The great end of life is not
knowledge but action. What men need is as much knowledge as they
can assimilate and organise into a basis for action; give them
more and it may become injurious. One knows people who are as
heavy and stupid from undigested learning as others are from
over-fulness of meat and drink. But a small percentage of the
population is born with that most excellent quality, a desire for
excellence, or with special aptitude of some sort or another....
Now, the most important object of all educational schemes is to
catch these exceptional people, and turn them to account for the
good of society. No man can say where they will crop up; like
their opposites, the fools and the knaves, they appear sometimes
in the palace, and sometimes in the hovel; but the great thing to
be aimed at, I was almost going to say, the most important end of
all social arrangements, is to keep these glorious sports of
Nature from being either corrupted by luxury or starved by
poverty, and to put them into the position in which they can do
the work for which they are specially fitted.... I weigh my words
when I say that if the nation could purchase a potential Watt or
Davy or Faraday, at the cost of a hundred thousand pounds down,
he would be dirt cheap at the money.
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