[NO WORK ENTIRELY SELF-SUFFICIENT.]

Any truth that there is in the paradox of excluding all books but one from perusal, belongs to it as a form of the maxim we have now been considering.  There is not in existence a work corresponding to the notion of absolute self-sufficiency.  Suppose we were to go over the chef-d’oeuvres of human genius, we should not find one in the position of entire independence of all others.  Take, for example, the poems of Homer; the Republic and a few other of Plato’s pre-eminent Dialogues; the great speeches of Demosthenes; the Ethics and Politics of Aristotle; the poems of Dante; Shakespeare, as a whole; Bacon’s Novum Organum; Newton’s Principia; Locke on the Understanding; the Mechanique Celeste of Laplace.  No one of all these could produce its effect on the mind without referring to other works, previous, contemporary, or following.  The remark is not confined to works of elucidation and comment merely—­as the contemporary history of Greece, or the speeches of Demosthenes—­but extends to other compositions, of the very same tenor, by different, although inferior, writers.  Shakespeare himself is made much more profitable by a perusal of the other Elizabethans, and by a comparison with dramatic models before and after him.

The nearest approach to a perfectly all-sufficing book is seen in scientific compilations by a conjunction of highly accomplished editors.  A new edition of Quain’s Anatomy, revised and brought up to date by the best anatomists, would, for the moment, probably be fully adequate to the wants of the student, and dispense with all other references whatsoever.  Not that even then, it would be desirable to abstain from ever opening a different compendium; although undoubtedly there would be the very minimum of necessity for doing so.  Nevertheless, literature presents few analogous instances.  One of the great works of an original genius, like Aristotle, might, by profuse annotation, be made nearly sufficing; but this is another way of reading by quotation a plurality of writers; and it would be better still to peruse some of these in full, there being no need for studying them with the degree of intensity bestowed on a main work.

[LOCKE’S TREATMENT OF THE BIBLE.]

The example, by pre-eminence, of one self-sufficing work is the Bible.  Being the sole and ultimate authority of Christian doctrine, it holds a position entirely apart; and, among Protestants at least, there is a becoming jealousy of allowing any extraneous writing to overbear its contents.  Yet we are not to infer, as many have done practically, that no other work needs to be read in company with it.  Granting that its genuine doctrines have been overlaid by subsequent accretions, the way to get clear of these is not to neglect the entire body of fathers, commentators, and theologians, and to give the whole attention to the scriptural text.  Locke himself set an example of this attempt.  He proposed,