The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer | Page 5

language.
A great many bad writers make their whole living by that foolish mania
of the public for reading nothing but what has just been
printed,--journalists, I mean. Truly, a most appropriate name. In plain
language it is _journeymen, day-laborers_!
Again, it may be said that there are three kinds of authors. First come
those who write without thinking. They write from a full memory, from
reminiscences; it may be, even straight out of other people's books.
This class is the most numerous. Then come those who do their
thinking whilst they are writing. They think in order to write; and there
is no lack of them. Last of all come those authors who think before they
begin to write. They are rare.
Authors of the second class, who put off their thinking until they come
to write, are like a sportsman who goes forth at random and is not
likely to bring very much home. On the other hand, when an author of
the third or rare class writes, it is like a battue. Here the game has been
previously captured and shut up within a very small space; from which
it is afterwards let out, so many at a time, into another space, also
confined. The game cannot possibly escape the sportsman; he has
nothing to do but aim and fire--in other words, write down his thoughts.
This is a kind of sport from which a man has something to show.
But even though the number of those who really think seriously before
they begin to write is small, extremely few of them think about _the
subject itself_: the remainder think only about the books that have been
written on the subject, and what has been said by others. In order to
think at all, such writers need the more direct and powerful stimulus of
having other people's thoughts before them. These become their
immediate theme; and the result is that they are always under their
influence, and so never, in any real sense of the word, are original. But
the former are roused to thought by the subject itself, to which their
thinking is thus immediately directed. This is the only class that
produces writers of abiding fame.
It must, of course, be understood that I am speaking here of writers who
treat of great subjects; not of writers on the art of making brandy.
Unless an author takes the material on which he writes out of his own
head, that is to say, from his own observation, he is not worth reading.
Book-manufacturers, compilers, the common run of history-writers,

and many others of the same class, take their material immediately out
of books; and the material goes straight to their finger-tips without even
paying freight or undergoing examination as it passes through their
heads, to say nothing of elaboration or revision. How very learned
many a man would be if he knew everything that was in his own books!
The consequence of this is that these writers talk in such a loose and
vague manner, that the reader puzzles his brain in vain to understand
what it is of which they are really thinking. They are thinking of
nothing. It may now and then be the case that the book from which they
copy has been composed exactly in the same way: so that writing of
this sort is like a plaster cast of a cast; and in the end, the bare outline
of the face, and that, too, hardly recognizable, is all that is left to your
Antinous. Let compilations be read as seldom as possible. It is difficult
to avoid them altogether; since compilations also include those
text-books which contain in a small space the accumulated knowledge
of centuries.
There is no greater mistake than to suppose that the last work is always
the more correct; that what is written later on is in every case an
improvement on what was written before; and that change always
means progress. Real thinkers, men of right judgment, people who are
in earnest with their subject,--these are all exceptions only. Vermin is
the rule everywhere in the world: it is always on the alert, taking the
mature opinions of the thinkers, and industriously seeking to improve
upon them (save the mark!) in its own peculiar way.
If the reader wishes to study any subject, let him beware of rushing to
the newest books upon it, and confining his attention to them alone,
under the notion that science is always advancing, and that the old
books have been drawn upon in the writing of the new. They have been
drawn upon, it is true; but how? The writer of the new book often does
not understand the old books thoroughly, and yet he is unwilling to take
their exact