largely a process of acquiring useless information. A little child
"That feels its life in every limb,"
and would so much rather be dancing about the meadows or the pavement, is cooped up in school and cruelly obliged to learn the length of the chief river of China. To what possible end? To be able to say, if asked? But who will ask it such an insensate question? Even in the imminence of a Yellow Peril to Western civilization, when the length of that river might be a fact of some importance to the American admiral considering whether to send his gunboats up it and shell the non-combatants on its banks, the chances are that few of the children who have learned it at school will be that admiral; certainly not if they are girls, and yet girls are obliged to learn it the same as boys.
No wonder so many children turn out badly; the sense of injury through the acquisition of useless information rankles in them, and turns them away from all knowledge, for they have never formulated their reason for preferring ignorance to false knowledge, which is what they really wish to escape. We must, in this matter, as in most others, begin with the young, if we would reform the old; and it could well be objected to much scientific information that it was permanently mistaken or only provisionally established in the form of an hypothesis. Indeed, this was the objection to it which we once heard made by an eminent man of science. He said that for the reason implied he wished the old-fashioned academic instruction for his children, rather than the modern scientific instruction. Latin and Greek did not change, nor living languages much; poetry, if it ever was poetry, remained so; drama was permanently dramatic in the fortunate instances when it was not melodramatic; the music of the spheres was perhaps not just the music imparted by the piano-teacher, yet it was the mother of this; and though it was not probable that the morning stars sang together in rag-time, the principles of melody and harmony were eternally the same. The perspective of the drawing-lessons was that which was discovered in the revival of the arts, and however neglected or despised, was of the nature of an exact science. But the sciences so called were not only inexact; they were tentative, speculative, and so mutable that what they taught to-day they would often unteach to-morrow. They were not instruction; they were information, and apt to be useless information because they so rapidly denied and superseded themselves. He made out a strong case against them, as a means of education, but he may not have meant to discourage their cultivation altogether.
At one time there was much dispute in the learned world as to how many angels could stand on the point of a needle, not individually or as a proof of personal daring, but collectively, and as a proof of their multitudinous compressibility. The question was never satisfactorily settled. But if it had been, the fact would have become useless information, which years would have been wasted in acquiring, when in the lapse of centuries science came to doubt whether there were any angels at all, and their multitudinous compressibility was a matter of no concern. Now again when science refuses to deny that there may be angels, no inquirer troubles himself as to how many or how few of them can stand on the point of a needle. The fact, if it could have been ascertained, would be of no more actual interest than the fact that the night train for Rome used to leave Florence at eight-ten.
We must constantly guard ourselves against the acquisition of useless information, if we would not be heaped with unavailing knowledge. Better a free mind at the expense of an empty one than a mind stuffed with dead or dying facts which never have been or ever can be used,—hours from time-tables long superseded, eight-ten trains untaken after crucial inquiry for the moment of their departure. Yet you never can tell whether information is going to be useless or not; and you are often obliged to acquire the useless sort at your peril, or on the chance of its turning out useful. In fact, if we were to confine ourselves to the useful sort, or the sort that explicitly promises to be useful, we might cut ourselves off from a great deal that would prove advantageous or pleasant.
