And, again, from the point of view of science, this study of earlier stages is useful because the simple things are often the best interpreters of more complex, the early of the late, and it is the vision of the whole in perspective to the very beginning which gives the clue to the real meaning of the latest. “Students have come to realize,” says Professor Stewart Paton (in the Popular Science Magazine 8,1912,166), “that in the ... amoeba, jelly-fish, crab or fish, is to be found the key that will eventually open the book ... (of) the most complex psychic manifestations.” This is true also of libraries—the oldest, smallest and rudest give a clue to the more complex, and it may be added, parenthetically, the library is itself in fact the most complex psychic manifestation in the objective Universe.
Beginnings thus, though small, are the roots of the matter. This is so well recognized in the field of science as to have become an axiom, and in the study of any class of things nowadays the aim is to trace each kind of thing—plant, animal, idea or social institution back to its beginning. Evolution has taught us to expect a genealogical series back and back to very simple forms and the method of all science has become what is called historical or genetic. Natural science is not satisfied until the most complex animals and plants have been traced back through all their complexities to single cell origins, and, if Browning may be believed, the aim of humane and ethical science too does not rest short of the same effort “to trace love’s faint beginnings in mankind”.
This study of the beginnings is, moreover, not only at the bottom of the method of modern science but of the method of modern teaching. Every man, it is said, in his life history retraces the history of his race, and the race history of man is above all things a history of developing ideas. This has two aspects significant for the method of teaching. As investigating science must trace every complex idea back to its simplest beginnings, so teaching traces the idea forward from those beginnings to its latest form. The law by which man in his individual development of ideas must retrace the history of the race applies to every idea or group of ideas and it is doubtful therefore if any one ever learns anything rightly in life unless he patiently follows the idea of it from its simplest beginnings to its latest form—the path being sometimes a steady growth in value, sometimes a rise and fall again towards extinction. The historical method of teaching, therefore, is the only method which can be called natural.
The other teaching aspect of this matter is the very significant fact in child psychology that the general development of the child’s mind, like the development of its body, does in fact repeat the history of its ancestors as they passed from gestures and cries to articulate speech and writing and through these from the simplest knowledge to the most complex. The child must therefore, in short, be taken along “the paths upon which in a very real sense every human being has come in person” and the natural method of child teaching must consequently be deduced particularly from a study of the beginnings of speech and writing, books and book collections. In a sense, and in a very real sense, the key to the scientific pedagogy of the future lies in the group of studies summed up as library science, for the library is the late and complex object which sums up in itself the sciences of the book, the word, and all simpler elements of human expression and record, if there be any such. A fourth reason for the study of beginnings is, therefore, that it is the natural method of study and teaching.
Finally and closely connected with the preceding reasons is the fact that the purpose of all science is prophecy. We learn not so much that we may teach, as the motto says, but we learn that we may foretell. The object of all science is to understand from what has been the relation of cause and effect in the past, what is likely to be the result of any given set of circumstances in the future. Physics, e.g. has proved a very sure prophetic guide. An engineer can tell with precision that a bridge constructed in a certain way will break if loaded beyond a certain point. Load it to that point and his prophecy becomes true. In the same way, with somewhat less precision perhaps, the biologist can prophesy results in the breeding of plants and animals, the physician can prophesy that quinine will help malaria, the farmer that planted seed under certain conditions will or will not on the average produce certain results, and so on through every branch of human activity. We study in order that we may know the conditions which will be brought about in the future by one or another set of circumstances and so that we may be able to produce the circumstances if we wish the result. The preparation for foretelling may, therefore, be labeled the fifth reason for historical study.
§ 3. Definition of the Library
In approaching the actual study of primitive libraries it is necessary to touch a little on definition and method. Both these matters, essential to the approach of any topic scientifically, doubly need some attention at this point, because library history has heretofore not troubled itself much about primitive libraries at all or indeed about libraries for the first two thousand years after they had left their more primitive stages. The very method, therefore, lies chiefly outside the experience of library history, being gathered mainly from primitive art and anthropology, and definition must needs consider what the essential nature of these primitive libraries is that links them with the great libraries of modern times. Discussion of definition is the more necessary in that the already contradictory usage has been still farther confused in the matter of the earlier historical libraries by those who, wishing to distinguish the collection of purely business records, public or private, from the collection of purely literary works by calling the former an archive, have yet applied the term archive, incorrectly, under their own definition, to mixed collections of business and other records.
Many answers have been given to this question: What is a library? All of these imply a book or books, a place of keeping and somebody to do the keeping—books, building and librarian—but some definitions emphasize the books, some the place and some the keeping. Far the commonest words used have been the Greek bibliotheke and the Latin libraria and their derivatives. The one rather emphasizes the place and the other the books but both were used sometimes for both library and bookshop. When modern languages succeeded to the Latin the Romance languages kept bibliotheca for library and libraria for bookshop. Germanic languages on the other hand kept both words for library, although in the course of time German has nearly dropped librerei for bibliothek, and English has quite deserted bibliotheke for library. Both English and German call “book shop”, or “book business”, what French, Italian and Spanish call “library”.
Library is thus the common modern word in English for a certain something which the German calls Bibliothek, the Frenchman bibliothèque and the Italian, Spaniard, Scandinavian and Slav call by some similar name. This something in its last analysis is a book or books kept for use rather than kept for sale or for the paper mill. A library is thus a book or books kept for use.
Among the many definitions of the library which do not recognize use as the library’s chief distinction, the commonest are perhaps those which adopt plurality or collection as the distinguishing factor. Many however adopt the building as chief factor. Typically, of course, the modern library does include many books, a whole separate building and a librarian, but even if the books are few, the place only a room, a chest, a bookcase, or a single shelf, and even if it is only the owner who is at the same time the keeper, it is still recognized to be a library if the books are kept for use and not for sale. Quantity does not matter: the point which divides is the matter of use or sale. Even a one book library is, in fact, a library just as much as a one cell plant is plant or a one cell animal is animal. A one book library is a very insignificant affair compared with the New York Public Library with its many books and many branches, but it is just as truly a library—or else you must find some other word. In point of fact “library” in English, or some derivative of bibliotheca in most other languages, is the word which in practice stands to the book-for-use as the word animal or plant does in biology for the living thing whether it is a single cell or a cell complex.