And thus
I come often, in my less hopeful moods, to watch the remorseless
cataract of daily literature which thunders over the remnants of the
past, as if it were a fresh impediment to the men of our day in the way
of systematic knowledge and consistent powers of thought, as if it were
destined one day to overwhelm the great inheritance of mankind in prose
and verse.
I remember, when I was a very young man at college, that a youth, in no
spirit of paradox, but out of plenary conviction, undertook to maintain
before a body of serious students, the astounding proposition that the
invention of printing had been one of the greatest misfortunes that had
ever befallen mankind. He argued that exclusive reliance on printed
matter had destroyed the higher method of oral teaching, the
dissemination of thought by the spoken word to the attentive ear. He
insisted that the formation of a vast literary class looking to the
making of books as a means of making money, rather than as a social
duty, had multiplied books for the sake of the writers rather than for
the sake of the readers; that the reliance on books as a cheap and
common resource had done much to weaken the powers of memory; that it
destroyed the craving for a general culture of taste, and the need of
artistic expression in all the surroundings of life.
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