So little do writers appreciate the importance of direct vision and
experience, that they are in general silent about what they themselves
have seen and felt, copious in reporting the experience of others. Nay,
they are urgently prompted to say what they know others think, and what
consequently they themselves may be expected to think. They are as if
dismayed at their own individuality, and suppress all traces of it in
order to catch the general tone. Such men may, indeed, be of service in
the ordinary commerce of Literature as distributors. All I wish to
point out is that they are distributors, not producers. The commerce
may be served by second-hand reporters, no less than by original seers;
but we must understand this service to be commercial and not literary.
The common stock of knowledge gains from it no addition. The man who
detects a new fact, a new property in a familiar substance, adds to the
science of the age; but the man who expounds the whole system of the
universe on the reports of others, unenlightened by new conceptions of
his own, does not add a grain to the common store.
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