"
But is it possible for us to give ourselves to any serious and lasting
work, forgetting the vast mystery of the universe and abandoning all
attempt to understand it? Is it possible to contemplate the vast All
with a serene soul, in the spirit of the Lucretian piety, if we are
conscious of the thought that a time must come when this All will no
longer be reflected in any human consciousness?
Cain, in Byron's poem, asks of Lucifer, the prince of the intellectuals,
"Are ye happy?" and Lucifer replies, "We are mighty." Cain questions
again, "Are ye happy?" and then the great Intellectual says to him: "No;
art thou?" And further on, this same Lucifer says to Adah, the sister
and wife of Cain: "Choose betwixt love and knowledge--since there is no
other choice." And in the same stupendous poem, when Cain says that the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a lying tree, for "we know
nothing; at least it promised knowledge at the price of death," Lucifer
answers him: "It may be death leads to the highest knowledge"--that is
to say, to nothingness.
To this word _knowledge_ which Lord Byron uses in the above quotations,
the Spanish _ciencia_, the French _science_, the German _Wissenschaft_,
is often opposed the word _wisdom, sabiduria, sagesse, Weisheit_.
Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,
Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest,
says another lord, Tennyson, in his _Locksley Hall_.
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