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 methods of
transportation; rather does it include in its scope all good thoughts and
all good actions. It makes better men and women of those who read it; it
is revolutionary and evolutionary at the same time, in the best sense of
both words.

What will thus inspire me, do you ask? It would be easy to try to tell