There are many matters required for understanding that you will not find in an encyclopedia. There are two particularly striking omissions. An encyclopedia, properly speaking, contains no arguments, except insofar as it reports the course of arguments that are now widely accepted as correct or at least as of historical interest. Thus a major element in expository writing is lacking. An encyclopedia also contains no poetry or imaginative literature, although it may contain facts about poetry and poets. Since both the imagination and the reason are required for understanding, this means that the
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