It is a great and prevalent mistake to imagine that a Cogitative mind (and Nose) is to be acquired by reading alone. It is almost certain that, as books multiply, Cogitative Minds decrease, for how is a man to think, if all his thinking is done for him? The mind, when constantly supplied with extraneous thoughts must, without great care, lose the habit of generating internal ones. All the greatest thinkers have been the first in their department of thought. Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakspere, Bacon, &c. These men, as compared with even mediocre men in our day, had very little learning,—but they had vast wisdom. Read Bacon’s Novum Organum and Sylva for instance, and see how few facts there are in them but such as are either now known to, or laughed at, by every school-boy; yet direct your attention to the train of thought, to the generalizations from these simple facts, to the originality of the deductions, and behold how the dwarf in Knowledge becomes a giant in Wisdom! It is even true that Bacon was behind his cotemporaries in many matters of mere knowledge; yet the majesty of his wisdom was so vast that it still rules, and ever must rule, the world of science. So, as on the one hand, a man may have wisdom and yet want knowledge; on the other, he may have all knowledge and be able to discourse of all things, from the hyssop to the cedar, and yet want wisdom. It is of no use to read and accumulate facts if we do not also _think_. Better indeed to think and never read, than read and not think. If a man does not think for himself, if he does not originate ideas, if books are not to him _only_ the elements of thought, if he is not fully and immoveably impressed with the conviction that two and two make five, or any greater number which the Cogitative Mind can evolve, he has no chance of becoming a wise man, whatever his learning, and however profound his acquaintance with the thoughts of other men. But you reply, two and two do not, and cannot make five, &c. We rejoin, they as certainly and unquestionably do in metaphysics, as they certainly and unquestionably do not in physics. True, in physics, two and two things, two and two facts make four, and only four; but if the mind, when in possession of those four, can generate nothing more from them, it is a hopeless case with that mind. If, upon the recipience of such four facts the mind remains contented with the arithmetical fact that, from four units it has segregated four, it is, and for ever will, remain stationary; it has gained nothing, and might as well have left those four facts in their original units, for their addition has not added to it one particle of wisdom.