set of goals.” Riesman made no effort to discover why the 
manuscript culture of the ancient and medieval worlds should 
not have conferred inner direction, nor why a print culture 
should inevitably confer inner direction. That is part of the 
business of the present book. But it can be said at once that 
“inner direction” depends upon a “fixed point of view.” A stable, 
consistent character is one with an unwavering outlook, an 
almost hypnotized visual stance, as it were. Manuscripts were 
altogether too slow and uneven a matter to provide either a 
fixed point of view or the habit of gliding steadily on single 
planes of thought and information. As we shall see, manuscript 
culture is intensely audile-tactile compared to print culture; and 
that means that detached habits of observation are quite 
uncongenial to manuscript cultures, whether ancient Egyptian, 
Greek, or Chinese or medieval. In place of cool visual 
detachment the manuscript world puts empathy and