Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or, rather, each
generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will
not fit this. Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which
attaches to the act of creation--the act of thought--is transferred to
the record. The poet chanting, was felt to be a divine man: henceforth
the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit:
henceforward it is settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero
corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly, the book becomes
noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the
multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so
opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an
outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written
on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who
start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight
of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their
duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have
given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in
libraries when they wrote these books.
Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm. Hence, the
book-learned class, who value books as such; not as related to nature
and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with
the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the
emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst.--R. W.
EMERSON. _The American Scholar._