Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 September 1874 — Possible and Impossible. [ARTICLE]

Possible and Impossible.

A great .deft! of wisdom of a man in this century js shown in leaving things unknown,* a great deal of his practical good sense in leaving things undone. ft is no longer possible to know everything. A universal scholar will be no more seen among men. The range of human knowledge has increased so vastly, has swept out and away so far and so fast, that no brain, be its quantity or quality what it may, can, in the years commonly given to man, even survey the field. A man, therefore, must make up his mind, if he proposes to learn anything, to be content with a profound ignorance of a great many other things. It is a bitter thing, perhaps, but it is the fact, that a man who would know anything in this century must purchase his knowledge with voluntary and chosen ignorance of a hundred other things. One must choose his specialty, and devotion and diligence in that is the price he pays for success. It is with doing as it is with knowing; there is only a certain amount of work in any case. He cannot do everything. Nevertheless, everything needs doing. All about him is undone work clamoring for hands. There are tw o courses before one. To -•—''rii.hc everything, to fret and avieve because thin asd mat is undone, and to make spasmodic efforts to do it—this is the way of failure. Resolutely to make up one’s mind to let, us far as he is concerned, the most that should be done stay undone still, to steel one's heart against demands and neces sities, to resist all inducements, to put forth a single effort, to close one’s eyes to it all, and to stick heart, hand, and life and lo7e to the thing a man undertakes and calls his own- that is the way of success. •' >■ Life is very ihort, and the single brain and hand at be»t very weak, and there are thousands of things to know and to do. One must choose and be' content with hiachoice. And so it comes to pass thft now at last tfe measure of a man’s will be th, amount of his vofunignorance, the wjasure G s his p tical amount of what he is convent to leave>, aattempt d w Ihave said tv is bit**. Rut we must •' *. • . 1 , \v r '

accept a changed world cheerfully. There is no use in fretting. Many a man wears his heart out with regrets pveT things he wknts to do and cannot; here and there one grieves over things he wants to know and cannot. ! A’ Neither God nor man demands impossibilities. The part of all the world’s knowing.or doing that I comes to one’s self is one’s own responsibility, and will be borne effectively and happily as one resolutely shuts his eyes to the enormous mass of things he cannot know and cannot do. Let others look to these. — Christian Journal.