Even Herbert Spencer, in my opinion the greatest mind
that ever lived, was often forced by it into agreeable little
backwaters of inquiry.
I imagine that in the majority of people who are conscious of the
wish to live--that is to say, people who have intellectual
curiosity--the aspiration to exceed formal programmes takes a
literary shape. They would like to embark on a course of reading.
Decidedly the British people are becoming more and more literary.
But I would point out that literature by no means comprises the
whole field of knowledge, and that the disturbing thirst to improve
one's self--to increase one's knowledge--may well be slaked quite
apart from literature. With the various ways of slaking I shall
deal later. Here I merely point out to those who have no natural
sympathy with literature that literature is not the only well.
III
PRECAUTIONS BEFORE BEGINNING
Now that I have succeeded (if succeeded I have) in persuading you to
admit to yourself that you are constantly haunted by a suppressed
dissatisfaction with your own arrangement of your daily life; and
that the primal cause of that inconvenient dissatisfaction is the
feeling that you are every day leaving undone something which you
would like to do, and which, indeed, you are always hoping to do
when you have "more time"; and now that I have drawn your attention
to the glaring, dazzling truth that you never will have "more time,"
since you already have all the time there is--you expect me to let
you into some wonderful secret by which you may at any rate approach
the ideal of a perfect arrangement of the day, and by which,
therefore, that haunting, unpleasant, daily disappointment of things
left undone will be got rid of!
I have found no such wonderful secret.
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