corated with golden stars, that were the joy of Early Victorian
chimney-pieces, and now hold spills in the second-best spare bedroom.
But like the psalmist's enemies, platitudes live and are mighty. They
remain, and, alas! they have the force of arguments in the minds
of sturdy unreflective men, who describe themselves as plain,
straightforward people, and whose opinions carry weight in a community
whose feelings are swayed by the statements of successful men rather
than by the conclusions of reasonable men.

One of these pernicious platitudes is the statement that every one ought
to know something about everything and everything about something. It
has a speciously epigrammatic air about it, dazzling enough to persuade
the common-sense person that it is an intellectual judgment.

As a matter of fact, under present conditions, it represents an
impossible and even undesirable ideal. A man who tried to know something
about everything would end in knowing very little about anything; and
the most exhaustive programme that could be laid down for the most
erudite of savants nowadays would be that he should know anything about
anything, while the most resolute of specialists must be content with
knowing something about something.

A well-informed friend told me, the other day, the name and date of
a man who, he said, could be described as the last person who knew
practically everything at his date that was worth knowing. I have
forgotten both the name and the date and the friend who told me, but I
believe that the learned man in question was a cardinal in the sixteenth
century. At the present time, the problem of the accumulation of
knowledge and the multiplication of books is a very serious one indeed.
It is, however, morbid to allow it to trouble the mind. Like all
insoluble problems, it will settle itself in a way so obvious that the
people who solve it will wonder that any one could ever have doubted
what the solution would be, just as the problem of the depletion of the
world's stock of coal will no doubt be solved in some perfectly simple
fashion.

The dictum in question is generally quoted as an educational formula in
favour of giving every one what is called a sound general education.
And it is probably one of the contributory causes which account for the
present chaos of curricula. All subjects are held to be so important,
and each subject is thought by its professors to be so peculiarly
adapted for educational st