Mein Kampf
tivation” takes him further away from the world, until not infrequently he ends either in a sanatorium or as a “politician” in parliament.
No man with a mind of this sort can ever fetch out from his jumbled “knowledge” what is appropriate for the needs of a given moment; his intellectual ballast is stowed not by the lines of life, but in the chance order in which he has read the books, and as the contents happen to have landed in his head. If in its daily demands Fate were to remind him of the proper use of what he has learned, it would have also to cite volume and page, or the poor wretch could never in all eternity find what he needed. But since Fate does not do this, these learned gentry are fearfully embarrassed at every critical juncture; they search frantically for analogies, and of course take the wrong prescription with unfailing certainty.
If this were not so, the political achievements of our learned government heroes in highest posts would be incomprehensible, unless we decided to assume base rascality instead of a pathological condition.
But a person who has mastered the art of right reading can, in reading any book, magazine or pamphlet, spot immediately everything he believes suited for retention, either because it fits his purpose or because it is generally worth knowing. What he has acquired in this way takes its proper place in the image formed by his imagination of the matter in hand; and thus its effect is either to correct or to complete the image—to increase its rightness or its clarity. If now life suddenly presents some question for examination or solution, the memory stored by this way of reading will instantly resort to the already imagined picture as a standard, and will bring out individual bits of information on the subject which have been collected through decades, as a basis for the intellect to clarify or answer the question.
Only thus are there sense and purpose in reading.
A speaker, for instance, who does not thus give his intelligence the materials to back it up will never be able, if contradicted, to fight effectively for his opinion, though it be a thousand times
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