For as long as a man is clumsy with details and free-handed with his “proofs” of things, you may still be able to help him understand a topic better, but you’ll always be working against that unruly undertow in his mind. It can snatch down a point of fact or of logic and wash it out to sea, as if it had never been established in the first place—even as the waves above seem to be running in the right direction.
It can take years for someone to settle down and to learn the value of getting the details and the reasoning just right. And that’s when you can really teach him something, with little fear that he will lose it. For the undisciplined of mind, learning is a matter of easy-come-easy-go, with new information being as likely let go as retained. But the disciplined mind has learned to hold on to what is true—whether in fact or in reason. And he learns how it all fits together. In time, he builds a house from what all he has gathered—a house that the undisciplined could never build, for having let go of so many truths he did not value for what they were.
The one really makes progress as his mind diligently takes in what may be learned in this world, while the progress of the other normally amounts to little more than seeking after possessions and perhaps prestige.
