of flying at will through space would probably extinguish civilisation
and society, for it would release us from the wholesome bondage of place
and rest. The power of hearing every word that had ever been uttered on
this planet would annihilate thought, as the power of knowing all
recorded facts by the process of turning a handle would annihilate true
science. Our human faculties and our mental forces are not enlarged
simply by multiplying our materials of knowledge and our facilities for
communication. Telephones, microphones, pantoscopes, steam-presses, and
ubiquity-engines in general may, after all, leave the poor human brain
panting and throbbing under the strain of its appliances, no bigger and
no stronger than the brains of the men who heard Moses speak, and saw
Aristotle and Archimedes pondering over a few worn rolls of crabbed
manuscript. Until some new Gutenberg or Watt can invent a machine for
magnifying the human mind, every fresh apparatus for multiplying its
work is a fresh strain on the mind, a new realm for it to order and to
rule.

And so, I say it most confidently, the first intellectual task of our
age is rightly to order and make serviceable the vast realm of printed
material which four centuries have swept across our path. To organise
our knowledge, to systematise our reading, to save, out of the
relentless cataract of ink, the immortal thoughts of the greatest--this
is a necessity, unless the productive ingenuity of man is to lead us at
last to a measureless and pathless chaos. To know anything that turns up
is, in the infinity of knowledge, to know nothing. To read the first
book we come across, in the wilderness of books, is to learn nothing. To
turn over the pages of ten thousand volumes is to be practically
indifferent to all that is good.

But this warns me that I am entering on a subject which is far too big