In the course of a recent conversation with an exceptionally brilliant woman of my acquaintance, it transpired that she believed Winchester and Cambridge to be in the same county. This lack of geographical knowledge did not appear, however, to have impaired her intellectual faculties. There are many persons who can accurately locate any town in England, and yet are vastly inferior in mental capacity to the lady who thought that Cambridge was in Hampshire.
Why should an individual know more than it is useful and convenient for him to know? For the student of foreign politics it is essential to be aware of the geographical difference between Tokio and Peking; but of what earthly use would this knowledge be to a man who devoted the whole of his life to inquiring into the domestic routine of the extinct dodo, or to the improvement of agriculture by the application of scientific manures?
Life is short, and it is only possible within the limits of the brief span allotted to us upon earth to acquire a certain number of facts. It is monstrously absurd to sacrifice our best years in stuffing so many facts into the brain, in order to avoid being laughed at by a few thin-minded pedants as an ignoramus. Some consolation, at least, might surely be derived from the reflection that many of the greatest geniuses whom the world has produced were profoundly ignorant as to ninety per cent. of the things which are considered to be indispensable knowledge at the present day.
Nobody can hope to read all the books that are popularly supposed to have been digested by the well-educated man. It would be impossible to get through a tithe of them. Yet how many people there are who will sooner tell a deliberate lie, than acknowledge having omitted to read some classic that happens to be mentioned in the course of conversation! And this is simply due to the infatuated belief that culture consists in stuffing one's self with the ideas of other people. A man whose brain was teeming with his own thoughts and creations, but who had neglected to stock it with the hundred thousand conventional facts culled from the hundred best books selected for him by other people, would be looked upon as an uneducated boor by cultured pedants of the conventional type.