Mar. 16.
"TiE endeavour of education to keep pace with the rapidly growing Ignorance, appears to be quite hopeless, since there are year by year, 30 many new things of which to. be ignorant. Mankind is confronted by the alternative of choosing content with an ignorance which is universal or of endeavouring. to acquire an ignorance which selective. If one is to give hi voice for u selective ignorance, then he must have or be sivan standard of value by which to measure his judgments of worth. This brings ux back again to the time-old question, what knowledge is of most worth?"
The above quotation from the annual address of President, Nicholas Murray Butler Columbia University brings. to one's mind the essential difference between the scholarship of a day.when it was sufficient in to know one's Aristotle or Confucius, to regarded as a very learned person and the scholarship of to-day: which embraces the entire world and much that is under or above the world, all time if not infinity, all things that exist, all phenomena of nature aiid. the actions of man, As the sum total of Knowledge increases, each dividual can know less in tion to it all.
The omniscient person who knew all there was to know, who could quote every quotable] book, who was in himself a verity able encyclopedia is passed. No tone can any longer know everything even in that field of work which he loves to call his speciality.
There is much talk on both sides of the question to whether the keen specialization of the period in which we live is helpful either to the individual or to the race, but decide this question whichever way we like soon find ourselves. specializ~ ing as much as the veriest expert who speaks a technical slang which no one but his colleagues understands. We are forced to specialize by the speed of the presses, if not by the movement of the times. What intelligent person of the nineteenth century in England had not read the novels of that time, had not dipped into Macaulay and Carlyle, did not wax enthusiastic over one. poet or another. Yet, we live in A day when much worthy liter ture is being produced in many' countries, fiction, essays, poetry, drama, much of which we may only know from reviews or the puffs of the publishers. Again, during the last century who did not take sides as between Mr.
Huxley and his. opponents, who had not argued on Darwin's suggestions, who was not concerned over the Pre-Raphelite Movement. To-day, we almost pass Einstein an invention of the sensational press. We take the technical developments of the radio, the motion picture, aviation, sanitation and all the hosts of science as we take the greatness of the art of our own times, something enjoy if we can utilize, but otherwise to be left strictly alone ay being a sort of private pro-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.