ith sincere humility and charity, for the simple reason that the most
erudite specialist at a University becomes aware both of the wide
diversity of knowledge and of his own limitations as well.

Personally, direct bookish talk is my abomination. A knowledge of books
ought to give a man a delicate allusiveness, an aptitude for pointed
quotation. A book ought to be only incidentally, not anatomically,
discussed; and I am pleased to be able to think that there is a good
deal of this allusive talk at the University, and that the only reason
that there is not more is that professional demands are so insistent,
and work so thorough, that academical persons cannot keep up their
general reading as they would like to do.

And then we come to what I have called, for want of a better word, the
ethical motive for reading; it might sound at first as if I meant that
people ought to read improving books, but that is exactly what I do not
mean. I have very strong opinions on this point, and hold that what I
call the ethical motive for reading is the best of all--indeed the only
true one. And yet I find a great difficulty in putting into words what
is a very elusive and delicate thought. But my belief is this. As I
make my slow pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful
mystery seems to gather and grow. I see that many people find the world
dreary--and, indeed, there must be spaces of dreariness in it for us
all--some find it interesting; some surprising; some find it entirely
satisfactory. But those who find it satisfactory seem to me, as a rule,
to be tough, coarse, healthy natures, who find success attractive and
food digestible: who do not trouble their heads very much about other
people, but go cheerfully and optimistically on their way, closing
their eyes as far as possible to things painful and sorrowful, and
getting all the pleasure they can out of material enjoyments.

Well, to speak very sincerely and humbly, such a life seems to me the
worst kind of failure. It is the life that men were living in the days
of Noah, and out of such lives comes nothing that is wise or useful or
good. Such men leave the world as they found it, except for the fact
that they have eaten a little way into it, like a mite into a cheese,
and leave a track of decomposition behind them.

I do not know why so much that is hard and painful and sad is
interwoven with our life here; but I see, or seem to see, that it is
meant to be so int