Throwing Away Experience

IN THE pungent phrasing of Benjamin Franklin: “Experience is a dear school, but a fool can learn in no other.” These words suggest two ways by which we learn the lessons of life: by our own experience and by the experience of others. The experience of others is a great heritage, and the more we learn from it the less of life we waste. For example, if every scientist insisted on going back to the beginning to perform all the experiments that all his predecessors had performed, there would be little or no progress in science. Life would be wasted in proving what had already been proved. If every explorer were to discard all maps and ignore all previous exploration, there would be little or no new discovery. Life would be wasted in finding what has already been found. Men of old have left us comparatively little that is tangible, but they have left us much that is invaluable: the great treasure of their experience, the great heritage of revealed and discovered truth. Jesus of Nazareth, for example, left us no tangibles. History does not record that he owned any. But he left us a way of life that has within it the answers to the human problems that beset this and every other generation. But, to speak in the vernacular, in many things we seem to insist on “starting from scratch” again and again. And often in bruised belligerency we beat our way through life, extravagantly proving what multitudes of men have proved many times before, foolishly fumbling and faltering where others have fumbled and faltered. If we don’t actually throw away the maps, at least it would often seem that we choose to ignore them. We look with puzzled pity upon the prodigal son who wantonly wasted inherited property. But deliberately throwing away experience from reliable sources is of the same cloth and color as deliberately throwing away tangibles. And if youth were always to disregard all that their parents or progenitors have learned, all that all men have proved about life, it would but mean the needless multiplying of many mistakes.