And yet, with regard to Knowledge, the very opposite of
this is what we do. We store the whole religiously, and that
though not twice alone, as with the bees in Virgil, but
scores of times in every year, is the teeming produce
gathered in. And then we put a fearful pressure on
ourselves and others to gorge of it as much as ever we can
hold.

_Facit indignatio versus._ My author, gathering heat, puts it
somewhat dithyrambically: but there you have it, Gentlemen.

If you crave for Knowledge, the banquet of Knowledge grows and
groans on the board until the finer appetite sickens. If, still
putting all your trust in Knowledge, you try to dodge the
difficulty by specialising, you produce a brain bulging out
inordinately on one side, on the other cut flat down and mostly
paralytic at that: and in short so long as I hold that the
Creator has an idea, of a man, so long shall I be sure that no
uneven specialist realises it. The real tragedy of the Library at
Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but
that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate.

VIII

The old schoolmaster whom I quoted just now goes on:

I believe, if the truth were known, men would be
astonished at the small amount of learning with which a
high degree of culture is compatible. In a moment of enthusiasm
I ventured once to tell my 'English set' that if they could