Consider how incalculably important becomes the question of proportion in our knowledge, and how that which we are is dependent as much upon our ignorance as our science. What we call ignorance is only a smaller proportion--what we call science only a larger. The larger quantity is recommended as an unquestionable good, but the goodness of it is entirely dependent on the mental product that we want. Aristocracies have always instinctively felt this, and have decided that a gentleman ought not to know too much of certain arts and sciences. The character which they had accepted as their ideal would have been destroyed by indiscriminate additions to those ingredients of which long experience had fixed the exact proportions. The same feeling is strong in the various professions: there is an apprehension that the disproportionate knowledge may destroy the professional nature. The less intelligent members of the profession will tell you that they dread an unprofessional use of time; but the more thoughtful are not so apprehensive about hours and days, _they_ dread that sure transformation of the whole intellect which follows every increase of knowledge. I knew an English author who by great care and labor had succeeded in forming a style which harmonized quite perfectly with the character of his thinking, and served as an unfailing means of communication with his readers. Every one recognized its simple ease and charm, and he might have gone on writing with that enviable facility had he not determined to study Locke's philosophical compositions. Shortly afterwards my friend's style suddenly lost its grace; he began to write with difficulty, and what he wrote was unpleasantly difficult to read. Even the thinking was no longer his own thinking. Having been in too close communication with a writer who was not a literary artist, his own art had deteriorated in consequence. I could mention an English landscape painter who diminished the pictorial excellence of his works by taking too much interest in geology. His landscapes became geological illustrations, and no longer held together pictorially. Another landscape painter, who began by taking a healthy delight in the beauty of natural scenery, became morbidly religious after an illness, and thenceforth passed by the loveliest European scenery as comparatively unworthy of his attention, to go and make ugly pictures of places that had sacred associations. For people who produce nothing these risks appear to be less serious; and yet there have been admirable characters, not productive, whose admirableness might have been lessened by the addition of certain kinds of learning. The last generation of the English country aristocracy was particularly rich in characters whose unity and charm was dependent upon the limitations of their culture, and which would have been entirely altered, perhaps not for the better, by simply knowing a science or a literature that was closed to them.