Another tool in the student's workshop is _Previously Acquired Knowledge_: that is, what one has in one's mind. Some people's minds are junk-shops. But a junk-shop is better than an empty shop. This previously acquired knowledge, if used rightly, becomes the tool of later courses, the servant of later years. Our stored-up facts--many of them--have not been an end in themselves. How could they be? For example, such things as paradigms and formulæ and long lists of names and dates, are tools pure and simple; but the student in the workshop must have them or she will be like a carpenter who had much to do but on coming to his bench found no tools there and so was idle all day.
A fourth tool for the girl in her study--one that cannot be deliberately acquired, as information or apparatus or even health can be--is _Experience_. This is the most valuable tool of all--one's experience of travel, with people, in responsibility, in love, in joy, in sorrow, in any kind of work. The girls who are the most interesting in the classroom are the girls who are not contenting themselves with apparatus alone but whose minds are flexible with experience, who bring all of themselves, their life, to bear upon the work. A certain well-known minister had prepared a sermon for his usual Sunday engagement, but half an hour before service another text came into his mind. He could not forget it, so he jotted down notes and preached the new sermon instead of the one that had been prepared. This sermon made a great impression on all who heard it, and the minister himself said of it that some people would declare that it had been thought out in half an hour, but that really he had put fifty years of his life into it. The sharper and better the tools, the finer the character of the work. If experience has been observed and retained, and previously acquired knowledge is ready for service, and hand and mind know how to use books, and the student is in good condition physically, then the excellence of that girl's work in the class and out can be guaranteed.
And now what are the uses of the work which these tools can accomplish for us? Coleridge wrote in his poem, "Work Without Hope,"
"Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, And Hope without an object cannot live."