Explorations 293 within the oral tradition enables us to estimate accurately the advantages and disadvantages of writing. Without writing there is little control of space, but perfect control of accumulated experience. The misunderstandings of Ireland and England can be seen in some basic respects as the clash of oral and written cultures. And the strange thing to us is that the written culture has very little historical sense. The English could never remember; the Irish could never forget. Today the university as a community is in large degree one in which the members are in regular oral communication. And whereas the university has a highly developed time sense, the business community operates on the very short-run and exists mainly by the control of space. The present divorce between these two worlds is only accentuated by the perfection of the media peculiar to each. Faced with the consequence of writing, Plato notes in the Phaedrus: This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence and you give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. Two thousand years of manuscript culture lay ahead of the Western world when Plato made this observation. But nobody has yet studied the rise and decline of Greece in terms of the change from oral to written culture. Patrick Geddes said 2 Frazer, Man, God and Immortality, 1927, p. 318. that the road destroyed the Greek city-state. But writing made the road possible, just as printing was later to pay for the roads of England and America. In order to understand the printed-book culture which today is yielding, after four hundred years, to the impact of visual and auditory media, it is helpful to note a few of the characteristics of that manuscript culture which persisted from the 5th century B.C. to the 15th century A.D. I shall merely mention a few of the principal observations of scholars like Pierce Butler and H.J.Chaytor. In the first place, manuscript culture never made a sharp break with oral speech because everybody read manuscripts aloud. Swift, silent reading came with the macadamized surfaces of the printed page. Manuscript readers memorized most of what they read since in the