- This
office appertains to writers great or small, particularly to the
educated who possess wit, imagination or eloquence, a pleasing style,
the art of finding readers or of making themselves understood. Owing
to their interposition, a doctrine wrought out by the specialist or
thinker in his study, spreads around through the novel, the theatre
and the lecture-room, by pamphlets, the newspaper, dictionaries,
manuals and conversation, and, finally, by teaching itself. It thus
enters all houses, knocks at the door of each intellect, and,
according as it works its way more or less forcibly, contributes more
or less effectively to make or unmake the ideas and sentiments that
adapt it to the social order of things in which it is comprised.
In this respect it acts like positive religions; in its way and on
many accounts, it is one of them. In the first place, like religion,
it is a living, principal, inexhaustible fountain-head, a high central
reservoir of active and directing belief. If the public reservoir is
not filled by an intermittent flow, by sudden freshets, by obscure
infiltrations of the mystic faculty, it is regularly and openly fed by
the constant contributions of the normal faculties.
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