The best preventive to this is to get denationalized early. The true
student is a citizen of the world, the allegiance of whose soul, at any
rate, is too precious to be restricted to a single country. The great
minds, the great works transcend all limitations of time, of language,
and of race, and the scholar can never feel initiated into the company
of the elect until he can approach all of life's problems from the
cosmopolitan standpoint. I care not in what subject he may work, the
full knowledge cannot be reached without drawing on supplies from lands
other than his own--French, English, German, American, Japanese,
Russian, Italian--there must be no discrimination by the loyal student
who should willingly draw from any and every source with an open mind
and a stern resolve to render unto all their dues. I care not on what
stream of knowledge he may embark, follow up its course, and the
rivulets that feed it flow from many lands. If the work is to be
effective he must keep in touch with scholars in other countries. How
often has it happened that years of precious time have been given to a
problem already solved or shown to be insoluble, because of the
ignorance of what had been done elsewhere. And it is not only book
knowledge and journal knowledge, but a knowledge of men that is needed.
The student will, if possible, see the men in other lands. Travel not
only widens the vision and gives certainties in place of vague surmises,
but the personal contact with foreign workers enables him to appreciate
better the failings or successes in his own line of work, perhaps to
look with more charitable eyes on the work of some brother whose
limitations and opportunities have been more restricted than his own.
Or, in contact with a mastermind, he may take fire, and the glow of the
enthusiasm may be the inspiration of his life. Concentration must then
be associated with large views on the relation of the problem, and a
knowledge of its status elsewhere; otherwise it may land him in the
slough of a specialism so narrow that it has depth and no breadth, or he
may be led to make what he believes to be important discoveries, but
which have long been current coin in other lands. It is sad to think
that the day of the great polymathic student is at an end; that we may,
perhaps, never again see a Scaliger, a Haller, or a Humboldt--men who
took the whole field of knowledge for their domain and viewed it as from
a pinnacle. And yet a great specializing generalist may arise, who can
tell? Some twentieth-century Aristotle may be now tugging at his bottle,
as little dreaming as are his parents or his friends of a conquest of
the mind, beside which the wonderful victories of the Stagirite will
look pale. The value of a really great student to the country is equal
to half a dozen grain elevators or a new trans-continental railway. He
is a commodity singularly fickle and variable, and not to be grown to
order. So far as his advent is concerned there is no telling when or
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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