How to Read a Book (1972 Edition) PDF

Copyright 1940 by Mortimer]. Adler, renewed 1967 by Mortimet" /.Adler Copyright o 1972 by Mortimer]. Adler and Cllarlea Van Doren AU rightl reHJWd Including tlla right of reproduction m whole or m part m any form A Touclaone Book Pubu.laed by Simon & SchUlter, Inc. Rockefelkr Center lJ30 Avenue of tlla America, New York, New York 10020 TOUCHSTONE and colophon are reglltered trGt:lerrb of Simon & SchUlter, Inc. ISBN 0-871-21280-X ISBN 0-871-21209-S Pbk. Ubrary of Congre" Catalog Card Number 72-81451 Dedgned by EdUh Fowler Manufactured m the UnUed Statea of America The excerpt from the blograplalea of Cllarlea Darwin and]. S. Mil are re,mted from Great Boks of the Western World, by perm1n of Encyclopedle BrUannka, Inc. so 49 48 CONTENTS Preface ix: PART ONE THE DIMENSIONS OF READING l. The Activity and Art of Reading 3 Active Reading 4 The Goals of Reading: Reading for Infonnation and Reading for Understanding 7 Read- ing as Learning: The Difference Between Learning by Instruction and Learning by Discovery 11 Present and Absent Teachers 14 2. The Levels of Reading 16 3. The First Level of Reading: Elementary Reading 21 Stages of Learning to Read 24 Stages and Levels 26 Higher Levels of Reading and Higher Education 28 Reading and the Democratic Ideal of Education 29 4. The Second Level of Reading: Inspectional Reading 31 Inspectional Reading I: Systematic Skimming or Pre- reading 82 lnspectional Reading II: Superficial Read- ing 86 On Reading Speeds 88 Fixations and Re- gressions 40 The Problem of Comprehension 41 Summary of Inspectional Reading 48 v vi Contents 5. How to Be a Demanding Reader 45 The Essence of Active Reading: The Four Basic Ques- tions a Reader Asks 46 How to Make a Book Your Own 48 The Three Kinds of Note-making 51 Forming the Habit of Reading 52 From Many Rules to One Habit 54 PART TWO THE THIRD LEVEL OF READING: ANALYTICAL READING 6. Pigeonholing a Book 59 The Importance of Classifying Books 60 What You Can Learn from the Title of a Book 61 Practical vs. Theoretical Books 65 Kinds of Theoretical Books 70 7. X-raying a Book 75 Of Plots and Plans: Stating the Unity of a Book 78 Mastering the Multiplicity: The Art of Outlining a Book 88 The Reciprocal Arts of Reading and Writ- ing 90 Discovering the Author's Intentions 92 The First Stage of Analytical Reading 94 8. Coming to Terms with an Author 96 Words vs. Terms 96 Finding the Key Words 100 Technical Words and Special Vocabularies 108 Find- ing the Meanings 106 9. Determining an Author's Message 114 Sentences vs. Propositions 117 Finding the Key Sen- tences 121 Finding the Propositions 124 Finding the Arguments 128 Finding the Solutions 185 The Second Stage of Analytical Reading 186 10. Criticizing a Book Fairly 137 Teachability as a Virtue 189 The Role of Rhetoric 140 The Importance of Suspending Judgment 142 The Importance of Avoiding Contentiousness 145 On the Resolution of Disagreements 147 Contents vii 11. Agreeing or Disagreeing with an Author 152 Pre;udice and Judgment 154 Judging the Author's Soundness 156 Judging the Author's Completeness 160 The Third Stage of Analytical Reading 168 12. Aids to Reading 168 The Role of Relevant Experience 169 Other Books as Extrinsic Aids to Reading 172 How to Use Com- mentaries and Abstracts 174 How to Use Reference Books 176 How to Use a Dictionary 178 How to Use an Encyclopedia 182 PART THREE APPROACHES TO DIFFERENT KINDS OF READING MATTER 13. How to Read Practical Books 191 The Two Kinds of Practical Books 198 The Role of Persuasion 197 What Does Agreement Entail in the Case of a Practical Book? 199 14. How to Read Imaginative Literature 203 How Not to Read Imaginative Literature 204 Gen- eral Rules for Reading Imaginative Literature 208 15. Suggestions for Reading Stories, Plays, and Poems 215 How to Read Stories 217 A Note About Epics 222 How to Read Plays 228 A Note About Tragedy 226 How to Read Lyric Poetry 227 16. How to Read History 234 The Elusiveness of Historical Facts 285 Theories of History 287 The Universal in History 289 Ques- tions to Ask of a Historical Book 241 How to Read Biography and Autobiography 244 How to Read About Current Events 248 A Note on Digests 252 17. How to Read Science and Mathematics 255 Understanding the Scientific Enterprise 256 Sugges- tions for Reading Classical Scientific Books 258 Fac- vii i Contents ing the Problem of Mathematics 260 Handling the Mathematics in Scientific Books 264 A Note on Popular Science 267 18. How to Read Philosophy 270 The Questions Philosophers Ask 271 Modem Philos- ophy and the Great Tradition 276 On Philosophical Method 277 On Philosophical Styles 280 Hints for Reading Philosophy 285 On Making Up Your Own Mind 290 A Note on Theology 291 How to Read "Canonicar' Books 298 19. How to Read Social Science 296 What Is Social Science? 297 The Apparent Ease of Reading Social Science 299 Difficulties of Reading Social Science 301 Reading Social Science Litera- ture 304 PART FOUR THE ULTIMATE GOALS OF READING 20. The Fourth Level of Reading: Syntopical Reading 309 The Role of Inspection in Syntopical Reading 318 The Five Steps in Syntopical Reading 316 The Need for Objectivity 323 An Example of an Exercise in Syntopical Reading: The Idea of Progress 325 The Syntopicon and How to Use It 829 On the Prin- ciples That Underlie Syntopical Reading 333 Sum- mary of Syntopical Reading 335 21. Reading and the Growth of the Mind 337 What Good Books Can Do for Us 338 The Pyramid of Books 341 The Life and Growth of the Mind 344 Appendix A. A Recommended Reading List 347 Appendix B. Exercises and Tests at the Four Levels of Reading 363 Index 421 PREFACE How to Read a Book was first published i n the early months of 1940. To my surprise and, I confess, to my delight, it im mediately became a best seller and remained at the top of the nationwide best-seller list for more than a year. Since 1940, it has continued to be widely circulated in numerous printings, both hardcover and paperback, and it has been translated into other languages-French, Swedish, German, Spanish, and Ital ian. Why, then, attempt to recast and rewrite the book for the present generation of readers? The reasons for doing so lie in changes that have taken place both in our society in the last thirty years and in the subject itself. Today many more of the young men and women who complete high school enter and complete four years of college; a much larger proportion of the population has be come literate in spite of or even because of the popularity of radio and television. There has been a shift of interest from the reading of fiction to the reading of nonfiction. The edu cators of the country have acknowledged that teaching the young to read, in the most elementary sense of that word, is our paramount educational problem. A recent Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, designat ing the seventies as the Decade of Reading, has dedicated federal funds in support of a wide variety of efforts to improve ix x Preface proficiency in this basic skill, and many of those efforts have scored some success at the level at which children are initiated into the art of reading. In addition, adults in large numbers have been captivated by the glittering promises made by speed-reading courses-promises to increase their comprehen sion of what they read as well as their speed in reading it. However, certain things have not changed in the last thirty years. One constant is that, to achieve all the purposes of read ing, the desideratum must be the ability to read different things at different-appropriate-speeds, not everything at the greatest possible speed. As Pascal observed three hundred years ago, "When we read too fast or too slowly, we under stand nothing." Since speed-reading has become a national fad, this new edition of How to Read a Book deals with the prob lem and proposes variable-speed-reading as the solution, the aim being to read better, always better, but sometimes slower, sometimes faster. Another thing that has not changed, unfortunately, is the failure to carry instruction in reading beyond the elementary level. Most of our educational ingenuity, money, and effort is spent on reading instruction in the first six grades. Beyond that, little formal training is provided to carry students to higher and quite distinct levels of skill. That was true in 1939 when Professor James Mursell of Columbia University's Teachers College wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled "The Failure of the Schools." What he said then, in two paragraphs that I am now going to quote, is still true. Do pupils in school learn to read their mother tongue effec tively? Yes and no. Up to the fifth and sixth grade, reading, on the whole, is effectively taught and well learned. To that level we find a steady and general improvement, but beyond it the curves flatten out to a dead level. This is not because a person arrives at his natural limit of efficiency when he reaches the sixth grade, for it has been shown again and again that with special tuition much older children, and also adults, can make enormous improvement. Nor does it mean that most sixth-graders read well enough for all Preface xi practical purposes. A great many pupils do poorly in high school because of sheer ineptitude in getting meaning from the printed page. They can improve; they need to improve; but they don't. The average high-school graduate has done a great deal of reading, and if he goes on to college he will do a great deal more; but he is likely to be a poor and incompetent reader. (Note that this holds true of the average student, not the person who is a subject for special remedial treatment.) He can follow a simple piece of fiction and enjoy it. But put him up against a closely written exposition, a carefully and economically stated argument, or a passage requiring critical consideration, and he is at a loss. It has been shown, for instance, that the average high-school student is amazingly inept at indicating the central thought of a passage, or the levels of emphasis and subordination in an argument or exposition. To all intents and purposes he remains a sixth-grade reader till well along in college. If there was a need for How to Read a Book thirty years ago, as the reception of the first edition of the book would certainly seem to indicate, the need is much greater today. But responding to that greater need is not the only, nor, for that matter, the main motive in rewriting the book. New in sights into the problems of learning how to read; a much more comprehensive and better-ordered analysis of the complex art of reading; the flexible application of the b ic rules to dif ferent types of reading, in fact to every variety of reading matter; the discovery and formulation of new rules of read ing; and the conception of a pyramid of books to read, broad at the bottom and tapering at the top-all these things, not treated adequately or not treated at all in the book that I w rote thirty years ago, called for exposition and demanded the thorough rewriting that has now been done and is here being published. The year after How to Read a Book was published, a How to Read Two Books; parody of it appeared under the title and Professor I. A. Richards wrote a seri9us treatise entitled How to Read a Page. I mention both these sequels in order to xii Preface point out that the problems of reading suggested by both of these titles, the jocular as well as the serious one, are fully treated in this rewriting, especially the problem of how to read a number of related books in relation to one another and read them in such a way that the complementary and conflict ing things they have to say about a common subject are clearly grasped. Among the reasons for rewriting How to Read a Book, I have stressed the things to be said about the art of reading and the points to be made about the need for acquiring higher levels of skill 'in this art, which were not touched on or de veloped in the original version of the book. Anyone who wishes to discover how much has been added can do so quickly by comparing the present Table of Contents with that of the original version. Of the four parts, only Part Two, ex pounding the rules of Analytical Reading, closely parallels the content of the original, and even that has been largely recast. The introduction in Part One of the distinction of four levels of reading-elementary, inspectional, analytical, and syntopical -is the basic and controlling change in the book's organiza tion and content. The exposition in Part Three of the different ways to approach different kinds of reading materials-prac tical and theoretical books, imaginative literature (lyric poetry, epics, novels, plays), history, science and mathematics, social science, and philosophy, as well as reference books, current journalism, and even advertising-is the most extensive addi tion that has been made. Finally, the discussion of Syntopical Reading in Part Four is wholly new. In the work of updating, recasting, and rewriting this book, I have been joined by Charles Van Doren, who for many years now has been my associate at the Institute for Philosophical Research. We have worked together on other books, notably the twenty-volume Annals of America, pub lished by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., in 1969. What is, per haps, more relevant to the present cooperative venture in which we have been engaged as co-authors is that during the Preface xiii last eight years Charles Van Doren and I have worked closely together in conducting discussion groups on great books and in moderating executive seminars in Chicago, San Francisco, and Aspen. In the course of these experiences, we acquired many of the new insights that have gone into the rewriting of this book. I am grateful to Mr. Van Doren for the contribution he has made to our joint effort; and he and I together wish to express our deepest gratitude for all the constructive criticism, guidance, and help that we have received from our friend Arthur L. H. Rubin, who persuaded us to introduce many of the important changes that distinguish this book from its pred ecessor and make it, we hope, a better and more useful book. MoRTIMER J. ADLER Boca Grande March 26, 1972 HOW TO READ A BOOK PART O N E The Dimensions of Reading 1 TH E ACTIVITY AND ART OF READI N G This is a book for readers and for those who wish to become readers. Particularly, it is for readers of books. Even more par ticularly, it is for those whose main purpose in reading books is to gain increased understanding. By "readers" we mean people who are still accustomed, as almost every liter!lte and intelligent person used to be, to gain a large share of their information about and their understand ing of the world from the written word. Not all of it, of course; even in the days before radio and television, a certain amount of information and understanding was acquired through spoken words and through observation. But for intelligent and curious people that was never enough. They knew that they had to read too, and they did read. There is some feeling nowadays that reading is not as necessary as it once was. Radio and especially television have taken over many of the functions once served by print, just as photography has taken over functions once served by painting and other graphic arts. Admittedly, television serves some of these functions extremely well; the visual communication of news events, for example, has enormous impact. The ability of radio to give us information while we are engaged in doing other things-for instance, driving a ear-is remarkable, and a great saving of time. But it may be seriously questioned 3 4 HOW TO READ A BOOK whether the advent of modem communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live. Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to, and insofar as knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understand ing as too few. There is a sense in which we modems are inun dated with facts to the detriment of understanding. One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance). The packag ing of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements-all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics-to make it easy for him to "make up his own mind" with the mini mum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and "plays back" the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed ac ceptably without having had to think. Active Read i n g As we said at the beginning, w e will be principally con cerned in these pages with the development of skill in reading books; but the rules of reading that, if followed and practiced, develop such skill can be applied also to printed material in The Activity and Art of Reading 5 general, to any type of reading matter-to newspapers, maga zines, pamphlets, articles, tracts, even advertisements. Since reading of any sort is an activity, all reading must to some degree be active. Completely passive reading is im possible; we cannot read with our eyes immobilized and our minds asleep. Hence when we contrast active with passive reading, our purpose is, first, to call attention to the fact that reading can be more or less active, and second, to point out that the more active the reading the better. One reader is better than another in proportion as he is capable of a greater range of activity in reading and exerts more effort. He is better if he demands more of himself and of the text before him. Though, strictly speaking, there can be no absolutely pas sive reading, many people think that, as compared with writing and speaking, which are obviously active undertakings, reading and listening are entirely passive. The writer or speaker must put out some effort, but no work need be done by the reader or listener. Reading and listening are thought of as receiving communication from someone who is actively engaged in giving or sending it. The mistake here is to suppose that re ceiving communication is like receiving a blow or a legacy or a judgment from the court. On the contrary, the reader or listener is much more like the catcher in a game of baseball. Catching the ball is just as much an activity as pitching or hitting it. The pitcher or batter is the sender in the sense that his activity initiates the motion of the ball. The catcher or fielder is the receiver in the sense that his activity terminates it. Both are active, though the activities are different. If any thing is passive, it is the ball. It is the inert thing that is put in motion or stopped, whereas the players are active, moving to pitch, hit, or catch. The analogy with writing and reading is almost perfect. The thing that is written and read, like the ball, is the passive object common to the two activities that begin and terminate the process. We ca take this analogy a step further. The art of catch- 6 HOW TO READ A BOOK ing is the skill of catching every kind of pitch-fast balls and curves, changeups and knucklers. Similarly, the art of reading is the skill of catching every sort of communication as well as possible. It is noteworthy that the pitcher and catcher are success ful only to the extent that they cooperate. The relation of writer and reader is similar. The writer isn't trying not to be caught, although it sometimes seems so. Successful communi cation occurs in any case where what the writer wanted to have received finds its way into the reader's possession. The writer's skill and the reader's skill converge upon a common end. Admittedly, writers vary, just as pitchers do. Some writers have excellent "control"; they know exactly what they want to convey, and they convey it precisely and accurately. Other things being equal, they are easier to "catch" than a "wild" writer without "control." There is one respect in which the analogy breaks down. The ball is a simple unit. It is either completely caught or not. A piece of writing, however, is a complex object. It can be re ceived more or less completely, all the way from very little of what the writer intended to the whole of it. The amount the reader "catches" will usually depend on the amount of activity he puts into the process, as well as upon the skill with which he executes the different mental acts involved. What does active reading entail? We will return to this question many times in this book. For the moment, it suffices to say that, given the sam : The second Article, dealing with the executive depart ment of the government; FoURTH: The third Article, dealing with the judicial depart ment of the government; FIFTH: The fourth Article, dealing with the relationship be tween the state governments and the federal government; SIXTH: The fifth, sixth, and seventh Articles, dealing with the amendment of the Constitution, its status as the supreme law of the land, and provisions for its ratifications; SEVENTH: The first ten amendments, constituting the Bill of Rights; EIGHTH : The remaining amendments up to the present day. Those are the major divisions. Now let us outline one of them, the Second, comprising the Constitution's first Article. Like most of the other Articles, it is divided into Sections. Here is a suggested outline. II, 1 : Section 1, establishing legislative powers in a Congress of the United States, divided into two bodies, a Senate and a House of Representatives; II, 2: Sections 2 and 3, respectively describing the composition of the House and Senate and stating the qualifications of members. In addition, it is stated that the House has the sole power of impeachment, while the Senate has the sole power of trying impeachments; II 3: Sections 4 and 5, having to do with the election of mem , bers of both branches of Congress and with the internal organization and affairs of each; II, 4: Section 6, stating the perquisites and emoluments of members of both branches, and stating one limitation on civil employment of members; II, 5: Section 7, defining the relationship between the legisla tive and executive departments of the government and de scribing the President's veto power; 88 HOW TO READ A BOOK II, 6: Section 8, stating the powers of Congress; II, 7 : Section 9, stating some limitations on the powers outlined in Section 8; II, 8: Section 10, stating limitations on the powers of the states and the extent to which they must give over certain powers to the Congress. We could then proceed to make a similar outline of all the other major divisions, and, after completing that, return to outline the Sections in tum. Some of these, for example Section 8 in Article I, would require the identification of many different topics and subtopics. Of course, this is only one way of doing the job. There are many others. The first three Articles could be grouped together in one major division, for instance; or instead of two divisions with respect to the amendments, more major divisions could be introduced, grouping the amendments according to the prob lems they dealt with. We suggest that. you try your hand at making your own division of the Constitution into its main parts. Go even further than we did, and try to state the parts of the parts as well. You may have read the Constitution many times, but if you have not applied this rule before, you will find that it reve.als much in the document that you never saw. Here is one more example, again very brief. We have al ready stated the unity of Aristotle's Ethics. Now let us attempt a first approximation of its structure. The whole is divided into the following main parts: A first, treating of happiness as the end of life, and discussing it in relation to all other practicable goods; a second, treating of the nature of voluntary action, and its relation to the formation of good and bad habits; a third, discussing the various virtues and vices, both moral and intel lectual; a fourth, dealing with moral states that are neither virtuous nor vicious; a fifth, treating of friendship; and a sixth and last, discussing pleasure, and completing the account of human happiness begun in the first. These divisions obviously do not correspond to the ten X-Rayi ng a Book 89 books of the Ethics. Thus, the first part is accomplished in the first book; the second part runs through Book II and the first half of Book Ill; the third part extends from the rest of Book III through the end of Book VI; the discussion of pleas ure occurs at the end of Book VII and again at the beginning of Book X. We mention this to show you that you need not follow the apparent structure of a book as indicated by its chapter divi sions. That structure may, of course, be better than the outline you develop, but it may also be worse; in any event, the point is to make your own outline. The author made his in order to write a good book. You must make yours in order to read it well. If he were a perfect writer and you a perfect reader, it would follow that the two would be the same. In proportion as either of you falls away from perfection, all sorts of dis crepancies will inevitably result. This does not mean that you should ignore chapter head ings and sectional divisions made by the author; we did not ignore them in our analysis of the Constitution, although we did not slavishly follow them, either. They are intended to help you, just as titles and prefaces are. But you must use them as guides for your own activity, and not rely on them passively. There are few authors who execute their plan perfectly, but there is often more plan in a good book than meets the eye at first. The surface can be deceiving. You must look beneath it to discover the real structure. How important is it to discover that real structure? We think very important. Another way of saying this is to say that Rule 2-the requirement that you state the unity of a book cannot be effectively followed without obeying Rule 3-the requirement that you state the parts that make up that unity. You might, from a cursory glance at a book, be able to come up with an adequate statement of its unity in two or three sentences. But you would not really know that it was adequate. Someone else, who had read the book better, might know this, and award you high marks for your efforts. But for you, from 90 HOW TO READ A BOOK your point of view, it would have been merely a good guess, a lucky hit. This is why the third rule is absolutely necessary as a complement to the second one. A very simple example will show what we mean. A two year-old child, just having begun to talk, might say that "two plus two is four." Objectively, this is a true statement; but we would be wrong to conclude from it that the child knew much mathematics. In fact, the child probably would not know what the statement meant, and so, although the statement by itself was adequate, we would have to say that the child still needed training in the subject. Similarly, you might be right in your guess about a book's main theme or point, but you still need to go through the exercise of showing how and why you stated it as you did. The requirement that you outline the parts of a book, and show how they exemplify and develop the main theme, is thus supportive of your statement of the book's unity. The Reciprocal Arts of Readi n g and Writing I n general, the two rules o f reading that we have been discussing look as if they were rules of writing also. Of course they are. Writing and reading are reciprocal, as are teaching and being taught. If authors and teachers did not organize their communications, if they failed to unify them and order their parts, there would be no point in directing readers or listeners to search for the unity and uncover the structure of the whole. Nevertheless, although the rules are reciprocal, they are not followed in the same way. The reader tries to uncover the skeleton that the book conceals. The author starts with the skeleton and tries to cover it up. His aim is to conceal the skeleton artistically or, in other words, to put flesh on the bare bones. If he is a good writer, he does not bury a puny skeleton under a mass of fat; on the other hand, neither should the flesh be too thin, so that the bones show through. If the flesh is thick X-Raying a Book 91 enough, and if flabbiness is avoided, the joints will be detect ible and the motion of the parts will reveal the articulation. Why is this so? Why should not an expository book, one that attempts to present a body of knowledge in an ordered way, be merely an outline of the subject? The reason is not only that most readers cannot read outlines, and that such a book would be repellent to a self-respecting reader who thought that if he could do his job, the author ought to do his. There is more to it than that. The :O.esh of a book is as much a part of it as the skeleton. This is as true of books as it is of animals and human beings. The flesh-the outline spelled out, "read out," as we sometimes say-adds an essential dimension. It adds life, in the case of the animal. Just so, actually writing the book from an outline, no matter how detailed, gives the work a kind of life that it would not otherwise have had. We can summarize all of this by recalling the old-fashioned maxim that a piece of writing should have unity, clarity, and coherence. That is, indeed, a basic maxim of good writing. The two rules we have been discussing in this chapter relate to writing that follows that maxim. If the writing has unity, we must find it. If the writing has clarity and coherence, we must appreciate it by finding the distinction and the order of the parts. What is clear is so by the distinctness of its outlines. What is coherent hangs together in an orderly disposition of parts. These two rules, therefore, can be used to distinguish well made books from badly made ones. If, after you have attained sufficient skill, no amount of effort on your part results in your apprehension of the unity of a book, and if you are also not able to discern its parts and their relation to one another, then very likely the book is a bad one, whatever its reputation. You should not be too quick to make this judgment; perhaps the fault is in you instead of the book. However, neither should you fail ever to make it and always assume that the fault is in you. In fact, whatever your own failings as a reader, the fault is usually in the book, for most books-the very great majority 92 HOW TO READ A BOOK -are badly made books in the sense that their authors did not write them according to these rules. These two rules can also, we might add, be used in read ing any substantial part of an expository book, as well as the whole. If the part chosen is itself a relatively independent, complex unity, its unity and complexity must be discerned for it to be well read. Here there is a significant difference between books conveying knowledge and poetical works, plays, and novels. The parts of the former can be much more autonomous than the parts of the latter. The person who says of a novel that he has "read enough to get the idea" does not know what he is talking about. He cannot be correct, for if the novel is any good at all, the idea is in the whole and cannot be found short of reading the whole. But you can get the idea of Aris totle's Ethics or Darwin's Origin of Species by reading some parts carefully, although you would not, in that case, be able to observe Rule 3. D iscovering the Author's I ntentions There is one more rule of reading that we want to discuss in this chapter. It can be stated briefly. It needs little explana tion and no illustration. It really repeats in another form what you have already done if you have applied the second and third rules. But it is a useful repetition because it throws the whole and its parts into another light. This fourth rule can be stated thus : RuLE 4. FIND OUT WHAT THE AurHOR's PROBLEMS WERE. The author of a book starts with a question or a set of questions. The book ostensibly contains the answer or answers. The writer may or may not tell you what the questions were as well as give you the answers that are the fruits of his work. Whether he does or does not, and especially if he does not, it is your task as a reader to formulate the questions as precisely as you can. You should be able to state the main X-Raying a Book 93 question that the book tries to answer, and you should be able to state the subordinate questions if the main question is com plex and has many parts. You should not only have a fairly ade quate grasp of all the questions involved but should also be able to put the questions in an intelligible order. Which are primary and which secondary? Which questions must be an swered first, if others are to be answered later? You can see how this rule duplicates, in a sense, work you have already done in stating the unity and finding its parts. It may, however, actually help you to do that work. In other words, following the fourth rule is a useful procedure in con junction with obeying the other two. And since the rule is a little more unfamiliar than the other two, it may be even more helpful to you in tackling a difficult book. We want to emphasize, however, that we do not mean for you to fall into what is called by critics the intentional fal lacy. That is the fallacy of thinking you can discover what was in an author's mind from the book he has written. This applies particularly to literary works; it is a grave error, for example, to try to psychoanalyze Shakespeare from the evidence of Hamlet. Nevertheless, even with a poetical work, it is often extremely helpful to try to say what the author was trying to do. In the case of expository works, the rule has obvious merit. And yet most readers, no matter how skilled in other respects, very often fail to observe it. As a result, their con eption of a book's main point or theme may be extremely deficient, and of course their outline. of its structure will be chaotic. They will fail to see the unity of a book because they do not see why it has the unity it has; and their apprehension of the book's skeletal structure will lack comprehension of the end that it serves. If you know the kinds of questions anyone can ask about anything, you will become adept in detecting an author's problems. They can be formulated briefly: Does something exist? What kind of thing is it? What caused it to exist, or under what conditions can it exist, or why does it exist? What purpose does it serve? What are the consequences of its existence? What 94 HOW TO READ A BOOK are its characteristic properties, its typical traits? What are its relations to other things of a similar sort, or of a different sort? How does it behave? These are all theoretical questions. What ends should be sought? What means should be chosen to a given end? What things must one do to gain a certain objective, and in what order? Under these conditions, what is the right thing to do, or the better rather than the worse? Under what conditi_ons would it be better to do this rather than that? These are all practical questions. This list of questions is far from being exhaustive, but it does represent the types of most frequently asked questions in the pursuit of theoretical or practical knowledge. It may help you discover the problems a book has tried to solve. The ques tions have to be adapted when applied to works of imaginative literature, and there too they will be useful. The F i rst Stage of Analytical Readi n g We have now stated and explained the first four rules of reading. They are rules of analytical reading, although if you inspect a book well before reading it, that will help you to apply them. It is important at this point to recognize that these first four rules are connected and form a group of rules having a single aim. Together, they provide the reader who applies them with a knowledge of a book's structure. When you have applied them to a book, or indeed to anything fairly lengthy and difficult that you may be reading, you will have accom plished the first stage of reading it analytically. You should not take the term "stage" in a chronological sense, unless perhaps at the very beginning of your exercise as an analytical reader. That is, it is not necessary to read a book through in order to apply the first four rules, then to read it again and again in order to apply the other rules. The practiced reader accomplishes all of these stages at once. Never- X-Raying a Book 95 theless, you must realize that knowing a book's structure does constitute a stage toward reading it analytically. Another way to say this is that applying these first four rules helps you to answer the first basic question about a book. You will recall that that first question is: What is the book about as a whole? You will also recall that we said that this means dis covering the leading theme of the book, and how the author develops this theme in an orderly way by subdividing it into its essential subordinate themes or topics. Clearly, applying the first four rules of reading will provide most of what you need to know in order to answer this question-although it should be pointed out that your answer will improve in ac curacy as you proceed to apply the other rules and to answer the other questions. Since we have now described the first stage of analytical reading, let us pause a moment to write out the first four rules in order, under the appropriate heading, for review. The First Stage of Analytical Read i ng, or Rules for Finding What a Book Is Abou t 1. Classify the book according to kind and subject matter. 2. State what the whole book is about with the utmost brevity. 3. Enumerate its major parts in their order and relation, and outline these parts as you have outlined the whole. 4. Define the problem or problems the author is trying to solve. 8 COM I NG TO TERMS WITH AN AUTHO R The first stage of analytical reading has been accomplished when you have applied the four rules listed at the end of the last chapter, which together allow you to tell what a book is about and to outline its structure. You are now ready to go on to the next stage, which also comprises four rules of reading. The first of these we call, for short, coming to terms. Coming to terms is usually the last step in any successful business negotiation. All that remains is to sign on the dotted line. But in the analytical reading of a book, coming to terms is the first step beyond the outline. Unless the reader comes to terms with the author, the communication of knowledge from one to the other does not take place. For a term is the basic element of communicable knowledge. Words vs. Terms A term is not a word-at least, not just a word without further qualifications. If a term and a word were exactly the same, you would only have to find the important words in a book in order to come to terms with it. But a word can have many meanings, especially an important word. If the author uses a word in one meaning, and the reader reads it in another, 96 Coming to Terms With an Author 97 words have passed between them, but they have not come to terms. Where there is unresolved ambiguity in communication, there is no communication, or at best communication must be incomplete. Just look at the word "communication" for a moment. Its root is related to the word "common." We speak of a com munity as a group of people who have something in common. Communication is an effort on the part of one person to share something with another person ( or with an animal or a ma chine ) : his knowledge, his decisions, his sentiments. It suc ceeds only when it results in a common something, such as an item of information or knowledge that two parties share. When there is ambiguity in the communication of knowl edge, all that is in common are the words that one person speaks or writes and another hears or reads. So long as am biguity persists, there is no meaning in common between writer and reader. For the communication to be successfully completed, therefore, it is necessary for the two parties to use the same words with the same meanings-in short, to come to terms. When that happens, communication happens, the mira cle of two minds with but a single thought. A term can be defined as an unambiguous word. That is not quite accurate, for strictly there are no unambiguous words. What we should have said is that a term is a word used unam biguously. The dictionary is full of words. They are almost all ambiguous in the sense that they have many meanings. But a word that has several meanings can be used in one sense at a time. When writer and reader somehow manage for a time to use a given word with one and only one meaning, then, during that time of unambiguous usage, they have come to terms. You cannot find terms in dictionaries, though the materials for making them are there. Terms occur only in the process of communication. They occur when a writer tries to avoid am biguity and a reader helps him by trying to follow his use of words. There are, of course, many degrees of success in this. Coming to terms is the ideal toward which writer and reader 98 HOW TO READ A BOOK should strive. Since this is one of the primary achievements of the art of writing and reading, we can think of terms as a skilled use of words for the sake of communicating knowledge. At this point it is probably clear that we are speaking exclusively of expository writers and expository books. Poetry and fiction are not nearly so concerned with the unambiguous use of words as expository works-works that convey knowl edge in the broad sense of the word that we have been employ ing. It can even be argued that the best poetry is that which is the most richly ambiguous, and it has been said with justice that any good poet is sometimes intentionally ambigu ous in his writing. This is an important insight about poetry to which we will return later. It is obviously one of the primary differences between the poetical and the expository or sci entific realms of literary art. We are now ready to state the fifth rule of reading ( an expository work ). Stated roughly, it is this: You must spot the important words in a book and figure out how the author is using them. But we can make that a little more precise and elegant: RuLE 5. FIND THE IMPORTANT WORDS AND THROUGH THEM COME TO TERMS WITH THE AUTHOR. Note that the rule has two parts. The first part is to locate the important words, the words that make a difference. The second part is to deter mine the meaning of these words, as used, with precision. This is the first rule for the second stage of analytical reading, the aim of which is not the outlining of a book's structure but the interpretation of its contents or message. The other rules for this stage, to be discussed in the next chapter, are like this one in an important respect. They also require you to take two steps : a step dealing with the language as such, and a step beyond the language to the thought that lies be hind it. If language were a pure and perfect medium for thought, these steps would not be separate. If every word had only one meaning, if words could not be used ambiguously, if, in short, each word was an ideal term, language would be a diaphanous Com ing to Terms With an Author 99 medium. The reader would see straight through the writer's words to the content of his mind. If that were the case, there would be no need at all for this second stage of analytical reading. Interpretation would be unnecessary. But of course that is far from the case. There is no use crying about it, no use making up impossible schemes for an ideal language, as the philosopher Leibniz and some of his followers have tried to do. Indeed, if they succeeded, there would be no more poetry. The only thing to do, therefore, in -expository works, is to make the best of language as it is, and the only way to do that is to use language as skillfully as possible when you want to convey, or to receive, knowledge. Because language is imperfect as a medium for conveying knowledge, it also functions as an obstacle to communication. The rules of interpretive reading are directed to overcoming that obstacle. We can expect a good writer to do his best to reach us through the barrier language inevitably sets up, but we cannot expect him to do the job all by himself. We must meet him halfway. We, as readers, must try to tunnel through from our side of the barrier. The likelihood of a meeting of minds through language depends on the willingness of both reader and writer to work together. Just as teaching will not avail unless there is a reciprocal activity of being taught, so no author, regardless of his skill in writing, can achieve communi cation without a reciprocal skill on the part of readers. If that were not so, the diverse skills of writing and reading would not bring minds together, however much effort was expended, any more than the men who tunnel through from opposite sides of a mountain would ever meet unless they made their calculations according to the same principles of engineering. As we have pointed out, each of the rules of interpretive reading involves two steps. To get technical for a moment, we may say that these rules have a grammatical and a logical aspect. The grammatical aspect is the one that deals with words. The logical step deals with their meanings or, more precisely, with terms. So far as communication is concerned, 1 00 HOW TO READ A BOOK both steps are indispensable. If language is used without thought, nothing is being communicated. And thought or knowledge cannot be communicated without language. As arts, grammar and logic are concerned with language in rela tion to thought and thought in relation to language. That is why skill in both reading and writing is gained through these arts. This business of language and thought-especially the dis tinction between words and terms-is so important that we are going to risk being repetitious to be sure the main point is understood. The main point is that one word can be the vehicle for many terms, and one term can be expressed by many words. Let us illustrate this schematically in the follow ing manner. The word "reading" has been used in many senses in the course of our discussion. Let us take three of these senses: By the word "reading" we may mean ( 1 ) reading to be entertained, ( 2 ) reading to get information, and ( 3 ) reading to achieve understanding. Now let us symbolize the word "reading" by the letter X, and the three meanings by the letters a, b, and c. What is symbolized in this scheme by Xa, Xb, and Xc, are not three words, for X remains the same throughout. But they are three terms, on the condition, of course, that you, as reader, and we, as writers know when X is being used in one sense and not another. If we write Xa in a given place, and you read Xb, we are writing and you are reading the same word, but not in the same way. The ambiguity prevents or at least impedes communication. Only when you think the word as we think it, do we have one thought between us. Our minds cannot meet in X, but only in Xa or Xb or Xc. Thus we come to terms. Finding the Key Words We are now prepared to put flesh on the rule that requires the reader to come to terms. How does he go about doing it? How does he find the important or key words in a book? Com i ng to Terms With an Author 1 01 You can be sure of one thing. Not all the words an author uses are important. Better than that, you can be sure that most of his words are not. Only those words that he uses in a special way are important for him, and for us as readers. This is not an absolute matter, of course, but one of degree. Words may be more or less important. Our only concern is with the fact that some words in a book are more important than others. At one extreme are the words that the author uses as the proverbial man in the street does. Since the author is using these words as everyone does in ordinary discourse, the reader should have no trouble with them. He is familiar with their ambiguity and he has grown accustomed to the variation in their meanings as they occur in this context or that. For example, the word "reading" occurs in A. S. Edding ton's book, The Nature of the Physical World. He speaks of "pointer-readings," the readings of dials and gauges on sci entific instruments. He is using the word "reading" in one of its ordinary senses. It is not for him a technical word. He can rely on ordinary usage to convey what he means to the reader. Even if he used the word "reading" in a different sense some where else in the book-in a phrase, let us say, such as "read ing nature"-he could be confident that the reader would note the shift to another of the word's ordinary meanings. The reader who could not do this could not talk to his friends or carry on his daily business. But Eddington is not able to use the word "cause" so lightheartedly. That may be a word of common speech, but he is using it in a definitely special sense when he discusses the theory of causation. How that word is to be understood makes a difference that both he and the reader must bother about. For the same reason, the word "reading" is important in this book. We cannot get along with merely using it in an ordinary way. An author uses most words as men ordinarily do in con versation, with a range of meanings, and trusting to the context to indicate the shifts. Knowing this fact is some help in detect ing the more important words. We must not forget, however, 1 02 HOW TO READ A BOOK that at diferent times and places the same words are not equally familiar items in daily usage. Contemporary writers will employ most words as they are ordinarily used today, and you will know which words these are because you are alive today. But in reading books written in the past, it may be more difficult to detect the words the author is using as most people did at the time and place he was writing. The fact that some authors intentionally employ archaic words, or archaic senses of words, complicates the matter further, as does the transla tion of books from foreign languages. Nevertheless, it remains true that most of the words in any book can be read just as one would use them in talking to one's friends. Take any page of this book and count the words we are using in that way: all the prepositions, conjunc tions, and articles, and almost all of the verbs, nouns, adverbs, and adjectives. In this chapter so far, there have been only a few important words: "word," "term," ambiguity," "communi cation," and perhaps one or two more. Of these, "term" is clearly the most important; all the others are important in relation to it. You cannot locate the key words without making an effort to understand the passage in which they occur. This situation is somewhat paradoxical. If you do understand the passage, you will, of course, know which words in it are the most important. If you do not fully understand the passage, it is probably because you do not know the way the author is using certain words. If you mark the words that trouble you, you may hit the very ones the author is using specially. That this is likely to be so follows from the fact that you should have no trouble with the words the author uses in an ordinary way. From your point of view as a reader, therefore, the most important words are those that give you trouble. It is likely that these words are important for the author as well. However, they may not be. It is also possible that words that are important for the Coming to Terms With an Author 1 03 author do not bother you, and precisely because you under stand them. In that case, you have already come to terms with the author. Only where you fail to come to terms have you work still to do. Techn i cal Words and Special Vocab u l aries So far we have been proceeding negatively by eliminating the ordinary words. You discover some of the important words by the fact that they are not ordinary for you. That is why they bother you. But is there any other way of spotting the im portant words? Are there any positive signs that point to them? There are several. The first and most obvious sign is the explicit stress an author places upon certain words and not others. He may do this in many ways. He may use such typo graphical devices as quotation marks or italics to mark the word for you. He may call your attention to the word by explicitly discussing its various senses and indicating the way he is going to use it here and there. Or he may emphasize the word by defining the thing that the word is used to name. No one can read Euclid without knowing that such words as "point," "line," "plane," "angle," "parallel," and so forth are of the first importance. These are the words that name geo metrical entities defined by Euclid. There are other important words, such as "equals," "whole," and "part," but these do not name anything that is defined. You know they are important from the fact that they occur in the axioms. Euclid helps you here by making his primary propositions explicit at the very beginning. You can guess that the terms composing such propo sitions are basic, and that underlines for you the words that express these terms. You may have no· difficulty with these words, because they are words of common speech, and Euclid appears to be using them that way. If all authors wrote as Euclid did, you may say, this busi ness of reading would be much easier. But that of course is 1 04 HOW TO READ A BOOK not possible, although there have in fact been men who thought that any subject matter could be expounded in the geometrical manner. The procedure-the method of exposition and proof-that works in mathematics is not applicable in every field of knowledge. In any event, for our purposes it is sufficient to note what is common to every sort of exposition. Every field of knowledge has its own technical vocabulary. Euclid makes his plain right at the beginning. The same is true of any writer, such as Galileo or Newton, who writes in the geometrical manner. In books differently written or in other fields, the technical vocabulary must be discovered by the reader. If the author has not pointed out the words himself, the reader may locate them through having some prior knowledge of the subject matter. If he knows something about biology or economics before he begins to read Darwin or Adam Smith, he certainly has some leads toward discerning the technical words. The rules of analyzing a book's structure may help here. If you know what kind of book it is, what it is about as a whole, and what its major parts are, you are greatly aided in separating the technical vocabulary from the ordinary words. The author's title, chapter headings, and preface may be useful in this connection. From this you know, for example, that "wealth" is a technical word for Adam Smith, and "species" for Darwin. Since one technical word leads to another, you cannot help but discover other technical words in a similar fashion. You can soon make a list of the important words used by Adam Smith : labor, capital, land, wages, profits, rent, commodity, price, exchange, productive, unproductive, money, and so forth. And here are some you cannot miss in Darwin: variety, genus, selection, survival, adaptation, hybrid, fittest, creation. Where a field of knowledge has a well-established techni cal vocabulary, the task of locating the important words in a book treating that subject matter is relatively easy. You can spot them positively through having some acquaintance with Com i ng to Terms With an Author 1 05 the field, or negatively by knowing what words must be tech nical, because they are not ordinary. Unfortunately, there are many fields in which a technical vocabulary is not well estab lished. Philosophers are notorious for having private vocabularies. There are some words, of course, that have a traditional stand ing in philosophy. Though they may not be used by all writers in the same sense, they are nevertheless technical words in the discussion of certain problems. But philosophers often find it necessary to coin new words, or to take some word from common speech and make it a technical word. This last proce dure is likely to be most misleading to the reader who sup poses that he knows what the word means, and therefore treats it as an ordinary word. Most good authors, however, anticipating just this confusion, give very explicit warning whenever they adopt the procedure. In this connection, one clue to an important word is that the author quarrels with other writers about it. When you find an author telling you how a particular word has been used by others, and why he chooses to use it otherwise, you can be sure that word makes a great difference to him. We have here emphasized the notion of technical vocabu lary, but you must not take this too narrowly. The relatively small set of words that express an author's main ideas, his leading concepts, constitutes his special vocabulary. They are the words that carry his analysis, his argument. If he is making an original communication, some of these words are likely to be used by him in a very special way, although he may use others in a fashion that has become traditional in the field. In either' case, these are the words that are most important for him. They should be important for you as a reader also, but in addition any other word whose meaning is not clear is im portant for you. The trouble with most readers is that they simply do not pay enough attention to words to locate their difficulties. They fail to distinguish the words that they do not understand sufB- 106 HOW TO READ A BOOK ciently from those they do. All the things we have suggested to help you find the important words in a book will be of no avail unless you make a deliberate effort to note the words you must work on to find the terms they convey. The reader who fails to ponder, or at least to mark, the words he does not understand is headed for disaster. If you are reading a book that can increase your under standing, it stands to reason that not all of its words will be completely intelligible to you. If you proceed as if they were all ordinary words, all on the same level of general intelligi bility as the words of a newspaper article, you will make no headway toward interpretation of the book. You might just as well be reading a newspaper, for the book cannot enlighten you if you do not try to understand it. Most of us are addicted to non-active reading. The out standing fault of the non-active or undemanding reader is his inattention to words, and his consequent failure to come to terms with the author. F i n d i n g the Meani ngs Spotting the important words is only the beginning of the task. It merely locates the places in the text where you have to go to work. There is another part of this fifth rule of reading. Let us tum to that now. Let us suppose you have marked the words that trouble you. What next? There are two main possibilities. Either the author is using these words in a single sense throughout or he is using them in two or more senses, shifting his meaning from place to place. In the first alternative, the word stands for a single term. A good example of the use of important words so that they are restricted to a single meaning is found in Euclid. In the second alternative, the word stands for several terms. In the light of these alternatives, your procedure should be as follows. First, try to determine whether the word has Coming to Terms With an Author 1 07 one or many meanings. If it has many, try to see how they are related. Finally, note the places where the word is used in one sense or another, and see if the context gives you any clue to the reason for the shift in meaning. This last will enable you to follow the word in its change of meanings with the same flexibility that characterizes the author's usage. But, you may complain, everything is clear except the main thing. How does one find out what the meanings are? The answer, though simple, may appear unsatisfactory. But patience and practice will show you otherwise. The answer is that you have to discover the meaning of a word you do not understand by using the meanings of all the other words in the context that you do understand. This must be the way, no matter how merry-go-roundish it may seem at first. The easiest way to illustrate this is to consider a definition. A definition is stated in words. If you do not understand any of the words used in the definition, you obviously cannot understand the meaning of the word that names the thing defined. The word "point" is a basic word in geometry. You may think you know what it means ( in geometry ) , but Euclid wants to be sure you use it in only one way. He tells you what he means by first defining the thing he is later going to use the word to name. He says : "A point is that which has no part." How does that help to bring you to terms with him? You know, he assumes, what every other word in the sentence means with sufficient precision. You know that whatever has parts is a complex whole. You know that the opposite of complex is simple. To be simple is the same as to lack parts. You know that the use of the words "is" and "that which" means that the thing referred to must be an entity of some sort. Incidentally, it follows from all this that, if there are no physical things without parts, a point, as Euclid speaks of it, cannot be physical. This illustration is typical of the process by which you acquire meanings. You operate with meanings you already possess. If every word that was used in a definition had itself 1 08 HOW TO READ A BOOK to be defined, nothing could ever be defined. If every word in a book you were reading was entirely strange to you, as in the case of a book in a totally foreign language, you could make no progress at all. That is what people mean when they say of a book that it is all Greek to them. They simply have not tried to understand it, which would be justifiable if it were really in Greek. But most of the words in any English book are familiar words. These words surround the strange words, the technical words, the words that may cause the reader some trouble. The sur rounding words are the context for the words to be interpreted. The reader has all the materials he needs to do the job. We are not pretending the job is an easy one. We are only insisting that it is not an impossible one. If it were, no one could read a book to gain in understanding. The fact that a book can give you new insights or enlighten you indicates that it probably contains words you may not readily understand. If you could not come to understand those words by· your own efforts, then the kind of reading we are talking about would be impossible. It would be impossible to pass from understand ing less to understanding more by your own operations on a book. There is no rule of thumb for doing this. The process is something like the trial-and-error method of putting a jigsaw puzzle together. The more parts you put together, the easier it is to find places for the remaining parts, if only because there are fewer of them. A book comes to you with a large number of words already in place. A word in place is a term. It is definitely located by the meaning that you and the author share in using it. The remaining words must be put in place. You do this by trying to make them fit this way or that. The better you understand the picture that the words so far in place already partially reveal, the easier it is to complete the picture by making terms of the remaining words. Each word put into place makes the next adjustment easier. You will make errors, of course, in the process. You will Coming to Terms With an Author 1 09 think you have managed to find where a word belongs and how it fits, only to discover later that the placement of another word requires you to make a whole series of readjustments. The errors will get corrected because, so long as they are not found out, the picture cannot be completed. Once you have had any experience at all in this work of coming to terms, you will soon be able to check yourself. You will know whether you have succeeded or not. You will not blithely think you under stand when you do not. In comparing a book to a jigsaw puzzle, we have made one assumption that is not true. A good puzzle is, of course, one all of whose parts fit. The picture can be perfectly com pleted. The same is true of the ideally good book, but there is no such book. In proportion as books are good, their terms will be so well made and put together by the author that the reader can do the work of interpretation fruitfully. Here, as in the case of every other rule of reading, bad books are less readable than good ones. The rules do not work on them, ex cept to show you how bad they are. If the author uses words ambiguously you cannot find out what he is trying to say. You can only find out that he has not been precise. But, you may ask, does not an author who uses a word in more than a single sense use it ambiguously? And is it not the usual practice for authors to use words in several senses, especially their most important words? The answer to the first question is No; to the second, Yes. To use a word ambiguously is to use it in several senses with out distinguishing or relating their meanings. ( For example, we have probably used the word "important" ambiguously in this chapter, for we were not always clear as to whether we meant important for the author or important for you. ) The author who does that has not made terms that the reader can come to. But the author who distinguishes the several senses in which he is using a critical word and enables the reader to make a responsive discrimination is offering terms. You should not forget that one word can represent several 110 HOW TO READ A BOOK terms. One way to remember this is to distinguish between the author's vocabulary and his terminology. If you make a list in one column of the important words, and in another of their important meanings, you will see the relation between the vocabulary and the terminology. There are several further complications. In the first place, a word that has several distinct meanings can be used either in a single sense or in a combination of senses. Let us take the word "reading" again as an example. In some places, we have used it to stand for reading any kind of book. In others, we have used it to stand for reading books that instruct rather than entertain. In still others, we have used it to stand for reading that enlightens rather than informs. Now if we symbolize here, as we did before, these three distinct meanings of "reading" by Xa, Xb, and Xc, then the first usage just mentioned is Xabc, the second is Xbc, and the third Xc. In other words, if several meanings are related, one can use a word to stand for all of them, for some of them, or for only one of them at a time. So long as each usage is definite, the word so used is a term. In the second place, there is the problem of synonyms. The repetition of a single word over and over is awkward and boring, except in mathematical writing, and so good authors often substitute different words having the same or very similar meanings for important words in their text. This is just the opposite of the situation where one word can stand for several terms; here, one and the same term is represented by two or more words used synonymously. We can express this symbolically as follows. Let X and Y be two diferent words, such as "enlightenment" and "insight." Let the letter a stand for the same meaning that each can express, namely, a gain in understanding. Then Xa and Ya represent the same term, though they ate distinct as words. When we speak of reading "for insight" and reading "for "enlightenment," we are referring to the same kind of reading, because the two phrases are being used with the same mean- Coming to Terms With an Author 111 ing. The words are diHerent, but there is only one term for you as a reader to grasp. This is important, of course. If you supposed that every time an author changed his words, he was shifting his terms, you would make as great an error as to suppose that every time he used the same words, the terms remained the same. Keep this in mind when you list the author's vocabulary and terminology in separate columns. You will find two relation ships. On the one hand, a single word may be related to several terms. On the other hand, a single term may be related to several words. In the third place, and finally, there is the matter of phrases. If a phrase is a unit, that is, if it is a whole that can be the subject or predicate of a sentence, it is like a single word. Like a single word, it can refer to something being talked about in some way. It follows, therefore, that a term can be expressed by a phrase as well as by a word. And all the relations that exist between words and terms hold also between terms and phrases. Two phrases may express the same term, and one phrase may express several terms, according to the way its constituent words are used. In general, a phrase is less likely to be ambiguous than a word. Because it is a group of words, each of which is in the context of the others, the single words are more likely to have restricted meanings. That is why a writer is likely to substitute a fairly elaborate phrase for a single word if he wants to be sure that you get his meaning. One illustration should suffice. To be sure that you come to terms with us about reading, we substitute phrases like "reading for enlightenment" for the single word "reading." To make doubly sure, we may substitute a more elaborate phrase, such as "the process of passing from understanding less to understanding more by the operation of your mind upon a book." There is only one term here, a term referring to the kind of reading that this book is mostly about. But that one 112 HOW TO READ A BOOK term has been expressed by a single word, a short phrase, and a longer one. This has been a hard chapter to write, and probably a hard one to read. The reason is clear. The rule of reading we have been discussing cannot be made fully intelligible without going into all sorts of grammatical and logical explanations about words and terms. In fact, we have actually done very little explaining. To give an adequate account of these matters would take many chapters. We have merely touched upon the most essential points. We hope we have said enough to make the rule a useful guide in practice. The more you put it into practice, the more you will appreciate the intricacies of the problem. You will want to know something about the literal and meta phorical use of words. You will want to know about the dis tinction between abstract and concrete words, and between proper and common names. You will become interested in the whole business of definition : the diHerence between defining words and defining things; why some words are indefinable, and yet have definite meanings, and so forth. You will seek light on what is called "the emotive use of words," that is, the use of words to arouse emotions, to move men to action or change their minds, as distinct from the communication of knowledge. And you may even become interested in the rela tion between ordinary "rational" speech and "bizarre" or "crazy" talk-the speech of the mentally disturbed, where al most every word carries weird and unexpected but neverthe less identifiable connotations. If the practice of analytical reading elicits these further interests, you will be in a position to satisfy them by reading books on these special subjects. And you will profit more from reading such books, because you will go to them with questions born of your own experience in reading. The study of grammar and logic, the sciences that underlie these rules, is practical only to the extent you can relate it to practice. You may never wish to go further. But even if you do not, Coming to Terms With an Author 113 you wil find that your comprehension of any book will be enormously increased if you only go to the trouble of finding its important words, identifying their shifting meanings, and coming to terms. Seldom does such a small change in a habit have such a large effect. 9 DETE RM I N I NG AN AUTHOR'S MESSAG E Not only coming to terms but also making propositions occurs among traders as well as in the world of books. What a buyer or seller means by a proposition is some sort of proposal, some sort of offer or acceptance. In honest dealings, the person who makes a proposition in this sense is declaring his intention to act in a certain way. More than honesty is required for suc cessful negotiations. The proposition should be clear and, of course, attractive. Then the traders can come to terms. A proposition in a book is also a declaration. It is an expression of the author's judgment about something. He affirms something he thinks to be true, or denies something he judges to be false. He asserts this or that to be a fact. A propo sition of this sort is a declaration of knowledge, not intentions. The author may tell us his intentions at the beginning in a preface. In an expository book, he usually promises to instruct us about something. To find out whether he keeps those prom ises, we must look for his propositions. Generally, the order of reading reverses the order of busi ness. Businessmen usually come to terms after they find out what the proposition is. But the reader must usually come to terms with an author first, before he can find out what the author is proposing, what judgment he is declaring. That is why the fifth rule of analytical reading concerns words and 114 Determi ni ng an Author's Message 115 terms, and the sixth, which we are about to discuss, concerns sentences and propositions. There is a seventh rule that is closely related to the sixth. The author may be honest in declaring himself on matters of fact or knowledge. We usually proceed in that trust. But un less we are exclusively interested in the author's personality, we should not be satisfied with knowing what his opinions are. His propositions are nothing but expressions of personal opinion unless they are supported by reasons. If it is the book and the subject with which it deals that we are interested in, and not just the author, we want to know not merely what his propositions are, but also why he thinks we should be per suaded to accept them. The seventh rule, therefore, deals with arguments of all sorts. There are many kinds of reasoning, many ways of sup porting what one says. Sometimes it is possible to argue that something is true; sometimes no more than a probability can be defended. But every sort of argument consists of a number of statements related in a certain way. This is said because of that. The word "because" here signifies a reason being given. The presence of arguments is indicated by other words that relate statements, such as: if this is so, then that; or, since this, therefore that; or, it follows from this, that that is the case. In the course of earlier chapters in this book, such sequences occurred. For those of us who are no longer in school, we observed, it is necessary, if we want to go on learning and discovering, to know how to make books teach us well. In that situation, if we want to go on learning, then we must know how to learn from books, which are absent teachers. An argument is always a set or series of statements of which some provide the ground or reasons for what is to be concluded. A paragraph, therefore, or at least a collection of sentences, is required to express an argument. The premises or principles of an argument may not always be stated first, but they are the source of the conclusion, nevertheless. If the argument is valid, the conclusion follows from the premises. 116 HOW TO READ A BOOK That does not necessarily mean that the conclusion is true, since one or all of the premises that support it may be false. There is a grammatical as well as a logical aspect to the order of these rules of interpretation. We go from terms to propositions to arguments, by going from words ( and phrases ) to sentences to collections of sentences ( or paragraphs ). We are building up from simpler to more complex units. The smallest significant element in a book is, of course, a single word. It would be true but not adequate to say that a book consists of words. It also consists of groups of words, taken as units, and similarly of groups of sentences, taken as units. The active reader is attentive not only to the words but also to the sentences and paragraphs. There is no other way of discovering the author's terms, propositions, and arguments. The movement at this stage of analytical reading-when interpretation is our goal-seems to be in the opposite direc tion from the movement in the first stage-when the goal was a structural outline. There we went from the book as a whole to its major parts, and then to their subordinate divisions. As you might suspect, the two movements meet somewhere. The major parts of a book and their principal divisions contain many propositions and usually several arguments. But if you keep on dividing the book into its parts, at last you have to say: "In this part, the following points are made." Now each of these points is likely to be a proposition, and some of them taken together probably form an argument. Thus, the two processes, outlining and interpretation, meet at the level of propositions and arguments. You work down to propositions and arguments by dividing the book into its parts. You work up to arguments by seeing how they are com posed of propositions and ultimately of terms. When you have completed the two processes, you can really say that you know the contents of a book. Determ i n i ng an Author's Message 117 Sentences vs. Propositions We have already noticed another thing about the rules we are going to discuss in this chapter. As in the case of the rule about words and terms, we are here also dealing with the relation of language and thought. Sentences and paragraphs are grammatical units. They are units of language. Propositions and arguments are logical units, or units of thought and knowl edge. We have to face here a problem similar to the one we faced in the last chapter. Because language is not a perfect medium for the expression of thought, because one word can have many meanings and two or more words can have the same meaning, we saw how complicated was the relation be tween an author's vocabulary and his terminology. One word may represent several terms, and one term may be represented by several words. Mathematicians describe the relation between the buttons and the buttonholes on a well-made coat as a one-to-one rela tionship. There is a button for every buttonhole, and a hole for every button. Well, the point is that words and terms do not stand in a one-to-one relation. The greatest error you can make in applying these rules is to suppose that a one-to-one relationship exists between the elements of language and those of thought or knowledge. As a matter of fact, it would be wise not to make too easy assumptions even about buttons and buttonholes. The sleeves of most men's suit jackets bear buttons that have no corre sponding buttonholes. And if you have worn the coat for a while, it may have a hole with no corresponding button. Let us illustrate this in the case of sentences and proposi tions. Not every sentence in a book expresses a proposition. For one thing, some sentences express questions. They state prob lems rather than answers. Propositions are the answers to questions. They are declarations of knowledge or opinion. That 118 HOW TO READ A BOOK is why we call sentences that express them declarative, and distinguish sentences that ask questions as interrogative. Other sentences express wishes or intentions. They may give us some knowledge of the author's purpose, but they do not convey the knowledge he is trying to expound. Moreover, not all the declarative sentences can be read as if each expressed one proposition. There are at least two reasons for this. The first is the fact that words are ambiguous and can be used in various sentences. Thus, it is possible for the same sentence to express different propositions if there is a shift in the terms the words express. "Reading is learning" is a simple sentence; but if at one place we mean by "learning" the acquisition of information, and at another we mean the development of understanding, the proposition is not the same, because the terms are different. Yet the sentence is the same. The second reason is that all sentences are not as simple as "Reading is learning." When its words are used unambigu ously, a simple sentence usually expresses a single proposition. But even when its words are used unambiguously, a compound sentence expresses two or more propositions. A compound sentence is really a collection of sentences, connected by such words as "and," or "if... then," or "not only... but also." You may rightly conclude that the line between a long com pound sentence and a short paragraph may be difficult to draw. A compound sentence can express a number of propositions related in the form of an argument. Such sentences can be very difficult to interpret. Let us take an interesting sentence from Machiavelli's The Prince to show what we mean : A prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated, which will always be as long as he abstains from the property of his citizens and from their women. This is grammatically a single sentence, though it is extremely complex. The semicolon and the "because" indicate the major Determi n i ng an Author's Message 119 break in it. The first proposition is that a prince ought to in spire fear in a certain way. Beginning with the word "because," we have what is in effect another sentence. ( It could be made independent by say ing: "The reason for this is that he can endure," and so forth. ) And this sentence expresses two propositions at least : ( 1 ) the reason why the prince ought to inspire fear in a certain way is that he can endure being feared so long as he is not hated; ( 2 ) he can avoid being hated only by keeping his hands off the property of his citizens and their women. It is important to distinguish the various propositions that a long, complex sentence contains. In order to agree or disagree with Machiavelli, you must first understand what he is saying. But he is saying three things in this one sentence. You may disagree with one of them and agree with the others. You may think Machiavelli is wrong in recommending terrorism to a prince on any grounds; but you may acknowledge his shrewd ness in saying that the prince had better not arouse hatred along with fear, and you may also agree that keeping his hands off his subjects' property and women is an indispensable con dition of not being hated. Unless you recognize the distinct propositions in a complicated sentence, you cannot make a discriminating judgment on what the writer is saying. Lawyers know this fact very well. They have to examine sentences carefully to see what is being alleged by the plaintiff or denied by the defendant. The single sentence, "John Doe signed the lease on March 24," looks simple enough, but still it says several things, some of which may be true and the others false. John Doe may have signed the lease, but not on March 24, and that fact may be important. In short, even a grammatically simple sentence sometimes expresses two or more propositions. We have said enough to indicate what we mean by the difference between sentences and propositions. They are not related as one to one. Not only can a single sentence express several propositions, either through ambiguity or complexity, but one and the same proposition can also be expressed by two 1 20 HOW TO READ A BOOK or more different sentences. If you grasp our terms through the words and phrases we use synonymously, you will know that we are saying the same thing when we say, "Teaching and being taught are correlative functions," and "Initiating and receiving communication are related processes." We are going to stop explaining the grammatical and logi cal points involved and tum to the rules. The difficulty in this chapter, as in the last, is to stop explaining. Instead, we will assume that you know some grammar. We do not necessarily mean that you must understand everything about syntax, but you should be concerned about the ordering of words in sen tences and their relation to one another. Some knowledge of grammar is indispensable to a reader. You cannot begin to deal with terms, propositions, and arguments-the elements of thought-until you can penetrate beneath the surface of lan guage. So long as words, sentences, and paragraphs are opaque and unanalyzed, they are a barrier to, rather than a medium of, communication. You will read words but not receive knowl edge. Here are the rules. The fifth rule of reading, as you will recall from the last chapter, was : RuLE 5. FIND THE IMPORTANT WORDS AND COME TO TERMS. The sixth rule can be expressed thus : RuLE 6. MARK THE MOST IMPORTANT SENTENCES IN A BOOK AND DISCOVER THE PROPOSmONS THEY CONTAIN. The seventh rule is this : RuLE 7. LOCATE OR CONSTRUCT THE BASIC ARGU MENTS IN THE BOOK BY FINDING THEM IN THE CONNECTION OF SENTENCES. You will see later why we did not say "paragraphs" in the formulation of this rule. Incidentally, it is just as true of these new rules as it was of the rule about coming to terms that they apply primarily to expository works. The rules about propositions and arguments are quite different when you are reading a poetical work-a novel, play, or poem. We will discuss the changes that are required in applying them to such works later. Determ i n i ng an Author's Message 1 21 Finding the Key Sentences How does one locate the most important sentences in a book? How, then, does one interpret these sentences to discover the one or more propositions they contain? Again, we are placing emphasis on what is important. To say that there is only a relatively small number of key sentences in a book does not mean that you need pay no attention to all the rest. Obviously, you have to understand every sentence. But most of the sentences, like most of the words, will cause you no difficulty. As we pointed out in our discussion of read ing speeds, you will read them relatively quickly. From your point of view as a reader, the sentences important for you are those that require an effort of interpretation because, at first sight, they are not perfectly intelligible. You understand them just well enough to know there is more to understand. They are the sentences that you read much more slowly and care fully than the rest. These may not be the sentences that are most important for the author, but they are likely to be, be cause you are likely to have the greatest difficulty with the most important things the author has to say. And it hardly needs remarking that those are the things you should read most carefully. From the author's point of view, the important sentences are the ones that express the judgments on which his whole argument rests. A book usually contains much more than the bare statement of an argument, or a series of arguments. The author may explain how he came to the point of view he now holds, or why he thinks his position has serious consequences. He may discuss the words he has to use. He may comment on the work of others. He may indulge in all sorts of supporting and surrounding discussion. But the heart of his communica tion lies in the major affirmations and denials he is making, and the reasons he gives for so doing. To come to grips, therefore, 1 22 HOW TO READ A BOOK you have to see the main sentences as if they were raised from the page in high relief. Some authors help you do this. They underline the sen tences for you. They either tell you that this is an important point when they make it, or they use one or another typo graphical device to make their leading sentences stand out. Of course, nothing helps those who will not keep awake while reading. We have met many readers and students who paid no attention even to such clear signs. They preferred to read on rather than stop and examine the important sentences carefully. There are a few books in which the leading propositions are set forth in sentences that occupy a special place in the order and style of the exposition. Euclid, again, gives us the most obvious example of this. He not only states his definitions, his postulates, and his axioms-his principal propositions-at the beginning, but he also labels every proposition to be proved. You may not understand all of his statements. You may not follow all of his arguments. But you cannot miss the im portant sentences or the grouping of sentences for the state ment of the proofs. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas is another book whose style of exposition puts the leading sentences into high relief. It proceeds by raising questions. Each section is headed by a question. There are many indications of the an swer that Aquinas is trying to defend. A whole series of objec tions opposing the answer is stated. The place where Aquinas begins to argue his own point is marked by the words, "I answer that." There is no excuse for not being able to locate the important sentences in such a book-those expressing the reasons as well as the conclusions-yet even here it remains all a blur for those readers who treat everything they read as equally important-and read it all at the same speed, either fast or slow. That usually means that everything is equally unimportant. Apart from books whose style or format calls attention to what most needs interpretation by the reader, the spotting of Determ i n ing an Author's Message 1 23 the important sentences is a job the reader must perform for himself. There are several things he can do. We have already mentioned one. If he is sensitive to the difference between passages he can understand readily and those he cannot, he will probably be able to locate the sentences that carry the main burden of meaning. Perhaps you are beginning to see how essential a part of reading it is to be perplexed and know it. Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature. If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess. Another clue to the important sentences is found in the words that compose them. If you have already marked the important words, they should lead you to the sentences that deserve further attention. Thus the first step in interpretive reading prepares for the second. But the reverse may also be the case. It may be that you will mark certain words only after you have become puzzled by the meaning of a sentence. The fact that we have stated these rules in a fixed order does not mean that you have to follow them in that order. Terms consti tute propositions. Propositions contain terms. If you know the terms the words express, you have caught the proposition in the sentence. If you understand the proposition conveyed by a sentence, you have arrived at the terms also. This suggests one further clue to the location of the principal propositions. They must belong to the main argument of the book. They must be either premises or conclusions. Hence, if you can detect those sentences that seem to form a sequence, a sequence in which there is a beginning and an end, you probably hav

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