The Banned Lecture

It is rather an hard saying—however worthy of all acceptation in a university like Oxford, where, I understand, the besetting sin of the inmates is lec- turing and being lectured, but discussions are always apt to turn out to be amusing, especially if conducted with blackthorns or shotguns, where as lecturing is merely an attempt, foredoomed to failure, to com- municate knowledge which usually the lecturer does not possess. I am sure that we all recognize that an attempt of this kind is impossible in nature. No ! I am not proposing to inflict upon you my celebrated discourse on Scepticism of the Instrument of Mind. I am not even going to refer to the first and last lecture which I suffered at a dud university some- where near Newmarket, in which the specimen of old red sandstone in the rostrum began by remarking that political economy was a very difficult subject to theorize upon because there were no reliable data. Never would I tell so sad a story on a Monday evening, with the idea of Tuesday already looming darkly in every melancholic mind. I should like to be just friendly and sensible, though it is perhaps too much to expect me to be cheerful. The fact is that I am in a very depressed state. My attention was attracted by that little word “ know- ledge ” of which we hear so much and see so little. I don’t propose to inflict upon you the M.C.H., and demonstrate that the life and opinions of Gilles de Rais were inevitably determined by the price of onions in Hyderabad. But I do think that in ap- proaching a historic question, we should be very careful to define what we mean—in our particular