de to
see the other facts. The main attribute of the education of the future,
in so far as it obtains to-day, is that it strikes both ways. It strikes
in and makes a man mean something, and having made the man--the main
fact--mean something, it strikes out through the man and makes all other
facts mean something. It makes new facts, and old facts as good as new.
It makes new worlds. All attempts to make a whole world without a single
whole man anywhere to begin one out of are vain attempts. We are going
to have great men again some time, but the science that attempts to
build a civilisation in this twentieth century by subdividing such men
as we already have mocks at itself. The devil is not a specialist and
never will be. He is merely getting everybody else to be, as fast as he
can.

It is safe to say in this present hour of subdivided men and
sub-selected careers that any young man who shall deliberately set out
at the beginning of his life to be interested, at any expense and at all
hazards, in everything, in twenty or thirty years will have the field
entirely to himself. It is true that he will have to run, what every
more vital man has had to run, the supreme risk, the risk of being
either a fool or a seer, a fool if he scatters himself into everything,
a seer if he masses everything into himself. But when he succeeds at
last he will find that for all practical purposes, as things are going
to-day, he will have a monopoly of the universe, of the greatest force
there is in it, the combining and melting and fusing force that brings
all men and all ideas together, making the race one--a force which is
the chief characteristic of every great period and of every great
character that history has known.

It is obvious that whatever may be its dangers, the topical or
scientific point of view in knowledge is one that the human race is not
going to get along without, if it is to be master of the House it lives
in. It is also obvious that the human or artistic, the man-point of view
in knowledge is one that it is not going to get along without, if the
House is to continue to have Men in it.

The question remains, the topical point of view and the artistic point
of view both being necessary, how shall a man contrive in the present
crowding of the world to read with both? Is there any principle in
reading that fuses them both? And if there is, what is it?

VII--Reading the World Together

I

Focusing

There ar