Quod nec Iovis ira, nec ignis,
Nec poterit ferrum, nec edax abolere vetustas.--OVID.
Aristotle tells us, that the world is a copy or transcript of those
ideas which are in the mind of the first Being, and that those ideas
which are in the mind of man are a transcript of the world. To this we
may add, that words are the transcript of those ideas which are in the
mind of man, and that writing or printing is the transcript of words. As
the Supreme Being has expressed, and as it were printed, his ideas in
the creation, men express their ideas in books, which, by this great
invention of these latter ages, may last as long as the sun and moon,
and perish only in the general wreck of nature. Thus Cowley, in his poem
on the Resurrection, mentioning the destruction of the universe, has
these admirable lines:
Now all the wide extended sky,
And all the harmonious worlds on high
And Virgil's sacred work shall die.
There is no other method of fixing those thoughts which arise and
disappear in the mind of man, and transmitting them to the last periods
of time; no other method of giving a permanency to our ideas, and
preserving the knowledge of any particular person, when his body is
mixed with the common mass of matter, and his soul retired into the
world of spirits. Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to
mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation, as
presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.--J. ADDISON.
_Spectator_, 166.