As a matter of fact, under present conditions, it represents an
impossible and even undesirable ideal. A man who tried to know
something about everything would end in knowing very little about
anything; and the most exhaustive programme that could be laid down
for the most erudite of savants nowadays would be that he should
know anything about anything, while the most resolute of
specialists must be content with knowing something about something.
A well-informed friend told me, the other day, the name and date of
a man who, he said, could be described as the last person who knew
practically everything at his date that was worth knowing. I have
forgotten both the name and the date and the friend who told me,
but I believe that the learned man in question was a cardinal in
the sixteenth century. At the present time, the problem of the
accumulation of knowledge and the multiplication of books is a very
serious one indeed. It is, however, morbid to allow it to trouble
the mind. Like all insoluble problems, it will settle itself in a
way so obvious that the people who solve it will wonder that any
one could ever have doubted what the solution would be, just as the
problem of the depletion of the world's stock of coal will no doubt
be solved in some perfectly simple fashion.
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