Mole ruit suâ.[17]

You will be overwhelmed, like Tarpeia, by the heavy wealth which you
have exacted from tributary generations.

Instances abound; there are authors who are as pointless as they are
inexhaustible in their literary resources. They measure knowledge by
bulk, as it lies in the rude block, without symmetry, without design.
How many commentators are there on the classics, how many on Holy
Scripture, from whom we rise up, wondering at the learning which has
passed before us, and wondering why it passed! How many writers are
there of Ecclesiastical history, such as Mosheim or Du Pin, who,
breaking up their subject into details, destroy its life, and defraud us
of the whole by their anxiety about the parts! The sermons, again, of
the English divines in the seventeenth century, how often are they mere
repertories of miscellaneous and officious learning! Of course Catholics
also may read without thinking; and in their case, equally as with
Protestants, it holds good, that such knowledge is unworthy of the name,
knowledge which they have not thought through, and thought out. Such
readers are only possessed by their knowledge, not possessed of it; nay,
in matter of fact they are often even carried away by it, without any
volition of their own. Recollect, the memory can tyrannise, as well as
the imagination. Derangement, I believe, has been considered as a loss
of control over the sequence of ideas. The mind, once set in motion, is
henceforth deprived of the power of initiation, and becomes the victim
of a train of associations, one thought suggesting another, in the way
of cause and effect, as if by a mechanical process, or some physical
necessity. No one, who has had experience of men of studious habits, but
must recognise the existence of a parallel phenomenon in the case of
those who have over-stimulated the memory. In such persons reason acts