He knows that it will not be given to him to
advance very far upon the path, and he half envies those who shall
come after, to whom many things that are dark mysteries to himself
will be clear and plain. But he sees, too, how the dim avenues of
knowledge reach out in every direction, interlacing and combining,
and when he contrasts the tiny powers of the most subtle brain with
all the wide range of law--for the knowledge which is to be, not
invented, but simply discovered, is all assuredly there, secret and
complex as it seems--there is but little room for complacency or
pride. Indeed, I think that a great savant, as a rule, feels that
instead of being separated by his store of knowledge, as by a wide
space that he has crossed, from smaller minds, he is brought closer
to the ignorant by the presence of the vast unknown. Instead of
feeling that he has soared like a rocket away from the ground, he
thinks of himself rather as a flower might think whose head was an
inch or two higher than a great company of similar flowers; he has
perhaps a wider view; he sees the bounding hedgerow, the distant
line of hills, whereas the humbler flower sees little but a forest
of stems and blooms, with the light falling dimly between.
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