Of Pedantry

I have been often vexed to see, in the comedies of Terence and Plautus, that the pedants who appear in them are always made ridiculous and odious characters; and yet there is great reason in it. These men have been at school twenty years, and have come out of it no wiser than they went in. They have loaded themselves with memory, and left their understanding empty. The letters they have conned have not improved their judgment by a scruple.

Chrysippus himself, the great Stoic, wrote so much that libraries groaned with his books — yet those who read him found they had to work through a thicket of repetition and qualification to arrive at very little. His erudition was prodigious; his wisdom, debatable. There are men like him in every age: men who have read everything and digested nothing, who can cite authorities and cannot draw conclusions, who have words for every situation and sense for none.

“We toil and labour to stuff the memory, and in the meantime leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.”

The true end of study is not to increase the quantity of what one knows but to improve the quality of how one thinks. A man who has read widely but has not changed his way of seeing has not truly read at all — he has merely stored. The pedant stores; the educated man uses. The distinction is not one of volume but of movement: does the knowledge flow from books into the mind, transforming it, or does it simply accumulate like sand?

I would far rather have a man who knows five things with understanding than a man who knows five hundred things by rote. The first can reason, can apply, can venture an opinion under pressure and stand by it. The second is a walking index — useful, perhaps, for reference, but no companion in difficulty. Learning, to be worth anything, must be reborn in the learner.