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Updated: May 26, 2025
There was invented the art of silver-plating, to give the bourgeoisie at moderate prices the sweet illusion of possessing objects of silver; great thinkers disappeared; instead were multiplied manuals, treatises, encyclopaedias, professors that summarised and vulgarised.
Even so, in our own time, China herself, wearied with the astral molds and inner burdens of two millenniums, has been writhing in a fever of destruction: has burnt down the Hanlin College, symbol and center of a thousand years of culture; destroyed old and famous cities; sent up priceless encyclopaedias in smoke; replaced the Empire with a republic, and the Dragon of wisdom with five meaningless stripes; breaking with all she was in her brilliant greatness, and all she has been since in her weakness and squalid decline.
Other valuable sources of information are encyclopaedias. They often give broad surveys and comprehensive digests that cannot readily be found elsewhere. Although they do not, as a rule, discuss subjects that are of mere local or present-day interest, yet the thorough searcher after evidence will usually do well to consult at least several.
In the absence of such instruction, one can seldom do better at the outset than to become familiar with indexes to periodical and contemporary literature, encyclopaedias, government reports, and the library catalogue. These give references to all articles published in the principal magazines and newspapers for many years.
Henri Martin, Sismondi, and Michelet may be consulted; also Hallam's Middle Ages, Milman's Latin Christianity, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Biographic Universelle, and the Encyclopaedias. We associate with Hildebrand the great contest of the Middle Ages between spiritual and temporal authority, the triumph of the former, and its supremacy in Europe until the Reformation.
At this moment, for instance, how could geology be treated otherwise than childishly by one who should rely upon the encyclopaedias of 1800? or comparative physiology by the most ingenious of men unacquainted with Marshall Hall, and with the apocalyptic glimpses of secrets unfolding under the hands of Professor Owen?
A schoolboy to-day knows more than Sir Isaac Newton knew; his knowledge has vanished away. You put yesterday's newspaper in the fire: its knowledge has vanished away. You buy the old editions of the great encyclopaedias for a few cents: their knowledge has vanished away. Look how the coach has been superseded by the use of steam.
He has not even the courage of other people's ideas, but insists on going directly to life for everything, and ultimately, between encyclopaedias and personal experience, he comes to the ground, having drawn his types from the family circle or from the weekly washerwoman, and having acquired an amount of useful information from which never, even in his most meditative moments, can he thoroughly free himself.
The greatest wonder is, that Nicolo Pesce ever obtained a place in the encyclopaedias of the world.
Godless men may be scientists, philosophers, encyclopaedias of knowledge, but for want of religion, they blunder in the direction of their lives, and lack wisdom enough to keep them from wrecking the ship on the rocks. The Israelitish parent was enjoined to teach his or her children the law of the Lord. Here the children are enjoined to listen to the instruction.
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