Such a work is Spencer’s First Principles.  I know that it is nearly useless to advise people to read First Principles.  They are intimidated by the sound of it; and it costs as much as a dress-circle seat at the theatre.  But if they would, what brilliant stocktakings there might be in a few years!  Why, if they would only read such detached essays as that on “Manners and Fashion,” or “The Genesis of Science” (in a sixpenny volume of Spencer’s Essays, published by Watts and Co.), the magic illumination, the necessary power of “synthetising” things, might be vouch-safed to them.  In any case, the lack of some such disciplinary, co-ordinating measure will amply explain many disastrous stocktakings.  The manner in which one single ray of light, one single precious hint, will clarify and energise the whole mental life of him who receives it, is among the most wonderful and heavenly of intellectual phenomena.  Some men search for that light and never find it.  But most men never search for it.

The superlative cause of disastrous stocktakings remains, and it is much more simple than the one with which I have just dealt.  It consists in the absence of meditation.  People read, and read, and read, blandly unconscious of their effrontery in assuming that they can assimilate without any further effort the vital essence which the author has breathed into them.  They cannot.  And the proof that they do not is shown all the time in their lives.  I say that if a man does not spend at least as much time in actively and definitely thinking about what he has read as he has spent in reading, he is simply insulting his author.  If he does not submit himself to intellectual and emotional fatigue in classifying the communicated ideas, and in emphasising on his spirit the imprint of the communicated emotions—­then reading with him is a pleasant pastime and nothing else.  This is a distressing fact.  But it is a fact.  It is distressing, for the reason that meditation is not a popular exercise.  If a friend asks you what you did last night, you may answer, “I was reading,” and he will be impressed and you will be proud.  But if you answer, “I was meditating,” he will have a tendency to smile and you will have a tendency to blush.  I know this.  I feel it myself. (I cannot offer any explanation.) But it does not shake my conviction that the absence of meditation is the main origin of disappointing stocktakings.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

NOVELS

  A MAN FROM THE NORTH
  ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS
  LEONORA
  A GREAT MAN
  SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
  WHOM GOD HATH JOINED
  BURIED ALIVE
  THE OLD WIVES’ TALE
  THE GLIMPSE
  HELEN WITH THE HIGH HAND
  CLAYHANGER
  THE CARD

FANTASIAS

  THE GRAND BABYLON HOTEL
  THE GATES OF WRATH
  TERESA OF WATLING STREET
  THE LOOT OF CITIES
  HUGO
  THE GHOST
  THE CITY OF PLEASURE