The Renaissance polymath Conrad Gessner balked at those "ignorant or
dishonest men" who "rely only on the indexes" to gain information. A
couple of centuries later Alexander
Pope put it more floridly in
The
Dunciad: "Index-learning turns no student pale/Yet holds the eel of
science by the tail." The index, in these conceptions, is a shortcut,
a cheat code that lets you digest a book without reading it in full.
We are back to Socrates.