ability to understand them is independent of time and progress. Our boys can understand the “Iliad.” Fetch a Greek boy back from ancient Athens and give us his Greek tongue and we can interest him in Milton’s story of Satan in half a day. But it will take a year or two to make him understand an elementary schoolbook about electricity. The great ideas about human nature and human feelings and about the visible world and the gods men dream of and believe in, these are the stuff of Imaginative Literature; they have been expressed over and over again in all ages and are intelligible to a Chinaman or an Englishman of the year one thousand or the year two thousand. That is why we are all citizens in the democracy of readers. That is why we do not need special knowledge to read “Hamlet,” why the most direct preparation for the reading of “Hamlet” is the reading of “Macbeth” and “Lear.” Now, all special subjects, biology, geology, zoölogy, political economy, are continually being forced by the imaginative power of great writers into the realm of Imaginative Literature. Poetry is full of philosophy. Our novels are shot through and through with problems of economics. Great expositors like Huxley and Mill are working over and interpreting the discoveries of science, relating them to our common life and making, not their minute facts but their bearing, clear to the ordinary man. So that there is a great deal of science and philosophy within the reach of the untrained reader. And a wide general reading prepares any person, by giving him a multitude of hints and stray bits of information, to make his way through a technical volume devoted to one special subject. The moral talks of Socrates to Athenian youths lead one on, as Socrates seems to have intended to lead those boys on, into the uttermost fields of philosophy. The genial essayists, Stevenson, Lamb, Emerson, are all tinged with philosophy and science, at least the social and political sciences. And when an idle reader approaches a new subject, economics, chemistry, or philosophy, he often finds with delight that he has been reading about it all his life. He is like the man in Molière’s comedy who was surprised to find that he had always been speaking prose. Yet there remains a good deal of the Literature of Information which can be understood only after a gradual approach to it through other works. You must learn the elements of chemistry before you can understand the arguments of the modern men of science about radium. You must read some elementary discussions of economics before you can take part in the arguments about protection and free trade, socialism, banking, and currency.