Faith + Reason = Truth

Have you ever heard of Project Gutenberg or the Net Library (www.netlibrary.com)?  Gutenberg is a massive effort to digitize the world's books and grant free access to them.  That's how I found the work I am going to reference in this post about the Library at Alexandria, a vast, ancient repository of the known and available works of writing that was established around 2300 years ago.  Fire and possibly earthquake/flooding destroyed many of its holdings on multiple occasions, which would be a primary reason to digitize and store all of our knows works on something other than paper, right?  Well, that's fine, as long as they are ALSO kept on paper, or stone, or metal, or other medium that does not require a device to know the contents of the work.  When we all destroy civilization as we know it, or when it happens via natural calamity (come on, you KNOW it's going to happen someday, just as it has on countless other occasions), what good will it do for a developing civilization thousands of years from now to discover a CD, or a PC, or an eBook reader from Sony?  None at all, because they won't be able to get to the stored content.  Paper, on the other hand, is instantly accessible without additional tools or technology:  just pick it up and start reading (or translating) with you naked eyeballs!  So keep multiple copies, spread across multiple locations around the world, so the next civilizations won't COMPLETELY be starting from scratch with re-inventing various wheels and re-discovering physical laws and technologies in the future.

In doing a little research on the Library at Alexandria with netlibrary.com, I came across something.  It's titled Alexandria and Her Schools, by Charles Kingsley, and has the note "These Lectures were delivered at the Philosophical Institution, Edinburgh, in February, 1854, at the commencement of the Crimean War." The DRM protection for these free, online versions of texts has prevented me from copying and pasting; all I can do is read on the screen or print out, page by page.  So I have typed in an excerpt from Kingsley's Preface as an example of the lost art of literary and scholarly humility, or at least lost in comparison to today's writers.  Not sure if this is an old British thing or what (G.K. Chesterton apologizes profusely for his lowly, pitiful output in the introductions of his works), but I find it amusing and gratifying to see such capable human beings being so keenly aware of their own  insignificance and smallness, while simultaneously being well aware of the greatness of their surroundings and the big picture.  If you can get access to it through Net Library or Project Gutenberg, read it (at least the Preface) in its entirety for some very relevant commentary from the perspective of a British scholar at the height of the Empire, touching on the history of the Empire, religious themes, subjecting others to foreign rule, the "hated" Turk, and all manner of other topics.  Here's the excerpt from the Preface:

I should not have presumed to choose for any lectures of mine a subject as that which I have tried to treat in this book. The subject was chosen by the Institution where the lectures were delivered. Still less should I have presumed to print them of my own accord, knowing how fragmentary and crude they are. They were printed at the special request of my audience. Least of all, perhaps, ought I to have presumed to publish them, as I have done, at Cambridge, where any inaccuracy or sciolism (and that such defects exist in these pages, I cannot but fear) would be instantly detected, and severely censured: but nevertheless, it seemed to me that Cambridge was the fittest place in which they could see the light, because to Cambridge I mainly owe what little right method or sound thought may be found in them, or indeed, in anything which I have ever written. In the heyday of youthful greediness and ambition, when the mind, dazzled by the vastness and variety of the universe, must needs know everything, or rather know about everything, at once and on the spot, too many are apt, as I have been in past years, to complain of Cambridge studies as too dry and narrow: but as time teaches the student, year by year, what is really required for an understanding of the objects with which he meets, he begins to find that his University, in as far as he has really received her teaching into himself, has given him, in her criticism, her mathematics, above all, in Plato, something which all the popular knowledge, the lectures and institutions of the day, and even good books themselves, cannot give, a boon more precious than learning; namely, the art of learning. That instead of casting into his lazy lap treasures which he would not have known how to use, she has taught him to mine for them himself; and has by her wise refusal to gratify his intellectual greediness, excited his hunger, only that he may be the stronger to hunt and till for his own subsistence; and thus, the deeper he drinks, in after years, at fountains wisely forbidden to him while he was a Cambridge student, and sees his old companions growing up into sound-headed and sound-hearted practical men, liberal and expansive, and yet with a firm standing-ground for thought and action, he learns to complain less and less of Cambridge studies, and more and more of that conceit and haste of his own, which kept him from reaping the full advantage of her training.