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