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Essays on social subjects from the Saturday review
Essays on social subjects from the Saturday review Author:Anne Mozley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: I GNORANCE. THERE are some sorts of ignorance that are evidently not at all disagreeable to, what we will call, their possessors. Indeed, pride in knowledg... more »e might sometimes seem to have given place to pride in ignorance. We are used to hear men boast of knowing nothing on such and such a subject, of being profoundly ignorant on matters which engage the common attention, and of which most people have a smattering; and we have learned to understand, by the obtrusive confession, either that the speaker's time has been better engaged, or that Nature, liberal to him in great things, has inflicted on him some slight defect or incapacity separating him from less gifted men by an idiosyncrasy. Or, it may be, he has such high and superior notions of what constitutes knowledge, that nothing less than entire mastery, amounting to an exclusive possession of a subject, deserves the name, and that everything short of thisis ignorance. Again, there is an honest philosophical ignorance which must be rather pleasant, for it comes of clearness of perception. The very ignorance of certain profound thinkers is impressive, and strikes awe. In fact, there is a form of it that only one of this sort can feel. Owing to the lucidity of his thoughts, the keenness of his apprehension in things which he does understand, he is alive to a strange and startling contrast when by chance he falls on anything that puzzles him. He finds himself pulled up ; he is sensible of having arrived at the traditional millstone ; his reason is consciously at fault, and straightway he lays his finger on the dark spot, and says, " This is ignorance!" In such a confession there can be no shame, in fact, it is not so much he that is ignorant as the human race of which he feels himself the representative. He knows that what ma...« less