THINKING AND READING.
THE Archbishop of York in the course of an address which he delivered at Blackburn last Sunday laid his finger upon a widely current illusion. He said that, although most people to-day were able to read, he doubted whether the number able to think and read had not diminished. No mistake indeed is more general than to believe that because a man reads a great deal he is necessarily a profound thinker. Uneducated people have always had a superstitions reverence for " book-laming," but it is at best a shallow philanthropy which believes that for the improvement of the human mind all that is needed is a reader's ticket for the local free library. The mere accumulation of knowledge is not the smallest guarantee of intelligence, and may even be a hindrance to its development The fact is that reading is often an anodyne to lull reason to sleep. It may even become the last refuge of laziness. And this is true not only of the superficial mind that skims over innumerable newspapers, and novels and memoirs, but also of the most erudite 'specialist. The student of Ailosophy, for instance, by ploughing through the works of Kant and Hegel and Schopenhaner and a score of other meta- physicians, generally succeeds only in providing himself with an inexhaustible collection of the half-digested opinions of other people which will save him the trouble of ever forming any of his own. The book-worm has always been recognized as being quite incompetent in practical affairs, but it has been forgotten that he is usually stupid intellectually into the bargain.
The point is brought out excellently in the old story of Southey and the Quaker. Southey, in a moment of self- satisfaction, was describing to his friend the ceaseless intel- lectual activity of his daily life, how every single moment of it was devoted to some strenuous form of study, how he learnt Portuguese while he was shaving and the higher mathe- matics in his bath, so that not a second should be wasted. After every hour in the twenty-four had been in some such way accounted for, there came a pause. "And, friend," asked the Quaker softly, "when dost thee think P" Most people, it is to be feared, would be tripped up by this searching question. And how extremely few could honestly reply to it with a simple, " When I am reading" With talking, on the other hand, the case is different. For if reading acts upon thought as a sedative, talking is a stimulant. Ten minutes of argument with Socrates would do more to clear up one's mind than many hours spent among the best authors. The merciless criticism of an antagonist in the flesh will pick holes in our inferences and show that our assumptions are only prejudices, and will do this in so provocative a manner that we can hardly avoid reforming them. But if our opponent is only a page of paper and ink, what can be easier than to succumb to our complacency and slackness and to skim on indolently to the next chapter P
But when all these drawbacks to reading have been recog- nized, it would be an obvious exaggeration to declare that the world would be better without books. And it would be im- possible to consider the Emperor Shi Hwang-ti as anything but a criminal, even if his motive in destroying every book in China had been an altruistic desire to promote clear thinking, and not (as was in fact the case) mere egomania. For instance, although art and philosophy could exist in an illiterate world, it is clear that science could not, since it depends on the accumulation of knowledge, which, as we have seen, is one of the principal functions of books. Books, then,
are necessary ; but even here we must hesitate. How many books are necessary P We can do no better than quote from the brilliant and thought-compelling speech made by Lord Rosebery on Monday when he opened the new Mitchell Library in Glasgow, which contains 180,000 volumes
I know [he said] I ought to feel elated at the fact that there is this number of books compressed within these walls, and that a number of the people will take advantage of them and read them. I ought to, but I do not. I feel an intense depression at this enormous mass of books, this cemetery of books, because, after all, most of them are dead. I should like to ask Mr. Barrett, in all his experience, how many really living books there are in all the Mitchell Library, how many inevitable books there are, time-proof books—I should rather call them weather-proof books—in all the Mitchell Library. You have told me it had 180,000 books. This morning I asked him if there were not 100,000 that nobody ever asked for. He declined, diplomatically, to reply ; but if it be true that the percentage of living books be exceedingly small—and I am afraid we must all agree that it is very small—we cannot test the life of a book till after two or three generations have passed. If the number of living books is exceedingly small in proportion to the whole, what a huge cemetery of dead books, or books half alive, is represented by a great library like this ! Of course some of them are absolutely dead books no human being out of a mad-house would ask for. Some are semi-living. Some strayed reveller or wandering student may ask for them at some heedless or too curious moment. The depressing thought to me in entering a great library of that kind is that in the main most of the books are dead. They shrug their barren backs at you appealing, as it were, for someone to come and take them down and rescue them from the passive collection of dust and neglect into which most of them have deservedly fallen."
The same feeling of horror at the thought of the number of dead books which silt up in such terrifying masses in every library is expressed by a most amusing passage in Lowell's "Fable for Critics ":— "I've thought very often 'twould be a good thing
In all public collections of books, if a wing Were set off by itself, like the seas from the dry lands,
Marked Literature suited to desolate islands,
And filled with such books as could never be read
Save by readers of proofs, forced to do it for bread—
Such books as one's wrecked on in small country taverns, Such as hermits might mortify over in caverns, Such as Satan, if printing had then been invented, As the climax of woe would to Job have presented, Such as Crusoe might dip in, although there are few so Outrageously cornered by fate as poor Crusoe."
To be a reader of such hooks as these would indeed be a horrible fate. But there is undoubtedly a worse one, and that is to be their author.
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