Of Bramble Bushes and Pierian Springs
American lawyers will be familiar with an old nursery rhyme about a wise man and a bramble bush, since it was used by Karl Llewelyn in a well-known set of lectures describing legal education in the United States:
There was a man in our town
and he was wondrous wise:
he jumped into a BRAMBLE BUSH
and scratched out both his eyes—
and when he saw that he was blind,
with all his might and main
he jumped into another one
and scratched them in again.
This rhyme, particularly when used as a metaphor for education, has the virtue of at least some shock value. It is probably an apt representation of law school, which can be a painful experience, and probably needs to be at least somewhat painful to be effective.
There is another—I think far better, at least if we broaden our sights beyond law school—warning about the dangers of learning in a famous passage from Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism:
A little learning is a dang'rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Here one finds reference to the muses, the Greek goddesses of learning (this reference is more explicit in the following lines). In law, a little bit of learning scratches out one’s eyes; Pope tells us that a little bit of learning is intoxicating. A drunk man, in a sense, is as blind as the man who jumped into the bramble bush: He is often unaware that he is acting foolishly, and needs to sober up to come back to his senses. One who takes a shallow draught may be drunk on that little bit of knowledge and lose sight of his ignorance. Socrates was troubled by the Oracle’s pronouncement that he was the wisest of Greeks, deciding finally that the Oracle had meant that he was aware of what he did not know. Perhaps this is what Pope meant by drinking deeply to become sober again. It is an amusing metaphor in any case. Who ever heard of drinking more in order to become sober? Who, for that matter, ever heard of jumping back in to the bramble bush to scratch one’s eyes back in again?
A little learning can indeed be intoxicating, and that can provide motivation to further plumb the depths of knowledge, whether in science or in the records of the human race. The latter, I think, are grossly underestimated and overlooked as of late. Let’s drink deep, friends!