Since this is the case, it is all-important to fill
the memory with what is essential and material in any branch of
knowledge, to the exclusion of everything else. The decision as to
what is essential and material should rest with the masterminds in
every department of thought; their choice should be made after the
most mature deliberation, and the outcome of it fixed and determined.
Such a choice would have to proceed by sifting the things which it
is necessary and important for a man to know in general, and then,
necessary and important for him to know in any particular business
or calling. Knowledge of the first kind would have to be classified,
after an encyclopaedic fashion, in graduated courses, adapted to the
degree of general culture which a man may be expected to have in the
circumstances in which he is placed; beginning with a course limited
to the necessary requirements of primary education, and extending
upwards to the subjects treated of in all the branches of
philosophical thought. The regulation of the second kind of knowledge
would be left to those who had shown genuine mastery in the several
departments into which it is divided; and the whole system would
provide an elaborate rule or canon for intellectual education, which
would, of course, have to be revised every ten years.
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