from The Lost Art of Read­ing (1903):

I had fin­ished writ­ing these chap­ters on the philo­sophic mind, and was just read­ing them over, think­ing how true they were, and how valu­able they were for me, and how I must act on them, when I heard a soft “Pooh!” from some­where way down in the depths of my being. When I had stopped and thought, I saw it was my Soul try­ing to get my atten­tion. “I do not want you always read­ing for prin­ci­ples,” said my Soul stoutly, “read­ing for a philo­sophic mind. I do not want a philo­sophic mind on the premises.”

“Very well,” I said.

“You do not want one your­self,” my Soul said, “you would be bored to death with one—with a mind that’s always read­ing for principles!”

“I’m not so sure,” I said.

“You always are with other people’s.”

and

In the mean­time I notice one thing about the philo­sophic mind. It not only does not do things. It can­not even be talked with. It is not inter­ested in things in par­tic­u­lar. There is some­thing gar­ru­lously, ped­a­gog­i­cally unreal about it…

and, regard­ing a philosophically-​​minded friend “Meakins”,

As fond as I am of him, I can­not get at him nowa­days in a con­ver­sa­tion. He is always just around back of some­thing. He is a ghost. I come home pray­ing Heaven, every time I see him, not to let me evap­o­rate. He talks about the future of human­ity by the week, but I find he doesn’t notice human­ity in par­tic­u­lar. You can­not inter­est him in talk­ing to him about him­self, or even in let­ting him do his own talk­ing about him­self. He is a mere detail to him­self. You are another detail. What you are and what he is are both mere foot­notes to a phi­los­o­phy. All his­tory is a foot­note to it–or at best a mar­ginal illus­tra­tion. There is no such thing as com­muning with Meakins unless you use (as I do) a tor­pedo or battering-​​ram as a starter. If you let him have his way he sits in his chair and in his deep, beau­ti­ful voice addresses a row of remarks to The Future in General–the only thing big enough or worth while to talk to. He sits per­fectly motion­less (except the whites of his eyes) and talks deeply and ten­derly and instruc­tively to the Next Few Hun­dred Years–to pos­ter­ity, to babes not yet in their moth­ers’ wombs, while his dear­est friends sit by.

and finally, for tonight,

Orig­i­nal­ity may be said to depend upon a bal­ance of two things, the power of being inter­ested in other people’s minds and the power of being more inter­ested in one’s own. In its last analy­sis, it is the power a man’s mind has of mind­ing its own busi­ness, which, even in another man’s book, makes the book real and absorb­ing to him. It is the least com­pli­ment one can pay a book. The only hon­est way to com­mune with a real man either in a book or out of it is to do one’s own share of talk­ing. Both the book and the man say bet­ter things when talked back to. In read­ing a great book one finds it allows for this. In read­ing a poor one the only way to make it worth while, to find any­thing in it, is to put it there. The most self-​​respecting course when one finds one’s self in the mid­dle of a poor book is to turn right around in it, and write it one’s self.