Learning is Not Wisdom.

MERRILL EDWARDS GATES, LL.D., President Amherst College, Mass.

"To what purpose should our thought be directed to various kinds of knowledge, unless room be afforded for putting it into practice, so that public advantage may be the result!"

-SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.

N certain moods you may spend an hour in turning over the leaves of a dictionary when you are not "using" it. But you will hardly call a dictionary interesting reading! Why? Not because there is too much learning in it, but because the knowledge contained in it is not alive. There is no such orderly arrangement of facts, no such systematic unfolding of principles, as marks the scientific treatise. It lacks the interest that attaches to the progress of events in a history, to the growth of character, the unfolding of plot in the novel. The dictionary is a mass of knowledge, valuable for reference; but it presupposes a man with intelligence, purpose, and will, to use this knowledge.

For the successful conduct of life, mere learning is not enough. We do not undervalue learning. All knowledge has a certain value. Probably the danger that least of all threatens your life is the danger of knowing too much! But it is possible to be very learned, and yet to be singularly destitute of the ability to make learning of any use, to one's self, to one's friends, or to the world at large. Learning is not wisdom. In order that learning may be intelligently acquired, even, there must be a wise appreciation of the ends for which it is to be attained, of the relations which the knowledge you are acquiring bears to other departments of knowledge, to the conduct of your own life, to the thought and the life of your fellow men. It is not merely a question of what

you know. To what purpose do you know it? How much do you see in it? To what use will you put it, for others or for yourself?

The knowledge that comes of itself through the mere experi ence of living is not enough to make one wise. How many men and women you know who have been beaten upon by all the stormy experience of fifty years, and sung to by all the beauty and joy of life for fifty years, who still seem none the wiser for it. One does not grow wiser by mere passive existence. If experience is to be of value, it must be reflected upon, it must be reacted upon, by the self within. You must learn your own lessons from experience, with conscious effort, and with the determination to learn them and to use them, or you will never be wise, even in the lowest sense of the term.

Nor is the knowledge that is strenuously worked for, that is won by severest effort, in itself enough to make one wise. It is not always true that "knowledge is power." Sometimes acquired knowledge is only the cause and the evidence of exhausted and wasted energy. Learning that is consciously labored for, as well as the knowledge that comes from experience of life, if it is to contribute to true wisdom, must be seen and used in the light of a higher vision. Knowledge must be directed to the attainment of ends higher than mere acquisition, whether of learning, or money, or fame and selfish power.

The knowledge which you have worked severely to acquire, furnishes a presumption that in thus working you have acquired power of will and the habit of the intelligent application of all your powers to the task that immediately confronts you. To this extent, the possession of knowledge creates a presumption in favor of your possessing wisdom. But it does not prove that you are wise.

Do you recall some of the elementary definitions of the science of mechanics? "Work is the production of motion against resistance." "Energy is the power a body has of doing work." "Potential energy is the power to do work which belongs to a body by virtue of its position," as, e. g., to the tightly coiled

spring, to the uplifted hammer of the pile-driver; these bodies by virtue of their position are in possession of potential energy, of energy which may or may not be used to accomplish wise ends. Learning is at best but potential energy. If wisely used, if intelligently directed to right ends, learning may become "kinetic energy," power actually put forth in useful work.

Learning alone will not make your life productive of good. There must be right feeling and strong willing before results follow. Knowledge ought to lead to right feeling. But knowledge does not always result in clear vision, right feeling, and right action. When it does we call it wisdom.

Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more."

Perhaps there is less of the conceit of learning among American scholars than in Europe. But we sometimes see traces of that conceit, which is always the mark of the petty soul. There is the conceited pedant. There is the dilettante in learning, finical in his moods and his intellectual habits, -a "man who thinks himself supreme or precious, and spends his life in turning pretty phrases, when not engaged in admiration of his own. exclusive intellectual possessions."

The wise man, with his learning, has the intelligence that teaches him how to use his knowledge. He has true views of life; right ends, and the skill to attain them. He is unselfish in his aims.

"Here the heart

May give a useful lesson to the head,

And learning wiser grow without his books."

No man can be called truly cultured, truly wise, until his relations to his fellow men and his power to serve them fill a larger place in his thought and effort than does his wish to advance his own interests, to press for his own selfish advantage.

To be wise, then, you must have a right aim in view, the true end of life clearly before you. It is no accident that in the Bible wisdom always includes morality and the willing service of God. All the world's great poets, too, speak to us always of

morality, and the unselfish service of our fellow men, as characteristic of the highest wisdom. There can be no true view of life where the highest ends of life are ignored. Always, however much of learning he may have acquired, the man who "says in his heart, there is no God," shows himself destitute of true wisdom," the fool" of Proverbs, and, in the light of philosophy and poetry, always "the fool."

If you are wise, you will ask yourself seriously, "For what, for whom, do I intend to live?" Two answers are possible : "I mean to live for myself"; "I mean to live for God, and so for my fellow men." Every man's life, whether he is conscious of it or not, vibrates full and strong to the keynote of one or the other of these two answers.

He who lives for God will find himself irresistibly impelled to the best and widest service of his fellow men. He who lives for self, however he may strive to strengthen his position by maxims of worldly prudence, fails of all the highest ends of living.

Reckon from self as a center, and your fellow men are your hated rivals in the struggle for existence and advancement. Ambition's law of life becomes the blood-stained "survival of the fittest"; and the highest glories life can yield you, in their hollow and transitory splendor will be yours but for a tremulous moment, until the younger, the more vigorous, the more fortunate competitor shall thrust you aside, and for his brief moment wear the bauble for which you strove until your selfish life went out in nothingness.

Reckon from God as the center, and your fellow men become your brothers, infinitely worthy of your loving interest, since one Father has made all our spirits after his own image, and one Saviour has died to redeem from sin and restore to God-likeness all who will turn to him, even the most debased. Thus reckoning from God as the center, the law of self-abnegation, of loving service, becomes the law of your life.

"But I have a duty to myself; I am under obligation to make the most of my own life," you say. Unquestionably! And you will do the best for yourself, intellectually and morally,