The unnatural method of the book—­the visible book instead of the audible book—­will then be done away.  Nature, who instructs the child by sound, will continue to teach the man in the same manner.  All mothers, from the mother bird to the mother woman, begin the teaching of their offspring by sound, by utterance.  The mother bird continues in this manner; but the mother woman is presently supplanted by a teacher who comes in with a printed book filled with crooked marks, and would have it that learning must be thus acquired.  Instead of continuing the natural process of instruction to the complete development and information of the mind, an abnormal method has been adopted by mankind with many hurtful consequences.

The youth at a certain age is led into the world of science, and there dismissed from the mother-method, to acquire, if he can, the painful and tedious use of meaningless hieroglyphics.  There he must study with the eye, learning as best he may the significance of the crooked signs which can at the most signify no more than words.  How much of human energy and life and thought have been thus wasted in the instruction of the mind by characters and symbols.  The eyes of mankind have, as we said, been dimmed and shadowed, and at the same time the faculties have been overheated and the equipose of perception and memory seriously disturbed by this unnatural process of learning.

Human beings begin the acquirement of knowledge with words, and they end with words; but an unnatural civilization has taught man to walk the greater part of his intellectual journey by means of arbitrary systems of writing and printing.  When the next Columbian Year arrives we shall see him untaught (a hard thing withal) and retaught on nature’s plan of learning.  Nature teaches language by sound only.  Artificiality writes a scrawl.  Nature’s book is a book of words.  Man’s book is as yet a book of signs and symbols.  Nature’s book utters itself to the ear, and man’s book blinds the eyes and overheats the imagination.  Nature’s method is to teach by the ear, and to reserve the sight for the discovery and enjoyment of beauty.

The sound-book in some form is coming; and with that the intellectual repose of mankind will begin to be restored.  The use of the eye for the offices of education instead of the stronger ear, has, we think, impaired, if it has not destroyed, the equilibrium of the human mind.  That equilibrium must be restored.  The mental diseases and unrest of our race are largely attributable to the over-excitement of the faculties through ages of too much seeing.

The Age of Hearing is, we think, to be ushered in with the twentieth century.  The coming of that age will tend to restore the mental balance of mankind.  Memory, now almost obliterated, will come again.  The over-heated perceptions will cool.  The imagination will become calm, and the eye itself will recover, we hope, from the injuries, of overstrain, and will regain its power and lustre.  Man will see once more as the eagle sees, and will learn Shakespeare by heart.  He will remember all knowledge, and will again be able to see, as of old, from Sicily to Carthage!