The superior student listens to the Way and follows it closely. The average student listens to the Way and follows some and some not. The lesser student listens to the Way and laughs out loud. If there were no laughter it would not be the Way.
Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; and science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,--I call it Dialectic,--which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true.
"I should have more faith," he said; "I ought to know by this time that when a fact appears opposed to a long train of deductions it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation."
Knowing things halfway is a greater success than knowing things completely: it takes things to be simpler than they really are andso makes its opinions more easily understandable and persuasive.
In the scientific world I find just that disinterested devotion to great ends that I hope will spread at last through the entire range of human activity.
For the purpose of knowledge we must know how to make use of the inward current which draws us towards a thing, and also of the current which after a time draws us away from it.
The intellect searches out the Absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God, and without the colors of affection. The intellectual and the active powers seem to succeed each other, and the exclusive activity of the one generates the exclusive activity of the other. There is something unfriendly in each to the other, but they are like the alternate periods of feeding and working in animals; each prepares and will be followed by the other.
For knowing is spoken of in three ways: it may be either universal knowledge or knowledge proper to the matter in hand or actualising such knowledge; consequently three kinds of error also are possible.