wise passiveness.

In Woodworth's Expostulation and Reply, he talks about feeding our minds with a wise passiveness. To me, that means that we can gain knowledge from things that we personally experience and from the things surrounding us everyday. He says, " They eye it cannot choose but see; we cannot bid the ear be still;" meaning that we are constantly listening and watching what is going on right in front of us and all around us and we are learning from it. So when his friend Matthew asks him why he is just sitting on the grey stone and not reading books to learn something, he responds with telling hiim that he can learn just as much by just sitting on a stone and observing nature and what is going on around him, as he can from a book.

This wise passiveness is almost in a way a sixth sense. It is being open to what is all around you, and still retaining it and learning from it.