Yes--the Cambridge Tutor was right. Before you can tell what a man
means, you must have patience to find out what he says. So far from
wishing our grammatical and philological education to be less severe
than it is, I think it is not severe enough. In an age like this--an
age of lectures, and of popular literature, and of self-culture, too
often random and capricious, however earnest, we cannot be too careful
in asking ourselves, in compelling others to ask themselves, the meaning
of every word which they use, of every word which they read; in assuring
them, whether they will believe us or not, that the moral, as well as
the intellectual culture, acquired by translating accurately one
dialogue of Plato, by making out thoroughly the sense of one chapter of
a standard author, is greater than they will get from skimming whole
folios of Schlegelian aesthetics, resumes, histories of philosophy, and
the like second-hand information, or attending seven lectures a-week
till their lives' end. It is better to know one thing, than to know
about ten thousand things. I cannot help feeling painfully, after
reading those most interesting Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, that
the especial danger of this time is intellectual sciolism, vagueness,
sentimental eclecticism--and feeling, too, as Socrates of old believed,
that intellectual vagueness and shallowness, however glib, and grand,
and eloquent it may seem, is inevitably the parent of a moral vagueness
and shallowness, which may leave our age as it left the later Greeks,
without an absolute standard of right or of truth, till it tries to
escape from its own scepticism, as the later Neoplatonists did, by
plunging desperately into any fetish-worshipping superstition which
holds out to its wearied and yet impatient intellect, the bait of
decisions already made for it, of objects of admiration already formed
and systematised.