hor, "he is all of us." I have read "The Egoist" five or six
times myself, and I mean to read it again; for I am like the young
friend of the anecdote--I think Willoughby an unmanly but a very
serviceable exposure of myself.

I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten much that
was most influential, as I see already I have forgotten Thoreau, and
Hazlitt, whose paper "On the Spirit of Obligations" was a turning-point
in my life, and Penn, whose little book of aphorisms had a brief but
strong effect on me, and Mitford's "Tales of Old Japan," wherein I
learned for the first time the proper attitude of any rational man to
his country's laws--a secret found, and kept, in the Asiatic islands.
That I should commemorate all is more than I can hope or the editor
could ask. It will be more to the point, after having said so much upon
improving books, to say a word or two about the improvable reader. The
gift of reading, as I have called it, is not very common, nor very
generally understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual
endowment--a free grace, I find I must call it--by which a man rises to
understand that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he
differs absolutely wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold them
passionately; and he may know that others hold them but coldly, or hold
them differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if he has the gift of
reading, these others will be full of meat for him. They will see the
other side of propositions and the other side of virtues. He need not
change his dogma for that, but he may change his reading of that dogma,
and he must supplement and correct his deductions from it. A human
truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life as it
displays. It is men who hold another truth, or, as it seems to us,
perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend our restricted field of
knowledge, and rouse our drowsy consciences. Something that seems quite
new, or that seems insolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a
reader. If he tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he has
the gift, and let him read. If he is merely hurt, or offended, or
exclaims upon his author's folly, he had better take to the daily
papers; he will never be a reader.

And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after I have laid down my
part-truth, I must step in with its opposite. For, after all, we are
vessels of a very limited content. Not all men c