Then to unlearn the first ideas of history, of science, of social
institutions, to unlearn one's own life and purpose; to unlearn the old
mode of thought and way of arriving at things; to take off peel after
peel, and so get by degrees slowly towards the truth--thus writing, as it
were, a sort of floating book in the mind, almost remaking the soul. It
seems as if the chief value of books is to give us something to unlearn.
Sometimes I feel indignant at the false views that were instilled into me
in early days, and then again I see that that very indignation gives me a
moral life. I hope in the days to come future thinkers will unlearn us,
and find ideas infinitely better. How marvellous it seems that there
should be found communities furnished with the printing-press and fully
convinced they are more intelligent than ants, and yet deliberately
refusing by a solid 'popular' vote to accept free libraries! They look
with scorn on the mediaeval times, when volumes were chained in the
college library or to the desk at church. Ignorant times those! A good
thing it would be if only three books were chained to a desk, open and
free in every parish throughout the kingdom now. So might the wish to
unlearn be at last started in the inert mind of the mass. Almost the only
books left to me to read, and not to unlearn very much, are my first
books--the graven classics of Greece and Rome, cut with a stylus so
deeply into the tablet they cannot be erased. Little of the monograph or
of classification, no bushel baskets full of facts, no minute dissection
of nature, no attempt to find the soul under the scalpel. Thoughts which
do not exactly deal with nature direct in a mechanical way, as the
chemist labels all his gums and spices and earths in small boxes--I
wonder if anybody at Athens ever made a collection of the coleoptera? Yet
in some way they had got the spirit of the earth and sea, the soul of the
sun. This never dies; this I wish not to unlearn; this is ever fresh and
beautiful as a summer morning:--