Whether one reads a single book or an entire library, the result is the same, if what is read fails to become the life of the reader--his feelings and his thoughts, his passions and his meditation, his experience and the extolment of his personality. The poet Giusti has said: "Writing a book is worse than useless, unless it is going to change people." Reading a book with no effect is infinitely worse. Of course the people that have to be transformed, both for the writer and for the reader (who are not two very different persons after all), are not the others, but first of all the author himself. The mere reading of a page or even a word inwardly reconstitutes us, if it does consist in a new throb of our personality, which continuously renews itself through the incessant vibrations of its becoming. This then is the all-important solution,--that the book or the word of a teacher arouse our souls and set them in motion; that it transform itself into our inner life; that it cease to be a thing, special and determinate, one of the many, and become transfused into our personality. And our personality in its act, in the act, I say, and not in the abstract concept which we may somehow form of it,--is absolute unity: that moving unity to which education can in no wise be referred, unless it is made identical with its movement, and therefore entirely conformant to its unity. The man whose culture is limited, or, rather, entirely estranged from the understanding of life, is called _homo unius libri_. We might just as well call him _homo omnium librorum_. For he who would read all books need have a leaking brain like the perforated vessel of the daughters of Danaus,--a leak through which all ideas, all joys, all sorrows, and all hopes, everything that man may find in books, would have to flow unceasingly, without leaving any traces of their passage, without ever forming that personality which, having acquired a certain form or physiognomy, reacts and becomes selective, picks what it wants out of the congeries, and chooses, out of all possible experiences, only what it requires for the life that is suited to it. We should never add books upon books _ad infinitum_! It is not a question of quantity. What we need is the ability to discover our world in books,--that sum total of interests which respond to all the vibrations of our spirit, which assuredly, as Herbart claimed, has a multiplicity of interests, but all of them radiating from a vital centre. And everything is in the centre, since everything originates there.