It is sin against the Holy Spirit to frighten away one’s own original thoughts by taking up a book.  It is the same as a man flying from Nature to look at a museum of dried plants, or to study a beautiful landscape in copperplate.  A man at times arrives at a truth or an idea after spending much time in thinking it out for himself, linking together his various thoughts, when he might have found the same thing in a book; it is a hundred times more valuable if he has acquired it by thinking it out for himself.  For it is only by his thinking it out for himself that it enters as an integral part, as a living member into the whole system of his thought, and stands in complete and firm relation with it; that it is fundamentally understood with all its consequences, and carries the colour, the shade, the impress of his own way of thinking; and comes at the very moment, just as the necessity for it is felt, and stands fast and cannot be forgotten.  This is the perfect application, nay, interpretation of Goethe’s

  “Was du ererbt von deinen Vaetern hast
   Erwirb es um es zu besitzen.”

The man who thinks for himself learns the authorities for his opinions only later on, when they serve merely to strengthen both them and himself; while the book-philosopher starts from the authorities and other people’s opinions, therefrom constructing a whole for himself; so that he resembles an automaton, whose composition we do not understand.  The other man, the man who thinks for himself, on the other hand, is like a living man as made by nature.  His mind is impregnated from without, which then bears and brings forth its child.  Truth that has been merely learned adheres to us like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose, or at best like one made out of another’s flesh; truth which is acquired by thinking for oneself is like a natural member:  it alone really belongs to us.  Here we touch upon the difference between the thinking man and the mere man of learning.  Therefore the intellectual acquirements of the man who thinks for himself are like a fine painting that stands out full of life, that has its light and shade correct, the tone sustained, and perfect harmony of colour.  The intellectual attainments of the merely learned man, on the contrary, resemble a big palette covered with every colour, at most systematically arranged, but without harmony, relation, and meaning.

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Reading is thinking with some one else’s head instead of one’s own.  But to think for oneself is to endeavour to develop a coherent whole, a system, even if it is not a strictly complete one.  Nothing is more harmful than, by dint of continual reading, to strengthen the current of other people’s thoughts.  These thoughts, springing from different minds, belonging to different systems, bearing different colours, never flow together of themselves into a unity of thought, knowledge, insight, or conviction,