Inside

It is always the same way.  I no sooner get a good, pleasant, interesting, working idea, like this “Reading for Principles,” arranged and moved over, and set up in my mind, than some insinuating, persistent, concrete human being comes along, works his way in to illustrate it, and spoils it.  Here is Meakins, for instance.  I have been thinking on the other side of my thought every time I have thought of him.  I have no more sympathy than any one with a man who spends all his time going round and round in his reading and everything else, swallowing a world up in principles.  “Why should a good, live, sensible man,” I feel like saying, “go about in a world like this stowing his truths into principles, where, half the time, he cannot get at them himself, and no one else would want to?” Going about swallowing one’s experience up in principles is very well so far as it goes.  But it is far better to go about swallowing up one’s principles into one’s self.

A man who has lived and read into himself for many years does not need to read very many books.  He has the gist of nine out of ten new books that are published.  He knows, or as good as knows, what is in them, by taking a long, slow look at his own heart.  So does everybody else.