“The old, old thing, you see! The weak protest of the living.”
He turned over the pages. “He shows a proper feeling, but he’s a little thin…. He says some good things. But—‘The age of Louis XIV, notwithstanding these respectable names, is still vastly, superior.’ Is it? Guess the respectable names that age of Louis XIV could override!—Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, D’Alembert! And now tell me the respectable names of the age of Louis XIV. And the conclusion of the whole matter—
“‘Thus the man who, under the patronage of the great might have done honour to humanity, when only patronized by the bookseller becomes a thing a little superior to the fellow who works at the press.’
“‘The patronage of the great’! ‘Fellow who works at the press’! Goldsmith was a damnably genteel person at times in spite of the ‘Vicar’! It’s printed with the long ‘s,’ you see. It all helps to remind one that times have changed.” …
I followed his careless footsteps into the garden; he went gesticulating before me, repeating, “‘An Inquiry into the State of Polite Learning’! That’s what your ‘Mind of the Race’ means. Suppose one did it now, we should do it differently in every way, from that.”
“Yes, but how should we do it?” said I.
The project had laid hold upon me. I wanted a broad outline of the whole apparatus of thinking and determination in the modern State; something that should bring together all its various activities, which go on now in a sort of deliberate ignorance of one another, which would synthesize research, education, philosophical discussion, moral training, public policy. “There is,” I said, “a disorganized abundance now.”
“It’s a sort of subconscious mind,” said Boon, seeming to take me quite seriously, “with a half instinctive will….”
We discussed what would come into the book. One got an impression of the enormous range and volume of intellectual activity that pours along now, in comparison with the jejune trickle of Goldsmith’s days. Then the world had—what? A few English writers, a few men in France, the Royal Society, the new Berlin Academy (conducting its transactions in French), all resting more or less upon the insecure patronage of the “Great”; a few schools, public and private, a couple of dozen of universities in all the world, a press of which The Gentleman’s Magazine was the brightest ornament. Now——
It is a curious thing that it came to us both as a new effect, this enormously greater size of the intellectual world of to-day. We didn’t at first grasp the implications of that difference, we simply found it necessitated an enlargement of our conception. “And then a man’s thoughts lived too in a world that had been created, lock, stock, and barrel, a trifle under six thousand years ago!…”