You will not accuse me of underrating your accomplishments.  You know what to do for a child in a fit, for an alderman in an apoplexy, for a girl that has fainted, for a woman in hysterics, for a leg that is broken, for an arm that is out of joint, for fevers of every color, for the sailor’s rheumatism, and the tailor’s cachexy.  In fact you do really know so much at this very hour, that nothing but the searching test of time can fully teach you the limitations of your knowledge.

Of some of these you will permit me to remind you.  You will never have outgrown the possibility of new acquisitions, for Nature is endless in her variety.  But even the knowledge which you may be said to possess will be a different thing after long habit has made it a part of your existence.  The tactus eruditus extends to the mind as well as to the finger-ends.  Experience means the knowledge gained by habitual trial, and an expert is one who has been in the habit of trying.  This is the kind of knowledge that made Ulysses wise in the ways of men.  Many cities had he seen, and known the minds of those who dwelt in them.  This knowledge it was that Chaucer’s Shipman brought home with him from the sea—­

   “In many a tempest had his berd be shake.”

This is the knowledge we place most confidence in, in the practical affairs of life.

Our training has two stages.  The first stage deals with our intelligence, which takes the idea of what is to be done with the most charming ease and readiness.  Let it be a game of billiards, for instance, which the marker is going to teach us.  We have nothing to do but to make this ball glance from that ball and hit that other ball, and to knock that ball with this ball into a certain caecal sacculus or diverticulum which our professional friend calls a pocket.  Nothing can be clearer; it is as easy as “playing upon this pipe,” for which Hamlet gives Guildenstern such lucid directions.  But this intelligent Me, who steps forward as the senior partner in our dual personality, turns out to be a terrible bungler.  He misses those glancing hits which the hard-featured young professional person calls “carroms,” and insists on pocketing his own ball instead of the other one.

It is the unintelligent Me, stupid as an idiot, that has to try a thing a thousand times before he can do it, and then never knows how he does it, that at last does it well.  We have to educate ourselves through the pretentious claims of intellect, into the humble accuracy of instinct, and we end at last by acquiring the dexterity, the perfection, the certainty, which those masters of arts, the bee and the spider, inherit from Nature.

Book-knowledge, lecture-knowledge, examination-knowledge, are all in the brain.  But work-knowledge is not only in the brain, it is in the senses, in the muscles, in the ganglia of the sympathetic nerves,—­all over the man, as one may say, as instinct seems diffused through every part of those lower animals that have no such distinct organ as a brain.  See a skilful surgeon handle a broken limb; see a wise old physician smile away a case that looks to a novice as if the sexton would soon be sent for; mark what a large experience has done for those who were fitted to profit by it, and you will feel convinced that, much as you know, something is still left for you to learn.