elicious:

The larger quantity is recommended as an unquestionable
good, but the goodness of it is entirely dependent _on the
mental product that we want._ Aristocracies have always
instinctively felt this, and have decided that a gentleman
ought not to know too much of certain arts and sciences. The
character which they had accepted as their ideal would have
been destroyed by indiscriminate additions to those
ingredients of which long experience had fixed the exact
proportions....

The last generation of the English country aristocracy
was particularly rich in characters whose unity and charm
was dependent upon the limitations of their culture, and
which would have been entirely altered, perhaps not for the
better, by simply knowing a science or a literature that was
dosed to them.

If anything could be funnier than that, it is that it is, very
possibly, true. Let us end our quest-by-commonsense, for the
moment, on this; that to read all the books that have been
written---in short to keep pace with those that are being
written--is starkly impossible, and (as Aristotle would say)
about what is impossible one does not argue. We _must_ select.
Selection implies skilful practice. Skilful practice is only
another term for Art. So far plain common-sense leads us. On this
point, then, let us set up a rest and hark back.

II

Let us cast back to the three terms of my first lecture--_What
does, What knows, What is._

I shall here take leave to recapitulate a brief argument much
sneered at a few years ago when it was still fashionable to
consider Hegel a greater philosopher than Plato. Abbreviating it
I repeat it, because I believe in it yet to-day, when Hegel (for
causes unconnected with pure right and wrong) has gone somewhat
out of fashion for a while.

As the tale, then, is told by Plato, in the tenth book of "The
Republic", one Er the son of Armenius, a Pamphylian, was slain in
battle; and ten days afterwards, when they collected the dead for
burial, his body alone showed no taint of corruption. His
relatives, however, bore it off to the funeral pyre; and on the
twelfth day, lying there, he returned to life, and he told them
what he had seen in the other world. Many wonders he related
concerning the dead, for example, with their rewards and
punishments: but what had impressed him as most wonderful of all
was the great spindle of Necessity, reaching up to Heaven, with
the planets r