as a matter of experience, cannot even be counted upon to
educate. Some of us have known men of extreme learning who yet
are, some of them, uncouth in conduct, others violent and
overbearing in converse, others unfair in controversy, others
even unscrupulous in action--men of whom the sophist Thrasymachus
in Plato's "Republic" may stand for the general type. Nay, some
of us will subscribe with the old schoolmaster whom I will quote
again, when he writes:

To myself personally, as an exception to the rule that
opposites attract, a very well-informed person is an object of
terror. His mind seems to be so full of facts that you cannot,
as it were, see the wood for the trees; there is no room for
perspective, no lawns and glades for pleasure and repose, no
vistas through which to view some towering hill or elevated
temple; everything in that crowded space seems of the same
value: he speaks with no more awe of "King Lear" than of the
last Cobden prize essay; he has swallowed them both with the
same ease, and got the facts safe in his pouch; but he has no
time to ruminate because he must still be swallowing; nor does
he seem to know what even Macbeth, with Banquo's murderers
then at work, found leisure to remember--that good digestion
must wait on appetite, if health is to follow both:

Now that may be put a trifle too vivaciously, but the moral is
true. Bacon tells us that reading maketh a full man. Yes, and too
much of it makes him too full. The two words of the Greek upon
knowledge remain true, that the last triumph of Knowledge is
_Know Thyself._ So Don Quixote repeats it to Sancho Panza,
counselling him how to govern his Island: