Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/114

 knowledge of Literature, or to advancing with his Age; but with this view only, that he may read, and reading live;—and so represents in his person the character of the pure Reader.

At this point Authorship and Readership both reach their end; they disappear in themselves, the final result being its own extinction. To the pure Reader, as we have described him, there is no longer any instruction in his reading, nor does he derive any clear conceptions from it; for any printed production forthwith lulls him into listless repose and placid self-forgetfulness. Besides, all other means of instruction are cut off from him. Hence verbal communication, by continuous discourse or scientific conversation, possesses infinite advantage over the mere dead letter. Writing was only practised by the Ancients in order to convey such spoken instruction to those who had not access to the speaker; everything that was written had in the first place been verbally communicated, and was but a copy of the spoken discourse: only among the Moderns, and particularly since the invention of printing, has this method of intercourse claimed recognition for its own sake; whereby style, among other things, having lost the living corrective of speech, has fallen to ruin. But even for spoken communication, a Reader such as we have described is from the first wholly unfit.

How could such an one, habitually given up to absolute passivity, understand the bearings of a connected discourse, which demand an active effort of the mind to lay hold of and retain them? How could he, were the discourse broken up into periods, as every good discourse ought to be,—how could he combine the separate periods together, and review them as a whole? If he could have them put before his eyes in black and white,—then, he thinks, his difficulty should be removed. But he deceives himself. Even in that case, he would not