And such is, indeed, the fact.  The wish to accomplish something outside their formal programme is common to all men who in the course of evolution have risen past a certain level.

Until an effort is made to satisfy that wish, the sense of uneasy waiting for something to start which has not started will remain to disturb the peace of the soul.  That wish has been called by many names.  It is one form of the universal desire for knowledge.  And it is so strong that men whose whole lives have been given to the systematic acquirement of knowledge have been driven by it to overstep the limits of their programme in search of still more knowledge.  Even Herbert Spencer, in my opinion the greatest mind that ever lived, was often forced by it into agreeable little backwaters of inquiry.

I imagine that in the majority of people who are conscious of the wish to live—­that is to say, people who have intellectual curiosity—­the aspiration to exceed formal programmes takes a literary shape.  They would like to embark on a course of reading.  Decidedly the British people are becoming more and more literary.  But I would point out that literature by no means comprises the whole field of knowledge, and that the disturbing thirst to improve one’s self—­to increase one’s knowledge—­may well be slaked quite apart from literature.  With the various ways of slaking I shall deal later.  Here I merely point out to those who have no natural sympathy with literature that literature is not the only well.

III

PRECAUTIONS BEFORE BEGINNING

Now that I have succeeded (if succeeded I have) in persuading you to admit to yourself that you are constantly haunted by a suppressed dissatisfaction with your own arrangement of your daily life; and that the primal cause of that inconvenient dissatisfaction is the feeling that you are every day leaving undone something which you would like to do, and which, indeed, you are always hoping to do when you have “more time”; and now that I have drawn your attention to the glaring, dazzling truth that you never will have “more time,” since you already have all the time there is—­you expect me to let you into some wonderful secret by which you may at any rate approach the ideal of a perfect arrangement of the day, and by which, therefore, that haunting, unpleasant, daily disappointment of things left undone will be got rid of!

I have found no such wonderful secret.  Nor do I expect to find it, nor do I expect that anyone else will ever find it.  It is undiscovered.  When you first began to gather my drift, perhaps there was a resurrection of hope in your breast.  Perhaps you said to yourself, “This man will show me an easy, unfatiguing way of doing what I have so long in vain wished to do.”  Alas, no!  The fact is that there is no easy way, no royal road.  The path to Mecca is extremely hard and stony, and the worst of it is that you never quite get there after all.