man who, desiring
to reach Mecca, and harried by the desire to reach Mecca, never leaves
Brixton.

It is something to have left Brixton. Most of us have not left
Brixton. We have not even taken a cab to Ludgate Circus and inquired
from Cook's the price of a conducted tour. And our excuse to ourselves
is that there are only twenty-four hours in the day.

If we further analyse our vague, uneasy aspiration, we shall, I think,
see that it springs from a fixed idea that we ought to do something in
addition to those things which we are loyally and morally obliged to
do. We are obliged, by various codes written and unwritten, to
maintain ourselves and our families (if any) in health and comfort, to
pay our debts, to save, to increase our prosperity by increasing our
efficiency. A task sufficiently difficult! A task which very few of
us achieve! A task often beyond our skill! Yet, if we succeed in it,
as we sometimes do, we are not satisfied; the skeleton is still with us.

And even when we realise that the task is beyond our skill, that our
powers cannot cope with it, we feel that we should be less discontented
if we gave to our powers, already overtaxed, something still further to
do.

And such is, indeed, the fact. The wish to accomplish something
outside their formal programme is common to all men who in the course
of evolution have risen past a certain level.

Until an effort is made to satisfy that wish, the sense of uneasy
waiting for something to start which has not started will remain to
disturb the peace of the soul. That wish has been called by many names.
It is one form of the universal desire for knowledge. And it is so
strong that men whose whole lives have been given to the systematic
acquirement of knowledge have been driven by it to overstep the limits
of their programme in search of still more knowledge. 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 s