The notion that unhappy men and women employ reading as an anodyne is not quite accurate. With them reading furnishes more than a substitute for thought; it furnishes them the occasion to set going in their minds a dance of images, a sequence of ideas, a march of memories which run parallel to the matter of the book, and to which the book, indeed, may be but the exciting cause. Neither is it quite accurate to say that inveterate readers, happy or unhappy, lead their lives within the pages of this volume or that for want of the more robust outlet which action affords those who do not care to read, or at least to read so much. Rather, such readers may be full of creative impulses which they prefer to exercise in a purer and more plastic universe than they have found elsewhere. There happens to be no standard by which to measure the relative value of the forces which are released by action and of those which are released by contemplation. If the man of action is associated in his career with other active persons, why may not the man of contemplation be equally associated in his with others whose society he enjoys through the medium of printed words? As there are men of action who drive blindly forward, without thought, to some goal which they hardly see though their instincts urge them in that general direction, so there are men of contemplation who drift with the tide of some—or any—poet or historian or philosopher without critical resistance; but the creative reader challenges, disputes, denies, fights his way through his book, and he emerges to some extent always another person. He has been a creator while he seemed to be merely passive and recipient. To take another easy illustration, a scholar engaged in actual research may wade through rivers and climb mountains of books while in the pursuit of proofs for his thesis, and may yet at every step be full of creative fire, throwing aside what he does not need and choosing what he does as emphatically as if he were a soldier on the most difficult campaign. The researcher is but a common type of creative reader, his process and his aim being more readily comprehensible than those of the other types but not essentially unlike them. All creative readers have at any given moment some conscious or unconscious thesis which they are seeking to prove, some conscious or unconscious picture they desire to complete, some conscious or unconscious point they mean to reach if they can. By it they are sustained through what would be unendurable labour to another, or even to them at an earlier or a later day. It gives them resoluteness, it gives them form. More potent than has been ordinarily recognized, it belongs with that faculty whereby the mind arranges its impressions in some sort of order and comes to some kind of conclusion without always consulting the will or even inviting the consciousness to be aware of what is going on.