Readers and Writers

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 24, 1870

Readers and Writers.

READING without purpose is sauntering, not exercise. More is got from one book on which the thought settles for a definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye. A cottage flower gives honey to the bee—a king's garden none to the butterfly. Youths who are destined for active careers, or ambitious of distinction in such forms of literature as require freshness of invention, or originality of thought, should avoid the habit of intense study for many hours at a stretch. There is a point in all tension of the intellect beyond which effort is only waste of strength. Fresh ideas do not readily spring up with a weary brain; and whatever exhausts the mind, not only enfeebles its power, but narrows its scope. We often see men who have over-read at college, entering upon life as languidly as if they were about to leave it. They have not the vigor to cope with their own generation; for their own generation is young, and they have wasted the nervous energy which supplies the sinews of war to youth in its contest for fame or fortune.

Study with regularity, at settled hours. Those in the forenoon are the best, if they can be secured. The man who has acquired the habit of study, though for only one hour every day in the year, and keeps to the one thing studied till it is mastered, will be startled to see the way he has made at the end of the twelvemonth. He is seldom overworked who can contrive to be in advance of his work. If you have three weeks before you to learn something which a man of average quickness could learn in a week, learn it the first week, and not the third. Business despatched is business well done, but business hurried is business ill done. In learning what others have thought, it is well to keep in practice the power to think for one's self; when an author has added to your knowledge, pause and consider if you can add nothing to his. Be not contented to have learned a problem by heart; try to deduce from it a corollary not in the book.

Spare no pains in collecting details before you generalize, but it is only when details are generalized that a truth is grasped. The tendency to generalize is universal with all men who achieve great success, whether in art, literature, or action. The habit of generalizing, though at first gained with care and caution, secures, by practice, a comprehensiveness of judgment and a promptitude of decision, which seem to the crowd like intuitions of genius. And, indeed, nothing more distinguishes the man of genius from the mere man of talent, than the facility of generalizing the various details, each of which demands the aptitude of a special talent; but all of which can be only gathered into a whole by the grasp of a mind which may have no special aptitude for any.—Blackwood.