side of a plant that he might examine its structure and appearance at his ease, would have seemed to a little child so like itself in taste and feeling that it would have lain down by him, in full confidence of entire sympathy between them in spite of his wizard-like, Armenian attire.
But I will extend the parallel, and say that true wisdom, which implies a moral as well as an intellectual result, consists in a return to that purity and simplicity which characterize early youth when its intuitions have not been perverted. It is, indeed, a similarity with a difference; for the wonder of a child at the material world is the effect of novelty, its simplicity and purity of ignorance; while the wonder of the wise man is the result of knowledge disclosing mystery, the simplicity and purity of his moral principles, the result of wide
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