A little knowledge is dangerous
A little learning wrote Pope ‘is dangerous thing’. We can be much amused; when we remember that Pope himself understood to translate Homer without knowing much Greek. Who could have known the pitfalls of a little knowledge better than he? So when he goes on to say in the next line ‘Drink deep’ or taste not the pierian spring the thought has been used for certain ironical appositeness.
We live in the age of superficiality every one wants to show that he is learned yet even he is shallow. The methods of showing that one is learned are interesting. One of them is to ignore all that other know. Another is to ignore the common place and concentrates on something odd and out of the way. If somebody begins to discuss Jan Eyre our Wathering heights say that you prefer the tenant o wild fell Hall. In this way you will easily acquire reputation for profound learning is the pitfall in to which the journalist in particular always falls. He must write airily of odd and remote in order to cancel his ignorance of the near and the classical. He has no leisure. His profession makes him acquainted with mass of miscellaneous and haphazard knowledge which he compelled to reproduce in his articles with an air of knowing every thing. The journalist is tempted to be readable and so he always tries to be original and unusual.
Is the pierian suited for every one? Can every one drink deep of it? The philosopher or the moral of science may do so with safety but of others the Pierian spring makes my prigs.
Aldows Huxley is an essay in “Along the Road” gives an amusing account of an exhibition of arts and crafts which he saw at Munich
Good art demands inverse concentration and excessive knowledge tends that make the type of concentration that art demands difficult.
For the superficial knowledge of our own times other things are responsible also. Men now a days have become so mercenary that they are not willing to undertake any serious work that does not pay. Intellect is valued only as a key to material prosperity. “He wastes his money on books. What good are they to him? He is a carpenter not a school master. Men do not realize that the brain is not a tool or exploiting our fellow men but. To follow knowledge like a sinking star beyond the most bound of human thought. The French have a beautiful phrase “la joie de vivire” parallel to the we can inventan other “la joie de savoir” the joy of knowledge is all unknown to money makers.
There are certain theories and dogmas which have diverted man and women from the pursuit of knowledge and make them content with their ignorance and stupidity. Religious teachers have made most of dogmas. They have taught that man has a body and soul, but they have forgotten that man has, mind also. Saint Basil is reported to have remarked very frankly “it is matter of no interest to as whether earth is sphere or a cylinder or a disc.
With this exaltation of stupidity and ignorance it is no wonder that we suffer from all short comings of little knowledge. Take such a glaring social evil of our country as early marriage. People marry early because so called religions books have recommended this practice. They have to quote chapter and verse to support this idea. I call this one of the instance of little knowledge let them go behind the book in to the mind of the author who made it. If they drank deeper of the peirian spring they would be compelled to throw away early marriage.
Knowledge is long and life is short and even the ebst of us must be content to have only a little of it. If we could live for hundreds of years instead of few deeds we could not have enough time to acquire all knowledge that there is. All the ills of humanity arise from ignorance. With knowledge we can at least over come ignorance.
A quotation from A-Houseman in which he praise the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is worth pondering over. “Other desire perish in their gratification but the desire of knowledge never the eve is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear filled with hearing, other desires become the occasion of pain through dearth of the material to gratify them but not the desire of knowledge the some of things to be known is inexhaustible and however long we read we shall never come to the end of story books. So long as the mind of man is what is it will continue to excite in advancing on the unknown throughout the infinite field of the universe, and tree of knowledge will remain for ever, as it was in the beginning a tree to be desired to make me wise”.
The above stated facts show that we should not be satisfied with what we have learnt. Because our knowledge is limited and knowledge it self is vast.
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