tify excesses like this. If their hunger for books
ever seems indiscriminate to them when they themselves stop to examine
it, they will have their excuses. They will argue that some bits of
knowledge they once had thought futile, had later on come in most
handy, in unthought of ways. True enough! For their scientists. But not
for their average men: they will simply be like obstinate housekeepers
who clog up their homes, preserving odd boxes and wrappings, and stray
lengths of string, to exult if but one is of some trifling use ere they
die. It will be in this spirit that simians will cherish their books,
and pile them up everywhere into great indiscriminate mounds; and these
mounds will seem signs of culture and sagacity to them.

Those who know many facts will feel wise! They will despise those who
don't. They will even believe, many of them, that knowledge is power.
Unfortunate dupes of this saying will keep on reading, ambitiously,
till they have stunned their native initiative, and made their thoughts
weak; and will then wonder dazedly what in the world is the matter, and
why the great power they were expecting to gain fails to appear. Again,
if they ever forget what they read, they'll be worried. Those who _can_
forget--those with fresh eyes who have swept from their minds such
facts as the exact month and day that their children were born, or the
numbers on houses, or the names (the mere meaningless labels) of the
people they meet,--will be urged to go live in sanitariums or see
memory doctors!

* * * * *

By nature their itch is rather for knowing, than for understanding or
thinking. Some of them will learn to think, doubtless, and even to
concentrate, but their eagerness to acquire those accomplishments will
not be strong or insistent. Creatures whose mainspring is curiosity
will enjoy the accumulating of facts, far more than the pausing at
times to reflect on those facts. If they do not reflect on them, of
course they'll be slow to find out about the ideas and relationships
lying behind them; and they will be curious about those ideas; so you
would suppose they'd reflect. But deep thinking is painful. It means
they must channel the spready rivers of their attention. That cannot be
done without discipline and drills for the mind; and they will abhor
doing that; their minds will work better when they are left free to run
off at tangents.

Compare them in this with othe