Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 171, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 July 1919 — Reader Finds Comfort in Old Books Written Without War in the Author’s Mind [ARTICLE]

Reader Finds Comfort in Old Books Written Without War in the Author’s Mind

If during the war it almost seemed to some people that nothing written before 1914 had kept its old value, they may, on the contrary, soon find themselves blinking suspiciously at books written since then. Mathematicians distinguished carefully between “systematic” error, which is cumulative, and the casual errors which are as likely to lie in one direction as the other and in the long run tend to offset each other. To the reader who is beginning to recover a deranged critical faculty the trouble with most of which has been written since 1914 is that it contains a systematic error due to the perturbations set up by the great war. The comfort of old books, on the contrary, lies in the fact that they were not written with the great war lurking in some corners of the author’s mind. Whatever their errors and prejudices, they are not bent all one way by a single force, and even their prejudices neutralize each other.