This malady is doubtless spontaneous in some degree, and dependent on failings of the human mind that we need not discuss here, but there are signs that it is being fostered, spread, and made more acute by special influences.  Probably our educational methods are not altogether blameless.  The boy who trustfully approached a Reference Librarian and said, “I have to write a composition on what I saw between home and school; have you got a book about that?” had doubtless been taught that he must look in a book for everything.  The conscientious teacher who was now trying to separate him from his notion may have been the very one who, perhaps unconsciously, had instilled it; if so, her fault had thus returned to plague her.

The boy or girl who comes to attach a sacredness or a wizardry to the book in itself will naturally believe, after a little, that whether he understands what is in it matters little—­and this is the malady of which we have been complaining.

A college teacher of the differential calculus, in a time now happily long past, when a pupil timidly inquired the reason for this or that, was wont to fix the interrogator with his eye and say, “Sir; it is so because the book says so!” Even in more recent days a well-known university teacher, accustomed to use his own text-book, used to say when a student had ventured to vary its classic phraseology, “It can not be expressed better than in the words of the book!?” These instances, of course, are taken from the dark ages of education, but even to-day I believe that a false idea of the value of a printed page merely as print—­not as the record of a mind, ready to make contact with the mind of a reader—­has impressed itself too deeply on the brains of many children at an age when such impressions are apt to be durable.  Not that the schools are especially at fault; we have all played our part in this unfortunate business.  It might all fade, at length; we all know that many good teachings of our childhood do vanish; why should not the bad ones occasionally follow suit?

But now come in all the well-meaning instructors of the adult—­the Chautauquans, the educational extensionists, the lecturers, the correspondence schools, the advisers of reading, the makers of booklists, the devisers of “courses.”  They deepen the fleeting impression and increase its capacity for harm, while varying slightly the mechanism that produced it.  As the child grows into a man, his childish idea that a book will produce a certain effect independently of what it contains is apt to yield a little to reason.  The new influences, some of which I have named above, do not attempt directly to combat this dawning intelligence; they utilise it to complete the mental discomfiture of their victims.  They admit the necessity of comprehending the contents of the book, but they persuade the reader that such comprehension is easier than it really is.  And they often administer specially concocted tabloids that convince one that he knows more than he really does.  Thus the unsuspecting adult goes on reading what he does not understand, not now thinking that it does not matter, but falsely persuaded that he has become competent to understand.