This mental dissipation and its concomitant evil, reading for the purpose of killing time,—with far more baneful effects than never reading at all, but relying merely on our own serious excogitations,—are curses from which we ought earnestly to endeavour to save ourselves. This we can only do by sternly exercising the mind in settled definite habits of thought, by placing before it a determinate aim and end to its cogitations. It must know beforehand whither it is tending, so that, as it proceeds, it may note its progress, and be able to judge whether it is advancing or receding. It would be as absurd for a man to start on a journey without knowing whither he was going, but to be continually trying first one road and then another, in hopes it would bring him somewhere, as it is for a student to sit down to study without any definite purpose or view before him. True, the traveller might pick up many facts and get some knowledge in his desultory course, and so might the student; but neither would be advanced on his journey or have gained any true wisdom. Yet this is the course of modern study. Loose, desultory reading: a vague acquisition of unconnected facts is alone aimed at. “Witness the transactions of our scientific bodies—a huge undigestive mass of valuable facts; mere raw materials, knowledge-bricks, which no one has dared yet to generalize or build up into a harmonious and well-proportioned temple of wisdom.”
Run your memory over the records of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and what do you find? Is it not exactly the same as that which the witty author of “Hudibras” castigated two hundred years ago, in his satire on the Royal Society,—a mere chronicle of the feats of butterfly-hunters and fly-catchers? Is there to be found in the eighteen years’ “Transactions” of the hundreds of scientific men, whose combined knowledge is many hundred times more extensive than that of the _savans_ of any past age, a single attempt at a generalization of their immense field of facts? Is there any effort at what Solomon calls the “interpretation of things?”—at gathering the “fruits” of the Baconian system? Are they not only a barren addition to the mountain of facts already accumulated? Alas! it is too true.