“Perhaps the prevalence of pedantry may be largely accounted for by the common error of thinking that, because useful knowledge should be remembered, any kind of knowledge that is at all worth learning should be remembered too.”
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Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.
Assuming that man has a distinct spiritual nature, a soul, why should it be thought unnatural that under appropriate conditions of maladjustment, his soul might die before his body does or that his soul might die without his knowing it?
Diligent as one must be in learning, one must be as diligent in forgetting otherwise the process is one of pedantry, not culture.
The university's business is the conservation of useless knowledge and what the university itself apparently fails to see is that this enterprise is not only noble but indispensable as well, that society can not exist unless it goes on.
