The aim of education or culture is merely the development of good taste in knowledge and good form. in conduct. The cultured man or the ideal educated man is not necessarily one who is well-read or learned, but one who likes and dislikes the right things. To know what to love and what to hate is to have taste in knowledge. 1. I have met such persons, and found that there was no topic that might come up in the course of the conversation concerning which they did not have some facts or figures to produce, but whose points of view were appalling. Such persons have erudition (the quality of being knowledgeable), but no discernment; or taste. Erudition is a mere matter of stuffing facts or information, while taste or discernment is a matter of artistic judgment. 2. In speaking of a scholar, the Chinese generally distinguish between a man's scholarship, conduct, and taste or discernment. This is particularly so with regard to historians; a book of history may be written with the most thorough scholarship, yet be totally lacking in insight or discernment, and in the judgment or interpretation of persons and events in history, the author may show no originality or depth of understanding. Such a person, we say, has no taste in knowledge. To be well-informed, or to accumulate facts and details, is the easiest of all things. 3. There are many facts in a given historical period that can be easily stuffed into our mind, but discernment in the selection of significant facts is a vastly more difficult thing and depends upon one's point of view.
An educated man, therefore, is one who has the right loves and hatreds. This we call taste, and with taste comes charm. 4. Now to have taste or discernment requires a capacity for thinking things through to the bottom, an independence of judgment, and an unwillingness to be knocked down by any form. of fraud, social, political, literary, artistic, or academic. There is no doubt that we are surrounded in our adult life with a wealth of frauds: fame frauds, wealth frauds, patriotic frauds, political frauds, religious frauds and fraud poets, fraud artists, fraud dictators and frauds psychologists. When a psychoanalyst tells us that the performing of the functions of the bowels during childhood has a definite connection or that constipation leads to stinginess of character, all that a man with taste can do is to feel amused. 5. When a man is wrong, he is wrong, and there is no need for one to be impressed and overawed by a great name or by the number of books that he has read and we haven't.