"[E]verything which a man fails to pursue for its own sake is but half-pursued; and true excellence... can be attained only where... produced for its own sake alone, and not as a means to further ends. ...[N]o one will ever succeed in doing anything really great and original... who does not seek to acquire knowledge for himself, and... decline to trouble himself about the knowledge of others... [E]rudition means endowing... with a great mass of alien thought... So we find Sterne in his Tristram Shandy, boldly asserting that an ounce of a man's own wit is worth a ton of other people's. ...[T]he most profound erudition is no more akin to genius than a collection of dried plants is like Nature, with its constant flow of new life, ever fresh, ever young, ever changing. There are no two things more opposed than the childish naïvety of an ancient author and the learning of his commentator."