It is the relativity of knowledge that dances before the eye, that bewilders, eludes, evades.  Group-systems and electives seem like a makeshift for the real thing.  We cannot tie a fact to a pupil, because to the tail of the fact is tied history itself.  Until a pupil gets a glimpse of that relation, that dependence of which we have just heard, with all that has yet happened in connection with it, he is not yet quite master of his fact.  He recites glibly the date of Thermopylae, and does not know that all Greece is trailing behind his desk.  When, after subsequent research, he knows something of Greece, he discovers Greece to be dovetailed into Rome and Egypt, and they lay hold upon the plain of Shinar and Eden, and the immemorial, prehistoric years.

Ah, no!  We never really know.  Every fact recedes from us, as might an ebbing wave, and leaves us stranded upon an unhorizoned beach, more despairing than before.  Education does not solve the problems of life—­it deepens the mystery.  What, then, may the sage know?  Are there no sages?  And have we all been misinformed?

A sage is one who knows what, in his position of life, is most necessary for him to know.  The larger sage, the great Sage, is the one who knows what is necessary for the race to know.

It is a wrong idea of wisdom, that we must necessarily know what some one else knows.  Wisdom is single-track for each man.  There are in the world those who know how to build aqueducts, and to bake charlotte russe, and to sew trousers.  Aqueducts and tailor work may be alike out of my individual and personal knowledge, yet I may not necessarily be an ignorant man.  The primitive hunter stood in the forest.  For him to be a hunting-sage, was to know the weather, traps, weapons, the times, and the lairs and ways of beasts.  He knew lions and monkeys, the coiled serpent and the serpent that hissed by the ruined wall; the ways of the wolf, the jackal, and the kite; the manners of the bear and the black panther in the jungle-wilds.  Kipling is the brother of that early man:  he is a forest-sage, and would have held his own in other times.

The sea-sage was the one who could toss upon the swan-road without fear.  He knew the strength of oak and ash; the swing of oar, the curve of prow, the dash of wave, and the curling breaker’s sweep.  He knew the maelstroms and the aegir that swept into northern fiords; the thunder and wind and tempest; the coves, safe harbors and retreats.  To-day, the sea-sage rules the fishing-boat, the ocean liner, the coastwise steamers, and the lake-lines of the world.

The fishing-sage knows the ways and haunts of fish.  He is wise in the salmon, the perch, the trout, the tarpon, and the muscalonge.  He says.  To-day the bass will bite on dobsons, but to-morrow we must have frogs.