Well, I say, these secondary impressions are valuable as adjuncts to
primary impressions. But when they stand absolute and have hardly any
reference to primary impressions, then they may deceive. When they stand
not only absolute but clothed with authority, and when they pretend to
convince us even against our own experience, they are positively undoing
the work which education was meant to do. When we receive them merely as
an enlargement of what we know and make of the unseen things of which we
read, things in the image of the seen, then they quite distort our
appreciation of the world.
Consider so simple a thing as a river. A child learns its map and knows,
or thinks it knows, that such and such rivers characterize such and such
nations and their territories. Paris stands upon the River Seine, Rome
upon the River Tiber, New Orleans on the Mississippi, Toledo upon the
River Tagus, and so forth. That child will know one river, the river
near his home. And he will think of all those other rivers in its image.
He will think of the Tagus and the Tiber and the Seine and the
Mississippi--and they will all be the river near his home. Then let him
travel, and what will he come across? The Seine, if he is from these
islands, may not disappoint him or astonish him with a sense of novelty
and of ignorance. It will indeed look grander and more majestic, seen
from the enormous forest heights above its lower course, than what,
perhaps, he had thought possible in a river, but still it will be a
river of water out of which a man can drink, with clear-cut banks and
with bridges over it, and with boats that ply up and down.
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