V
Luckily we are not the first human beings. We have come into a
great heritage of interesting things, collected and piled all
about us by the curiousity of past generations. And so our
interest is selective. Our education consists in learning
intelligent choice. Our energies do not clash or compete: each is
free to take his own path to knowledge. Each has that choice,
which is man's alone, of the life he shall live, and finds out
first or last that the art in living is not only to be genuine
and one's own master, but also to learn mastery in perception and
preference. Your true woodsman needs not to follow the dusty
highway through the forest nor search for any path, but goes
straight from glade to glade as if upon an open way, having some
privy understanding with the taller trees, some compass in his
senses. So there is the subtle craft in finding ways for the
mind, too. Keep but your eyes alert and your ears quick, as you
move among men and among books, and you shall find yourself
possessed at last of a new sense, the sense of the pathfinder.
Have you never marked the eyes of a man who has seen the world he
has lived in: the eyes of the sea-captain, who has watched his
life through the changes of the heavens; the eyes of the
huntsman, nature's gossip and familiar; the eyes of the man of
affairs, accustomed to command in moments of exigency? You are at
once aware that they are eyes which can see.
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