Profitable knowledge …

… Wisdom on the Installment Plan - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The Eleventh was the last great encyclopedia. Its greatness derived not alone from its contributors or its organization but from the spirit infusing it. This spirit was one of confidence in progress—material, scientific, artistic, if not religious than spiritual. The society in which the Eleventh was composed and published considered itself, as Denis Boyles notes in “Everything Explained That Is Explainable,” to be “the Rome to the long nineteenth-century’s Greece, an era in which engineers spoke the language of visionaries. And it was English.”