(Vol. viii., p. 440.)
I have not verified in the works of St. Thomas this saying ascribed to him,
but I subjoin a passage from Bishop Taylor, where it is quoted:
"A river cut into many rivulets divides also its strength, and grows
contemptible and apt to be forded by a lamb and drunk up by a summer
sun; so is the spirit of man busied in variety, and divided in itself;
it abates its fervour, cools into indifferency, and becomes trifling by
its dispersion and inadvertency. Aquinas was once asked, with what
compendium a man might best become learned? He answered, _By reading of
one book_; meaning that an understanding entertained with several
objects is intent upon neither, and profits not." --_Life of Christ_,
part ii. s. xii. 16.
He also quotes Ecclus (xi. 10.), St. Gregory, St. Bernard, Seneca,
Quintillian, and Juvenal to the same purpose.
Southey quotes part of this passage from Bishop Taylor (in the _Doctor_)
and adds:
"Lord Holland's poet, the prolific Lope de Vega, tells us to the same
purport. The _Homo Unius Libri_ is indeed proverbially formidable to
all conversational figurantes: like your sharpshooter, he knows his
piece, and is sure of his shot."
The truth of this dictum of St. Thomas cannot be too much insisted on in
this age of many books, which affords such incentives to literary
dissipation and consequent shallowness.
"An intellectual man, as the world now conceives of him, is one who is
full of 'views,' on all subjects of philosophy, on all matters of the
day. It is almost thought a disgrace not to have a view at a moment's
notice on any question from the Personal Advent to the Cholera or
Mesmerism. This is owing in a great measure to the necessities of
periodical literature, now so much in request. Every quarter of a year,
every month every day, there must be a supply for the gratification of
the public, of new and luminous theories on the subjects of religion,
foreign politics, home politics, civil economy, finance, trade,
agriculture, emigration, and the colonies. Slavery, the gold fields,
German philosophy, the French empire, Wellington, Peel, Ireland, must
all be practised on, day after day, by what are called original
thinkers."--_Dr. Newman's Disc. on Univ. Educ._, p. xxv. (preface).
This writer follows up the subject very ably, and his remarks on that
spurious philosophism which shows itself in what, for want of a better
word, he calls "viewiness," are worth the attention of all _homines unius
libri_.
P.S.--As I think of it, I shall make a cognate Query. Some facetious
opponent of the schoolmen fathered on St. Thomas Aquinas an imaginary work
in sundry folio volumes entitled _De Omnibus Rebus_, adding an equally
bulky and imaginary supplement--_Et Quibusdam Aliis_. This is as often used
to feather a piece of unfledged wit, as the speculation concerning the
number of angels that could dance on the point of a needle, and yet I have
never been able to trace out the inventor of these visionary tomes.