It is better to know one thing, than to know
about ten thousand things. I cannot help feeling painfully, after
reading those most interesting Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, that
the especial danger of this time is intellectual sciolism, vagueness,
sentimental eclecticism--and feeling, too, as Socrates of old believed,
that intellectual vagueness and shallowness, however glib, and grand,
and eloquent it may seem, is inevitably the parent of a moral vagueness
and shallowness, which may leave our age as it left the later Greeks,
without an absolute standard of right or of truth, till it tries to
escape from its own scepticism, as the later Neoplatonists did, by
plunging desperately into any fetish-worshipping superstition which
holds out to its wearied and yet impatient intellect, the bait of
decisions already made for it, of objects of admiration already formed
and systematised.
Therefore let us honour the grammarian in his place; and, among others,
these old grammarians of Alexandria; only being sure that as soon as any
man begins, as they did, displaying himself peacock-fashion, boasting of
his science as the great pursuit of humanity, and insulting his fellow-
craftsmen, he becomes, ipso facto, unable to discover any more truth for
us, having put on a habit of mind to which induction is impossible; and
is thenceforth to be passed by with a kindly but a pitying smile.
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