The Pleasures of Ignorance | Page 3

the
male, and not the female, cuckoo that sings. I may have to learn again
not to call the campion a wild geranium, and to rediscover whether the
ash comes early or late in the etiquette of the trees. A contemporary
English novelist was once asked by a foreigner what was the most
important crop in England. He answered without a moment's hesitation:
"Rye." Ignorance so complete as this seems to me to be touched with
magnificence; but the ignorance even of illiterate persons is enormous.
The average man who uses a telephone could not explain how a
telephone works. He takes for granted the telephone, the railway train,
the linotype, the aeroplane, as our grandfathers took for granted the
miracles of the gospels. He neither questions nor understands them. It
is as though each of us investigated and made his own only a tiny circle
of facts. Knowledge outside the day's work is regarded by most men as
a gewgaw. Still we are constantly in reaction against our ignorance. We
rouse ourselves at intervals and speculate. We revel in speculations
about anything at all--about life after death or about such questions as
that which is said to have puzzled Aristotle, "why sneezing from noon
to midnight was good, but from night to noon unlucky." One of the
greatest joys known to man is to take such a flight into ignorance in
search of knowledge. The great pleasure of ignorance is, after all, the
pleasure of asking questions. The man who has lost this pleasure or
exchanged it for the pleasure of dogma, which is the pleasure of
answering, is already beginning to stiffen. One envies so inquisitive a
man as Jowett, who sat down to the study of physiology in his sixties.
Most of us have lost the sense of our ignorance long before that age.
We even become vain of our squirrel's hoard of knowledge and regard
increasing age itself as a school of omniscience. We forget that
Socrates was famed for wisdom not because he was omniscient but
because he realised at the age of seventy that he still knew nothing.

II

THE HERRING FLEET

The last spectacle of which Christian men are likely to grow tired is a
harbour. Centuries hence there may be jumping-off places for the stars,
and our children's children's and so forth children may regard a ship as
a creeping thing scarcely more adventurous than a worm. Meanwhile,
every harbour gives us a sense of being in touch, if not with the ends of
the universe, with the ends of the earth. This, more than the entrance to
a wood or the source of a river or the top of a bald hill, is the beginning
of infinity. Even the dirtiest coal-boat that lies beached in the harbour, a
mere hulk of utilities that are taken away by dirty men in dirty carts,
will in a day or two lift itself from the mud on a full tide and float away
like a spirit into the sunset or curtsy to the image of the North Star.
Mystery lies over the sea. Every ship is bound for Thule. That, perhaps,
is why men are content day after day to stand on the pier-head and to
gaze at the water and the ships and sailors running up and down the
decks and pulling the ropes of sails.
We may have no reason for pretending to ourselves that the
fishing-boats are ships of dreams setting out on infinite voyages. But,
none the less, even in a fishing village there is always a congregation of
watching men and women on the pier. Every day the crowd collects to
see the harbour awake into life with the bustle of men about to set out
among the nations of the fishes. By day the boats lie side by side in the
harbour--stand side by side, rather, like horses in a stable. There are
two rows of them, making a camp of masts on the shallow water. In
other parts of the harbour white gigs are bottomed on the sand in
companies of two and three. As the tide slowly rises, the masts which
have been lying over on one side in a sleepy stillness begin to stir, then
to sway, until with each new impulse of the sea all the boats are
dancing, and soon the whole harbour is awake and merry as if every
mast were a steeple with a peal of bells. It is not long till the fishermen
arrive. One meets them in every cobbled lane. How magnificent the
noise made by a man in sea-boots on the stones! Surely, he strikes
sparks from the road. He thumps the ground as with a hammer. The
earth rings. One has seen those boots in the