TEXT A His ignorance was as
remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and
politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he
inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise
reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the
Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar system.
"You appear to be astonished," Holmes said, smiling at my expression. "Now
that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it. You see, I consider that a
man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it
with such furniture as you choose: A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort
that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets
crowded out, or at best jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has
difficulty in laying his hand upon it. It is a mistake to think that the little
room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it, there
comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you
know before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless
facts elbowing out the useful ones." "But the Solar System!" I
protested. "What the deuce is it to me" he interrupted
impatiently. One morning, I picked up a magazine from the table
and attempted to while away the time with it, while my companion munched
silently at his toast. One of the articles had a pencil mark at the heading, and
I naturally began to run my eye through it. Its somewhat
ambitious title was "The Book of Life," and it attempted to show how much an
observant man might learn by an accurate and systematic examination of all that
came in his way. It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of shrewdness
and of absurdity. The reasoning was close and intense, but the deduction
appeared to me to be far-fetched and exaggerated. The writer claimed by a
momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a
man’s inmost thought. Deceit, according to him, was impossibility in the case of
one trained to observation and analysis. His conclusions were as infallible as
so many propositions of Euclid. So startling would his results appear to the
uninitiated that until they learned the processes by which he had arrived at
them they might well consider him as a necromancer. "From a drop
of water, "said the writer, "a logician could infer the possibility of an
Atlantic. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we
are shown a single link of it. Like all other arts, the science of Deduction and
Analysis is one which can be acquired by long and patient study, nor is life
long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in
it." This smartly written piece of theory I could not accept
until a succession of evidences justified it. What was the Holmes’ idea about knowledge-learning
A.Learning what every body learned. B.Learning what was useful to you. C.Learning whatever you came across. D.Learning what was different to you.