ESSAYS 683 



In books our knowledge to date is rounded up and displayed ; you may read a 

 book on a lump of coal, a grass blade, a sea worm, on hair combs, carpets, ships, 

 sticks, sealing-wax, cabbages, kings, cosmetics, Kant. A very thick volume 

 indeed was published last year upon the thorax of a field cricket. It would require 

 a learned man to catalogue the literature that deals with such comparatively trivial 

 subjects as the History of the Punch and Judy Show, or the History of Playing 

 Cards. 



At the present rapid rate of accumulation, the time must come when the 

 British Museum, thousands of years hence, will occupy an area as large as London, 

 and the Encyclopedia Britannica be housed in a building as big as the Crystal 

 Palace ; an accumulation of learning to make Aristotle and Scaliger turn pale. 



For let us not forget that man is only at the beginning of things. The first 

 Egyptian dynasty began 7000 B.C. and we are now only in A.D. 1917. Every day 

 sees the birth of entirely new things that must be collected and preserved, new 

 babies, new battles, new books, new discoveries, so that — to take a moderate figure 

 — by a.d'. 3000 we shall have saved up such a prodigious quantity of the relics 

 and minutise of the past, that only a relatively small fraction of it will be contained 

 in the united consciousness of the men of that time. Everything will be there 

 and accessible, but for reference only. Knowledge will be an amazing organisation 

 (let us hope it will be done better than the Poor Law system), and battalions of 

 men of the intellectual lineage of Diderot and D'Alembert will be continuously 

 occupied in sifting and arranging our stores of information whereby the curious by 

 handing a query over the counter will be given all the knowledge in existence in 

 any particular subject. Yet for the most part human knowledge will be left 

 stranded high and dry in books — entombed, embalmed, labelled and clean for- 

 gotten—unless the human brain becomes hypertrophied. 



Conservation is a natural tendency of the mind. One might lay down a certain 

 law of the conservation of consciousness to indicate our extreme repugnance to 

 the idea of anything passing clean away into the void. What insinuating comfort 

 in those words that every hair of our heads is numbered ! 



True, the chain of causation is unbroken and in a sense every effect is the 

 collection and preservation of all its past courses, and if to live can be said to exist 

 in results, then no man ever dies and no thought can perish, and every act is 

 infinite in its consequences. Yet I fancy this transcendental flourish will not 

 satisfy the brotherhood of Salvationists who desire to possess something more than 

 the means embodied abstractly in the result, nor will it cause them to abate one jot 

 their feverish labours to forestall their common enemies — cormorant-devouring 

 Time, man's own leaky memory, Death's abhorred shears, the Futurist, the Hun, 

 the Vandal, the carrion-worm or the Devil. 



The instinct for conservation in different men has different origins. To the 

 scientific man, Nature is higgledy-piggledy until she is collected, classified, stored, 

 and explained according to his own scheme ; every phenomenon unobserved or 

 imperfectly comprehended escapes and flows past him, defeating his will to under- 

 stand. In politics, conservatism means a distrust of the unknown future suited to 

 a comfortable habituation to current customs and current statecraft or — to quote 

 Fluellen — the ceremonies of it and the cares of it and the forms of it and the sobriety 

 of it and the modesty of it. In still another direction, the desire to conserve is 

 simply a sentiment for the old forgotten far-off things and tales of long ago. The 



