But to know oneself is to know that which alone can know _What Is._ So the hierarchy runs up. XI _What Does, What Knows, What Is...._ I have happily left myself no time to-day to speak of _What Is_: happily, because I would not have you even approach it towards the end of an hour when your attention must be languishing. But I leave you with two promises, and with two sayings from which as this lecture took its start its successors will proceed. The first promise is, that _What Is,_ being the spiritual element in man, is the highest object of his study. The second promise is that, nine-tenths of what is worthy to be called Literature being concerned with this spiritual element, for that it should be studied, from firstly up to ninthly, before anything else. And my two quotations are for you to ponder: (1) This, first: That all spirit is mutually attractive, as all matter is mutually attractive, is an ultimate fact beyond which we cannot go.... Spirit to spirit--as in water face answereth to face, so the heart of man to man. (2) And this other, from the writings of an obscure Welsh clergyman of the 17th century: You will never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars. [Footnote 1: The reader will kindly turn back to p.1, and observe the date at the head of this lecture. At that time I was engaged against a system of English teaching which I believed to be thoroughly bad. That system has since given place to another, which I am prepared to defend as a better.] LECTURE II APPREHENSION VERSUS COMPREHENSION WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1916 I Let us attempt to-day, Gentlemen, picking up the scent where we left at the conclusion of my first lecture, to hunt the Art of Reading (as I shall call it), a little further on the line of common-sense; then to cast back and chase on a line somewhat more philosophical. If these lines run wide and refuse to unite, we shall have made a false cast: if they converge and meet, we shall have caught our hare and may proceed, in subsequent lectures, to cook him. Well, the line of common-sense has brought us to this point-- that, man and this planet being such as they are, for a man to read all the books existent on it is impossible; and, if possible, would be in the highest degree undesirable. Let us, for example, go back quite beyond the invention of printing and try to imagine a man who had read all the rolls destroyed in the Library of Alexandria by successive burnings. (Some reckon the number of these MSS at 700,000.) Suppose, further, this man to be gifted with a memory retentive as Lord Macaulay's. Suppose lastly that we go to such a man and beg him to repeat to us some chosen one of the fifty or seventy lost, or partially lost, plays of Euripides. It is incredible that he could gratify us.