Lay Morals

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - The problem of education is twofold: first to know and then to utter. Every one who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks; and the best of teachers can impart only broken images of the truth which they perceive. Speech which goes from one to another between two natures and what is worse between two experiences is doubly relative. The speaker buries his meaning; it is for the hearer to dig it up again; and all speech written or spoken is in a dead language until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. Such moreover is the complexity of life that when we condescend upon details in our advice we may be sure we condescend on error; and the best of education is to throw out some magnanimous hints. No man was ever so poor that he could express all he has in him by words looks or actions; his true knowledge is eternally incommu-nicable for it is a knowledge of himself; and his best wisdom comes to him by no process of the mind but in a supreme self-dictation which keeps varying from hour to hour in its dictates with the variation of events and circumstances.