The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer | Page 6

words; so he bungles them, and says in his own bad way
that which has been said very much better and more clearly by the old
writers, who wrote from their own lively knowledge of the subject. The
new writer frequently omits the best things they say, their most striking
illustrations, their happiest remarks; because he does not see their value
or feel how pregnant they are. The only thing that appeals to him is
what is shallow and insipid.

It often happens that an old and excellent book is ousted by new and
bad ones, which, written for money, appear with an air of great
pretension and much puffing on the part of friends. In science a man
tries to make his mark by bringing out something fresh. This often
means nothing more than that he attacks some received theory which is
quite correct, in order to make room for his own false notions.
Sometimes the effort is successful for a time; and then a return is made
to the old and true theory. These innovators are serious about nothing
but their own precious self: it is this that they want to put forward, and
the quick way of doing so, as they think, is to start a paradox. Their
sterile heads take naturally to the path of negation; so they begin to
deny truths that have long been admitted--the vital power, for example,
the sympathetic nervous system, _generatio equivoca_, Bichat's
distinction between the working of the passions and the working of
intelligence; or else they want us to return to crass atomism, and the
like. Hence it frequently happens that _the course of science is
retrogressive._
To this class of writers belong those translators who not only translate
their author but also correct and revise him; a proceeding which always
seems to me impertinent. To such writers I say: Write books yourself
which are worth translating, and leave other people's works as they are!
The reader should study, if he can, the real authors, the men who have
founded and discovered things; or, at any rate, those who are
recognized as the great masters in every branch of knowledge. Let him
buy second-hand books rather than read their contents in new ones. To
be sure, it is easy to add to any new discovery--_inventis aliquid addere
facile est_; and, therefore, the student, after well mastering the
rudiments of his subject, will have to make himself acquainted with the
more recent additions to the knowledge of it. And, in general, the
following rule may be laid down here as elsewhere: if a thing is new, it
is seldom good; because if it is good, it is only for a short time new.
What the address is to a letter, the title should be to a book; in other
words, its main object should be to bring the book to those amongst the
public who will take an interest in its contents. It should, therefore, be
expressive; and since by its very nature it must be short, it should be
concise, laconic, pregnant, and if possible give the contents in one word.
A prolix title is bad; and so is one that says nothing, or is obscure and

ambiguous, or even, it may be, false and misleading; this last may
possibly involve the book in the same fate as overtakes a wrongly
addressed letter. The worst titles of all are those which have been stolen,
those, I mean, which have already been borne by other books; for they
are in the first place a plagiarism, and secondly the most convincing
proof of a total lack of originality in the author. A man who has not
enough originality to invent a new title for his book, will be still less
able to give it new contents. Akin to these stolen titles are those which
have been imitated, that is to say, stolen to the extent of one half; for
instance, long after I had produced my treatise _On Will in Nature_,
Oersted wrote a book entitled On Mind in Nature.
A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's
thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in _the matter about
which he has thought_, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other
words, _what it is that he has thought about it._
The matter of books is most various; and various also are the several
excellences attaching to books on the score of their matter. By matter I
mean everything that comes within the domain of actual experience;
that is to say, the facts of history and the facts of nature, taken in and by
themselves and in their widest sense. Here it is the thing treated of,
which gives its peculiar character to the