Intellectual Opportunities, Past and Present [pp. 88-100]

PAST AND PRESENT.
what marvellous expedition, accuracy, and neatness it turns out
volume after volume! How perfectly and faultlessly it forms
every letter and even every stop! Or consider the system of
the post-office. To what wonderful results has it not led? It
enables us to read detailed accounts of the most interesting
events that have taken place in the most distant points of Great
Britain within a day or two of their occurrence. It keeps us
an couraiit with the political, social, and literary world; it enables
us to keep pace, as far as may be in these days, with the inventions, discoveries, and improvements in every department of science. We can learn not only the minds of great men and their
intellectual bias, not only who have written and the subjects they
have chosen, but their style and method, and what the world
thinks of them. Each man-and each woman, to the matter
of that-who has what is called a view on any subject can find
every opportunity now of ventilating it. Papers and pamphlets
and magazines, reviews and puffs and prospectuses, in hopeless
variety and overwhelming quantities flood our tables day after
day.
The number of books is inconceivably great, the field of the
reader vast as ocean. Every day new books and new editions are
issuing from the teeming press, and each year in an increasing
ratio. Books upon books on theology and religion, on science
and philosophy, on history and biography, on painting and poetry, on travel and adventure, pour down upon us in alarming
profusion. Nor is this all: novels and romances and tales for
the million add their tributaries to the great stream, with books
on cooking and dressing, on letter-writing and love-making, and
Heaven knows what besides. "There never was a time when
information was scattered about so freely, when every kind of
knowledge was brought within men's reach. We have books on
everything, and little treatises to explain these books. It is pleasant, of course, to think that where there are so many hundreds
of writers there must be many thousands of readers. Publishers
are, after all, commercial men, and carry on their business on trade,
not on philanthropic, principles. If books are printed they are
sold, and we take comfort to ourselves that the age we live in is
an age of readers." And this is, no doubt, true. People do read
more now than formerly. We have many readers, but have we
many students? Have we many men who care to do more than
read, who strive to master any study, to sink to its foundations
and understand its first principle?
Let us consider this matter briefly and see the practical result
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