Quote of the week No. 36 : On learning

Six degrees at 8:30am. Sunny, but with a stiff wind sending glittering white horses galloping across the lake, and spray erupting upwards from the harbour walls and cliff sides.

Denis Diderot (1713-1784), the French philosopher and writer, was one of the giants of the Enlightenment, and, together with Jean Le Ronde d'Alembert, compiled what is considered to be the first real encyclopaedia, a project that consumed twenty years of his life. The Encyclopèdie was to enable any person who could read access to knowledge on any subject, and not just those already covered by the universities, and in this sense it was a deeply revolutionary work. It may be no coincidence - although not a simple one - that the French Revolution itself took place only five years after Diderot's death.

As one might imagine, Diderot thought a lot about learning, and where the ordinary person might come by it. But for him simply having access to books and the ability to read them was not enough. For him, information, facts, knowledge needed to be systematised and presented in all its many facets in order for real learning to take place. He wrote :

"The number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes."

Almost three hundred years later, in 2004, the number of new books published in the English language alone was a staggering 450,000 - that's almost a book a minute. And if that's not enough, I wonder what Diderot would have thought about the Internet...

Frontispiece snaffled from Wikipedia.