What does one want to make of one’s own children?  One wants them to be generous, affectionate, simple-minded, just, temperate in the moral region.  In the intellectual region, one desires them to be alert, eager, independent, perceptive, interested.  I like them to ask a hundred questions about what they see and hear.  I want them to be tender and compassionate to animals and insects.  As for books, I want them to follow their own taste, but I surround them only with the best; but even so I wish them to have minds of their own, to have preferences, and reasons for their preferences.  I do not want them to follow my taste, but to trust their own.  I do not in the least care about their amassing correct information.  It is much better that they should learn how to use books.  It is very strange how theories of education remain impervious to development.  In the days when books were scarce and expensive, when knowledge was not formulated and summarised, men had to depend largely on their own stores.  But now, what is the use of books, if one is still to load one’s memory with details?  The training of memory is a very unimportant part of education nowadays; people with accurate memories are far too apt to trust them, and to despise verification.  Indeed, a well-filled memory is a great snare, because it leads the possessor of it to believe, as I have said, that knowledge is culture.  A good digestion is more important to a man than the possession of many sacks of corn; and what one ought rather to cultivate nowadays is mental digestion.

June 14, 1889.

It is comforting to reflect how easy it is to abandon habits, and how soon a new habit takes the place of the old.  Some months ago I put writing aside in despair, feeling that I was turning away from the most stable thing in life; yet even now I have learned largely to acquiesce in silence; the dreary and objectless mood visits me less and less frequently.  What have I found to fill the place of the old habit?  I have begun to read much more widely, and recognise how very ill-educated I am.  In my writing days, I used to read mainly for the purposes of my books, or, if I turned aside to general reading at all, it was to personal, intime, subjective books that I turned, books in which one could see the development of character, analyse emotion, acquire psychological experience; but now I find a growing interest in sociological and historical ideas; a mist begins to roll away from my mental horizon, and I realise how small was the circle in which I was walking.  I sometimes find myself hoping that this may mean the possibility of a wider flight; but I do not, strange to say, care very much about the prospect.  Just at present, I appear to myself to have been like a botanist walking in a great forest, looking out only for small typical specimens of certain classes of ground-plants, without any eyes for the luxurious vegetation, the beauty of the rich opening glade, the fallen day of the dense underwood.