n that species of
intellectual dissipation, called "general reading," in which the mental
voluptuary reads merely for momentary excitement, in the gratification
of an idle curiosity, and which is as enervating and debilitating to the
intellectual faculties, as other kinds of dissipation are to the bodily
functions. One book, well read and thoroughly digested, nay, one single
train of thought, carefully elaborated and attentively considered, is
worth more than any conceivable amount of that indolent, dreamy sort of
reading in which many persons indulge. There is in fact no more unsafe
criterion of knowledge than the number of books a man has read. A young
man once told me he had read the entire list of publications of the
American Sunday-School Union. He was about as wise as the man at the
hotel, who began at the top of the bill of fare with the intention of
eating straight through to the bottom! Depend upon it, this mental
gorging is debilitating and debauching alike to the moral and the
intellectual constitution. There is too much reading even of good books.
No one should ever read a book, without subsequent meditation or
conversation about it, and an attempt to make the thoughts his own, by a
vigorous process of mental assimilation. Any continuous intellectual
occupation, which does not leave us wiser and stronger, most assuredly
will leave us weaker, just as filling the body with food which it does
not digest, only makes it feeble and sickly. We are the worse for
reading any book, if we are not the better for it.

There is an obvious distinction on this subject, of some practical
importance, first suggested, so far as I am aware, by the Scotch
metaphysician, Dr. Reid, between attention as directed to external
objects, and the same faculty directed to what passes within us. When we
attend to what is without us, to what we hear, or see, or smell, or
taste, or touch, the process is called observation. When, on the other
hand, dismissing for the time all notice of the external world, we turn
our thoughts inward, and consider only what is passing in the inner
chambers of the mind,--when, for instance, we analyze our motives, or
notice the workings of passion, or scan the mysterious and subtle agency
of the will, the process is called reflection. This latter species of
attention is one much more difficult of development than the former.
It is developed ordinarily much later in life,--seldom, I
believe, developed to any con