On The Art of Reading

or in gassing him, or in slaughtering him neatly and wholesale. But still the whisper (not ridiculous in its day) will assert itself, that What Is comes first, holding and upheld by God; still through the market clamour for a 'Business Government' will persist the voice of Plato murmuring that, after all, the best form of government is government by good men: and the voice of some small man faintly protesting 'But I don't want to be governed by business men; because I know them and, without asking much of life, I have a hankering to die with a shirt on my back.'

VI

But let us postpone What Is for a moment, and deal with What Does and _What Knows._ They too, of course, have had their oppositions, and the very meaning of a University such as Cambridge--its _fons,_ its _origo,_ its [Greek: to ti en einai]-- was to assert What Knows against What Does in a medieval world pranced over by men-at-arms, Normans, English, Burgundians, Scots. Ancillary to Theology, whic