ng! Of course Catholics
also may read without thinking; and in their case, equally as with
Protestants, it holds good, that such knowledge is unworthy of the name,
knowledge which they have not thought through, and thought out. Such
readers are only possessed by their knowledge, not possessed of it; nay,
in matter of fact they are often even carried away by it, without any
volition of their own. Recollect, the memory can tyrannise, as well as
the imagination. Derangement, I believe, has been considered as a loss
of control over the sequence of ideas. The mind, once set in motion, is
henceforth deprived of the power of initiation, and becomes the victim
of a train of associations, one thought suggesting another, in the way
of cause and effect, as if by a mechanical process, or some physical
necessity. No one, who has had experience of men of studious habits, but
must recognise the existence of a parallel phenomenon in the case of
those who have over-stimulated the memory. In such persons reason acts
almost as feebly and as impotently as in the madman; once fairly started
on any subject whatever, they have no power of self-control; they
passively endure the succession of impulses which are evolved out of the
original exciting cause; they are passed on from one idea to another
and go steadily forward, plodding along one line of thought in spite of
the amplest concessions of the hearer, or wandering from it in endless
digression in spite of his remonstrances. Now, if, as is very certain,
no one would envy the madman the glow and originality of his
conceptions, why must we extol the cultivation of that intellect which
is the prey, not indeed of barren fancies but of barren facts, of random
intrusions from without, though not of morbid imaginations from within?
And in thus speaking, I am not denying that a strong and ready memory is
in itself a real treasure; I am not disparaging a well-stored mind,
though it be nothing besides, provided it be sober, any more than I
would despise a bookseller's shop:--it is of great value to others, even
when not so to the owner. Nor am I banishing, far from it, the
possessors of deep and multifarious learning from my ideal University;
they adorn it in the eyes of men; I do but say that they constitute no
type of the results at which it aims; that it is no great gain to the
intellect to have enlarged the memory at the expense of faculties which
are indisputably higher.

Nor indeed am I suppos