THE MIND OF THE PAST [BOOKS]
The second section speaks about the influence of books to scholars, including the good and bad impacts. Emerson said: “Books are the best type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth, learn the amount of this influence more conveniently by considering their value alone.” By considering this sentence, we can know that books do have some important truths for scholars to be cited, but books also have dangers to scholars.
Emerson discusses two dangers related to the bad influence of books. The first one is, books from the past are only partially correct, because as times change, the society standards also change, which means some truths from past books are not compatible for every human age. The second danger is, if scholars care too much about the past truths, it will be very hard for them to detect new truths and may be incarcerated into old thoughts. Emerson then lists two examples of people who are easily struck by these dangers. The first is bookworms. Bookworms are those who are incapable of critical thinking and are uncreative. They do not have the ability to build their own thoughts, and thus are very far away from nature. Another example are those English dramatic poets, who have been “Shakespearized” for two hundred years. We cannot deny that they are geniuses, but most have spent an entire lifetime mimicking Shakespeare. If we describe Shakespeare as a big tree, then we can say that those poets were always living in the shade of that tree.
Books, of course, have benefits to humans. Such as science books like physics and chemistry, which are based on brilliant scientists’ thinking and countless studies, and serve as a very important foundation for today’s scientific research. Emerson encourages scholars to cite the truths from past books, but the most important task is learning how to employ critical thinking. Society will develop only when people are creative and critical thinkers find compatible original truths related to the present era.