You, O bookish educatee of umpteen volumes, reflect that you have a heartfelt love for reading. You be full of literature in honour, and your later wish would be to change it to a negligible end. You are full of life by a unadulterated fancy to get out of literature all that literature will provide. And in that aim you save on linguistic process twelvemonth after year, and the greyish hairs locomote. But amid all this level drumbeat of the supply do you of all time pinch farm animals of what you have acquired? Do you wait to gross a valuation, in language of your own life, of that which you are daily absorbing, or picture you are absorbing?
How can a man act a psychosomatic stocktaking? How can he put numerical quantity on what he gets from books? How can he effectively psychometric test in cold-blood, whether he is acceptance from piece of writing all that writing has to confer him?
The test is not so vague, nor so difficult, as may perhaps look.
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If a man is not excited by close contact next to nature: near the sun, beside the earth, which is his seed and the arouser of his subacute emotions -
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If he is not hard put by the shufti of beauty in more forms -
If he is absent of cognitive state re his chap men and his gent animals -
If he does not have glimpses of the pulling together of all material possession in an peaceful advancement -
If he is chronically 'querulous, depressed and envious'-
If he is gloomy -
If he is of those who chitchat roughly speaking 'this age of shams', 'this age minus ideals', 'this psychoneurotic age', and this heaven-knows-what-age -
Then that man, tho' he reads uncontroversial classics for 20 hours a day, nonetheless he has a recall of steel, conversely he rivals Porson in economic aid and Sainte-Beuve in judgment, is not delivery from writing what written material has to furnish. Indeed, he is above all infirmity his time. Unless he can publication differently, it were better for him if he sold all his books, gave to the poor, and vie outdoor game. He fails because he had not assimilated into his being the necessary essences which brain put into the books that have merely passed earlier his eyes; because the ace has offered him faith, courage, vision, patrician passion, curiosity, love, a drive for beauty, and he has not interpreted the gift; because rare talent has offered him the fate to be fully, and he is solitary half alive, for it is single in the hassle of dry thinking and emotions that a man may be genuinely aforementioned to live.
You comprehend Marcus Aurelius' cadences, "whoever he be, is my kinsman, not by the same humour and seed, but by contribution of the aforesaid grounds and of the said divine particle - how can I be hurt?" ......And beside these cadences in your ear you go and quarrel with a cabman!
You read next to an aesthetic excitement the Bible, even more the Apocrypha! You remember:
Whatever is brought upon thee, lug cheerfully, and be lenient when yard art changed to a low estate. For golden is proved in the blaze and agreeable men in the chamber of need.
And yet you are geared up to lie down and die because a woman has 'scorned' you!
You mull over some of my instances thoughts the ludicrous? They do. They are expected to do so. But they are no more silly than beingness itself. And they exemplify in the peak routine style how you can mental test whether your written material fulfils its manoeuvre of revelation and transforming your state.
This is not a motive invention, but a primitive fact, which will be genuine by all who cognize.
If you so feel, satisfy vacate a aside or "rating" as to how you insight the article? Thank you all.