Responsibility for What We Learn
By S. S. Times
Books tell nothing until you open them. The microscope or the telescope is a visionless brass tube, until you apply your eye to it. No permanent knowledge can lodge in the mind until the mind consents to receive it. This it is which makes it possible for us to be responsible for what we learn from others. Evil men may be all around us, and may exert their utmost to make their evil ours; but unless we ourselves open our minds to them, as we open our minds to a book, their evil can never find entrance within us. All that we learn is our own no matter from whom it comes; and if it is evil, we must bear the guilt of it ourselves, whoever else may also bear the evil and the guilt. There is no way of shirking the responsibility, and the only way of avoiding the guilt is by refusing to learn the evil, shutting our minds to it as we shut the pages of a book.—S. S. Times.