Too Much Reading | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 19, 1871

Too Much Reading.

It is quite certain that many youthful minds in our age are made effeminate, and torpid, and incapable of strong, original thought, by too much reading. They read simply for amusement, to pass away weary hours, and there is no mental stimulus of growth and no discipline of memory. Rev. F. W. Robertson says in one of his letters:

By E——’s letter to you, I see she is reading Southey’s “Peninsular War,” and meditating one or two other great works. At Oxford, Southey’s “Peninsular War” would take six months’ to study, pen in hand, getting up the details of policy, battles, laws, geography. It is better not to read at all, than to run through such a book.

I have got a small, popular work on Chemistry, which I am reading now, of 160 pages. I have read little else for a fortnight; but then, I could bear an examination on every law and principle it lays down. Town’s “Manual of Chemistry,” a small octavo, will take me six months, I calculate; but then, as a medical man said to me to-day, if you study it in the way you are doing, you will know by that time more chemistry than nine out of ten of the medical men in this town.

I never knew but one or two fast readers, and readers of many books, whose knowledge was worth anything. Miss Martineau says of herself, that she is the slowest of readers, sometimes a page in an hour; but then, what she reads she makes her own. Do impress this on E——. Girls read too much and think too little. I will answer for it that there are few girls of eighteen who have not read more books than I have; and as to religious books, I can count upon my fingers in two minutes all I ever read, but then they are mine.

Sir Erskine Perry said the other day that, a fortnight ago, in a conversation with Comte—one of the most profound thinkers in Europe—Comte told him that he had read an incredibly small number of books these last twenty years—I forget how many—and scarcely ever a review; but then, what Comte reads lies there fructifying, and comes out a living tree with leaves and fruit.

Multifarious reading weakens the mind more than doing nothing, for it becomes a necessity at last, like smoking, and is an excuse for the mind to lie dormant, whilst thought is poured in, and runs through, a clear stream, over unproductive gravel, on which not even mosses grow. It is the idlest of all idleness, and leaves more of impotency than any other. I do not give myself as a specimen, for my nervous energies are shattered by stump oratory, its excitements and reaction; but I know what reading is, for I could read, once, and did. I read hard, or not at all—never skimming, never turning aside to merely inviting books; and Plato, Aristotle, Butler, Thucydides, Sterne, Jonathan Edwards, have passed like the iron atoms of the blood into my mental constitution.