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08474_Field_TCGG T239.txt
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1996-04-10
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occurs we are soon in the world of books, scribal or typographic.
The rest of our concern will be with books written and printed
and the results for learning and society. From the fifth century
B.C. to the fifteenth century A.D. the book was a scribal
product. Only one third of the history of the book in the
Western world has been typographic. It is not incongruous,
therefore, to say as G. S. Brett does in Psychology Ancient and
Modern (pp. 36­7):
The idea that knowledge is essentially book learning
seems to be a very modern view, probably derived from
the mediaeval distinctions between clerk and layman, with
additional emphasis provided by the literary character of
the rather fantastic humanism of the sixteenth century.
The original and natural idea of knowledge is that of
“cunning” or the possession of wits. Odysseus is the