I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental
and extraordinary.
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.
There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, (Intuition) the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that, as the seer's hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part, -- only the authentic utterances of the oracle; -- all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato's and Shakespeare's.
May those who read and enjoy philosophy be encouraged, by the taste of the clear water, to follow the brook to its source.
Much reading is an oppression of the mind, it extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world......William Penn.
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