In the wish to find the center or dominant of the library world it would be presumptuous for me to dogmatize and say "Lo here! this is the point," or "Behold! this is the principle." In the very name of the institution which we are talking about there are two elements joined—Public, and Library—and it seems quite obviously proper to try the first as the center.
Perhaps the application which follows might repel some as narrow, as exclusive of any but a single type of libraries. The principle itself may, however, be made to apply to the entire library world by recognizing as "public" all libraries which are not private, and by defining public anew as applied to each group or type of libraries, always letting it include all those individuals for whose use and pleasure the library is maintained.
What does "public" signify in Canada and the United States? What but all the people of these two great experiments in democratic society? Pray note that I say society not government. An excursion into discussion of the latter might involve dabbling in the stream of politics which would threaten dangers far more imminent, for me, than philosophy promised. To consider democratic society for a few moments very simply is a less hazardous matter.
What is any society but "a world" again, a whole, in which the great thing that matters is the level and fullness of mind that is reached through the diversities of complete development and perfection of the individual members which compose it?
The level of value and happiness for the whole can only be raised by raising the condition of the individuals and, on the other hand, that individuality is the most complete, of most real, felt value to itself, which contributes to the perfection of the whole, because it is only thus that the individual is conscious of having done his utmost.
Why try to say it again when the philosopher has said it so exactly?
"What a man really cares about—so it seems to me—may be described as making the most of the trust he has received. He does not value himself as a detached and purely self-identical subject. He values himself as the inheritor of the gifts and surroundings which are focussed in him and which it is his business to raise to their highest power. The attitude of the true noble, one in whom noblesse oblige is a simple example of what, mutatis mutandis, all men feel. The man is a representative, a trustee for the world, of certain powers and circumstances. And this cannot fail to be so. For suffering and privation are also opportunities. The question for him is how much he can make of them. This is the simple and primary point of view, and also, in the main, the true and fundamental one. It is not the bare personality or the separate destiny that occupies a healthy mind. It is the thing to be done, known and felt; in a word, the completeness of experience, his contribution to it, and his participation in it.
"At every point the web of experience is continuous; he cannot distinguish his part from that of others, and the more he realizes the continuity the less he cares about the separateness of the contribution to it.... It is impossible to overrate the co-operative element in experience."
Does it not appear then that the highest possible service to the public is service to the individual, in giving to the individual stimulus and opportunity for the fullest, most diverse, most perfect development, creating thus a world the more enriched, the more unified, in that each of its members has rich powers, functions and experience of his own?
But the crux is to come. A people, a society, is made up of individuals of diverse tastes and powers, but it includes very many who are far short of being fully alive to the powers which they may possess. If the span of such lives passes thus, if no stimulus, no illumination reaches them, life will be uninspired, unfruitful of much service, or much joy. It will not be life at its full, nor "the soul at its highest stretch."
It is not always afar from our own doors that such things happen. President Eliot says, "Do we not all know many people who seem to live in a mental vacuum—to whom, indeed, we have great difficulty in attributing immortality, because they have so little life except that of the body?"