How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
Page: 9

price of a conducted tour. And our excuse to ourselves is that there are only
twenty-four hours in the day.

If we further analyse our vague, uneasy aspiration, we shall, I think, see
that it springs from a fixed idea that we ought to do something in addition
to those things which we are loyally and morally obliged to do. We are
obliged, by various codes written and unwritten, to maintain ourselves
and our families (if any) in health and comfort, to pay our debts, to save,
to increase our prosperity by increasing our efficiency. A task sufficiently
difficult! A task which very few of us achieve! A task often beyond our
skill! yet, if we succeed in it, as we sometimes do, we are not satisfied; the
skeleton is still with us.

And even when we realise tat the task is beyond our skill, that our powers
cannot cope with it, we feel that we should be less discontented if we gave
to our powers, already overtaxed, something still further to do.

And such is, indeed, the fact. The wish to accomplish something outside
their formal programme is common to all men who in the course of evolution
have risen past a certain level.

Until an effort is made to satisfy that wish, the sense of uneasy waiting for
something to start which has not started will remain to disturb the peace of
the soul. That wish has been called by many names. It is one form of the
universal desire for knowledge. And it is so strong that men whose whole
lives have been given to the systematic acquirement of knowledge have
been driven by it to overstep the limits of their programme in search of
still more knowledge. Even Herbert Spencer, in my opinion the greatest
mind that ever lived, was often forced by it into agreeable little backwaters
of inquiry.

I imagine that in the majority of people who are conscious of the wish to
live--that is to say, people who have intellectual curiosity--the aspiration
to exceed formal programmes takes a literary shape. They would like to
embark on a course of reading. Decidedly the British people are becoming
more and more literary. But I would point out that literature by no means