There is hardly any class or member of the community that does not suffer drawback or injury from knowledge. As I am giving only a crude outline of a design, I leave a great deal to the imagination of the reader. He will easily perceive how much happier and more free would be the man of business, the girl, the boy, the scientist, the controversialist, and, above all, the literary man, if each knew little or nothing, instead of having pressed upon the attention from youth accumulated experiences, traditions, discoveries, and reasonings of many centuries.
To the “Delights of Ignorance,” I should devote the consideration of man devoid of knowledge under various circumstances and in various positions.
By the sea who does not love to lie “propt on beds of amaranth and moly, how sweet (while warm airs lull, blowing lowly), with half-dropt eyelids still, beneath a heaven dark and holy, to watch the long bright river drawing slowly his waters from the purple hill--to hear the dewy echoes calling from cave to cave through the thick-twined vine--to watch the emerald-coloured waters falling through many a woven acanthus wreath divine! Only to see and hear the far-off sparkling brine, only to hear were sweet, stretched out beneath the pine.” Just so! Is not that much better than bothering about gravitation and that wretched old clinker the moon, and the tides, and how sea-water is made up of oxygen and hydrogen and chloride of sodium and bromide of something else, and fifty other things, not one of which has a tolerable smell when you meet it in a laboratory? Isn’t it better than thinking of the number of lighthouses built on the coast of Albion, and the tonnage which yearly is reported and cleared at the custom-houses of London, Liverpool, and that prosperous seaport of Bohemia! Isn’t it much better than improving the occasion by reading a hand-book on hydraulics or hydrostatics? Who on the seashore wants to know anything? There will always, down to the last syllable of recorded time, be finer things unknown about the sea than can be said about all other matters in the world. Trying to know anything about the sea is like shooting into the air an arrow attached to a pennyworth of string with a view to sounding space. If we threw all the knowledge we have into the ocean the Admiralty standards of high-water mark would not have to be altered one-millionth part of a line.