However precious and
coherent in themselves, all subject-matters thus organized are mere
lugs, crimps, and frills. All such culture is spurious, unreal, and
parasitic. It may make a scholastic or sophistic mind, but a worm is
at the root and, with a dim sense of the vanity of all knowledge that
does not become a rule of life, some form of pessimism is sure to
supervene in every serious soul. With age a civilization accumulates
such impedimenta, traditional flotsam and jetsam, and race fatigue
proceeds with equal step with its increasing volume. Immediate
utilities are better, but yet not so much better than acquisitions
that have no other than a school or examination value. If, as Ruskin
says, all true work is praise, all true play is love and prayer.
Instil into a boy's soul learning which he sees and feels not to have
the highest worth and which can not become a part of his active life
and increase it, and his freshness, spontaneity, and the fountains of
play slowly run dry in him, and his youth fades to early desiccation.
The instincts, feelings, intuitions, the work of which is always play,
are superseded by method, grind, and education by instruction which is
only an effort to repair the defects of heredity, for which, at its
best, it is vulgar, pinchbeck substitute.
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