“I let him alone because he is a fool.”

“But he is puffed up by the fond impression that you agree with him!”

“That doesn’t hurt me,—­and waste of cellular tissue in such a cause would!”

“Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit?” asks Solomon.  “There is more hope of a fool than of him.”

Which I take to mean that self-conceit is the rankest form of folly, a sort of triple armor of defence against counter-statement and rebutting argument.  So far as my experience goes to prove a disheartening proposition,—­all fools are wise (to themselves) in their own conceit.  The first evidence of true wisdom is humility.  One may be ignorant without being foolish.  Lack of knowledge because the opportunity for acquiring it has been withheld, induces in the human mind such conditions as we find in a sponge that has been cleaned and dried.  Information fills and enlarges the pores.  Ignorance that is content with itself is turgid and saturated.  It will take up no more, no matter what is offered.

This is the form of folly which the preacher admonishes us to answer in kind.  The effort to force the truth upon the charged sponge is an exercise of mental muscle akin to the beating of the air, deprecated by the Apostle to the Gentiles.

“Such stolid stupidity is incredible in a land where education is compulsory!” exclaimed a friend who, having talked himself out of breath in the effort to persuade a rich vulgarian into belief of one of the simplest of philosophical principles, had the mortification of seeing that his opponent actually flattered himself with the idea that he had come off victorious in the wordy skirmish.  “One would have thought that living where he does, and as he does, he would have taken in such knowledge through the pores.”

“Not if the pores were already full,” was a retort that shed new light into the educated mind.

Folly has a law and language of its own with which intelligence intermeddles not.  The workings of an intellect at once untrained and self-sufficient are like the ways of Infinite Wisdom—­past finding out.

Philosophy and politeness harmonize in the effort to meet such intellects upon what they shall not suspect is “made ground.”  To apply to them the rules of conversation and debate you would use in intercourse with equals would be absurd, and disagreeable alike to you and to themselves.  They would never forgive a plain statement of the difference between you and their guild.

As a matter of curious experiment, I made the attempt once, in a case of a handsome dolt, who was, nominally, a domestic in my employ for a few months.  She had an affected pose and tread which she conceived to be majestic.  She was stupid, awkward and slovenly about her work, and altogether so “impossible” that I disliked to send her adrift upon the world, and was still more averse to imposing her upon another household.  In a weak moment I essayed to reason her out of her fatuous vanity, and stimulate in her a desire to make something better of herself.  She seemed to hearken while I represented mildly the expediency of learning to do her part in life well and creditably; how conscience entered into the performance of duties some people considered mean; how, in this country, a washerwoman is as worthy as the President’s wife, so long as she respects herself.