This work is indispensable to a bookman. Personally, I owe it much.

When you have read, wholly or in part, a majority of these
three hundred and thirty-five volumes, *with enjoyment*,
you may begin to whisper to yourself that your literary taste
is formed; and you may pronounce judgment on modern works
which come before the bar of your opinion in the calm assurance that,
though to err is human, you do at any rate know what you are talking about.



Chapter XIV

MENTAL STOCKTAKING

Great books do not spring from something accidental in the great men
who wrote them. They are the effluence of their very core,
the expression of the life itself of the authors. And literature cannot
be said to have served its true purpose until it has been
translated into the actual life of him who reads. It does not succeed
until it becomes the vehicle of the vital. Progress is the gradual result
of the unending battle between human reason and human instinct,
in which the former slowly but surely wins. The most powerful engine
in this battle is literature. It is the vast reservoir of true ideas
and high emotions--and life is constituted of ideas and emotions.
In a world deprived of literature, the intellectual and emotional activity
of all but a few exceptionally gifted men would quickly sink and retract
to a narrow circle. The broad, the noble, the generous would tend
to disappear for want of accessible storage. And life would be
correspondingly degraded, because the fallacious idea