ger to know! If we wish to
know anything, instead of digging for it ourselves, it is much easier to
flock all together to some lecturer who has put all the results into an
hour, and perhaps can throw them all upon a screen, so that we can
acquire all we want by merely using the eyes, and bothering ourselves
little about what is said. Reading itself is almost too much of an
effort. We hire people to read for us--to interpret, as we call it
--Browning and Ibsen, even Wagner. Every one is familiar with the
pleasure and profit of "recitations," of "conversations" which are
monologues. There is something fascinating in the scheme of getting
others to do our intellectual labor for us, to attempt to fill up our
minds as if they were jars. The need of the mind for nutriment is like
the need of the body, but our theory is that it can be satisfied in a
different way. There was an old belief that in order that we should enjoy
food, and that it should perform its function of assimilation, we must
work for it, and that the exertion needed to earn it brought the appetite
that made it profitable to the system. We still have the idea that we
must eat for ourselves, and that we cannot delegate this performance, as
we do the filling of the mind, to some one else. We may have ceased to
relish the act of eating, as we have ceased to relish the act of
studying, but we cannot yet delegate it, even although our power of
digesting food for the body has become almost as feeble as the power of
acquiring and digesting food for the mind.

It is beautiful to witness our reliance upon others. The house may be
full of books, the libraries may be as free and as unstrained of
impurities as city water; but if we wish to read anything or study
anything we resort to a club. We gather together a number of persons of
like capacity with ourselves. A subject which we might grapple with and
run down by a few hours of vigorous, absorbed attention in a library,
gaining strength of mind by resolute encountering of difficulties, by
personal effort, we sit around for a month or a season in a club,
expecting somehow to take the information by effortless contiguity with
it. A book which we could master and possess in an evening we can have
read to us in a month in the club, without the least intellectual effort.
Is there nothing, then, in the exchange of ideas? Oh yes, when there are
ideas to exchange. Is there nothing stimulating in the conflict of mind
with mind? O