Popularly, and amongst the thoughtless, it is held to include everything that is printed in a book.
Little logic is required to disturb that definition.
For not only is much that takes a station in books not literature, but, inversely, much that really is literature never reaches a station in books. But a far more important correction, applicable to the common vague idea of literature,is to be sought, not so much in a better definition of literature, as in a sharper distinction of the two functions which it fulfils. In that great social organ which, collectively, we call literature, there may be distinguished two separate offices, that may blend and often do so, but capable, severally, of a severe insulation, and naturally fitted for reciprocal repulsion. There is, first, the literature of knowledge , and, secondly, the literature of power . Men have so little reflected on the higher functions of literature as to find it a paradox if one should describe it as a mean or subordinate purpose of books to give information.