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I have read The Egoist five or six times myself, and I mean to read
it again; for I am like the young friend of the anecdote--I think
Willoughby an unmanly but a very serviceable exposure of myself.
I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten much
that was most influential, as I see already I have forgotten
Thoreau, and Hazlitt, whose paper 'On the Spirit of Obligations'
was a turning-point in my life, and Penn, whose little book of
aphorisms had a brief but strong effect on me, and Mitford's Tales
of Old Japan, wherein I learned for the first time the proper
attitude of any rational man to his country's laws--a secret found,
and kept, in the Asiatic islands. That I should commemorate all is
more than I can hope or the Editor could ask. It will be more to
the point, after having said so much upon improving books, to say a
word or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as I
have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood.
It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment--a free
grace, I find I must call it--by which a man rises to understand
that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs
absolutely wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold them
passionately; and he may know that others hold them but coldly, or
hold them differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if he has
the gift of reading, these others will be full of meat for him.
They will see the other side of propositions and the other side of
virtues. He need not change his dogma for that, but he may change
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