such an enterprise as the title of Sebastian Cabot's joint stock
company suggests: "Merchants Adventurers of England for the discovery
of lands, territories, isles and seignories, unknown."
Indeed no knowledge of the sort that our scientific inductions can
achieve ever will take from life this adventurous element. Scientific
knowledge in these latter decades has grown incalculably; yet for all
that, every child's life is a hazardous experiment, every boy choosing
a calling takes his chances, every friendship is a risky exploration
in the province of personality, and all devotion to moral causes is
just as much a venturesome staking of life on insight and hope as it
was when Garrison attacked slavery or Livingstone landed in Africa. To
one who had acquired not only all extant but all possible knowledge,
as truly as to any man who ever lived, life would be full of hazard
still. He could not certainly know in advance the outcome of a single
important decision of his life. He could not at any moment tell in
what new, strange, challenging, or terrific situation the next hour
might find him. With all his science, he must face each day, as Paul
faced his journey to Rome, "not knowing the things that shall befall
me there" (Acts 20:22).
The reason for this is obvious. Our systematized knowledge is the
arrangement under laws of the experiences which we have already had.
It furnishes invaluable aid in guiding the experiments and
explorations which life continuously forces on us. In every
enterprise, however, we must use not only legs to stand on, but
tentacles as well with which to feel our way forward--intuitions,
insights, hopes, unverified convictions, faith. We project our life
forward as we build a cantilever bridge. Part of the structure is
solidly bolted and thoroughly articulated in a system; but ever beyond
this established portion we audaciously thrust out new beginnings in
eager expectation that from the other side something will come to meet
them. Without this no progress ever would be possible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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