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to be used by everybody. It is because we think that they were, mostly,
that we have come to our present, modern, heartlessly-cordial fashion of
knowing people--knowing people by parlourfuls--whole parlourfuls at a
time. "Is thy servant a whale?" said my not unsociable soul to me. "Is
one to be fed with one's kind as if they were animalculae, as if they had
to be taken in the bulk if one were really to get something?" It is
heartless and shallow enough. Who is not weary of it? No one knows
anybody nowadays. He merely knows everybody. He falls before The
Reception Room. A reception room is a place where we set people up in
rows like pickets on a fence to know them. Then like the small boy with
a stick, one tap per picket, we run along knowing people. No one comes
in touch with any one. It is getting so that there is hardly any
possible way left in our modern life for knowing people except by
marrying them. One cannot even be sure of that, when one thinks how
married people are being driven about by books and by other people.
Society is a crowd of crowds mutually destroying each other and
literature is a crowd of books all shutting each other up, and the law
seems to be either selection or annihilation, whether in reading or
living. The only way to love everybody in this world seems to be to pick
out a few in it, delegates of everybody, and use these few to read with,
and to love and understand the world with, and to keep close to it, all
one's days.

The higher form one's facts are put in in this world the fewer one
needs. To know twelve extremely different souls utterly, to be able to
borrow them at will, turn them on all knowledge, bring them to bear at a
moment's notice on anything one likes, is to be an educated, masterful
man in the most literal possible sense. Except in mere matters of
physical fact, things which are small enough to be put in encyclopedias
and looked up there, a man with twelve deeply loved or deeply pitied
souls woven into the texture of his being can flash down into almost any
knowledge that he needs, or go out around almost any ignorance that is
in his way, through all the earth. The shortest way for an immortal soul
to read a book is to know and absorb enough other immortal souls, and
get them to help. Any system of education which like our present
prevailing one is so vulgar, so unpsychological, as to overlook the soul
as the organ and method of knowledge, which fails to see that the
knowle