THE CASE FOR IGNORANCE.
LORD COLERIDGE may say what he likes, but the case is not so absolutely clear as he thinks. He told the Yorkshire Union of Mechanics' Institutes on Wednesday that men now-a- days were ashamed to say that knowledge was a bad thing for any man, and that "if any unfortunate beings who thought so still lurked here and there, they were not bold enough to come forward and say so." That is true enough, but it is true because of that tyranny of opinion which modern education tends so directly to develope, and which will ultimately kill out all originality of thought and of feel- ing. There are plenty of people who still believe firmly in the uses and value of Ignorance. Half the upper-class women of the world hold that faith at heart, and a great many cultivated men. We do not hold it, hold the very reverse of it as strongly as Lord Coleridge, but we grow habitually impatient at an attitude of mere contempt for the opposition, and have a fancy just for once fairly to state, or try to state, their case. We may add that in stating it we are not putting wholly imaginary arguments, but are repeating, of course in our own words, ideas which an excessively cultivated American once expressed to us as being his most sincere convictions.
If the end of life is to make men nobler, as most men who think at all think in their sanguine moods, and some few men in all moods, no doubt Lord Coleridge is more or less right, for know- ledge is essential to intellectual progress, and intellectual progress to moral advance ; but if the end is to make men happier—and that must be one end—the argument, incessantly repeated though it be, will not equally convince all men. The argument against educa- tion is usually so badly and so brutally put, that it revolts the benevolent, but crudeness of form in a proposition is no complete or necessary disproof of its truth. It seems to those who doubt the advantages of culture, that the majority of thinkers, as well as of instinctive Tories, would acknowledge that to the happiness and well-being of the mass of mankind, whose destiny, whether they like it or not, is and must always be manual labour, certain qualities must always be invaluable, and are always inipaired by education ; that a condition of great value is sacrificed to a perpetual advance towards a condition we know nothing about. The pleasant seat is abandoned, merely to walk on. These qualities are, to begin with, the capacity of intentness, docility or teachableness, and that ability to endure without repining which is usually called content. There can hardly be a doubt that knowledge diminishes intentness. To be truly devoted to the daily work of life, which from the conditions of things must always be more or less narrow work, be it making a furrow or painting a Madonna, a man must regard that work as important, as something which it is not so much wrong or childish as impossible to do badly,—an idea which disappears as his knowledge advances ; must concentrate himself on it,—which he cannot do if he is thinking of other things ; and must do it with a willingness which, if he knows of pleasanter labour, is im- possible to him. All the positive and the successful work of the world, the work which made it habitable and sustains the human race, clearing and ploughing, planting and breeding, the build- ing of houses and the making of ships, was done before the masses knew anything but their work, and therefore was done effectually. Knowing no better, they did not feel that monotony of daily toil by which alone the great works of the world—the production of the annual harvest, for example, which is the greatest, or at all events, the most needful of all works— can be successfully accomplished. They thought of ploughing, not of history ; of digging, not of arithmetic ; of sowing, not of what authors say ; and so were intent on their work, intent to intellectual imbecility, and it was well done. There is no agri- culture like that of the Chinese, who cannot read. No people suffer so little from idleness or neglect of needful work as the Bengalees, who are as ignorant as fish. No people produce so much as the Belgians and Southern French peasants, who think books and manuscripts, as Mr. Hamerton tells us, in the most charming of all gossipy-thoughtful books ever written, the same thing. No ploughing is like that of the old-fashioned labourer, who cannot write ; no carpentry or bootmaking like that of the China- man, who knows only his right hand from his left ; and the reason is the intentness of the man. Being a human being, he must have an object of interest, and instead of finding it in thought, he finds it in his work, till the manipulation required becomes an instinct, like that of the pointer, and families show an aptitude for the plough or the adze like that of the Venetians of Murano for the twirl of the hand without which there cannot be fine-blown glass. This is what the upper-class women, and the men still bold enough to speak out, mean when they say they like ignorant handi- craftsmen, and there is something in it. Intentness—the in- tentness which produces industry and fidelity to work and patience—is a great quality ; and for ram who must labour with the hand, it is weakened by the cultivation of the mind, just as cultivation is impeded, as the Cornell experimentalists have at last admitted, by manual toil. If, then, the destiny of mankind in millions is handicraft, is not a gain which makes them feebler for their handicraft a loss ? It is not felt yet, because education is so slight and so little diffused, but when it is deep and universal, will not the labour of man be less and less successfully done, to the great diminution of his happiness ? Everybody acknowledges that the sciolist falls; and is not the handicraftsman who knows a little of books, and art, and science sure to be a sciolist ? And is it certain that his new vivacity of mind will be to him or to the world a sufficient compensation?
Then—and here again the instinct of the despised doubters, who, in Lord Coleridge's speech, lurk about ashamed of them- selves, may have led them right—education impairs docility. If there is anything true, it is true that a man most willingly takes guidance from the man who knows better than himself ; but if all know pretty equally, all will feel impatient of guidance, or be patient only of guidance they approve. The faculty of combina- tion, which makes everything great, from an empire to a regiment, or a ship's crew, which made the Pyramids possible, and the English Constitution a fact, will be diminished with every advance in knowledge ; and as it cannot be dis- pensed with, must be replaced either by bribery, as is happening now in industrial undertakings, or by force, as is happening now in the new organisation of armies. Men will have to be bribed or shot into an obedience formerly rendered willingly from respect, a respect founded on many apparent causes, and one real one, difference in the capacity to guide. Of course, obedience will not end. The world is not going to pieces, and rulers are finding out already how to make the cultivated work in combina-
tion—four privates recorded Speicheren in Sanscrit—but willing obedience will go, and with it much of the happiness of 'mankind. The conscript will, in all departments, replace the willing soldier. That is not an evil as regards the world's work, for the conscript is the more efficient of the two, but it is an evil as regards the world's small allowance of happiness. Even if out of education should spring a dominant sense of duty, that, like a dominant sense 'of religious awe, may be a force which will ennoble, but which cannot ease the permanent burden on mankind. The old docile habit which followed, and obeyed, and endured without thinking, will be gone, and replaced by a new fear of the whip, though the whip may be ultimately a moral and an adorable one. Take, as an instance, service of any kind,—domestic service, or service under the State. Service is just as good as ever it was. It is, in truth, much better, more exact, mechanical, and punctilious ; but the ancient ease and pleasure of servitude is going or gone, and though the loss first strikes those who are served, and who can complain, and who do com- plain in almost comic selfishness, the lose will ultimately be the greater to the millions who must serve, who must take orders and guidance, or cease to exist. Nature is neither lenient nor pitiful, but fearfully hard, and in educating we are but making the millions on whom her yoke falls heaviest, conscious at once of her hardness, and their powerlessness to resist. We make them aware of their littleness, without removing or being able to re- move-the certainty that they will always be little.
And in that consciousness, and in the decline of intentness, content also disappears. Knowledge deserves some of the praise Lord Coleridge gives it, though "to know" is to know so little, that even in the few who know it breeds unrest ; but knowledge, such knowledge as is possible to the majority, who must always toil to eat, and can have but a por- tion even of that modicum of disposable time which is granted by Heaven to the most fortunate, certainly brings no -content. It brings, on the contrary, desire for the unattainable, for escape from the hard monotony of work, for easy lives and leisure, and more knowledge yet, to be attained only by sacrifice. Ambition, desire, restlessness increase with cultivation, not the sense of tranquillity once enjoyed by all mankind, and now still the grand compensation for the monotony of life among the millions of Asia. To have found out the divine order of things, and stick to it, so that each day is as yesterday and each to-morrow as to-day ; to have no wish to rise, or change, or abandon any- 'thing; to be clothed in habit as in armour, and to see in the pleasing and unpleasing alike the inevitable ; to live always through life as the man lives for an hour who has had the pre- cisely adequate dose of opium or burgundy,—this is content, and is it so certain that this is not for man the happiest condition? The instinct of man seems to say it is, else why does he regret the past when all was smoother, or why enjoy the Lotus-eaters, or why imagine heaven always as eternal calm? Did the Greek think be would progress in the Elsyian Fields, or -does the Dissenter of Islington look forward to a Paradise in 'which he shall always be striving and attaining ? He wants to be, not to strive. The destiny of man being what it is—pain in being born, pain in the toil of life, pain in dying, with happiness so momentary and pleasure so cloying, and the irrevocable doom of capital punishment always hanging over him, with this aggravation, that he knows neither the day, nor thehour, nor the method—is this restful condition of unchangeableness, and freedom from wish to change, and liberation from desire or energy, as of a cat bask- ing in the firelight and purring instead of discussing, not a con- dition which it is sad to throw away ? And with education, it is thrown away. It is probable that we do not know yet how com- pletely it is thrown away, that we are unaware how generations of instruction will change the brain and the nerves in their very structure, making both more sensitive and more susceptible— principally to pain—but we do know this, that with education comes unrest, the desire to "advance," and to change, and to "improve." And if, as is very probable, that desire can only be exceptionally gratified, if for the infinite majority the con- .ditions. of being impose monotonous life as a destiny—and others than theologians admit this, and it seems to be -admitted by nature, in the perfectness men can acquire in making .pin's-heads, if they make pin's-heads alone—is the happiness -of the world so certainly to be increased by culture that those who seek that happiness first of all should be even ashamed, as Lord Coleridge truly says they are, to discuss the boundless benefits of ignorance ? We say nothing of the feebleness that -comes of knowledge—feebleness such as would come to the pedestrian who was suddenly made percipient of every danger
conceivably awaiting him in walking down the Strand, for every politician sees that, and every theologian laments it, and talks of want of faith—and confine ourselves to the thought that in the great diminution of intentness, docility, and content, the millions will possibly lose in happiness more than they gain from know- ledge. Everybody acknowledges that as regards the cultivated. There is no Oxford tutor but laments that some lad is "over- educated for his mental power." Well, must not the human race one day be over-educated for its mental power ? We all admit that the mind may be frittered away on too many subjects. Is not the mind of the millions so frittered, when they attend to any- thing but work and the preparation for another life ? It seems to us that the doubters who still have the courage of their convic- tions, and do not subscribe to education, have something to say, —and that though the answer is perfect, and the educationists as right as they are wearisome, the answer cannot come first or with the greatest force from the modern Epicureans.
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