There was no more space for the chronicles and, what was worse, there was no more space in which anything could happen at all, the whole land had become one vast cancerous growth of chronicles, chronicles, chronicles, nothing but chronicles.
The catalogue of the Browne medals alone will in time come to occupy several hundreds of pages in the University Calendar.
There was a professor who was looked upon as such a valuable man because he had done more than any other living person to suppress any kind of originality.
“It is not our business,” he used to say, “to help students to think for themselves—surely this is the very last thing that one who wishes them well would do by them. Our business to make them think as we do, or at any rate as we consider expedient to say we do.”
He was President of the Society for the Suppression of Useless Knowledge and for the Complete Obliteration of the Past.
They have professional mind-dressers, as we have hair-dressers, and before going out to dinner or fashionable At-homes, people go and get themselves primed with smart sayings or moral reflections according to the style which they think will be most becoming to them in the kind of company they expect.
They deify as God something which I can only translate by a word as underivable as God—I mean Gumption. But it is part of their religion that there should be no temple to Gumption, nor are there priests or professors of Gumption—Gumption being too ineffable to hit the sense of human definition and analysis.
They hold that the function of universities is to make learning repellent and thus to prevent its becoming dangerously common. And they discharge this beneficent function all the more efficiently because they do it unconsciously and automatically. The professors think they are advancing healthy intellectual assimilation and digestion when they are in reality little better than cancer on the stomach.
Let them be afflicted by an epidemic of the fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease. Enumerate its symptoms. There is a new discovery whereby the invisible rays that emanate from the soul can be caught and all the details of a man’s spiritual nature, his character, disposition, principles, &c. be photographed on a plate as easily as his face or the bones of his hands, but no cure for the f. o. g. th. a. disease has yet been discovered.
They have a company for ameliorating the condition of those who are in a future state, and for improving the future state itself.