Lighting up the Mist.

February 27.

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance. For what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?

Which is the best man to deal with,—he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?

A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful,—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge.

The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.

I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before,—a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.

It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot know in any higher sense than this.

H.D. Thoreau, Walking (1861) 

See February 27, 1851("I do not know that knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise, or a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we had called knowledge before; an indefinite sense of the grandeur and glory of the universe. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. But man cannot be said to know in any higher sense,  than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun.")