time, but a mistaken way of employing all of it.

The best kind of recreation is gently stimulating, but stimulation may
rise easily to abnormality. There are fiction drunkards just as there are
persons who take too much alcohol or too much coffee. In fact, if one is
so much absorbed by the ideas that he is assimilating that the process
interferes with the ordinary duties of life, he may be fairly sure that it
is injuring him. If one loves coffee or alcohol, or even candy, so dearly
that one can not give it up, it is time to stop using it altogether. If a
reader is so fond of an exciting story that he can not lay it aside, so
that he sits up late at night reading it, or if he can not drop it from
his mind when he does lay it aside, but goes on thinking about the deadly
combat between the hero and Lord William Fitz Grouchy when he ought to be
studying his lessons or attending to his business, it is time to cut out
fiction altogether. This advice has absolutely nothing to do with the
quality of the fiction. It will not do simply to warn the habitual
drunkard that he must be careful to take none but the best brands; he must
drop alcohol altogether. If you are a fiction drunkard, enhanced quality
will only enslave you further. This sort of use is no more recreation in
the proper sense of the word than is gambling, or drinking to excess, or
smoking opium.

And now we come to a use of books that is more important--lies more at the
root of things--than their use for either information or recreation--their
use for inspiration. One may get help and inspiration along with the other
two--reading about how to make a box may inspire a boy to go out and make
one himself. It is this kind of thing that should be the final outcome of
every mental process. Nothing that goes on in the brain is really complete
until it ends in a motor stimulus. The action, it is true, may not follow
closely; it may be the result of years of mental adjustment; it may even
take place in another body from the one where it originated. The man who
tells us how to make a box, and tells it so fascinatingly that he sets all
his readers to box-making, presumably has made boxes with his own hands,
but there may be those who are fitted to inspire action in others rather
than to undertake it themselves. And the larger literature of inspiration
is not that which urges to specific deeds like box-making, or even to
classes of deeds, like caring for the sick or improving m