Page:EB1911 - Volume 01.djvu/17 essentials of the comprehension
of scholarly books, which are made unreadable by the use of
diacritical signs and unpronounceable spellings, culture cannot
advance except within the narrowest of sects. This
incompatibility is bad for the public, but it is also bad for
scholarship. While the general reader Need of com- mon ground.is
repelled, the Orientalist is neglected, - to the loss of both.
This criticism, which substantially applies to many other formal
aspects of modern learning, may be unwelcome to the professors,
but it is the result of an extended experience in the attempt to
bring accurate knowledge into digestible shape for the wide
public for whom the Encyclopædia Britannica is intended. It is
indeed partly because of the tendency of modern science and
modern scholarship to put the artificial obstacles of a
technical jargon in the path of people even of fairly high
education, that it becomes imperative to bring both parties upon
a common ground, where the world at la