§ 15. There are three ways in which the model-book may be studied. 1st, it may be read through rapidly again and again, which was Ratke’s plan and Hamilton’s; or, 2nd, each lesson may be thoroughly mastered, read in various ways a dozen times at the least, which was Ascham’s plan; or, 3rd, the pupil may begin always at the beginning, and advance a little further each time, which was Jacotot’s plan.[182] This last, could not, of course, be carried very far The repetitions, when the pupil had got on some way in the book, could not always be from the beginning; still every part was to be repeated so frequently that _nothing could be forgotten_. Jacotot did not wish his pupils to learn simply in order to forget, but to learn in order to remember for ever. “We are learned,” said he, “not so far as we have learned, but only so far as we remember.” He seems, indeed, almost to ignore the fact that the act of learning serves other purposes than that of making learned, and to assert that to forget is the same as never to have learned, which is a palpable error. We necessarily forget much that passes through our minds, and yet its effect remains. All grown people have arrived at some opinions, convictions, knowledge, but they cannot call to mind every spot they trod on in the road thither. When we have read a great history, say, or travelled through a fresh country, we have gained more than the number of facts we happen to remember. The mind seems to have formed an acquaintance with that history or that country, which is something different from the mere acquisition of facts. Moreover, our interests, as well as our ideas, may long survive the memory of the facts which originally started them. We are told that one of the old judges, when a barrister objected to some dictum of his, put him down by the assertion, “Sir, I have forgotten more law than ever you read.” If he wished to make the amount forgotten a measure of the amount remembered, this was certainly fallacious, as the ratio between the two is not a constant quantity. But he may have meant that this extensive reading had left its result, and that he could see things from more points of view than the less travelled legal vision of his opponent. That _power_ acquired by learning may also last longer than the knowledge of the thing learned is sufficiently obvious. So the advantages derived from having learnt a thing are not entirely lost when the thing itself is forgotten.[183]