So, as on the one hand, a man may have wisdom and yet want knowledge; on the other, he may have all knowledge and be able to discourse of all things, from the hyssop to the cedar, and yet want wisdom. It is of no use to read and accumulate facts if we do not also _think_. Better indeed to think and never read, than read and not think. If a man does not think for himself, if he does not originate ideas, if books are not to him _only_ the elements of thought, if he is not fully and immoveably impressed with the conviction that two and two make five, or any greater number which the Cogitative Mind can evolve, he has no chance of becoming a wise man, whatever his learning, and however profound his acquaintance with the thoughts of other men.
But you reply, two and two do not, and cannot make five, &c. We rejoin, they as certainly and unquestionably do in metaphysics, as they certainly and unquestionably do not in physics. True, in physics, two and two things, two and two facts make four, and only four; but if the mind, when in possession of those four, can generate nothing more from them, it is a hopeless case with that mind. If, upon the recipience of such four facts the mind remains contented with the arithmetical fact that, from four units it has segregated four, it is, and for ever will, remain stationary; it has gained nothing, and might as well have left those four facts in their original units, for their addition has not added to it one particle of wisdom.
Facts are, or ought to be, only the generators of ideas. Facts in themselves are utterly worthless; it is in their associations, in their consequences, their bearings on each other; it is as they support or refute systems, theories and other mind-born facts, that they are of value. Now, it is only by the action of mind upon them that they have associations, consequences, &c. Without mind, facts must for ever remain units; even though added together, _ad infinitum_, they have no natural co-unity, no cohesion, no affinity for each other. A thousand facts added together are still but a thousand units, unless mind has cohered them into a system. This done, you clearly have the thousand facts still, but you have _also_ something infinitely more valuable, you have a mind-born fact, a deduction, a system, hypothesis, theory, axiom, or whatever you please to call it.