THE LIBRARY 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 HOW TO READ
 
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 BY 
 J. B. KERFOOT 
 
 " Reading is a form of living " 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 (Cbe Riiicrgi&c pnpjf Cambri&rje
 
 COPYRIGHT, I916, BY JOHN B. KERFOOT 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published October iQib 
 
 Wit »tt»tr«rt>e S«S« 
 
 CAMBRIDGE • MASSACHUSETTS 
 PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.
 
 PN 
 
 (S-a 
 
 G4G446
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I. LEARNING TO READ I 
 
 II. MUCKRAKING THE DICTIONARY . . 29 
 
 III. WATCHING THE WHEELS GO ROUND . 53 
 
 IV. WHAT 'S THE USE 88 
 
 V. A SENSE OF DIRECTION 112 
 
 VI. THE WORLD OUTSIDE US AND THE 
 
 WORLD WITHIN 14$ 
 
 VII. INTELLECTUAL DIGESTION .... I92 
 
 VIII. HOW TO READ A NOVEL . . . .221 
 
 IX. THE COSMOS A LA CARTE .... 265
 
 ^ HOW TO READ ^ 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 LEARNING TO READ 
 I 
 
 A few months ago I happened to be present 
 at a dinner where a chance question led to an 
 interesting talk. Some phase of primary edu- 
 cation was under discussion; and in the course 
 of it the host, turning to one of the guests, 
 asked, "When did you learn to read?" 
 
 "At three," was the prompt reply, given 
 with a touch of pride. 
 
 "And you ? " said the host to the next guest. 
 
 "Oh, I don't know. About five, I suppose." 
 
 "And you?" to a lady beyond. 
 
 There was a moment's embarrassed hesita- 
 tion. And then, with something about scarlet 
 fever, came the confession that she had not 
 learned her letters till she was nine. 
 
 And thus it went, halfway round the table. 
 
 I
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 Now these replies were direct and perti- 
 nent. They were categorical answers to a 
 technical question. Taken separately, they 
 gave the exact information asked for. 
 
 And yet, as they piled up, one after the 
 other, there seemed to be something about 
 them that I found myself vaguely resenting. 
 
 It was not what they said. It was, rather, a 
 discernible common denominator of implica- 
 tion in their manner of saying it. 
 
 It seemed as though these people were 
 leaving out of account all the other-than- 
 technical meanings of the phrase with which 
 they dealt, not because they were consciously 
 excluding these deeper meanings for the mo- 
 ment, but because they unconsciously ignored 
 them at all times. 
 
 There was a cumulative inflection of finality 
 in their declarations. It almost sounded as 
 though, in dealing with the primary-school 
 meaning of "learning to read," they felt that 
 they had dealt with the whole meaning of that 
 expression. And while it never entered my 
 head at the moment that this was really true, 
 the fact that it was somehow being made to 
 appear true struck me as amusing. It struck 
 
 2
 
 LEARNING TO READ 
 
 me as amusing enough to call attention to. 
 And so, presently, when the host asked me 
 when / had learned to read, I answered with a 
 smile that I was still learning. 
 
 And to my utter astonishment it developed, 
 in the chaffing and talk that followed, that no 
 single member of that largely literary and 
 more or less intellectual company had ever 
 thought of the expression "learning to read" 
 as having any other meaning than the tech- 
 nical, primary-school meaning; that, namely, 
 of learning the alphabet, learning to recog- 
 nize words made out of the alphabet, learning 
 the dictionary meanings of more, and more, 
 and still more words, and thus learning to 
 receive messages sent by print or handwriting. 
 
 No one of them, it turned out, had ever 
 asked himself what it is, exactly, that we do 
 when we read. No one of them had ever 
 watched himself in the act of reading. And 
 all of them, in consequence, had retained in- 
 tact the careless assumption that reading is 
 essentially a receptive process. They all looked 
 upon it, let us say, as though print were a 
 sort of silent telephone, into one end of which 
 an author delivers a message, and from the 
 
 3
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 other end of which (by simply "knowing how 
 to read") his audience receives it. 
 
 Now, as a matter of fact, and as we shall see 
 presently, this is not true at all. It is not even 
 an inadequate statement of the facts; it is 
 a misstatement of them. And when I had 
 pointed out something of this, — when I had, 
 hurriedly, and to the poor best of my sur- 
 prised unpreparedness, mobilized a few argu- 
 ments and illustrations in defense of what I 
 had regarded as a neutralized axiom, — we 
 began, in the course of the give-and-take of the 
 talk that followed, to make discoveries. And 
 we continued, excitedly and joyously, to make 
 them until I a.m. 
 
 We discovered that the common-school 
 definition of "learning to read" is so univer- 
 sally accepted as the whole definition, that, 
 while almost every newspaper and magazine 
 publishes regular articles on what to read, 
 none of them, so far as any of us knew, ever 
 publishes articles on how to read. We discov- 
 ered that, while there is a whole literature of 
 books about books, — about what books it 
 behooves us to read, and why it behooves us 
 to read them, and what (according to the 
 
 4
 
 LEARNING TO READ 
 
 author) it behooves us to read into them, — 
 there is little or nothing in the whole literature 
 about literature that tells us anything at all 
 about how we have to read books and what it 
 is that we have to read into them. We discov- 
 ered — But, enough! What we are here con- 
 cerned with is the last discovery that we made ; 
 the discovery upon which, so to say, the in- 
 quiry culminated and broke up; the discovery 
 that I have tried to summarize in a sentence 
 on the title-page of this book. 
 
 We discovered that reading, so far from 
 being a merely receptive act, is a creative proc- 
 ess. That it is "creative," not simply in the 
 more or less cant-sodden "artistic" sense, but 
 in a biologic sense as well. That it is an active, 
 largely automatic, purely personal, construe- j. 
 tive functioning. That it is, indeed, a species 
 of anabolism. In short, that it is a form of liv- 
 ing. And as this last expression will be found, 
 as we proceed, progressively to absorb and 
 adequately to sum up the essence of our suc- 
 cessive conclusions, I will put it that it is this 
 last "discovery" — the discovery of reading as 
 a form of living — that I propose to examine 
 and hope to elucidate in the following pages. 
 
 5
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 And now, having said this much by way of 
 introduction; having, as it were, established 
 a mental take-off; let us, like sensible swim- 
 mers, dive at once into the deepest pool that 
 our preliminary subject affords. 
 
 ii 
 
 Until ten or twelve years ago, no man who 
 ever lived could tell another man a story. 
 
 I am sorry to begin by making so obviously 
 idiotic a statement. But I have two excuses 
 for doing so. One (which I merely mention in 
 passing) is that the statement is literally true. 
 The other (upon which I want to lay all pos- 
 sible emphasis) is that the trueness of this 
 truth is of the essence of our inquiry. 
 
 Allow me, therefore, to repeat the state- 
 ment. 
 
 From the beginning of time, right down 
 until about ten years ago, no man ever lived 
 who could tell another man a story. Moses 
 could n't. Homer could n't. Chaucer could 
 n't. The minstrels and minnesingers could n't. 
 Dante could n't. Dickens could n't. Even 
 Conan Doyle could n't. 
 
 The best that the very best of them ever 
 
 6
 
 LEARNING TO READ 
 
 succeeded in doing was to trick, or to coax, or 
 to compel their readers or their hearers into 
 telling stories to themselves. 
 
 "Pshaw!" you are very likely going to ex- 
 claim at this point. "Here is a man pretend- 
 ing to explain one idiotic statement by making 
 another." And perhaps it does look that way. 
 But, before we continue the discussion, let us 
 take a few minutes off and go to the movies. 
 
 in 
 
 That stirring photo-play, "The Two Rat- 
 tlesnakes," is on the bill. 
 
 We scuttle down the darkened aisle and 
 slip into some vacant seats near the front. 
 
 There is a little hissing splutter overhead. 
 A flickering green frame, with "Jim meets a 
 Rattler" inside it, springs into view on the 
 dim curtain. And a moment later the entire 
 audience, and we with them, have settled 
 down into an eager, yet perfectly passive, re- 
 ceptivity, and are looking (through a hole in 
 the darkness) at the arid slope of an Arizona 
 sheep-ranch, where a cowboy with a lamb in 
 his arms and an old ewe at his heels is picking 
 his way down the rocky and cactus-grown 
 
 7
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 hillside. On he comes, twisting and turning; 
 near enough now for us to see the litheness of 
 his limbs and his cheery eyes. Then, suddenly, 
 there is a blur of motion at his feet. A snaky 
 something launches its length and strikes for 
 a second at his knee. Bewilderment, horror, 
 realization, chase each other across his face. 
 We see him drop the lamb; snatch out a knife; 
 rip away the cloth; slash the naked flesh; bend 
 to suck the poison from the wound. We 
 watch him make a tortion bandage from the 
 kerchief at his neck. We watch him start, 
 limping, down the hill. We watch him waver, 
 and stumble, and stop to rest with his hand on 
 a boulder. We watch him press on; and fall; 
 and get up; and struggle on again. We see 
 him fall, and fail to rise. We see him, with a 
 last spurt of strength, pull his six-shooter 
 from its holster; fire three slow shots in the 
 air; and drop back into unconsciousness. And 
 we see a little cloud of distant dust turn into 
 the mounted figures of his friends; see them 
 ride furiously up; leap to the ground; gather 
 round him; examine his hurt; lift his inert 
 body to a horse's back, and ride away — just 
 as the hole in the darkness disappears and 
 
 8
 
 LEARNING TO RKAD 
 
 we find ourselves back again in the dim-lit, 
 crowded hall. 
 
 Now it would be nice to sit out the show. 
 To see how "Mollie gets the News" — 
 Mollie in her Harlem flat; with her sleeves 
 rolled up above her plump forearms; inter- 
 rupted in the act of touching a moist finger to 
 a hot iron by the coming of a telegram — 
 "Jim bitten by a rattler. Come at once." To 
 see her drag a chair to the corner cupboard; 
 take down the old teapot; empty its contents 
 on the ironing-board; stuff the money into 
 her purse; put on her wraps and go. To see 
 her, in the next reel, poring over time-tables 
 in an emigrant sleeper; while the other rattle- 
 snake — a human one — watches her from 
 across the aisle. To see him scrape acquaint- 
 ance with her; learn her story; get out maps; 
 offer suggestions; finally send a telegram of 
 his own — "Meet me at Dry Gulch with the 
 buckboard." To see her whisked behind fast 
 horses to the cattle-thieves' camp. To see 
 the cowboy raid; the timely rescue; the ride 
 to the ranch; the reunited lovers. To see the 
 human rattler tied hand and foot and tossed 
 (on the same hillside that Jim came down 
 
 9
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 in the beginning) into the center of a grim- 
 faced circle and within reach of a coiled 
 something that writhes, and springs, and 
 dashes obscene fangs against his contorted 
 face. 
 
 But we have n't time for that. We must 
 get back to our discussion. Let us slip out 
 quietly while the hall is dark. 
 
 IV 
 
 Do you happen to know how the movies are 
 made? 
 
 They begin, like any other piece of fiction, 
 in the mind of a man who has told himself a 
 story. Having done so, he undertakes, by 
 means of a short piece of descriptive writing 
 (called a scenario) to guide the imagination of 
 his readers along the road his own imagina- 
 tion has followed. And this scenario is sub- 
 mitted to a movie-manager, who, if he likes 
 it, buys it and turns it over to his producing 
 department. 
 
 Now the producing department of a mov- 
 ing-picture concern is a remarkable establish- 
 ment. It has a long list of actors at its beck 
 and call. It has storehouses full of stage prop- 
 
 10
 
 LEARNING TO READ 
 
 erties. It has clothes-presses full of costumes. 
 It has a card index of "likely places." It has 
 a corps of mechanics to do its bidding. And 
 when the scenario of an author's story is 
 turned over to the directing intelligence of 
 this establishment, he chooses actors for it 
 from his troupe. He supplies them with cos- 
 tumes from his cupboards. He draws stage 
 properties from his stores. He selects scenes 
 from his card index. He has his mechanics 
 provide effects that are not in stock. And 
 finally, before the recording eye of the camera, 
 he proceeds — well or ill according to his 
 ability and his resources — to re-tell the au- 
 thor's story in the concrete terms of his own 
 equipment. 
 
 And for us who sit in the audience his re- 
 telling — his reading of the story — is final. 
 You may know a hillside far more picturesque 
 than the one Jim comes down. But you can- 
 not substitute it, in your mind, for the movie- 
 man's hillside. / may know a girl a dozen 
 times more Molly-ish than the Mollie of the 
 film. But I cannot cast her for Mollie' 's part 
 in "The Two Rattlesnakes." The movie- 
 man is reading the author's story, not we. 
 
 II
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 For the moment he stands, like St. Peter, at 
 the gates of our imaginations. What he 
 chooses is chosen. What he puts in is in. 
 What he leaves out is out. 
 
 He is the first man who has told another 
 man a story since the world began. 
 
 "But," you are perhaps exclaiming, "how 
 then about the others? How about Virgil? 
 And Cervantes? And Balzac? And — Marie 
 Corelli?" 
 
 Every one of them, from the least to the 
 greatest, has but written for the movies. 
 
 Not for the movies of the photo-theater, but 
 for the movies of our minds. 
 
 For a novel is nothing but an elaborate 
 scenario. And each of us is a moving-picture 
 concern. 
 
 When we examine a book at a bookstore; 
 when we look at the opening sentences, and 
 read a snatch of conversation on page 247, 
 and turn back to the last page to see how it 
 alUends, — a scenario has been submitted 
 to the manager. When we pay down our 
 $1.35, or present our library card to be 
 stamped, — we have purchased the local 
 rights in it. And when we switch on our 
 
 12
 
 LEARNING TO READ 
 
 electric reading-lamp, and stretch out in our 
 favorite chair, and open the book at the first 
 chapter, — we turn the tale over to our pro- 
 ducing department. 
 
 And the producing department of a human 
 moving-picture concern is also a remarkable 
 establishment. 
 
 All the people we have ever known, plus 
 thousands we have spoken to, or crossed eyes 
 with in a crowd, or watched in public places, 
 or merely glimpsed in passing, are actors at 
 its beck and call. And it can, moreover, pick 
 and choose, not only among these actors, but 
 among their attributes. It can, and that in 
 the twinkling of an eye, take a chance ex- 
 pression on the face of one's best friend, the 
 body of a blacksmith seen years since at a 
 country crossroad, the mustache of yester- 
 day's organ-grinder, and the eyes of last 
 year's cotillion leader, and cast the composite 
 of them (together with the composite sug- 
 gestion of personality that results) as the 
 villain of a piece. 
 
 It, too, has memory storehouses full of 
 stage properties; mental cupboards crammed 
 with costumes; a brain-cell index of likely 
 
 13
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 places. It, too, has a marvelous mechanic, 
 called Imagination, that contrives effects that 
 are not in stock out of odds and ends of raw 
 material. 
 
 And when a story-teller's scenario is sub- 
 mitted to it, the directing mind of this estab- 
 lishment — contriving, as they are needed, 
 actors from this troupe; stage properties from 
 these stores; costumes from these cupboards; 
 scenes from this cell catalogue — proceeds, 
 paragraph by paragraph and page by page, 
 before the estimating eye of our intelligence, 
 and well or ill according to its ability and 
 its resources, to re-tell the author's story in the 
 recollective and imaginative and emotional terms 
 of its own equipment. 
 
 v 
 
 Do you, by any chance, doubt this? 
 
 If so, I have a confession to make. I have, 
 deliberately and with malice aforethought, 
 deceived you. The photo-play performance 
 of "The Two Rattlesnakes" never took 
 place. There never has been such a photo-play. 
 
 I made that all up "as I went along," as 
 the children say. And I placed before you,
 
 LEARNING TO READ 
 
 not a story, but only the skeleton of a story — 
 the merest dry bones of a half-finished sce- 
 nario. 
 
 Yet I'll warrant that in reading it you 
 pictured to yourself a Jim of your own fancy- 
 ing, walking down a hillside of your own in- 
 vention. That you contrived a Mollie to your 
 own liking and placed her in a flat of your 
 own furnishing. That at the last you in- 
 vested the horrid death of the villain with 
 emotions dictated by your own temperament. 
 That you either exulted in a punishment that 
 so poetically fitted the crime, or shuddered to 
 see men, made in God's image, capable of such 
 horrors. 
 
 Is it not so? 
 
 Moreover, when you stop to consider it, 
 you will see that this cannot be otherwise. 
 
 The terms of one's own equipment are the 
 only terms in which a story can reach us. 
 
 For the heroine that the author imagined is 
 forever invisible to us, no matter how mi- 
 nutely he describes her. And though his scene 
 for the moment be Chicago, and though we 
 chance to live there, it is in our Chicago, and 
 not in his, that we stage that chapter of his 
 
 15
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 tale. Indeed, if he describes a character too 
 minutely, — if he keeps our minds too long 
 from imagining their own protagonists in the 
 effort to imagine his, — our minds end by 
 shrugging their shoulders, going on strike, 
 and refusing to imagine any. And it is for the 
 same reason that we so often skip elaborate 
 descriptions of scenery, and that meticulously 
 word-painted landscapes commonly prove in- 
 visible to the eyes of our imaginations. 
 
 Nor is it alone to the things of the senses 
 that this inexorable law applies. It is the 
 same with less tangible stage properties. 
 When we are called upon to "register" hor- 
 ror, we have only our own brands of that 
 emotion to register. When a mental attitude 
 is asked of us, we can but place our own 
 minds, like lay figures, in, or somewhere near, 
 the posture demanded. And if the specifica- 
 tions of our author's scenario include a spirit- 
 ual reaction, we must either supply it, or a 
 substitute for it, from the laboratory of our 
 own spirit, or else pass on, saying in effect (as 
 the motion-picture man would say in the 
 vernacular), "Kill that soul stuff!" 
 
 16
 
 LEARNING TO READ 
 
 VI 
 
 But let us go back for a moment to that be- 
 ginning which we have skipped. Let us go 
 back to the nursery and to our own "learning 
 to read." 
 
 Let us suppose that you have just mastered 
 your letters (or, if you happen to belong to 
 the later order, that you have not mastered 
 them) and that you are about to receive your 
 first lesson in reading. 
 
 A book is placed before you, open at the 
 first page. 
 
 On this page is the woodcut of an animal. 
 And below that are the mystic hieroglyphics, 
 See the Cat. 
 
 Do you see what has happened? 
 
 Do you perceive the significance — the 
 practical symbolism — of this performance? 
 Do you see that at the very threshold of 
 "learning to read," even in the restricted, 
 common-school sense of learning to interpret 
 an arbitrary code of black marks on white 
 paper, there has been placed before you, as a 
 symbol of what you are to do, the moving pic- 
 ture reduced to its simplest form ? Do you see 
 
 17
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 that in effect, and by the silent pantomime 
 of that juxtaposition, they are saying to you, 
 "Visualize, darn you!"? 
 
 But perhaps you will balk at this interpre- 
 tation. 
 
 Let us, therefore, suppose again. 
 
 Let us suppose that there is no house cat in 
 your home. 
 
 Let us suppose that the weeks have gone by 
 and that you have learned to read many pages 
 in your picture primer; and that one fine 
 morning, on a pictureless page in another 
 book, you come across again those now famil- 
 iar characters, See the Cat. 
 
 What happens now? 
 
 Why, instantly and inevitably you visualize 
 the woodcut. 
 
 Why? Because it is the only cat you have 
 in stock; and so, willy-nilly, you cast it for the 
 hero of the sentence. You have, in short, on a 
 ridiculously inadequate capital, begun your 
 own career as a moving-picture concern. 
 
 Let us pursue the inquiry. 
 
 Let us suppose that you go for a few weeks' 
 visit to some cousins in the country, and that 
 one of them has a Maltese kitten. 
 
 18
 
 LEARNING TO READ 
 
 And let us suppose that on your return, 
 fearing perhaps that you had forgotten your 
 lessons, they put that old primer in your 
 hand, open at the first page. 
 
 What happens this time? 
 
 Do you accept the woodcut? 
 
 Not you. As you take in the words See the 
 Cat, your mind presents you, unasked, the 
 picture of a blue-gray kitten, the extreme tip 
 of its tail twitching back and forth above the 
 grass, and one curved paw tapping a red apple 
 just fallen in the orchard. And with this pic- 
 ture comes a swift sense of soft winds; and 
 just a taste of cider. 
 
 You have, you see, increased the capital of 
 your moving-picture establishment and are 
 already exercising your prerogatives as a 
 producing manager. You have just rejected 
 with scorn the illustrator's offer to supply 
 your equipment. You are telling the author's 
 story yourself. 
 
 VII 
 
 And now I think that we are ready to sum 
 up. 
 
 Or, shall we put it that we have now 
 
 19
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 acquired the equipment necessary to read 
 what follows? For that, after all, is what we 
 really mean. 
 
 We read, then, quite literally, with our own 
 experience. We read with what we have seen 
 and heard and smelled and tasted and felt. 
 We read with the emotions we have had — 
 with the love we have loved, the fear we have 
 feared, the hate we have hated. We read with 
 the observations we have made and the de- 
 ductions we have drawn from them; with 
 the ideas we have evolved and the ideals we 
 have built into them; with the sympathies we 
 have developed and the prejudices we have 
 failed to rid ourselves of. 
 
 "Learning to read" in the common-school 
 sense — learning, let us put it, to read print 
 and learning to read handwriting — has ex- 
 actly as much (and exactly as little) to do 
 with our reading of a novel as it has with 
 Forbes-Robertson's ''reading" of Shake- 
 speare. 
 
 Learning to read, in the real sense, means 
 enlarging our equipment, and learning, cre- 
 atively, to use it. 
 
 We receive in reading; but we receive, not 
 
 20
 
 LEARNING TO READ 
 
 directly by what the author tells us, but in- 
 directly, by the new uses that he stimulates 
 as into putting our experience to. 
 
 For reading consists of our making — with 
 the aid of the pattern and the hints supplied 
 by the author, but out of our mental stock, 
 which we have produced by living — some- 
 thing that never existed before; something 
 that only exists at all in so far as we make it; 
 something that can never be duplicated by 
 any other reader; something that we ourselves 
 can never wholly reproduce. 
 
 Reading is a copartnership. What we re- 
 ceive from it is in the nature of dividends on a 
 joint investment. 
 
 VIII 
 
 M 
 
 Yes," I seem to hear some one saying, 
 this is very interesting and quite true — 
 about fiction. But how about a philosophic 
 treatise? How about an abstract sociological 
 argument? How about a discussion of scien- 
 tific principles?" 
 
 It is all quite as true of these kinds of read- 
 ing as it is of a novel, or of a magazine story, 
 or of a newspaper account of a fire. 
 
 21
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 You can no more put a new idea into a 
 person's head than you can tell him a story. 
 All that you can do is to stimulate him into 
 making new combinations out of the ideas 
 already there. 
 
 "But how, then," I seem to hear the same 
 objector saying, "do new ideas get into peo- 
 ple's heads, if you cannot put them there?' 1 
 
 The answer to this is Topsy's: They grow. 
 
 I recall the tale of a servant who was a 
 most dependable agent for doing anything 
 that she had once been shown how to do, but 
 who (or so her bachelor employer thought) 
 had never had an original idea in her head 
 since she was born. But it happened that one 
 of her acquired accomplishments was the 
 making of ice-cream. And one hot day in 
 summer, when a thunderstorm had unex- 
 pectedly sent the mercury tumbling down 
 into the sixties, he was suddenly confronted, 
 not only with a squat figure standing in his 
 study door, but with the complete destruction 
 of his theory. 
 
 "Say!" his servant was saying, "if I turn 
 the handle backward will it unfreeze the 
 cream?"
 
 LEARNING TO READ 
 
 IX 
 
 The truth is that our heads house other in- 
 dustries beside that of moving-picture making 
 And one of these is a distillery. 
 
 Here the raw materials of crude experience 
 — like, say, the jerking of a burned finger out 
 of the flame — are treated by a secret process 
 and " ideas " — like the idea that fire is hot — 
 are extracted from them. You cannot, as most 
 of us know from experience, put the idea that 
 fire is hot into a child's head. The best that you 
 can do is to supervise the delivery of the raw ex- 
 perience at the gate of the distillery. 
 
 But we are more than distillers of low-grade 
 ideas — of these comparatively crude, first- 
 hand realizations. 
 
 We are blenders and rectifiers of these as 
 well. 
 
 We combine two or more of them and from 
 the mixture we distill a sublimated extract — ■ 
 the idea, say, of a resemblance. We combine 
 a number of these ideas of resemblance and 
 from the blend distill a still more rarefied es- 
 sence — the idea, say, of a generalization. 
 And each of these ideas — each of these home- 
 
 23
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 made products of our distillery — becomes a 
 permanent item of our stock in trade. Each of 
 them is, so to say, stored away in its own bot- 
 tle, ready for use in our further experiments. 
 
 And these further experiments — these 
 combinings of ideas that we have in stock — 
 are by no means always made on our own 
 initiative. They are often — more often than 
 otherwise — made on order, or by suggestion. 
 
 Smith meets Jones in the subway and they 
 have a little chat. 
 
 Later, Smith says to his wife, "Keen chap, 
 that Jones. He gave me a new idea to-day." 
 
 But of course he did n't. 
 
 What Jones gave him was a formula. 
 
 He suggested that if Smith would take 
 some of the Idea in Bottle 68, and some of the 
 Idea in Bottle 7042, and mix them, he'd get 
 such and such a result. And Smith did. And 
 he got it. 
 
 But, suppose Smith had n't had the ingredi* 
 ents in stock ? 
 
 x 
 
 Let us take our own case. 
 
 When you began this chapter, you quite 
 
 24
 
 LEARNING TO READ 
 
 definitely did n't have in your head several 
 ideas that are now there. 
 
 You did n't, for instance, have in your head 
 
 the idea that authors do not tell us stories; 
 
 that they only issue instructions to us for 
 
 telling ourselves stories; that they only write 
 
 'scenarios" for us to "produce." 
 
 How, then, did this idea get into your head? 
 
 Not, certainly, by my putting it there. 
 
 If you are inclined, for the moment, to 
 think that I did this, you have only to turn 
 back to section n of this chapter in order to 
 see how you felt toward it, and what you 
 thought of me, when I pretended to think that 
 I could put this idea into your head. 
 
 No. I did n't put it there. I could n't. 
 
 All that I could do was to furnish you, in 
 the proper order, the various formulae needed 
 for distilling it; to see that you were supplied, 
 on occasion, with certain necessary raw ma- 
 terials; and to stimulate you, from time to 
 time, to make certain combinations out of 
 these ingredients. 
 
 I knew, for instance, that you were going 
 to need the idea that there were two meanings 
 to the expression "learning to read"; and I 
 
 25
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 was afraid that you might not have this idea 
 in stock. So I suggested that you take a 
 number of ideas that I knew you could supply 
 from stock — ■ the ideas of an inquisitorial 
 host; of a series of guests, each of whom 
 thought in his own way that he had learned 
 to read, once for all, when he was a child; and 
 of one guest who thought that he had n't — 
 I suggested that you take these simple ideas 
 and mix them in a certain way. And you did 
 as I suggested and got the desired result — 
 the more complex idea. 
 
 And I took pains to "stimulate you into 
 making this new combination of ideas that 
 were already on hand." 
 
 That was a part of my job as author. 
 
 I did it, in this case, by inducing you to 
 dramatize the ideas; by inducing you to im- 
 agine people holding these ideas, or enacting 
 them. In fine, I did it by inventing this din- 
 ner party; which, like the photo-play of "The 
 Two Rattlesnakes," never took place. 
 
 But the dinner party and the photo-play 
 were invented for entirely different reasons. 
 In the latter case I knew that you were going 
 to need the idea that we read in terms of our 
 
 26
 
 LEARNING TO READ 
 
 own equipment and not in terms of the author's 
 equipment; and I was also afraid that you did 
 not have this idea in stock. 
 
 But this is an idea that is not easily derivable 
 from the mixing of other, simpler ideas. This 
 is an idea that we get best first-hand, from 
 experience — by actually doing the thing 
 and watching ourselves do it. It is practically 
 one of those realization-ideas, like the idea 
 that fire is hot. Its extreme complexity is due 
 to the extreme complexity of the experience 
 itself. 
 
 So I took measures to supply you with the 
 experience. 
 
 I wrote a scenario and I tricked you into 
 "producing" it. 
 
 And then, while the experience was fresh in 
 your mind, I called your attention to what 
 you had done. 
 
 XI 
 
 Philosophy or fiction, then, it is all one. 
 
 Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" is as 
 much a scenario as is Stevenson's Treasure 
 Island." They merely call for different equip- 
 ments to "produce" them. 
 
 27
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 Reading either of them is a partnership 
 transaction between the author and ourselves. 
 
 And in either case our dividends will depend 
 upon (i) the amount of our contributed capi- 
 tal; and (2) upon the number and the nature 
 of the "turn-overs" we are stimulated into 
 making with it.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 MUCKRAKING THE DICTIONARY 
 
 I 
 
 Looking up at my calendar as I begin this 
 chapter, I notice that I have an engagement 
 to-night. I am going to the theater. 
 
 I also notice that it is the first of April. And 
 I wonder, in passing, whether this is a coinci- 
 dence, or whether there is also a divinity that 
 guides our beginnings, rough-hew them as we 
 will. At any rate, the day is well lit upon. To 
 talk of the dictionary on April Fools' Day is 
 as appropriate as to wear green on the seven- 
 teenth of March. 
 
 However, let us get back to my engage- 
 ment. 
 
 The play we are going to see has made a 
 great hit. We had to get tickets weeks in ad- 
 vance. The house will be packed to the roof. 
 
 Suppose I jump up on my seat in the mid- 
 dle of the third act and shout "Fire!!" 
 
 What does your imagination suggest as the 
 result? 
 
 Panic? 
 
 29
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 Stampede? 
 
 Women trampled? 
 
 Clothes torn from men's backs? 
 
 Five or six hundred well-fed, well-dressed, 
 outwardly kindly folk, suddenly swept by a 
 brain-storm of herd-horror; and then, quiet, 
 and a few still bodies sprawled in the empty 
 aisles? 
 
 Probably. 
 
 And what would have been responsible for 
 all this? 
 
 Terror. Instant, unreasoned, irresistible 
 terror. 
 
 And what would have caused this terror? 
 
 An idea. 
 
 And what would have detonated this idea, 
 like a bomb, in five hundred minds at once? 
 
 A shouted word. 
 
 Surely, this must be a very terrible word? 
 A word with a most immemorial, definite, 
 terror-striking meaning? 
 
 ii 
 
 But hold on a minute. 
 It happens that Jim Sedgworth dined with 
 me last night. 
 
 30
 
 MUCKRAKING THE DICTIONARY 
 
 You don't know Jim. But he is one of those 
 big, blue-eyed, absent-minded, intensely-in- 
 earnest fellows, whose greatest joy in life is to 
 pounce on an idea and worry it. Jim treats an 
 idea exactly as though he were a bull pup and 
 it were the corner of a sofa cushion. 
 
 Well, when we'd finished dinner, and I had 
 given Jim a cigar, and he'd cut the end off of 
 it; I saw, by the way he searched his pockets, 
 and by the puzzled frown between his eyes as 
 he talked (he had just gotten an idea by the 
 ear and was beginning to growl at it), that he 
 had left his matches at home. So I caught the 
 butler's eye; and he, presently, brought a little 
 alcohol lamp and stood at Jim's side with it. 
 
 But Jim had his idea by the throat by then 
 and did n't notice. 
 
 ''Fire, Sir," said the man. 
 
 Jim paid no attention. And yet, curiously 
 enough, I noticed that his hand stopped grop- 
 ing in his pockets. 
 
 "Fire, Sir," said the butler, again, a little 
 louder. 
 
 Jim did n't seem to notice, even yet. He 
 did n't start. He did n't look round and say, 
 "Oh — yes — thank you." He went right on 
 
 31
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 talking. He gave his idea a final shake. He 
 disdainfully tossed the carcass of it on to the 
 table between us, as who should say, "Re- 
 suscitate that if you can." And then, his eyes 
 fixed on mine, he leaned a little sideways to- 
 ward the lamp. The frown disappeared from 
 his forehead. With his eyes still on mine, he 
 stuck the end of his cigar into the little blue 
 flame. And he puffed. 
 
 Now what caused Jim to stop groping for 
 matches? 
 
 What gradually wiped the perplexed frown 
 from his face? 
 
 What caused him, while his real attention 
 was fixed on his argument and his eyes on me, 
 to avail himself of the proffered lamp? 
 
 Let us put it that these things were the re- 
 sult of a slowly dawning sense of a need about 
 to be supplied. 
 
 And what caused this sense of approaching 
 satisfaction? 
 
 The gradual taking form of a vague idea in 
 the back of his mind. 
 
 And what was it that prompted the slow 
 generation of this idea in his half-conscious* 
 ness ? 
 
 32
 
 MUCKRAKING THE DICTIONARY 
 
 A repeated word. 
 
 Surely, this must be a most reassuring 
 word? A word with an age-old, ingratiating, 
 domestic significance? 
 
 in 
 
 But hold on again! 
 
 It is the same word! 
 
 Or, are we mixing things up? 
 
 Are these, perhaps, two different words 
 that happen to be spelled alike? 
 
 Or are they the same word, used in two 
 different senses? 
 
 Let us consult the dictionary. 
 
 IV 
 
 On second thought, however, and while the 
 dictionary is being gotten down from the 
 shelf for us, let me tell you what it is that I 
 want to show you. 
 
 We made, in the last chapter, some rather 
 startling discoveries. 
 
 We discovered, for instance, that authors 
 do not, because they cannot, tell us stories or 
 put new ideas into our heads. That they 
 merely guide and prompt us, with varying 
 
 33
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 skill and effectiveness, in telling stories, and in 
 building up ideas, for ourselves. 
 
 We discovered that books are, in reality, 
 nothing but more-or-less elaborate scenarios 
 ■ — descriptions of the stories or syntheses that 
 their authors want us to stage in our minds; 
 and that the only material we have to draw 
 upon for the "producing" of these scenarios 
 is our own experience — the stored products 
 of the living we have done. 
 
 In fact, we discovered that reading, instead 
 of being the comparatively passive and es- 
 sentially receptive process that we are in the 
 habit of considering it, is in reality an in- 
 tensely personal and creative activity. 
 
 We are, we found, astonishingly "on our 
 own" when we read a book. 
 
 But we have not, even yet, pushed our in- 
 vestigations in this regard quite home. 
 
 We have not, even yet, discovered how 
 much "on our own" we really are when we 
 read. 
 
 For story scenarios are written in words. 
 And while we have discovered where we get 
 our stories, we have yet to discover where we 
 get our word-meanings. 
 
 34
 
 MUCKRAKING THE DICTIONARY 
 
 We have discovered that no man can tell us 
 a story. 
 
 We have yet to realize that no man can tell 
 us the meaning of a word. 
 
 v 
 
 "What!" you are, of course, going to ex- 
 claim at this point, "and how, then, about 
 the dictionary?" 
 
 Allow me to be as shocking as possible. The 
 dictionary is the very last place in which you 
 will find this information. 
 
 However, don't think for a moment that I 
 expect you to take my word for this. I quite 
 realize that you do not believe me. But fortu- 
 nately, and just in the nick of time, here 
 comes the dictionary to speak for itself. 
 
 Here is Funk and Wagnall's New Stand- 
 ard Dictionary of the English Lan- 
 guage. Let us resume our interrupted in- 
 vestigation by seeing what it has to tell us. 
 
 VI 
 
 We were wanting to know whether the 
 word "fire" as supposedly shouted in the 
 theater, and the word "fire" as spoken to Jim 
 
 35
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 Sedgworth by the butler, were perhaps two 
 different words that happened to be spelled 
 alike. 
 
 The dictionary tells us that the word "fire" 
 only occurs twice in English; once as a verb, 
 and once as a noun. And as both of these 
 words, as used, are nouns, they must necessa- 
 rily be the same word, used in different senses. 
 
 At least one would suppose so. 
 
 Let us see, however, what the dictionary 
 has to say. 
 
 The dictionary gives fourteen or fifteen dif- 
 ferent meanings for the noun "fire" and di- 
 vides these into six groups. Here they are: — 
 
 Fire, (i) The evolution of heat and light by 
 combustion; also, the combustion 
 thus manifested, especially the flame, 
 or the fuel as burning. 
 
 (2) The discharge of firearms; firing. 
 
 (3) One or more sparks, especially as 
 emitted by iron or stone when struck 
 by a substance hard enough to tear it. 
 
 (4) Any light, luster, or flash resembling 
 fire. 
 
 (5) Liveliness or intensity of thought, feel- 
 ing, or action ; ardor; passion; vivacity. 
 
 (6) Any raging evil; a severe affliction; 
 sore trial; as, the fires of persecution. 
 
 36
 
 MUCKRAKING THE DICTIONARY 
 
 Well? 
 
 This does n't seem to help us much, 
 does it? 
 
 There is manifestly but one of these mean- 
 ings — but one of these fourteen or fifteen 
 meanings divided into six groups — that in 
 any remotest degree connects itself with my 
 supposed cry in the theater. 
 
 This is the last meaning in the first group : — 
 
 the combustion thus manifested, especially 
 the flame, or the fuel as burning. 
 
 And there is but one of these meanings — 
 but one of these fourteen or fifteen meanings 
 divided into six groups — that in any remot- 
 est degree connects itself with the butler's 
 proffer of the cigar-lighter. 
 
 Namely, the last meaning in the first 
 group : — 
 
 the combustion thus manifested, especially 
 the flame, or the fuel as burning. 
 
 But, these are not different meanings! 
 These are the same meaning! 
 And not only that. 
 
 This "dictionary meaning" does not, in 
 either case, indicate in the remotest degree 
 
 37
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 the meaning actually conveyed by the word 
 as used. 
 
 Jim Sedgworth certainly could n't have got- 
 ten his meaning of the word as used by the 
 butler from the dictionary. 
 
 The theater audience to-night, should I 
 shout that word from my seat during the 
 third act, certainly would n't get its meaning 
 of it from the dictionary. 
 
 Evidently, if we have nowhere to go for our 
 word-meanings except to the dictionary, we 
 are up a tree. 
 
 VII 
 
 As a matter of fact, however, we are merely 
 up against two very interesting questions: — 
 
 (i) Where do we get the meanings of words ? 
 
 (2) What is the function of the dictionary? 
 
 Let us tackle the latter question first. And, 
 to that end, let us begin by setting down, as 
 clearly as we can, the meanings actually con- 
 veyed by the word "fire" as used in these two 
 cases. 
 
 Let us put it that the meaning conveyed tG 
 an audience by the word "Fire!" shouted in 
 a theater would be something like this: — 
 
 38
 
 MUCKRAKING THE DICTIONARY 
 
 The frightful Theater-fire-death is upon us! We 
 are trapped! Every man for himself! 
 
 And let us put it that the meaning actually 
 conveyed to Jim Sedgworth by "Fire, Sir," 
 as spoken by the butler, was something like 
 this: — 
 
 Sir, give over groping and frowning; the slight 
 fire-service that you require is here at your 
 elbow. 
 
 If, now that we have them before us, we 
 compare these two meanings; if we examine 
 them carefully, but with an eye to resem- 
 blances rather than to differences; we shall 
 find that they have one, and only one, ele- 
 ment in common. In each the fire-notion is 
 present. 
 
 And if we now turn back to that vague 
 "dictionary meaning" of the noun "fire," 
 which, of all the "dictionary meanings" 
 given, we found to be the only one remotely 
 connectible with either of these cases, and 
 equally connectible with each of them; 
 namely, — 
 
 the combustion thus manifested, especially 
 the flame, or the fuel as burning, — « 
 
 39
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 we shall discover that it is, in reality, nothing 
 but a definition of this fire-notion. 
 
 Suppose, now, with this discovery in our 
 minds, we reexamine the six groups of mean- 
 ings given by the dictionary for the noun 
 "fire." 
 
 We shall find that they can be described, 
 and summed up, as follows: — 
 
 (i) The evolution of heat and Definitions of 
 light by combustion; also the general 
 the combustion thus mani- fire-notion, 
 fested, especially the flame, 
 or the fuel as burning. 
 
 (2) The discharge of firearms; A definition of 
 firing. the shooting- 
 iron fire-notion. 
 
 (3) One or more sparks, espe- A definition of 
 dally as emitted by iron the flint-and- 
 or stone when struck by a steel, or horse- 
 substance hard enough to shoe-and-cob- 
 tear it. ble fire-notion. 
 
 (4) Any light, luster, or flash Definitions of 
 resembling fire. the looks-like- 
 
 fire-to-the-eye 
 notion. 
 
 40
 
 MUCKRAKING THE DICTIONARY 
 
 (5) Liveliness or intensity of Definitions of 
 thought, feeling or action; the makes- 
 ardor; passion; vivacity. you-think-of- 
 
 fire notion. 
 
 (6) Any raging evil; a severe Definitions of 
 affliction; sore trial; as, the the makes- 
 fires of persecution. you-think-of- 
 
 the-effect-of- 
 fire notion. 
 
 In fine, we have hit upon the function of 
 the dictionary; which is, not to give us the 
 definite meanings of words as used, but to de- 
 fine the root-ideas; the type-notions; the lowest 
 common denominators of grouped meanings; 
 for which words, by long usage and slow develop- 
 ment, have come to stand. 
 
 And this, as we shall see more clearly in a 
 few moments, cannot, in the nature of things, 
 be otherwise. For words, in themselves, — 
 words, that is to say, without context, — do 
 not possess definite meanings. They merely 
 stand for generalized ideas. They are magic 
 formulae — rubbed lamps — "Open Sesames!" 
 — by which we command the presence of 
 "notions" in one another's minds. 
 
 41
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 VIII 
 
 It is possible that at first blush you doubt 
 my soundness in making this statement. If 
 so, I can refer you to the dictionary itself. 
 For the dictionary knows this fact perfectly, 
 — or, rather, partially, — but, for reasons of 
 its own, does n't force it on our notice. It 
 prints it, in very small type, in a dark corner 
 where you will be unlikely to come across it; 
 but where, if accused of not knowing its own 
 business, it could triumphantly point it out. 
 On page 2730 of the New Standard Diction- 
 ary, tucked away among some other com- 
 ments on the word "word," appears the fol- 
 lowing: — 
 
 In human language, all words, except proper 
 names and some exclamations, are signs of gener- 
 alized ideas, called notions. 
 
 Please bear this statement of the diction- 
 ary's in mind. We will have occasion to refer 
 to it later on. 
 
 IX 
 
 And now for our other question: where do 
 we get the meanings of words as actually 
 used? 
 
 42
 
 MUCKRAKING THE DICTIONARY 
 
 We have already, as it happens, stumbled 
 on the answer to this question also. We get 
 the meanings of words, as actually used, from 
 the context. 
 
 The matter, however, is not quite so simple 
 as this sounds. Let us look at it a bit more 
 closely. 
 
 Suppose I say to you, "I am going down 
 town to get a down pillow." 
 
 My meaning, because of the context, is 
 perfectly clear to you in spite of the two 
 "downs." 
 
 Or you would probably say so. 
 
 But, is it? 
 
 Do you, as a matter of fact, know what 
 "down town" means to me? Do I know what 
 it means to you? Do we understand the same 
 thing, all the way through, by "down pil- 
 low"? Or does "down pillow," possibly, 
 mean to you an aid to luxurious ease? To me, 
 as it happens, it means a squashy nuisance 
 that is forever shedding white fuzz on the 
 back of my coat. 
 
 In short, are the other words the whole of the 
 context ? 
 
 Let us see for ourselves. 
 
 43
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 Let us return for a moment to the crowded 
 theater. 
 
 Here we had a single word, shouted by it- 
 self. Whence do these five hundred people 
 get, at the same instant, the same meaning 
 from this word? Not from the verbal context, 
 since there is none. They get it from the ma- 
 terial context: — from the big, crowded house, 
 and the small, distant exits; from their com- 
 mon knowledge of the horrors of theater fires; 
 from the context, in short, of the shared situa- 
 tion. 
 
 But even this is not all. 
 
 Up to a certain point — to the exact point 
 up to which the situation is really shared — 
 these people get a practically identical mean- 
 ing from the shouted word. But each of them 
 gets, also, a more definite meaning yet; a per- 
 sonal meaning. 
 
 The little lady in G 34 gets the meaning 
 that two babies at home will be motherless if 
 she does n't somehow get out before the rush. 
 
 The big man in B, next seat but one to the 
 aisle, gets the meaning that he must manhan- 
 dle the flabby fellow at his right in order to 
 get started while the going is good. 
 
 44
 
 MUCKRAKING THE DICTIONARY 
 
 The fireman near the main exit gets the 
 meaning that now at last he is "on duty" in 
 deadly earnest. 
 
 And so on, and so forth, through five hun- 
 dred variations. 
 
 In fact, the personal character and the 
 private concerns of every man and woman in 
 that theater are, for him or her self but for no 
 one else, a part of the context. 
 
 We ourselves, our endowments and deriva- 
 tions, our past performances and present en- 
 tanglements, in fine, the sum total of living 
 that we have stored in us, are always and al- 
 ways, forever and ever, a part of the context 
 from which we derive the meaning of every 
 word that we hear spoken or read in print. 
 
 x 
 
 "Learning to read," therefore, does not 
 only mean increasing our stored experience, 
 physical, mental, and spiritual; and learning 
 to draw on these stores more and more skill- 
 fully for the "producing" of our authors' 
 scenarios. It means, also, enlarging our "per- 
 sonal contexts"; developing our responsive- 
 ness to "verbal contexts"; and learning to 
 
 45
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 draw more and more discriminatingly on 
 these two sources for the word-meanings in 
 which we interpret the directions that our succes- 
 sive partners, the authors, issue to us. 
 
 XI 
 
 This, dramatically considered, would ap- 
 pear to be the proper place to ring down the 
 curtain on this chapter. But before doing this 
 I want to be certain that you realize the ab- 
 solute universality of the explanation above 
 set forth. 
 
 I chose the word "fire" to use as an illus- 
 tration because it seemed convenient. But 
 I might have chosen any one of the 349,999 
 other words in the New Standard Dictionary. 
 For they all, without exception, stand, in 
 their respective degrees, for "generalized 
 ideas called notions"; and it is invariably 
 from the contexts — verbal, situational, per- 
 sonal — that we derive the specific meanings 
 which, in actual use, we individually assign to 
 them. 
 
 But I have more than a suspicion that you 
 are still inclined to question this. You are, I 
 dare swear, bursting at this very moment 
 
 46
 
 MUCKRAKING THE DICTIONARY 
 
 with suggested exceptions. You are, I am 
 certain, feeling around with the fingers of 
 your mind for words — words that you know 
 must exist — whose meanings are singular 
 and absolute. 
 
 Well, there are no such words. 
 
 Not in practice at any rate. 
 
 I defy you to find one, inside the dictionary 
 or out. 
 
 For they exist only in theory. And, even 
 there, they are hard birds to get hold of. The 
 only way to catch one is to put salt on its tail 
 — the intellectual salt called metaphysics. 
 
 XII 
 
 " But," you are doubtless wanting to remind 
 me, "the dictionary itself expressly says that 
 'In human language, all words, except proper 
 names and some exclamations, are signs of gen- 
 eralized ideas called notions.'" 
 
 Exactly. But, let me remind you in turn, 
 we are engaged in muckraking the dictionary. 
 And the dictionary is either less practically 
 perspicacious than it thinks itself, or less in- 
 tellectually honest than it pretends to be, in 
 making this statement. 
 
 47
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 It either fails to realize that it is talking 
 common sense in the unitalicized portion of 
 the quoted sentence, and metaphysics in the 
 italicized portion; or else it deliberately aban- 
 dons, in practice, the double standard that it 
 sets up in theory. For no one can detect the 
 alleged difference of status between these 
 classes of words by examining the text of the 
 dictionary. 
 
 Let us try for ourselves. 
 
 Let us look up a proper name in the New 
 Standard Dictionary (where proper names 
 are listed, in ordinary alphabetical order, in 
 the text); and then take the next, ordinary, 
 word in the column; and compare the two. 
 Suppose we take "Aristotle." The next word 
 after "Aristotle" is "aristotype." Here is 
 what the dictionary says about them: — ■ 
 
 Aristotle. A Greek philosopher (384-322 B.C.); 
 
 pupil of Plato; teacher of Alexander the 
 
 Great. 
 
 Aristotype. Phot. A print made on paper treated 
 
 as with mixed collodion and gelatin, 
 
 capable of receiving a high polish. 
 
 Well? How about it? Now that you have 
 read what the dictionary has to say, is "aris- 
 
 48
 
 MUCKRAKING THE DICTIONARY 
 
 totype" a "notion" to you and "Aristotle" 
 not? 
 
 Or, as a matter of cold, practical fact, is 
 not your notion of "Aristotle" just as general- 
 ized as it was before consulting the diction- 
 ary, while your notion of "aristotype" has 
 become a trifle more specific than formerly? 
 
 XIII 
 
 But perhaps you think that Aristotle is not 
 a fair selection. He has been dead such a long 
 time that our notions of him are naturally 
 hazy. 
 
 Let us get into the twentieth century: into 
 the lime-light. 
 
 Let us put it that proper names run all the 
 way from "John Doe," which stands, by defi- 
 nition, for a generalized idea, to "Teddy 
 Roosevelt," which stands, let us say, for 
 
 A type of human being of which, "more's the 
 pity," or "thank God!" (according to our per- 
 sonal contexts) there happens to be but one. 
 
 Dr. Woods Hutchinson pointed out, some 
 years ago, that "night air" was the only kind 
 of air we have to breathe — at night. I 
 
 49
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 would respectfully point out that a general- 
 ized idea is the only idea we have, either of 
 Mr. Aristotle or Mr. Roosevelt, and that 
 "Aristotle" and "Teddy Roosevelt" stand 
 for them. 
 
 Words, after all, are but push-buttons. 
 When we press them, they call up notions in 
 other minds. When I push the button 
 "Teddy," it calls up a notion of Teddy in 
 your mind. It does n't call up my notion of 
 him. It does n't call up his notion of himself. 
 It calls up that generalization which, at the 
 moment, stands for your notion of him. 
 
 xiv 
 
 So much, then, for proper names. As for 
 "some exclamations," the dictionary defines 
 "O" as "an exclamation of lamentation." 
 
 It defines "Oh" as "a natural ejaculation 
 evoked by sudden surprise." 
 
 It defines "Ah" as "an exclamation ex- 
 pressing various emotions according" — in 
 short, according to the context. 
 
 And so on through the list. In short, it de- 
 fines these words as standing for ideas that 
 are merely a little more generalized than the 
 
 50
 
 MUCKRAKING THE DICTIONARY 
 
 others. One can, for instance, imagine a fat 
 and very self-satisfied dictionary exclaiming, 
 "0!" or "Oh!!" or "Pshaw!" or even 
 "Ouch!" as these little mistakes are pointed 
 out to it. 
 
 You will find it an amusing game and a 
 helpful exercise to take a list of words, — any 
 words, like "spirituality," "toward," "hum- 
 ble," "angrily," "diphthong," "potato," 
 "Aristophanes," "Humph!" — and satisfy 
 yourself in each case of the relevancy of the 
 facts set forth. 
 
 You will find that they are all — nouns, 
 verbs, adjectives, adverbs, proper names, ex- 
 clamations, what-not — you will find that 
 they are all "signs" alike; all signals, rubbed 
 lamps, mental push-buttons. 
 
 You will find that, as any one of them is 
 presented to you, a "notion" springs up in 
 your mind. 
 
 You will find that, while these notions dif- 
 fer in degree of vagueness (your "Humph!" 
 notion will be vaguer than your "Aristoph- 
 anes" notion, which, in turn, will be vaguer 
 than your "potato" notion), each of them 
 
 51
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 will prove, on examination, to be a "general- 
 ized idea." 
 
 And you will find, finally, that each of these 
 ideas is a generalization made from your own 
 stored-up experience.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 WATCHING THE WHEELS GO ROUND 
 
 I 
 
 It is not customary for authors to print their 
 prefatory remarks at the beginning of the 
 third chapter. But this, for reasons that will 
 presently appear, is what I am about to do. 
 
 The object of this book, briefly stated, is 
 to help its readers to a more intelligent em- 
 ployment of reading for their own individual 
 ends — whatever those may be. 
 
 But since this object, thus summarized, 
 will seem to many to imply the setting forth 
 of some definitely formulated technique, — 
 of a specific formula that needs only to be fol- 
 lowed, — there are no doubt those who are 
 already looking to see this book's instructions 
 summed up for them in a set of cut-out-able, 
 pin-up-able, memorizable, and try-it-on-a- 
 dog-able rules. They are looking, let us say, 
 for something analogous to those lists of in- 
 structions commonly furnished us in treatises 
 on " How to Grow Thin " : — so many of such 
 
 53
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 and such stoopings and flexings before the 
 morning tub; so many miles at a brisk walk 
 after breakfast; so and so many tens and 
 twenties and fifties of such and such rollings 
 and toe-touchings before getting into bed; 
 supplemented by carefully worked-out menus 
 of what we may, and carefully compiled lists 
 of what we may not, eat. 
 
 If, however (from the personal contexts of 
 your own preconceptions and desires), you 
 have read any such expectation out of the 
 title of this volume, it is only right that I 
 should, in advance, disabuse your mind of the 
 false hope. 
 
 I do not propose to tell you that you must 
 always, in reading, let the light fall on your 
 book from behind, over your shoulder; that 
 you should avoid stories of thrilling adventure 
 and should pick out theological essays when 
 you are trying to read yourself to sleep o' 
 nights: that half an hour, morning and eve- 
 ning, is all that you ought to devote to the daily 
 papers; and that you should keep a small edi- 
 tion of the classics in your coat pocket to read 
 while you are waiting in line at the box office 
 of the movie-theater. I am not even going 
 
 54
 
 WATCHING THE WHEELS 
 
 to divulge to you that legendary secret of 
 the professional "reader," — that sea serpent 
 among trade tricks, — by which it is said that 
 the initiated are enabled to take in whole 
 paragraphs and even whole pages of print at a 
 glance; instead of plodding along, sentence by 
 sentence, after the manner of the untaught. 
 
 This volume, in short, contains no royal 
 road to learning — not even learning to read. 
 It contains a scenario which you, as my partner 
 of the moment, are invited to "produce" — the 
 scenario of an inquiry, leading to conclusions. 
 
 If you are inclined to protest that such a 
 scenario must necessarily be lacking in ex- 
 citement and essentially undramatic, I can 
 only assure you that you are wrong. An in- 
 quiry is first cousin to a detective story. A 
 conclusion may be the most thrilling of de- 
 nouements. And no scenario of exploration, 
 not even one that leads us to the sources of 
 the Orinoco or lands us in the heart of Thibet, 
 can be fuller of adventure, and more fraught 
 with surprises and flavored with the wine of 
 astonishment, than a voyage of investigation 
 in that hermit kingdom — one's own mind. 
 
 If you protest further that you prefer 
 
 55
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 Romance, that you like to have your villains 
 come up with and all the nice people married 
 off in the last chapter, I can only assure you 
 that in every chapter of this book one of 
 the most tricky and treacherous villains — a 
 false Notion — will be pursued and cornered 
 and run through the vitals; that two Ideas of 
 romantic proclivities (and of thoroughly eu- 
 genic antecedents), which have been kept 
 from mating by this villain aforesaid, will be 
 led to the altar; and that the happiness-ever- 
 after of these successive couples will be 
 proved by the fact that the next chapter will 
 deal with their children. 
 
 If you still shrug your shoulders and say that 
 this would appear to be a scenario for high- 
 brows, I can only assure you that — quite on 
 the contrary — it is a scenario for human be- 
 ings; that it is for — because it is about — 
 you and me and the man next door. 
 
 Moreover, the plan of this scenario is very 
 simple. First, it proposes to induce you (not 
 through my eyes, but through your own) to 
 see just hozv, whether we ever analyze the 
 process or not, we all must and all do read. 
 Next, it proposes to induce you, in similar 
 
 56
 
 WATCHING THE WHEELS 
 
 manner, to see just why, whether we are con- 
 scious of the reasons or not, we any of us ever 
 read at all. And finally, having led you to 
 recognize for yourself the inherent limitations 
 of this universal method of reading, and the 
 latent possibilities that hide for each of us be- 
 hind this universal desire to read, it proposes 
 to induce you (out of your understanding, not 
 out of mine) to formulate for yourself that at- 
 titude toward reading that alone will enable 
 you intelligently and consciously to adapt 
 the means at hand to the development and 
 furthering of your personal purposes. 
 
 ii 
 
 We have already, in the preceding chap- 
 ters, seen something of the unsuspected proc- 
 esses by which we actually do read. We 
 have located and identified the sources we 
 draw upon for the scenery, the animals, the 
 human characters, and the intellectual con- 
 ceptions, in terms of which we "produce" an 
 author's scenario for ourselves. And we have 
 located and identified the sources we draw 
 upon for the meanings of the words in which 
 these scenarios are written. 
 
 57
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 But as yet, in spite of our assumptions to 
 the contrary, we would appear to be mere 
 creatures of chance, helplessly dependent (for 
 material to read with) upon the first memory- 
 picture, or the first word-meaning that our 
 minds get hold of when they reach into the 
 grab-bag of our past experience. 
 
 And to a certain extent we are. 
 
 If I suddenly present for your interpreta- 
 tion the words 
 
 A green tree 
 
 not only do I not know what picture your 
 mind will present you with, but you are as 
 ignorant, before the event, as I am, and as 
 powerless to control the choice. Your mind 
 simply reaches down into the "green tree" 
 compartment of your stored experience and 
 fetches up whatever comes handy: — a "gen- 
 eralized notion," or the elm tree in front of 
 your childhood home, or a banyan monster in 
 Madras, or what-not. 
 
 And yet, in the last chapter, we summed up 
 our inquiry, as far as prosecuted, in the con- 
 clusion (and I assume that you acquiesced in 
 it at the time) that learning to read did not 
 
 58
 
 WATCHING THE WHEELS 
 
 merely mean learning to draw "more and 
 more skillfully" on our stored experience for 
 scenario producing purposes, but also involved 
 enlarging our "personal contexts," develop- 
 ing our responsiveness to verbal contexts, and 
 "learning to draw more and more discriminat- 
 ingly on these two sources for the word-mean- 
 ings in which we interpret the directions that 
 our successive partners, the authors, issue to 
 us." 
 
 It is now necessary for us to discover how 
 ■ — by what actually employed process or pro- 
 cedure — we achieve and exercise this critical 
 selection. 
 
 I assume that, in reading the last chapter, 
 you personally acquiesced in its conclusions. 
 Yet I can imagine you, after a little reflection, 
 addressing me somewhat as follows: "That 
 first chapter on 'Learning to Read' was fine. 
 All it said about our minds being moving- 
 picture concerns; about printed stories being 
 nothing but scenarios; about our only mate- 
 rial for their 'producing' being our own ex- 
 perience; — all this is not only astonishingly 
 plain, once it has been pointed out, but it in- 
 stantly gives to the whole idea of reading a 
 
 59
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 prt of exciting interest. And the second chap- 
 ter, too, taken by itself, is convincing. In- 
 deed, I Ve tried the thing out on myself and it 
 works. The 'dictionary meanings' of words 
 are only definitions of generalized notions. I 
 do get the meanings of used words from the 
 contexts, verbal and 'personal.' And yet I 
 can't, for the life of me, make these two chap- 
 ters hitch up. I don't see how I can be ex- 
 pected to make 'nicely discriminated' word- 
 meanings for myself unless I superintend the 
 process as I go along. But if I stop to examine 
 the meanings I am giving to words as I read 
 them, then I find that I can't 'read.' Instead 
 of a 'mental movie,' or anything resembling 
 one, I get nothing but a jumble of unrelated 
 meanings, memories, associations, and ideas. 
 Are you sure you are right? Or have I some- 
 how gotten off the track?" 
 
 in 
 
 Suppose we examine the mental mechanics 
 of reading a little more closely — watch the 
 wheels go round a bit — and see if we cannot 
 clear these matters up. It is n't a difficult job 
 if we go about it right. And these questions — ■ 
 
 60
 
 WATCHING THE WHEELS 
 
 (i) Why is it impracticable te "examine the mean- 
 ings we are giving to words as we read them?" 
 
 (2) Why is it impossible to " read " if we do stop to 
 examine the meanings we are giving to individ- 
 ual words? 
 
 (3) What is the actual way in which we do control 
 our word interpretations? 
 
 — are of greater importance than appears on 
 the surface. They strike, as it happens, to the 
 very root of our inquiry. Indeed, the answer 
 to the third of them is the root of our inquiry; 
 and is going, therefore, to acquire far-reaching 
 significance for us. 
 
 IV 
 
 Let us glance back for a moment at the 
 cinematograph. 
 
 You know, of course, that a motion-picture 
 film is made up of a great number of individ- 
 ual photographs. That these were originally 
 taken separately, but in rapid succession. 
 That they are thrown on the screen, also 
 separately, and in the original order, and at 
 the original rapid rate — as a matter of fact, 
 at the rate of about twenty per second. And 
 you quite understand (although you cannot 
 
 61
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 detect the fact for yourselves by observation) 
 that It is precisely because each of these sepa- 
 rate pictures is actually there, stationary, on 
 the screen, long enough for us to perceive it, 
 yet is always succeeded by another picture 
 (ever so slightly different) too quickly for us 
 to differentiate the impressions we receive 
 from them, that the series merges, to our 
 minds, into a "moving picture." 
 
 Now the significant fact that I wish to 
 point out to you — the fact that is going to 
 enable us to "hitch up" our previous discov- 
 eries to the facts of actual reading practice 
 ■ — is this: that the separate words on a page 
 of print correspond exactly to the separate 
 pictures of a movie film. 
 
 It is not merely true in a sort of meta- 
 phorical sense that " reading " results in "men- 
 tal movies." 
 
 It is literally true that the mental mechan- 
 ics of the two processes are identical. 
 
 Let us examine them. 
 
 The cinematograph is operated at the rate 
 of about twenty pictures per second. In other 
 words, in one minute of the movies something 
 like twelve hundred pictures, one after the 
 
 62
 
 WATCHING THE WHEELS 
 
 other, twenty to the second, are thrown on 
 the screen before our eyes. 
 
 On the other hand, an ordinary reader 
 takes about a minute to read an average 
 page of the usual novel. Such a page con- 
 tains in the neighborhood of three hundred 
 words. Which is to say that in one minute of 
 "reading" something like three hundred 
 words, one after the other, five to the sec- 
 ond, are flashed onto the sensitized screen of 
 the mind. 
 
 And, in this case as in the other, it is pre- 
 cisely because each of these words is there, 
 stationary, before our moving eyes, just long 
 enough for us to feel the flavor of its signifi- 
 cance, but is always — before we have time to 
 differentiate the impressions made on us — 
 abandoned for another word, different, yet 
 either qualifying or qualified by the first one, 
 that the series merges in our minds into the 
 living flux of "representation" or "under- 
 standing" that we call "reading," and that 
 we have elected to describe as a "mental 
 movie." 
 
 Here, then, are our first two points already 
 clear to us: — 
 
 63
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 (i) At five words to the second, it is obviously im- 
 possible to "examine the meanings we are giv- 
 ing to the words as we read them." 
 
 (2) Yet if, in order to make such an examination 
 possible, we slow down to, say, ten words to the 
 minute, we instantly destroy the cinemato- 
 graphic effect of the merged series. Instead 
 of a "mental movie" we get a "jumble of un- 
 related meanings, memories, associations and 
 ideas." 
 
 In exactly the same way, if we slow a movie 
 film down until each picture remains on the 
 screen for two whole seconds, and is then, 
 after an interval of darkness, succeeded, for 
 two whole seconds more, by the next picture, 
 we instantly turn a "moving picture" into a 
 procession of meaningless monotony. 
 
 In both cases we have a watched pot that 
 never boils. 
 
 v 
 
 Of course this seems to land us in a vicious 
 circle — in a sort of mouse-trap cylinder in 
 which we go round and round without ever 
 getting any forwarder. 
 
 Fortunately, however, there is a way out. 
 There is a door to the trap. There is a very 
 
 64
 
 WATCHING THE WHEELS 
 
 practical way in which we not only can, but in 
 actual practice frequently do, examine and 
 control the meanings we give to the words we 
 read. 
 
 This method is so simple, so natural, so 
 unnotedly habitual to us, that you will laugh 
 when I point it out. You use it constantly. 
 But you use it so instinctively, so thought- 
 lessly, and with so little realization of funda- 
 mental relationship, not only to what we are 
 now discussing, but to all living, that I am 
 sure you do not know what it is. Nor, for 
 the moment, am I going to tell you. There 
 is, as it happens, a small matter of detail that 
 we must master first. 
 
 VI 
 
 We now understand (although we cannot 
 detect the matter for ourselves by observa- 
 tion) that we " read " by carrying a " flavor of 
 significance" forward from each printed word 
 and blending it with the "flavors of signifi- 
 cance" we take from the words that follow. 
 
 The things that we are wanting a means of 
 controlling, therefore, are really "flavors of 
 significance." 
 
 65
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 But what, in the name of all that is practical 
 and thinkable, may such a thing as a "flavor 
 of significance" look like? 
 
 What, as a matter of cold fact, is a "flavor 
 of significance?" 
 
 Let us see if we can find out. 
 
 VII 
 
 Suppose, in actual conversation, I were to 
 ask you the meaning of the word "good." 
 
 You would instantly feel that you knew. 
 But you would find considerable difficulty in 
 framing a reply that either of us considered 
 satisfactory. And this (although the inabil- 
 ity would doubtless embarrass you) is really 
 quite as it should be. You are a human being, 
 not a dictionary. It is your regular business 
 to feel the notions called up in your mind by 
 code-signals like "good." It is not your regu- 
 lar business to frame adequate definitions of 
 those notions in other code-signals. 
 
 But, even in the matter of feeling mean- 
 ings to yourself, a time element enters. You 
 do not, instantly, feel the full meaning, to 
 you, of the word "good." To do this would 
 take time. Not much time, but some. Time 
 
 66
 
 WATCHING THE WHEELS 
 
 enough, let us say, to feel all the way round the 
 word. 
 
 It does n't take you long to feel round a 
 concrete word like "hairbrush." It takes you 
 some time to feel round an abstract word like 
 " unrighteousness." 
 
 Try it and see. 
 
 Your mind goes round "hairbrush" like a 
 squirrel round a tree. A frisk of its tail and — ■ 
 it's looking at you from the other side. But 
 your mind feels its way round "unrighteous- 
 ness" like a blindfolded man using his hands 
 for eyes. It may be ten seconds before it comes 
 out with a full report. 
 
 Let us say, then, that it takes us, on the 
 average, two seconds to feel the full meaning, 
 to us, of a word. 
 
 It follows, does it not, that in reading at 
 the rate of five words to the second, we have, 
 on the average, and as the equivalent of our 
 "flavor of significance," about one tenth of a 
 fully realized meaning to carry forward from 
 each word we read. 
 
 Let us see, now, if we can find a magnifying 
 glass that will enable us to see, not a tenth of a 
 fully realized meaning, — that would require a 
 
 67
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 microscope, — but, say, a quarter or a fifth of 
 such a meaning. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Suppose, instead of asking you the meaning 
 of a word, I were to ask you to play a game 
 with me. 
 
 Suppose I were to ask you to speak out to 
 me, frankly, immediately, and automatically, 
 — that is, without thinking the matter over 
 at all, — the very first thing that popped into 
 your head as each of a series of words was 
 spoken to you, slowly, one after the other. 
 
 Thus, if I were to give you the word "cow," 
 you would answer "red," or "calf," or "Jer- 
 sey," or "milk," or whatever notion came up 
 automatically to your mind at the instant of 
 hearing the word. 
 
 As a matter of actual fact, if you are of av- 
 erage quickness in your mental reactions, you 
 could, for ordinary words, and after a little 
 practice, give me my answers in from seven to 
 nine tenths of a second. That is to say, you 
 could, on the average, answer me in eight 
 tenths of a second. And as at least half of 
 this time would be taken up in making your 
 
 68
 
 WATCHING THE WHEELS 
 
 reply, each answer would, roughly speaking, 
 represent two fifths of a second's realization of 
 that word's full meaning to you, or (since it 
 takes two seconds, on the average, to attain 
 such a realization complete) one fifth of a fully 
 realized meaning. 
 
 Now, suppose that T -*. . \ 1 to select six words 
 at random. And suppose that I were to pro- 
 pound them, in this fashion, first to one, and 
 then to another of you ; and in each case were to 
 write down the answers. The record of words 
 and answers would read somewhat as follows: 
 
 Second Player's 
 Answer 
 Wash 
 Carve 
 Pie 
 Hot 
 Charlie 
 Break 
 
 First Player's 
 
 Word Answer 
 
 Water Wet 
 
 Knife Sharp 
 
 Good Mother 
 
 Pepper Salt 
 
 Blond Hair 
 
 Bond Coupon 
 
 Here, then, — crudely exaggerated by the 
 action of a rough magnifying medium, and 
 thus rendered, as it were, visible to the actual 
 eye, — are some fractions of realized mean- 
 ings; some "flavors of significance," coarser 
 than those we read with, but yet akin to them. 
 
 We have only to examine them, for in- 
 
 69
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 stance, to see that player number one would, 
 at the moment of the test, have been likely 
 to carry forward from the word "good" 
 a "mother-goodness" flavor of significance; 
 and player number two a "pie-goodness" 
 flavor of significance. 
 
 Perhaps, if we try, we can make this list 
 give us an answer to our third question. 
 
 IX 
 
 We see that to player number one, at the 
 moment of the test, the word "bond" sug- 
 gested investments; while to player number 
 two it suggested a desire for freedom. We 
 can, therefore, conceive that, had they been 
 reading, player number one would have car- 
 ried forward from the word "bond" a money- 
 satisfaction flavor, and player number two a 
 dis s atisj action-with-slavery flavor. 
 
 But these would scarcely prove suitable 
 flavors of significance for the same word in 
 the same sentence. One of them — possibly 
 even both of them — would need to be criti- 
 cized and "controlled." 
 
 How, in actual reading, would these two 
 players accomplish the adjustment? 
 
 70
 
 WATCHING THE WHEELS 
 
 Let us suppose a case. 
 Let us suppose that the sentence they 
 were reading began — 
 
 The bond that held them together — 
 
 By the time that they had read thus far, 
 player number one would be carrying for- 
 ward a sort of "comfortable-circumstances" 
 attitude toward the union. And player number 
 two would be carrying forward a sort of 
 "readiness-for-divorce" attitude toward it. 
 
 And now suppose that the balance of the 
 sentence ran — 
 
 was thus a spiritual tie. 
 
 Instantly, both readers would find themselves 
 "in wrong." 
 
 And instantly, by a mental gesture, — a 
 mere motion of the mind, — so familiar and 
 instinctive as to be all but unconscious, each 
 would make his or her own personal correc- 
 tion. 
 
 x 
 
 Here, then, we have our third question 
 cleared up for us. 
 
 We control our "flavors of significance" by 
 
 71
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 hindsight, not by foresight. We do not cut 
 them to measure. We get them ready-made, and 
 refit them when necessary. 
 
 And for the most part no readjustments are 
 needed. For, after all, word-meanings are by 
 no means haphazard hand-me-downs. Each 
 of us has, as a matter of fact, and for every 
 word really contained in his vocabulary,a more 
 or less richly composite meaning-notion of his 
 own, — a personal generalization, — built up 
 by slow degrees and repeated usings. And it 
 is into these composites, as into grab-bags, 
 that we really reach — reach at the rate of 
 five times per second — for personal "flavors 
 of significance" that shall fit the verbal con- 
 text. 
 
 It is n't often, therefore, that our minds 
 bring up for us such incongruous and un- 
 usable flavors of meaning as those just ex- 
 amined in the case of the word "bond." 
 
 In an overwhelming majority of cases, the 
 "meanings" we pull out are adequate. And 
 even in the other cases, the needed readjust- 
 ments are usually slight and are made in- 
 stinctively, without conscious thought, and 
 almost instantly forgotten. 
 
 72
 
 WATCHING THE WHEELS 
 
 But the more alert the reader is (and es- 
 pecially the more alert he is on this basis of 
 right understanding of the nature of our read- 
 ing processes), the more frequently will he 
 detect these errors and inadequacies, and 
 the more often will he make these mental 
 gestures of correction. And each time that he 
 does so he increases the suppleness of his 
 mind, betters his technical skill of interpreta- 
 tion, adds permanently to the richness of that 
 particular word-meaning composite, and, in 
 all these ways, strengthens the foundations of 
 efficiency for his future reading. 
 
 XI 
 
 Alertness, then, is the first requisite for the 
 reader. And by "alertness" I mean, here, 
 expectant interest, focused attention, and a 
 mental readiness to act. 
 
 XII 
 
 But before I go on to point out the particu- 
 lar character and type of alertness demanded 
 of the reader by the reading-facts we have es- 
 tablished thus far in our inquiry, I want to 
 clear your mind of a misconception that we 
 
 73
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 are forever entertaining, like a bad angel, un v 
 awares. 
 
 We are all of us given to thinking of "read- 
 ing" as of a comparatively recent human 
 attainment, based upon the invention of 
 graphic signs. 
 
 In reality, however, reading is not an at- 
 tainment, but a natural function and inborn 
 aptitude of the mind. 
 
 A thousand centuries before alphabets 
 were, reading was. 
 
 Semi-human hunters read the incised records 
 of the game trails before they had even learned 
 to cook the flesh of their quarry. Immemori- 
 ally forgotten savages read the faces of their 
 friends and the minds of their enemies before 
 the stone age was dreamed of. Prehistoric 
 precursors of the prophets read the signs of 
 the weather in the skies, and their still pre- 
 historic successors became priests and read 
 the Will of God in their own hearts, untold 
 ages before the first cuneiform inscription was 
 impressed on the first brick in Babylonia. 
 
 Nor are these expressions mere figures of 
 speech. It is a "simile" only by inversion to 
 call "reading the signs of the times" a simile. 
 
 74
 
 WATCHING THE WHEELS 
 
 The real simile lies rather in speaking of 
 " reading a book." For the word " read " (to go 
 no further back than its immediate parent) is 
 an Anglo-Saxon word meaning to " take coun- 
 sel." And its linguistic first cousin is that 
 other ancient expression, "to red up," — to 
 "red" meaning to tidy, to put in order; and 
 hence to clear up and explain. "Reading," 
 then, is a form of "redding," — to take coun- 
 sel by putting things in order. And you can no 
 more (without smothering it to death) keep 
 the human mind from "reading" than you 
 can keep the human body from breathing. 
 And you will note that for all forms of reading 
 — for that of the semi-human hunter no less 
 than for that to which this book is intended 
 to guide you — alertness (meaning expect- 
 ant interest, focused attention, and a mental 
 readiness to act) is the first requisite. 
 
 XIII 
 
 In this volume we are dealing with reading 
 in its everyday sense of reading letters, news- 
 papers, magazines, and books — written and 
 printed language in general. And even in this 
 sense it is practically permissible to-day to 
 
 75
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 say that "everybody reads." It is also true 
 that whatever actual reading any of us do is 
 accomplished by the exercise of some alertness. 
 For one no more reads a page of print by 
 mechanically passing one's eyes across and 
 across its lines, and perhaps silently forming 
 the words with one's lips, while one's mind is 
 playing hide and seek elsewhere, than one 
 reads a game trail by following it, eyes on the 
 ground ticking off deer tracks, but mind and 
 imagination walking up Broadway. 
 
 Let us be clear about this. 
 
 It happens to all of us, at times, to discover 
 that, while we've imagined we were reading, 
 we really were n't; to find, on turning over a 
 page, that we've no idea as to what was on it. 
 Generally, in such cases, if we take the trouble 
 to examine our own minds, we find that while 
 we were automatically going through the 
 mental and physical motions of reading, we 
 were really being lazily and undirectedly 
 alert about something else — going over the 
 month's accounts, or wondering why some 
 friend acted so offish when we last met. 
 
 Again, it sometimes happens to all of us to 
 realize, on turning over a page, that a single 
 
 76
 
 WATCHING THE WHEELS 
 
 sentence on it, say three quarters of the way 
 up from the bottom, is the only thing on it 
 that we seem really to have taken in. If we 
 turn back and read the sentence over again, 
 we can generally discover exactly what it was 
 that caused our minds to stop wool-gathering 
 for an instant and roused us to a half-hearted 
 and momentary alertness. 
 
 XIV 
 
 For right reading, however, it is not enough 
 to be alert. 
 
 The alertness must be both informed and 
 disciplined. It must be based on understand- 
 ing and trained to the point of unconscious . 
 performance. 
 
 Let me illustrate this last statement. 
 
 I said, awhile back, that the mind "reads" 
 as naturally as the body breathes. Yet the 
 first thing that a would-be opera singer has to 
 learn is how to breathe. It is n't enough that 
 she breathe naturally. Her breathing must be 
 both informed and disciplined. She must 
 understand both the mechanism at her dis- 
 posal and the purposes of its employment. 
 And she must so train herself in the technique 
 
 77
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 of performance that her lungs function with- 
 out conscious thought for the adequate 
 achievement of her changing personal aims. 
 
 xv 
 
 Or, let us take a cruder analogy. 
 
 Alertness is a prerequisite in driving an 
 automobile. But it is not enough to be alert. 
 Here, too, the alertness must be both informed 
 and disciplined: based on understanding and 
 trained to the point of unconscious perform- 
 ance. 
 
 The kind of alertness that grasps the steer- 
 ing wheel so tightly as to breed cramps in the 
 wrists is more of a handicap than a help. Yet 
 this stage — the stage of exaggeratedly con- 
 scious alertness — has to be passed through. 
 
 The kind of alertness that is so preoccupied 
 with technique that it keeps telling itself 
 which pedal to push in an emergency is also 
 more of a handicap than a help. But this 
 stage — the stage of reducing conscious per- 
 formance to a subconscious habit — must 
 also be passed through. 
 
 The driver who is ignorant of the mechan- 
 ism of his engine keeps going by the grace of 
 
 78
 
 WATCHING THE WHEELS 
 
 God — or of some man in Detroit, Michigan. 
 But the driver whose mind is busy with his 
 engine when he is threading the intricacies of 
 traffic is likely to get into trouble with the 
 police. 
 
 No one is master of the automobile — no 
 one is capable of driving one entirely "on his 
 own," anywhere that it will go for the ac- 
 complishment of his own ends, to the full of 
 its inherent possibilities and to the limit of his 
 own capacity — until he has gradually built 
 up, on a constantly broadening basis of un- 
 derstanding, — understanding of the working 
 of internal-combustion engines in general, of 
 the idiosyncracies of his own machine in 
 particular, of the rules of the road, of the 
 psychology of other drivers and of himself, 
 and of the character of his own pursuit, — an 
 alertness that is seldom conscious of itself, yet 
 always many-sidedly operative, and that is 
 usually able, by becoming conscious of itself, 
 to detect the causes of its own shortcomings, 
 and by correcting these to add to its own ef- 
 frciency. 
 
 79
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 XVI 
 
 And it is no otherwise with reading. 
 
 It is only by thus building up, on a con- 
 stantly broadening basis of understanding, 
 an informed and disciplined alertness, that 
 we learn to drive that other internal-combus- 
 tion engine, our own mind, along the roads of 
 print toward our chosen objective — be this 
 an afternoon's enjoyment or an intellectual 
 goal. 
 
 XVII 
 
 Do not, however, mistake me. The most 
 ordinary reader exercises alertness. He has to 
 in order to read. Some measure of expectant 
 interest, no matter how slight; some degree of 
 focused attention, no matter how vague; 
 some mental readiness to act, no matter how 
 sluggish, he must bring to the task. Else the 
 very act of reading ceases to take place. 
 
 But the ordinary reader, because he mis- 
 understands the nature of reading, misdirects 
 these elements of alertness; if, indeed, he 
 directs them at all. 
 
 The ordinary reader thinks of a story as a 
 
 So
 
 WATCHING THE WHEELS 
 
 concrete thing contained in a book, just as he 
 thinks of a lemonade as a concrete thing con- 
 tained in a glass. And he assumes that, just 
 as he sucks the one in, ready-mixed, through a 
 straw, so he drinks the other in, ready-made, 
 through his eyes. 
 
 Naturally, his expectant interest is centered 
 on "what the author has to say." His at- 
 tention is focused outside himself. His mental 
 readiness to act is largely reduced to a readi- 
 ness to suck faster if he likes it and to suck 
 slower if he does n't. 
 
 And — I want to underscore this fact — 
 the thing works. It does n't work the way he 
 supposes, but it arrives — after a fashion. He 
 reads, not because he understands what he is 
 doing, but because he is built that way. He 
 keeps going, as we said of the auto-driver, by 
 the grace of God. If it were really true, as the 
 proverb seems to imply, that God helps only 
 those who help themselves, we should most 
 of us be stalled motors by the wayside. 
 
 XVIII 
 
 But really "learning to read" is another 
 matter. 
 
 81
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 And the reader who has once grasped in 
 outline the true nature of reading, and who 
 wishes to build up for himself on that founda- 
 tion a better and more personally remunera- 
 tive technique, should begin by altering the 
 character of his alertness. 
 
 He knows that the words the author prints 
 are but signals to his mind — but push- 
 buttons that his eyes press as they pass over 
 them. He knows that the flux of "notions" 
 they call up, the associative memories, and 
 mental pictures, and character conceptions, 
 and idea complexes, that these form them- 
 selves into, are his word-notions, his memo- 
 ries, his mind pictures, his character con- 
 ceptions, his idea constructions. And he 
 will, therefore, practice centering his expect- 
 ant interest, not on "what the author is say- 
 ing," but on "what the author is saying to 
 him." 
 
 He knows, moreover, that whatever happens 
 when we read happens inside ourselves. And 
 he will, therefore, practice keeping his real 
 attention turned inward. 
 
 And he knows that he, and he alone, is the 
 one who can, when occasion arises, stage- 
 
 82
 
 WATCHING THE WHEELS 
 
 manage and control this internal upwelling 
 of notions and memories, pictures and ideas. 
 And he will, therefore, practice the develop- 
 ment of a mental readiness to act that con- 
 sists in readiness to act as stage manager on 
 his own initiative; adjusting himself as well as 
 he may to the author's mood, and producing 
 to the best of his equipment the author's 
 scenario. 
 
 XIX 
 
 This, then, is the root of our inquiry: — this 
 fact that, in reading, we deliberately and of 
 our own choice expose ourselves to suggestion; 
 respond automatically and personally to the 
 successive stimuli of words and word-groups; 
 and then consciously or unconsciously criticize 
 and control our automatic responses. 
 
 This (although he does n't know it) is 
 what the tramp on a park bench, scanning 
 the draggled pages of last week's paper, is 
 doing. 
 
 And this is all that the keenest mind in 
 Christendom does when it reads. 
 
 The road between the two, as far as mere 
 technique goes, lies along the line of teaching 
 
 83
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 one's self little by little to do this common act 
 of reading with an informed and disciplined 
 alertness; an alertness based on a constantly 
 broadening understanding of one's own mind- 
 workings and of one's own aims, and trained 
 to a greater and greater suppleness of uncon- 
 scious performance. 
 
 xx 
 
 Before closing this chapter, however, I want 
 to point out the importance, in connection 
 with all that follows in this volume, that this 
 discovered method of our "control" of word- 
 meanings is going to assume for us. 
 
 It looks an insignificant little discovery — 
 this fact that we first react automatically to 
 words and then criticize the reaction, and that 
 this is absolutely the only method we have, 
 either of getting at our word-meanings (which 
 are, so to say, the molecules of our thought) 
 or of controlling them. And yet, in reality, 
 it is the root of self-knowledge and the key 
 to all that has any right to be called cul- 
 ture. 
 
 Talkers of cant tell us, in effect if not in 
 words, that culture is something that we can 
 
 84
 
 WATCHING THE WHEELS 
 
 receive from without; something that exists, 
 independently of its possessors; something 
 that can be imparted, and accepted, and 
 built into our consciousness and our person- 
 alities like bricks into a wall. They would 
 have us believe that culture is a sort of 
 censored and sublimated sophistication — a 
 knowing (through an eager submission of our- 
 selves to the best authorities) of what to feel 
 and what not to; what to like and what not to; 
 what to admire and what not to; what to 
 think and what not to. 
 
 Do not believe them. Culture is always 
 unique, for it is an individual achievement — 
 a by-product of personal living. 
 
 Its essential entity is an "attitude toward 
 the cosmos." Its component elements — the 
 things from which it is built up — are recog- 
 nized relationships between the life inside us 
 and the world without. And the ultimate 
 atoms out of which these component elements 
 are constructed are neither more nor less than 
 "controlled meanings" — spontaneous per- 
 sonal feelings, subsequently criticized. 
 
 Culture is a gradually coordinated accumu- . 
 lation of criticized reactions — of the "con-' 
 
 8S
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 trolled meanings" that we ourselves have 
 given to hunger and thirst and satiety; to 
 love and friendship and hate; to hope and 
 fear and indifference; to words and sentences 
 and books; to art and philosophy and religion; 
 ■ — in a word, to life. 
 
 Much fun has been made of those who say, 
 "I don't know anything about art, but I 
 know what I like." The fun-makers are in- 
 tellectual snobs, if, indeed, they are not shal- 
 low-pated fools. For, granted that they them- 
 selves know anything about art (and not 
 merely about what they think they ought to 
 think about it), they started from that identi- 
 cal beginning — the beginning of "knowing 
 what they liked" and nothing more. 
 
 To "know what we like" is nearer to cul- 
 ture than to know what we ought to like. For 
 to know the latter, beforehand, is often to be 
 prevented from ever knowing whether we 
 really like it or not. But to like a thing, or to 
 dislike it, is to have reacted to it; to have 
 lived with regard to it; to have given it a 
 meaning. When we have criticized this mean- 
 ing, — when we have learned how and why 
 we like it or dislike it, and have approved or 
 
 86
 
 WATCHING THE WHEELS 
 
 disapproved of our spontaneous feeling, — ■ 
 we have taken a step toward culture. 
 
 And the only reason that culture is in any- 
 way derivable from books is that reading is a 
 form of living.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 what's the use? 
 
 I 
 
 We have now completed the first portion of 
 our inquiry. We have found out what reading 
 really is. We have found out how we do it. 
 And from this knowledge we have drawn our 
 preliminary conclusions as to the true nature 
 of "learning to read" and as to the first steps 
 necessary for setting about this endlessly in- 
 teresting self-enhancement. 
 
 We have satisfied ourselves that this learn- 
 ing is not a dull, two-year task in a primary 
 school, as usually assumed. We know, in- 
 deed, that it is no once-for-all acquirement 
 (like learning the Greek alphabet or learning 
 to extract cube roots) in any educational cur- 
 riculum. We see, on the contrary, that it is a 
 till-death-us-do-part sort of learning. For we 
 see that it consists in a lifelong, year-by-year, 
 progressive learning to put the constantly ac- 
 cumulating store of our own personal experi- 
 ence into fuller and fuller order, by using it 
 for the "producing," on the stage of our own 
 
 88
 
 WHAT'S THE USE? 
 
 consciousness, of the reported actions, the 
 suggested emotions, and the outlined thoughts 
 of others. 
 
 And from the vantage-point of this knowl- 
 edge we begin to see, opening out at the feet 
 of our clarified understanding, a deepening 
 perspective of possibilities. We begin, in fact, 
 to realize that learning to read is an adventure. 
 
 ii 
 
 And of course the first result of this realiza- 
 tion is a thrill. 
 
 We feel the romance, the allure, of the un- 
 dertaking. The vitally personal nature of it 
 appeals to us. The very fact that we must 
 set out upon it, like pioneers, dependent upon 
 our own original equipment and upon the 
 subsequent, day-by-day results of our own re- 
 sourcefulness, stimulates us. The realization 
 that we shall be setting out for an individual 
 exploring of two mysterious, little-known, 
 and infinitely exciting worlds — the world 
 outside us and the world within — fires our 
 imagination. 
 
 At first blush we are all enthusiasm for the 
 start. 
 
 8 9
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 in 
 
 But, on further thought, there is sure to 
 come a reaction. 
 
 We are going, in this very chapter, to see 
 that two alternating impulses — the impulse 
 to do, and the impulse to shrink from doing 
 ■ — lie at the very heart of all our living; are, 
 as it were, the beating of that heart. And the 
 strong impulse-to-action that is born of our 
 realization of the line, adventurous possibili- 
 ties of thus learning to read is sure to be suc- 
 ceeded by a counter-impulse — an impulse- 
 to-inaction. 
 
 We see that this adventure will be very 
 long, and very slow, and very likely arduous; 
 and so we ask ourselves why we should bother. 
 
 We see that, properly prosecuted, it would 
 inevitably call for other, less easy, things 
 than mere enthusiasm: for patience and perti- 
 nacity; for the honesty of humbleness; for the 
 courage of self-reliance; for grace as well as 
 grit; and we pause and ask ourselves if the 
 game is worth the candle. 
 
 "This world," we say to ourselves, "is a 
 busy place. We are not specialists, we are 
 
 90
 
 WHAT'S THE USE? 
 
 'general practitioners' in life. Is not the pur- 
 suit of special knowledge, the attainment of 
 special skill, even in so useful and universale 
 thing as reading, the concern of the special- 
 ist?" 
 
 And so we shrug our shoulders and ask our- 
 selves, "What's the use?" 
 
 IV 
 
 Very good. This is a legitimate question, 
 although, as we shall see in a moment, it 
 probes very deep. For, since reading is a form 
 of living, this question, applied to it, is but a 
 form of saying, "What's the use — ever?" 
 Perhaps, however, in answering the reading 
 form of this question we shall find that we 
 have answered the general form also. 
 
 This much at least is evident to start with: 
 we cannot hope to answer this reading-ques- 
 tion reasonably until we have uncovered for 
 ourselves our real reasons for reading. And 
 thus we are led directly to the second item of 
 our projected investigation — the inquiry 
 into why we read. 
 
 Suppose, like good gardeners, we now dig 
 Straight down to the real root of this matter. 
 
 91
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 v 
 
 There are, at bottom, two reasons, and only 
 two reasons in the world, why any of us ever 
 read anything. 
 
 We are seldom conscious of these reasons, 
 yet we are always, when we read, actuated by 
 one or other of them. It makes no difference 
 who we are or what we are; these reasons and 
 no others hold good for us. They hold good 
 for Hapsburgs and for hoboes. They are all 
 the philosopher has, and Fluffy Ruffles has 
 them. 
 
 Nor does the nature of the thing read make 
 any difference. 
 
 This may be a sky-sign on Broadway, or a 
 signpost at a country crossroads. It may be 
 the account of a murder trial in the morning 
 paper, or a bargain-sale notice delivered in the 
 afternoon mail. It may be a love scene in 
 "Hearts Aflutter" (sixty thousand sold be- 
 fore publication), or the chapter on the Cate- 
 gorical Imperative in Kant's "Critique of 
 Pure Reason" (copyright expired). It makes 
 no difference. 
 
 Consciously or unconsciously, wittingly or 
 
 92
 
 WHAT'S THE USE? 
 
 unwittingly, we all read everything that we 
 do read (not according to its nature, but ac- 
 cording to our need) either 
 
 (i) To get away from ourselves; 
 
 or, 
 (2) To find ourselves. 
 
 VI 
 
 Yes, I know. You are nodding your head 
 (meaning "aye, aye, sir") over the first of 
 these statements. And, deep down inside, 
 you are thinking that I am talking highbrow 
 in making the second. 
 
 But you are wrong. 
 
 The significance of these expressions 1.3 
 equally simple, and the experiences to which 
 they relate are equally common to us all. 
 
 Wanting to "get away from one's self* 
 merely expresses the recurrent need, experi- 
 enced by each one of us, of forgetting for a 
 while the tangle of contradictory impulses, 
 mixed motives, cross-purposes, and conflict- 
 ing emotions that is one's self; and which, 
 when too intimately realized, or too continu- 
 ously envisaged, becomes unbearable. 
 
 Wanting to "find one's self" merely ex- 
 
 93
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 presses the equally recurrent craving, equally 
 experienced by us all, actively to achieve 
 some measure of order, no matter how fleeting 
 or how restricted, in the ever-flexing meshes 
 of this same internal tangle. 
 
 However, this is a stuffy subject. Let us 
 get out into the open air. 
 
 VII 
 
 Just below my window as I write there is a 
 strip of park that runs — like the Gadarene 
 swine — down a steep hill to the Hudson. It 
 is some miles in length, this strip. But in 
 width it only varies between a perpendicular 
 hundred yards and a shelving quarter-mile. 
 Yet big shade trees beautify it. And long 
 paths parallel the river through it, rising and 
 sinking, on the swells of its slopes like the 
 wakes of little boats. And there are benches 
 in it — benches that face the water across 
 squirrel-dotted sweeps of grass. And there 
 are people on the benches. People with ba- 
 bies. People with books. People with spent 
 hands folded in dejected laps. People with 
 high hopes new-kindling in far-focused eyes. 
 
 Let us suppose a desperate morning: a 
 
 94
 
 WHAT'S THE USE? 
 
 morning when the milkman has n't come (of 
 the blue-ribbon chef has given notice) ; when 
 the baby cannot somehow seem to cut its 
 tooth (or the limousine to use its carburettor); 
 when Himself has gotten out of bed on the 
 wrong side; when the people next door keep 
 playing thevictrola; when, in short, the cos- 
 mic Doll is just generally leaking sawdust at 
 every joint. 
 
 Let us suppose that on such a morning a 
 woman — yourself or another — flees to this 
 strip of park and sits down on one of its green 
 benches : on a bench that looks across a stretch 
 of level lawn; past a rosily budding oak; past 
 a white signboard nailed to a driven stake; 
 out to the restful river, where the big ships 
 lie at anchor and the little shallops come and 
 
 go- 
 
 For a time, her need — the need of escap- 
 ing from herself — is ministered to by the 
 sheer sensed beauty of the scene. She lies 
 back on its loveliness. She loses herself in it. 
 She floats on it like a grateful swimmer in a 
 summer sea. 
 
 But not, alas, for long. 
 
 Little meddlesome messages from home — 
 
 95
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 like Marconigrams in mid-Atlantic — begin 
 to reach her. 
 
 The river view blurs. 
 
 The butcher's bill reasserts itself. 
 
 With a little shudder of impatience she 
 turns away and looks for a new, a nearer, a 
 more insistent interest. 
 
 She watches the nursemaid on the next 
 bench who is industriously upturning a baby 
 in the vain hope of emptying it of yells. 
 
 She follows with a speculative eye a wistful 
 couple that come strolling past with finger 
 tips surreptitiously touching. 
 
 She notes the growing glory of the budding 
 oak and for a moment fills her mind with that. 
 
 And each of these things in turn serves her 
 need for a time, and then loses its efficacy. 
 
 Finally, her glance lights on the white sign- 
 board; but at first she only takes it in as a 
 noticeable spot — a white rectangle against a 
 green background. As that she toys with it. 
 She moves it (in her mind) to the right and 
 left; fits it in, picture-puzzle fashion, at the 
 foot of the oak — plays an idle, esthetic game 
 with it. 
 
 At last, she tires of this in its turn. She 
 
 96
 
 WHAT'S THE USE? 
 
 sees that it is a notice board. She realizes 
 that there is printing on it. She gets desper- 
 ately up. She walks slowly over to it. She 
 reads it. 
 
 VIII 
 
 And what, you ask, does it say? 
 What, I answer, does it matter? 
 Perhaps it says, "keep off the grass." 
 Perhaps it says, "to 96TH street and the 
 
 GATE." 
 
 What does matter, here, is her reason for 
 reading it. For here, in its simplest form, ab- 
 solutely unadulterated, "chemically pure," 
 we have the first of our two impulses toward 
 reading. This woman read the signboard to 
 get away from herself. 
 
 IX 
 
 But she need not have. 
 
 Suppose that by ever so little we change 
 our supposition. 
 
 Suppose that the sudden peace, the far 
 view, the spring air, the muted sounds of 
 busy life rising from the river, prove healing 
 to this woman's hurt. 
 
 97
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 Suppose that in consequence, and without 
 her conscious knowledge, the tide of her cour- 
 age and energy that had, like the tide in the 
 river, been running out, turns and begins to 
 "make." 
 
 Suppose, in further consequence, that the 
 victrola and the milkman, the baby's tooth 
 and the family grouches, the little puzzles and 
 big problems in the stream of her life, begin, 
 like the anchored barges and battleships on 
 the river, to swing at their moorings and to 
 face the other way. So that when, at last, the 
 Marconigrams begin to come through, they 
 are no longer S.O.S's of desperation, but 
 urgings to action. 
 
 "Good Heavens!" she says, suddenly, "I 
 never dreamed that it was that late!" 
 
 She draws a long, invigorated breath. She 
 straightens her shoulders and looks about her. 
 She wonders which is her nearest way out of 
 the park; sees the signboard; gets alertly up; 
 goes over to it; reads it. 
 
 x 
 
 And what, you ask, does it say? 
 What, I repeat, does it matter? 
 98
 
 WHAT'S THE USE? 
 
 Perhaps it says, "to q6th street and the 
 
 GATE." 
 
 Perhaps it says, no dogs allowed at 
 
 LARGE." 
 
 What matters, here, is again her reason for 
 reading it. For here, in its simplest form, 
 isolated, unadulterated, "chemically pure," 
 we have the second of our impulses toward 
 reading. This time the woman read the sign 
 to find herself. 
 
 XI 
 
 And this woman in the park is typical of us 
 all. Just so — not according to its nature, but 
 according to our need; impelled, first by one 
 and then by the other of these two prompt- 
 ings — it is possible for us to read anything; 
 from the "help wanted,- female" column — 
 which we may read (i) because we have read 
 everything else in the paper and still wish to 
 "keep from thinking," or (2) because we want 
 a job — to Fox's "Book of Martyrs," which 
 we may read (1) to kill time or (2) to prepare 
 for eternity. 
 
 Nor does it cover the ground to say that in 
 either one of these two modes we may read 
 
 99
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 anything. It is necessary to add that in al- 
 ternation between these two moods we must 
 read everything. 
 
 Are you inclined to doubt this last? 
 
 Let us glance, for a moment, beyond the 
 scope of our immediate inquiry. 
 
 Not alone our reading, but our lives, alter- 
 nate between these two moods; are conducted 
 in these two modes; are governed by these 
 two appetites, urges, — call them what you 
 will, — this desire to do, and this desire to 
 shrink from doing; this recurrent keenness 
 personally to master reality, and this recurrent 
 craving personally to escape from the conscious- 
 ness of its tyranny; this longing to "find our- 
 selves," and this longing to "get away from 
 ourselves." 
 
 If you doubt this, look into your own heart. 
 You will see (as your eyes get used to the 
 dusk) that it is multiformly true. These two 
 urges are, so to say, the legs of our inner being. 
 We move, from day to day, from hour to 
 hour, sometimes from moment to moment, by 
 advancing first one and then the other of them. 
 
 For we are built that way. We are spiritual 
 bipeds. 
 
 ioo
 
 WHAT'S THE USE? 
 
 XII 
 
 But, as I have already said, we are seldom 
 conscious of these reasons. 
 
 No one, unless he be an unconscionable 
 prig, thinks, say, of the looking-up of a sub- 
 ject in an encyclopedia, as an effort to "find 
 himself"; nor, unless he is very low in his 
 mind, of the reading, say, of a detective story 
 on a journey as an effort to "get away from 
 himself." 
 
 Let us therefore briefly bridge the gap be- 
 tween what analysis has shown us to be the 
 fundamental character of our reading im- 
 pulses and the more familiar forms in which 
 these impulses habitually manifest themselves 
 to us in daily life. 
 
 What are the simplest terms of everyday 
 speech in which we can adequately summarize 
 our conscious impulses toward reading? 
 
 Let us put it that all these conscious im- 
 pulses fall under one or other of the follow- 
 ing heads : — 
 
 Some form of wanting to know. 
 Some form of wanting to play. 
 Some form of wanting to forget. 
 
 IOI
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 Here, however, instead of two divisions, we 
 have three. And while the first and last of 
 these are obvious translations of the two ex- 
 pressions we have been using, the relation 
 that the second bears to these expressions is 
 not so clear. " Some form of wanting to play" 
 describes a class of reading-impulses familiar 
 to us all. But how does it fit into our recent 
 analysis, if, indeed, it does fit into it? 
 
 Let us examine the play-impulse a bit more 
 closely. 
 
 XIII 
 
 Our old friend the New Standard Diction- 
 ary defines "play" as "action without special 
 aim, or for amusement; opposed to -work or 
 earnest." And from time immemorial poets, 
 puritans, and push-aheads — looking on, 
 from their respective temperamental angles, 
 at the apparent frivolities of kids, kittens, 
 cubs, and young children — have been at one 
 in accepting this definition at its surface value. 
 
 But a new spirit of wanting to know — the 
 spirit of redding things up by a more intelli- 
 gent reading of the book of Nature, the scien- 
 tific spirit — has recently come into the world. 
 
 1 02
 
 WHAT'S THE USE? 
 
 And all kinds of men, singly and in groups, 
 have been looking with freshly focused minds 
 at all sorts of supposedly unimportant hap- 
 penings; even at the gambols of kittens and 
 at the games of children. And (since science, 
 like charity, begins at home) one of the first 
 things that these latter observers discovered 
 was the fact that no kitten ever plays at any- 
 thing except at being a cat, and that no puppy 
 ever plays at anything except at being a dog. 
 At first this seemed interesting, but not 
 especially important. But, as the observa- 
 tions were extended, it developed that the 
 lower one goes in the scale of life, the more 
 meager and short-lived become the play-im- 
 pulses of the young; while the higher one goes 
 in the scale, the more complex and long-con- 
 tinued they are. And when the facts had been 
 sufficiently studied and compared, it became 
 clear that the play of young animals, far 
 from being a mere meaningless spending of 
 surplus energy, is really in the nature of a 
 preparation — a dramatization of their develop- 
 ing instincts. And when, gradually, a great 
 many men and groups of men, working along 
 separate lines and ultimately comparing notes 
 
 103
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 and sharing discoveries, had built up the sci- 
 ences of biology and comparative psychology, 
 it became evident at last that the same is true 
 of children. 
 
 Of course, at first, it did n't look (to take a 
 crude example) as though the small son of 
 highly civilized parents was "playing at being 
 a man" when he used the first stick he got 
 hold of to beat the cat with. But no sooner 
 had biology discovered that the life of every 
 creature, from conception to maturity, is a 
 condensed recapitulation of the evolution of 
 its race, than the matter became clear. The 
 three-year-old club-wielder is not yet playing 
 at being a civilized man like his father, but is 
 still playing at being a club-wielding wild man 
 like his prehistoric forbears. He is, in fact, 
 dramatizing the instincts of that phase of de- 
 velopment through which he is then passing. 
 
 Later on he and his fellows will dramatize 
 the instincts of savage tribesmen by forming 
 "gangs" and by the building (qui:e without 
 'special aim," as the dictionary would say) 
 of bonfires — at the same period developing 
 the savage's thoughtless cruelty and the fire- 
 defended nomad's fear of the dark. 
 104
 
 WHAT'S THE USE? 
 
 Nor, while all this is going on, is the child 
 neglecting to dramatize that other instinct — 
 the instinct of imitativeness. He does this 
 by playing at driving tandem, playing at 
 keeping store, playing at keeping house. And 
 he constantly mixes the two. As when he 
 dramatizes the ancestral instinct of pugnacity 
 in elaborate snowball fights, and organizes 
 the defenses and the attacks on the supposed 
 ground-plan of Verdun. 
 
 XIV 
 
 In short, play, in the young, is a form of 
 practice; an embodying in action of develop- 
 ing instincts. 
 
 And the same thing, with a slight differ- 
 ence, is true of grown-ups. 
 
 Even grown-up animals play. 
 
 The wise old dog, chasing the chicken that 
 he takes very good care not to catch, is play- 
 ing; and is dramatizing an instinct that life, 
 as he is living it, forbids him to indulge in 
 earnest. 
 
 And the grown-up man, with a thousand 
 instincts suppressed by life as he is living it, 
 and by the need of concentration on the indi- 
 
 105
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 vidual tasks that this life imposes, takes his 
 recreation by playing; and plays by drama- 
 tizing one or more of these otherwise inopera- 
 tive urges. 
 
 He may do this quite simply and directly 
 ■ — dramatize his instinct for the chase by 
 going after big game, or by shooting squirrels, 
 or by firing at clay pipes at the county fair. 
 Or he may do it vicariously — dramatize his 
 fighting instinct by watching a boxing-match. 
 Or he may do it obliquely — dramatize his 
 acquisitive instinct by collecting postage 
 stamps. Or he may do it symbolically — 
 dramatize his your-money-or-your-life in- 
 stinct by pointing four aces at an opponent's 
 head and relieving him of his "pile" at penny- 
 ante. 
 
 xv 
 
 But there is another form of play; another 
 method of dramatizing suppressed instincts 
 — the most universally applicable, indeed, 
 and most minutely adjustable of all methods 
 to all needs. 
 
 A man may dramatize any instinct that 
 he has by taking the right book down from 
 
 1 06
 
 WHAT'S THE USE? 
 
 the right shelf and by then identifying him- 
 self in imagination with the instinct's pictured 
 fulfillment. 
 
 And this is precisely what we are seeking to 
 do when we read from any impulse recogniz- 
 able as "some form of wanting to play." 
 
 We are seeking relaxation by dramatizing 
 some side of ourselves that is not usually free 
 to function. We are, indeed, trying for re- 
 freshment by "finding ourselves" afresh. 
 
 XVI 
 
 Let us get back to our muttons. 
 
 These being our reasons for reading, what 
 is the use of taking more than ordinary trouble 
 in learning to read? 
 
 The answer goes into a nutshell. 
 
 We live, as it happens, in a world where all 
 mental highways are partly paved with ink. 
 We live in a world where the avenues of ap- 
 proach to "ourselves" and many of the most 
 direct avenues of escape from "ourselves" — 
 the alternating roads of our constant needs — ■ 
 are, at least in part and by inescapable neces- 
 sity, roads of reading. 
 
 How effectively — and how far — we are 
 
 107
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 able to go along these roads depends upon our 
 means of locomotion. 
 
 "Learning to read," in the common-school 
 fashion, is but "learning to walk" in the 
 nursery sense. The rest is up to us. 
 
 We live, as it were, alone, in the country. 
 
 We can, if we choose, keep no horse in the 
 stable except "shank's mare." We can con- 
 fine ourselves to the meager utilitarianism of 
 "hoofing it," and to the modest relaxation of 
 "walks." 
 
 Or we can ride a bike. 
 
 Or own a Ford. 
 
 Or drive an eight-cylinder car. 
 
 XVII 
 
 This is the answer. 
 
 Of course, as you may perhaps be moved to 
 point out to me, it is not an ultimate answer. 
 
 But there are no ultimate answers. 
 
 And for this particular answer this much at 
 least may be said: The question — "What's 
 the use?" — is a query that, like a recurrent 
 decimal, may go on repeating itself forever. 
 And this answer is a recurrent answer. 
 
 Pose this question from any angle you 
 
 108
 
 WHAT'S THE USE? 
 
 choose, couch your reply in any terms you 
 elect, — theological or biological, metaphysi- 
 cal or physical, mystical or plain practical, — 
 and this answer can be shown to be the gist 
 of your reply. 
 
 It is, indeed, the ultimate essence of the 
 only answer there is. 
 
 XVIII 
 
 And now, in closing this chapter, and while 
 we have our reasons for reading thus recog- 
 nizably before us, I want to say a further word 
 about them in connection with the special 
 purposes of our inquiry — the acquirement, 
 namely, of a more intelligent use of reading 
 for our own ends. 
 
 We have seen that our reasons for reading 
 may be summed up as follows: — 
 
 Some urge toward wanting to know, and some 
 urge toward wanting to play; both being forms of 
 the desire to "find ourselves"; and some urge to- 
 ward wanting to forget, the same being an impulse 
 to escape from the consciousness of a side of our- 
 selves that is weary, or baffled, or discouraged. 
 
 Please note, then, that the last of these 
 reasons can justify itself by fulfillment only 
 
 109
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 through the development, in us, of one or 
 other of the other two urges. 
 
 We cannot forget, through reading, except 
 by becoming interested in what we read. And 
 we cannot become interested in what we read 
 except by beginning to "want to know" or by 
 beginning to "play." 
 
 We cannot, in short, escape from one side 
 of ourselves except by beginning to formulate 
 another. 
 
 We are like a man, standing. If he wearies 
 of standing on one foot, he can stand on the 
 other. And if he wearies of standing on that, 
 he can shift back. Only, mentally, we are 
 centipedes. We have a hundred shifts. 
 
 We are many-sided. And there are three 
 ways of ministering to, and of being served by, 
 — each of them through reading. "Wanting 
 to know" is an active side of us, reaching out 
 for its own. " Wanting to play " is a smothered 
 side of us, asking to be allowed to breathe. 
 "Wanting to forget" is a wearied side of us, 
 asking to be relieved from duty. An intelli- 
 gent use of reading for our own ends, there- 
 fore, involves an intelligent selection of what 
 we will elect to know, of how we will elect to 
 
 no
 
 WHAT'S THE USE? 
 
 play, and of what forms of these activities we 
 will elect to employ for purposes of relief and 
 relaxation. 
 
 Later on, in the chapter on "A Sense of 
 Direction," we shall return to this matter of 
 intelligent choice. But before doing this it is 
 necessary for us to gain, at first-hand, a more 
 vivid realization and a more intimate under- 
 standing of the many-sidedness that we have 
 above referred to. We must find out exactly 
 what we mean by calling reading an explora- 
 tion of two worlds — the world outside us 
 and the world within.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 A SENSE OF DIRECTION 
 
 I 
 
 We have all heard of the Frenchman who, at 
 about forty, discovered, quite by accident 
 and to his great surprise, that in keeping his 
 diary and answering his correspondence and 
 making his business reports and other taken- 
 for-granted uses of pen and paper, he had all 
 his life been writing prose without knowing it. 
 
 We have now reached a point in our in- 
 quiry where a somewhat similar realization 
 should be ours. All our lives we have been 
 doing the intricate things set forth in the pre- 
 ceding chapters, and have been doing them 
 for the specific reasons therein explained, and 
 yet have never suspected either fact. 
 
 It is not true, therefore, as it may possibly 
 appear to some of you, that I am recommend- 
 ing you to learn an unfamiliar game, or to 
 acquire a new and heretofore unpracticed 
 technique. Far from it. The game that I am 
 recommending to you we all began to play, 
 
 112
 
 A SENSE OF DIRECTION 
 
 untaught, in the nursery. And the technique 
 that I am urging you to perfect is the same 
 technique that, from inborn necessity, we 
 have all developed and which, in a catch- 
 as-catch-can way, we all employ in our 
 most casual scanning of the most ephemeral 
 print. 
 
 All that I am suggesting that you should 
 do is to play this game with a more con- 
 scious knowledge of its nature and possibili- 
 ties; and develop this technique with a more 
 purposeful and personal realization of its re- 
 quirements. 
 
 ii 
 
 Nor does this mean that I am urging you to 
 become self-conscious in your reading. 
 
 I happened, just now, to speak of reading as 
 a g?me. Let us consider for a moment the re- 
 lationship that self-consciousness bears to our 
 performance in those more outward and ob- 
 jective games — games where physical skill 
 as well as mental supervision is involved — 
 such as tennis, golf, billiards. 
 
 Many people play tennis, or billiards, or 
 golf, very much as most of us read — by the 
 
 113
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 spontaneous, unanalyzed, and all but undi- 
 rected exercise of their natural aptitudes. 
 They learn the rules. They flounder round 
 for a time while their hands and eyes are get- 
 ting the hang of the tools and their tricks. 
 And then they go ahead, hit-or-missedly in- 
 creasing their speed and accuracy and general- 
 ship by the catch-as-catch-can, experimental 
 route of personal practice. And in this sort of 
 play, once the initial awkwardnesses are over- 
 come and so long as one is pitted against play- 
 ers of one's own caliber, self-consciousness 
 seldom figures. But once let such a player de- 
 termine to "learn the game"; once let him 
 place himself under the guidance of a teacher; 
 and instantly self-consciousness becomes a 
 prime factor to be taken into account — at 
 once the subtlest means, and the deadliest 
 foe, to progress. 
 
 At first it is crassly and exaggeratedly pres- 
 ent in all the student's efforts. There are so 
 many things that he has to do (things that he 
 has been doing pretty well without knowing 
 it, but now has to do better; things that he 
 has been doing wrong, and now has to make 
 himself do properly; things that he has not 
 
 114
 
 A SENSE OF DIRECTION 
 
 been doing at all, and now has to take intc 
 account) that for a time he feels as though 
 he were driving sixteen horses abreast, while 
 balancing himself on the bare back of one of 
 them. 
 
 But let us skip this phase of his training. It 
 is to a later adjustment that I wish to call 
 your attention. And, moreover, we have al- 
 ready dealt with these initial problems of 
 coordination in comparing the developing of 
 an auto-driver's "unconscious alertness" to 
 that required of the skillful reader. 
 
 There comes a time, then, when this learner 
 of a game of skill is dealing with such deli- 
 cately mixed matters of muscular training 
 and mental control as those involved in a 
 billiard-player's "stroke," or a tennis-play- 
 er's "delivery" of a fast serve, or a golfer's 
 "follow-through." He now understands the 
 laws that govern the material objects he is 
 manipulating. He knows definitely what it 
 is that he is striving to accomplish. And he 
 has acquired at least an occasional semi-per- 
 fection of unconscious performance. But he 
 wants to correct a fault, or to add a cubit to 
 his efficiency, or to turn "occasional semi- 
 US
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 perfection" into a more constant and reliable 
 asset of his technical equipment. And either 
 under the direct guidance of a coach, or in 
 self-supervised practice, he is endeavoring to 
 attain this improved status. 
 
 Almost every one of us has struggled, in 
 some form of psycho-physical self-training, 
 with this curiously baffling problem. And al- 
 most every one of us has discovered in con- 
 sequence that a deliberate, self-conscious de- 
 termining of what it is that we wish to do, 
 and of how it is that we propose to do it, is 
 necessary before the undertaking of the act; but 
 that the act itself must, if it is going to "get 
 over" in any way worth mentioning, be per- 
 formed with the free, untrammeled, unlooked- 
 at play of physical spontaneity. 
 
 Let us put it that the only way in which 
 these niceties of skill can possibly be attained 
 is by Self-Consciousness playing teacher to 
 our muscles; by its going over and over for 
 them the things they are to do and to leave 
 undone; and by its then, at the crucial instant 
 of execution, turning its back on them with a 
 nice and considerate delicacy and saying, "Go 
 ahead now, I'm not looking." 
 
 116
 
 A SENSE OF DIRECTION 
 
 in 
 
 And the same thing, precisely, is true of 
 the subtler mind-training involved in improv- 
 ing one's reading skill. I am therefore so far 
 from wishing to urge you to self-conscious- 
 ness in reading that, on the contrary, I would 
 urge you to a more and ever more zestful and 
 complete yielding of yourself, in the actual act 
 of reading, to the full, free, untrammeled play 
 of your natural faculties. But I would have 
 you train these faculties to a suppler and more 
 efficient performance of their unconscious 
 tasks, through a knowledge of the real nature 
 of reading, and through an alert readiness 
 personally to supervise the process on occa- 
 sion. I would have you gradually develop a 
 growingly intelligent system of individual ex- 
 perimentation in the choice of what you read, 
 based upon your growing understanding of 
 our common and self-serving reasons for 
 reading. And I would have you gradually 
 learn to serve your personal ends more and 
 more fully by concentrating your atten- 
 tion and your interest and your subsequent 
 criticism on what actually happens inside 
 
 117
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 of you when you read the things you have 
 chosen. 
 
 IV 
 
 We have already considered in some detail 
 the question of personally supervising our 
 reading processes as occasion demands and 
 shall deal with other aspects of the matter 
 later. 
 
 In the present chapter we are going to seek 
 out, from our actual experience in reading, a 
 sound basis for a system of individual experi- 
 ment in the choice of what we read. 
 
 And afterward we shall examine more care- 
 fully the true character and real importance 
 of what actually happens in us in reading. 
 
 But even for our present purpose it is im- 
 portant that we have at least a general idea 
 of the fact that "the things that actually 
 happen in us when we read" form the sole 
 value-basis that reading has for us, as well as 
 the one basic test of all our judgments of its 
 worth for us. 
 
 And the proof of this is simple. 
 
 Nothing whatever does happen when we 
 read except what happens inside ourselves. 
 
 nS
 
 A SENSE OF DIRECTION 
 
 And since we read wholly in terms of our past 
 experience, these happenings all consist either 
 of revivifyings of simple items of that experi- 
 ence (revisualized seeings, reawakened emo- 
 tions, and the like), or of new, never-before- 
 achieved combinings of old experience into 
 new awarenesses, new understandings, new 
 sympathies and prejudices, new thoughts — 
 in fine, into new experiences. 
 
 But to know pleasure and pain, to feel de- 
 light and disgust, to be moved to sympathy, 
 resentment, pity, and hate, to observe human 
 conduct and approve or deplore it, to judge it 
 by our own and to estimate our own by it, to 
 be stirred to active, self-defining acquiescence 
 in the views of our fellows, or to be roused 
 to an active, self-revealing formulation of 
 our disagreement with them, — are not such 
 things as these of the very essence of being 
 alive? Are they not, indeed, the coefficients 
 of living? And are not such things as these 
 the precise sort of things, and the sole sort of 
 things that happen in us when we read? 
 
 But suppose none of them happen? 
 
 Our proposition is proved by the absurdity 
 of its converse. What possible value can any 
 
 119
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 reading matter have for us, or what hand- 
 hold for an estimate of it can we possess, if 
 nothing whatever of all this happens in us 
 when we read it? 
 
 v 
 
 Reading, then, is a form of living because of 
 the things that happen in us when we read. 
 
 And since our mothers sang lullabies to us in 
 our cradles, and repeated Mother Goose to us 
 in the nursery, and read us fairy tales before 
 the fire, and told us stories at bedtime, we 
 began to practice this form of living (we be- 
 gan, let us say, to read by proxy) long before 
 we learned our letters. 
 
 Here, by the way, is another chance to dis- 
 tinguish between the two kinds of "knowing 
 how to read" — the kind that we are con- 
 sidering in this book, and the kind that the 
 United States census and the dictionary and 
 the primary school have in mind. In the latter 
 sense, you and I know how to read with our 
 eyes; and a blind man knows how to read with 
 his fingers; and a blind man with both arms 
 amputated cannot know how to read at all. 
 But suppose you were private secretary to an 
 
 1 20
 
 A SENSE OF DIRECTION 
 
 armless blind man. And suppose that you 
 (with your eyes and your vocal chords doing 
 their humdrum tasks, but with your mind and 
 your imagination busy elsewhere) were to 
 read "David Copperfield" aloud to your in- 
 tensely attentive employer. Which one of 
 you, in the sense of our present inquiry, would 
 you say had read the novel? 
 
 VI 
 
 We began, then, to live and (with the aid of 
 a private secretary) we began to read, in the 
 nursery. And we have been reading, as well as 
 living, ever since. We read baby books in 
 words of one syllable when we were toddlers. 
 We read childrens' stories in words of two 
 syllables when we were children. As we grew 
 older we read school primers and textbooks. 
 We read "Alice in Wonderland" and "St. 
 Nicholas." We read Sunday-school scenarios, 
 and the "Youth's Companion," and penny- 
 dreadfuls, and "Treasure Island," and "Little 
 Women," and "The Golden Treasury," and 
 so on and so forth; up and out into maturity. 
 
 Has there not, perhaps, without our realiz- 
 ing it or thinking anything about it, been a 
 
 121
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 definite and decipherable relationship between 
 our developing selves and this progressive 
 reading? A linked, organic, vital parallelism 
 between them: Is it not possible that these 
 two forms of living have marched, hand in 
 hand, helping each other along, on an un- 
 charted road that both followed, yet that 
 neither took note of? 
 
 And if this should prove true, what better 
 way could we have of obtaining what we are 
 seeking — a sense of direction in our reading 
 — than that of diagraming this past relation- 
 ship, mapping that part of this road that lies 
 behind us, and then sighting ahead along these 
 established li?ies ? 
 
 Let us see if we cannot, somehow, find a 
 point of vantage — a mental steeple, or 
 mountain-top, or captive balloon — from 
 which we can get a bird's-eye view of the way 
 we have come. 
 
 VII 
 
 J. Henri Fabre, that lovable old French 
 savant with the soul of a poet, the attain- 
 ments of a scientist, and the attitude of a 
 philosopher, tells us, in one of his wonderful 
 
 122
 
 A SENSE OF DIRECTION 
 
 chapters on the life of the spider, how the 
 young of the Banded Epira get their start in 
 the world. 
 
 The Banded Epira do not weave webs to 
 snare their prey. They stalk their quarry, 
 tiger-like, on foot; or lie in wait behind the 
 petals of a rose and leap, like micro-jaguars, 
 on the backs of bees that come to drink. But 
 each one of them, none the less, has a silk 
 mill in its abdomen. And it is upon the spin- 
 nerets of this factory that the mother spider 
 draws when she weaves the fleece-lined pouch 
 in which she lays her eggs — the cocoon-like 
 pellicule that she fastens beneath a twig at the 
 foot of some spindling bush, and from which, 
 later on, the heat of mid-July calls forth some 
 six hundred pin-points of new-hatched life. 
 And it is with the initial contents of these 
 same spinnerets as their sole capital that 
 these newborn mites start in on the business 
 of living. 
 
 No sooner have the six hundred emerged 
 than they set out, en masse, to climb the bush. 
 And as this, for such teeny climbers, proves a 
 several days' journey, the tribe, at each day's 
 end, spins itself a shelter which it occupies for 
 
 123
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 the night and abandons in the morning. And 
 thus, alternately climbing and camping, at last 
 they reach the top. And there, with feverish 
 industry, they build a platform of interwoven 
 strands. And upon this for a time they come 
 and go, busily engaged in some work of prep- 
 aration. And then — mystery or miracle 
 
 for all the world like tiny witches traveling 
 on broomsticks — they are seen, one by one, 
 serenely to depart, floating on nothing through 
 the summer air. 
 
 And Fabre tells us how, by means of some 
 ingenious experiments conducted in his study, 
 he at last discovered the simple secret of this 
 aerial dispersion — filaments of silk, so fine as 
 to be invisible to the human eye, paid out to 
 the breeze by each tiny spider until buoyant 
 enough to support him; and then embarked 
 upon, air-ship fashion, for the great adventure. 
 
 And I have retold the story here because it 
 is upon just such an embarkation that I am 
 now asking you to join me. Like these spider- 
 lets we have journeyed together, camping by 
 the way, from the bottom of our bush. Like 
 them we have built a sort of platform at the 
 top. And now, like them, we are about to set 
 
 124
 
 A SENSE OF DIRECTION 
 
 forth, supported, to the eye of the uninitiated, 
 upon nothing, but really borne securely aloft 
 upon two fine filaments of understanding that 
 we have spun. 
 
 Let us examine this air-craft. 
 
 The first filament is the knowledge that we 
 are makers when we read. That things read 
 are not taken into the mind bodily from with- 
 out, — sucked in through the eye like soda 
 through a straw, — but are built up, brand- 
 new, within us. That we do this building with 
 assorted fragments of our own experience just 
 as literally as a child builds castles with its 
 wooden blocks. And that, just as the child's 
 block-architecture is conditioned by the 
 quantity and variety of its supply, so the 
 scope of our reading capacity depends upon 
 the amount and variousness of living — of 
 physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual 
 living — that we have done. 
 
 The second filament is the knowledge that 
 no matter what we read or when, no matter 
 whether we are conscious of it or not, we al- 
 ways read either to "find ourselves" or to 
 "get away from ourselves." Either from the 
 calculated desire, or from the playful joy, of 
 
 125
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 establishing some new order in our individual 
 chaos; or for the comfort of forgetting the dis- 
 order that has baffled us by turning to some 
 fresh order-making. 
 
 These are the wings of our bi-plane. 
 
 VIII 
 
 As we look down and back, between these 
 buoyant bits of understanding about the way 
 we read and our reasons for reading, we shall 
 see the past, like a landscape, begin to open 
 out beneath us. We shall see supposedly hap- 
 hazard choices in our early reading fall into 
 significant relationship to one another. We 
 shall see method emerge from the mix-up. We 
 shall see, finally, that the way we have come 
 stretches, like a straight ribbon of road, visible 
 and comprehensible before our eyes. 
 
 IX 
 
 We see, for example, why, as little children, 
 we liked to read Mother Goose. 
 
 For the youngest child, no less than the 
 wisest savant, reads with its own experience 
 for building-blocks. But the child's experi- 
 
 126
 
 A SENSE OF DIRECTION 
 
 ence is very fragmentary. And, what is more, 
 the fragments are as yet unassorted. 
 
 Its mind is like a cupboard without parti- 
 tions, into which all that it finds with its five 
 senses — the pap-spoon and the puppy-dog, 
 the taste of milk and the feel of stomach-ache, 
 the sound of the cat's miaow and the appear- 
 ance of the moon's disk — are all stowed away, 
 helter-skelter, like loot gathered for a rum- 
 mage sale. 
 
 But though its experience is a jumble, yet 
 already in this jumble the child "knows 
 what it likes." And, moreover, since it lives 
 in a world where there is already "rhyme," 
 though not yet "reason," it already, without 
 knowing it, senses something about "art." 
 
 It is not yet equipped to read "Hamlet." 
 It is not even, as yet, equipped to read "Puss 
 in Boots." But it is equipped to "produce" 
 on the stage of its own consciousness — and 
 it does take genuine joy in there "producing" 
 — that famous scenario — 
 
 "Hey diddle diddle! 
 The cat and the fiddle; 
 The cow jumped over the moon. 
 The little dog laughed to see such sport 
 And the dish ran away with the spoon." 
 
 127
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 And while it is "producing" it, it laughs 
 and claps its hands. For it is establishing a 
 rhythmic order in the jumble of its experience. 
 It is "making new combinations out of its 
 stock in trade," and is thus, according to 
 its infant mood, either "finding itself" amid 
 its chaotic environment, or — forgetting the 
 colic. 
 
 x 
 
 We see, again, why it is that the same 
 child, a bit later, reads fairy tales with such 
 gusto. 
 
 It has, by now, greatly multiplied its ex- 
 periences. It has, moreover, begun to discover 
 in others like traits to its own. It has begun 
 to feel pity for others' pain through imagining 
 itself hurt. It has begun to take pleasure in 
 others' joy through imagining itself rejoiced. 
 It has established a tentative (although a 
 largely arbitrary and unwarranted) order in 
 the jumble of its experience. It has grasped 
 the crude principle (although it has not yet 
 learned the hard-and-fast rules) of cause and 
 effect. It has begun to distil ideas, and has 
 developed its instinctive responsiveness to 
 
 128
 
 A SENSE OF DIRECTION 
 
 "rhyme" into a budding passion for "poetic 
 justice." And it is, without knowing it, eager 
 for any opportunity or guidance that will en- 
 able it to invest this capital; to arrange and 
 rearrange it in explanatory sequences and 
 satisfying symmetry. It is like a housewife 
 with a kettle of simmering jelly, looking round 
 for moulds to pour it into. 
 
 And as such scenarios as "Cinderella" and 
 "The Sleeping Princess" are exactly the 
 moulds it needs, it seizes upon them with 
 avidity and pours its accumulated capital into 
 them with a realism of mental stage manag- 
 ership equal to Belasco's. It lives them — 
 quite literally — with round-eyed wonder and 
 palpitant delight; and in the act it is con- 
 structively "finding itself" through self-as- 
 sertion even when we think that it is only for- 
 getting hurt feelings or a burned finger in the 
 fascination of the inner "movies." 
 
 XI 
 
 Let us glance in passing at boyhood. 
 
 Some of you, I know, have before now asked 
 yourselves why your growing boy, leaving the 
 orthodox reading you had so carefully pro- 
 
 129
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 vided for him in the library, has stolen out to 
 the lean-to behind the woodshed and buried 
 himself in "Tomahawk Bill, the Terror of the 
 Tetons." Doubtless you felt that evil com- 
 munications had corrupted his native man- 
 ners. But you were wrong. If you will look 
 down from our air-craft you will see that he 
 did it, not from acquired perversity, but from 
 an inner urge. 
 
 He did it for the same reason that the 
 guinea hen "steals her nest" in the woodlot 
 behind the barn. 
 
 The guinea hen is half domesticated and 
 half wild. When she "steals her nest" she is 
 dramatizing her wild instincts. The boy is 
 half civilized and half a savage. He reads 
 dime novels to dramatize the imagining that 
 the savage in him has done, or — to forget 
 the "civilizing" that is being done to him. 
 
 XII 
 
 And now let us ask ourselves a subtler 
 question. Let us ask why it is that adoles- 
 cence — youth ripening toward maturity — 
 reads with such glowing sympathy the visions 
 of the poets, and produces with such zest the 
 
 130
 
 A SENSE OF DIRECTION 
 
 lighter scenarios of idealism and romance; 
 while only a little later, the same individuals 
 ■ — new-fledged grown-ups now — are so often 
 found demanding plots of stripped action and 
 tales in which, to use their own expression, 
 there is "something doing." 
 
 This, too, viewed from our altitude, is 
 simple. 
 
 Youth ripening toward maturity sees itself 
 as the heir to the ages. It conceives the sum 
 of its experience as a completed course of prep- 
 aration. It is like a hound straining at the 
 leash, or a runner tensed for the start. Its 
 motto is "Just you wait!" 
 
 It scorns to use its building-blocks of ex- 
 perience, — the piled-up raw material of its 
 preparedness, — except to build tall towers of 
 what it means to do. It reads romance alter- 
 nately to dramatize its own intentions, and to 
 forget the tedium of enforced delay. 
 
 But it is quite otherwise with new-fledged 
 grown-ups. 
 
 From strutting seniors in the University of 
 Youth these have become yelled-at office boys 
 in the department store of Life. From being 
 the "leading citizens" in a land of dreams, 
 
 131
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 they have become tenderfeet on the frontier 
 of Reality. 
 
 It is, indeed, almost permissible to say that 
 they have been born again. 
 
 For if the boy (a creature physically active 
 in a world of the imagination) is indeed "father 
 to the man" (the average young man being a 
 creature mentally alert in a world of physical 
 endeavor) — then your newborn adult is a 
 baby. And for a time he reads like a child. 
 
 "Stories of action" are the Mother Goose 
 rhymes of young maturity. The cows in them 
 make magnificent leaps. The pussy-cats in 
 them face the music. All the young dogs are 
 elated. And in the end the dish always elopes 
 with the spoon. In short, they are scenarios 
 in which the unassorted fragments of a new, 
 chaotic, "practical" experience are arranged 
 in a rhythm of accomplishment. 
 
 XIII 
 
 So much, then, for what lies definitely be- 
 hind us. Let us descend from our flight of ob- 
 servation and take stock of our discoveries. 
 
 We have seen that the roads of living and 
 of reading do indeed parallel each other. And 
 
 132
 
 A SENSE OF DIRECTION 
 
 that in this parallelism they maintain an ac- 
 tive, vital, organic relationship. And that, 
 in the past at least, their joint direction has 
 been the direction of our developing lives. 
 
 We have seen, moreover that in traveling 
 these linked roads it behooves us not only to 
 live, but to out-live. 
 
 Do you, by any chance, doubt this last? 
 
 I know a woman of forty-two who still plays 
 
 at paper dolls, and who still responds with 
 
 evidently pleasurable shudders to the reading 
 
 of that earliest of our remembered tragedies, — ■ 
 
 "Hickory, dickory, dock! 
 The mouse ran up the clock." 
 
 But, "Ah!" you are perhaps saying, "this 
 is an extreme example." 
 
 So be it. Yet you all know, I am sure, men 
 and women of an age approximate to hers 
 who, having been safely born into maturity, 
 went no further; and who still continue to 
 ask, both of life and of letters, merely that 
 "something shall happen on every page." 
 
 Do you not see what has overtaken them? 
 
 They have let life cease to be a develop- 
 ment and become a treadmill. They have let 
 living cease to be an adventure and become a 
 
 133
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 habit. And their reading has, of necessity, 
 followed suit. 
 
 For although our reading ranges, appar- 
 ently, much further afield than our lives, the 
 moving centers of their activities coincide. 
 Our living and our reading are like a man and 
 his dog. The man walks along his chosen or 
 his given way. The dog puts rings around him 
 as he moves. Now the dog is ahead, nosing 
 the path. Now it is far behind, re-sniffing the 
 back trail. Now it is off to the right, announc- 
 ing a treed squirrel. Now it is digging franti- 
 cally for a ground-hog on the left. But always 
 the center of the dog's activities is the man's 
 moving footsteps. And if the man lies down 
 by the side of the road and falls asleep, sooner 
 or later the dog will come and stretch out 
 beside him. 
 
 XIV 
 
 And now, having traced the course of these 
 joint roads behind us, let us see if we cannot, 
 on the same lines, prefigure their course ahead. 
 Let us see if we cannot forecast the general 
 direction of maturity's living-and-reading de- 
 velopment. 
 
 134
 
 A SENSE OF DIRECTION 
 
 Physical activity is, after all, only the basis 
 of living; only the foundation — the root, if 
 you prefer — of our emotional, our intellec- 
 tual, our spiritual development. And it is 
 along this line — it is in this direction if at all 
 — that our development takes place and that 
 our experiences pile up. And it is in circles 
 round our progress along this line that that 
 sheep-dog of our experiences, our reading, 
 moves. 
 
 For a time, as we have seen, scenarios of 
 action engross us. But variety of action is 
 circumscribed. The situations of physical ac- 
 complishment, juggle them as we may, are 
 limited in number. The meaning of life, we 
 gradually discover, develops for us less through 
 what happens to us from without than through 
 what, as a direct consequence of this, happens 
 to us from within. Our physical activities 
 become ordered. Our emotional experiences 
 accumulate. Sooner or later, therefore, we 
 take to using these building-blocks of ex- 
 perienced emotion in reading books of an 
 emotional appeal. 
 
 But the reading of love-stories may also 
 cease to be an adventure and become a habit. 
 
 135
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 For the situations of emotion are also, both 
 in life and in literature, limited in number. 
 The real variousness of our common human- 
 ity lies, not in the differences of our emotions, 
 but in the infinite variety and conjugation of 
 our personal reactions to emotion. Little by- 
 little, therefore, as our experienced realiza- 
 tion of differences accumulates, we reach out 
 toward the reading of books that marshal 
 these differences — books of an intellectual 
 appeal. Perhaps we begin with genre studies 
 and move on to tales of character devel- 
 opment. Perhaps we begin with local color 
 effects and move on through parochial litera- 
 ture and books of travel to memoirs, autobi- 
 ographies, and treatises on historical periods. 
 Perhaps we begin with handbooks of science 
 and move on, through the rudiments of ab- 
 normal psychology and the outlines of alien 
 theologies, to the beginnings of speculative 
 philosophy. Or perhaps we pick and choose, 
 push out now on this side now on that — read 
 anything and everything, in short, that, over- 
 lapping in some measure our familiar lives and 
 extending a bit beyond into the unknown, 
 enables us to orient ourselves a little in an in- 
 
 136
 
 A SENSE OF DIRECTION 
 
 finitely interesting world, or to forget, by con- 
 structing these oases of deciphered orderliness, 
 the immediate disorder that baffles us nearer 
 home. 
 
 And here, at first glance, it would seem 
 that we are come to the parting of the ways. 
 
 Thus far, we will have jogged along to- 
 gether on a common road. But now that the 
 highway breaks up into a maze of cart tracks, 
 now that one of us may take the trail of sci- 
 ence, another that of sociology, another that 
 of fiction, or of esthetics, or of history, or of 
 philosophy, it may seem that we shall never 
 meet again. 
 
 But this need not be so. 
 
 To discover this it is only necessary for us 
 to go on, each in his own way, with the twin 
 adventures of living and reading. 
 
 For, choose what by-ways you will, pursue 
 as many of them as you can, you will find at 
 last that they all give over their fanlike dis- 
 persing and begin to bend inward toward 
 reunion — a reunion hidden beneath the ho- 
 rizon, but ever more and more definable in 
 location by the simple geometry of this con- 
 vergence. 
 
 *37
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 For the ultimate meaning of life inheres, not 
 in the multiplicity of differences that super- 
 ficially distinguish us, but in the deeper one- 
 ness of the common humanity that we share 
 and into which these differences coalesce. And 
 the final miracle of existence lies, not in the 
 swarming diversity of living forms, and in the 
 diverse laws of their separate being, but in 
 the final unity of their relationship to the in- 
 soluble Purpose of their common Source. 
 
 Sooner or later, therefore, the persistent ex- 
 plorers of the by-ways learn to use their ac- 
 cumulated building-blocks of experienced di- 
 versity for the reading of books dealing with 
 unifying relationships — books not of anal- 
 ysis, but of synthesis — books which, in a 
 human instead of a theological sense, we 
 must call books of a spiritual appeal: — - the 
 great novel scenarios of the deep-seeing, the 
 great philosophic card-castles of the thinkers, 
 the great poetic prophecies of the seers, the 
 many-sided gospels of the elect. 
 
 xv 
 
 Here, then, is the sense of direction that 
 we have been seeking. 
 
 138
 
 A SENSE OF DIRECTION 
 
 But it is more than a sense of direction. It 
 is the road itself. It is the inclusive highway 
 of all our individual adventures. For it is the 
 unbuoyed but inevitable channel of the mind. 
 Along it, if we are to move at all, we must 
 make our way. And while it is wide enough 
 to accommodate us all, and deep enough to 
 float genius itself, yet no flat-bottomed skiff 
 of human intelligence is of such light draught 
 that it will not ground on the mud flats at the 
 channel's edge if the course be lost. 
 
 The woman referred to some pages back, 
 the one of forty-odd who still plays at paper 
 dolls and chortles over nursery rhymes, is 
 hard aground at the very entrance to the fair- 
 way — the machinery of her mind, poor soul, 
 disabled in a collision between her head and 
 the carriage-block when the nurse dropped 
 her at the age of two. 
 
 But there are more kinds of arrested devel- 
 opment than are diagnosed by the doctors. 
 
 Those other women — there are thousands 
 of them — who never read anything but love- 
 stories — the same old love-stories with the 
 same old plots and the same old situations, 
 everlastingly ripped and turned and sponged 
 
 139
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 and pressed and refurbished and retrimmed, 
 but always modeled on the same adolescent 
 dream and the same sixteen-year-old idealism 
 — they too are hard aground a few years up 
 the course. 
 
 And those men — there are thousands of 
 them — who vary the breakfast business- 
 beer-garden-bed treadmill by reading endless 
 successions of adventure tales and detective 
 yarns and pipe-dreams of exotic action — "be- 
 cause they help to pass the time" — they too 
 are keel-fast: grounded on the bar between 
 an over-ripe adolescence and an undeveloped 
 maturity. They are like mathematicians who 
 spend their skill counting sheep to put them- 
 selves to sleep. 
 
 xvi 
 
 But it is neither the nursery rhymes, nor 
 the love-stories, nor the adventure scenarios 
 that are at fault. 
 
 All these things "belong." 
 
 No illusion or delusion, no dream or desire, 
 no crude instinct or unfolding impulse or con- 
 scious ideal that is native to humanity, is out- 
 side the legitimate field of our realization and 
 
 140
 
 A SENSE OF DIRECTION 
 
 re-realization through reading — of our re- 
 peated "redding up" and of our progressive 
 formulation for ourselves in the constantly 
 accumulating terms of our own experience. 
 
 The only fault, the fatal fault, is stagnation 
 — arrested development. 
 
 Nor does this mean that we should leave 
 nursery rhymes behind, and love-stories, and 
 adventure tales. We should n't. Not any 
 more than we should kill the "child" in us, 
 or the lover, or the sense of adventure. We 
 should carry these things with us and de- 
 velop them as we develop. There are nurs- 
 ery rhymes for every mile of the way. There 
 are love-stories for every stage of growth. 
 There are adventures for every enlarge- 
 ment of our consciousness and our under- 
 standing. 
 
 XVII 
 
 But perhaps you will be asking why I have 
 called this channel "unbuoyed" when there 
 are so many guide-marks set up by earlier 
 voyagers, so many charts of the best reading, 
 so many pilot-critics ready to come aboard 
 and steer for us. 
 
 141
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 I am not for a moment suggesting that you 
 should discard any of these aids to navigation. 
 But if you will recall our discovery as to how 
 we get our meanings for words — by react- 
 ing spontaneously to them and subsequently 
 criticizing the reactions; and if you will re- 
 member our noting the similar source of 
 all life's meanings for us — the subsequent 
 weighing and valuing of our actual, spontane- 
 ous, personal responses to life's stimuli; and if 
 you will remember our final conclusion that 
 "culture" in any form is only derivable from 
 books at all because reading is a form of living 
 in that things actually happen in us when we 
 read, — you will see why I used this word. 
 
 All these buoyed courses of reading, all 
 these charts of other voyagings, all these au- 
 thorities on the shortest routes to selected 
 destinations, invaluable as they are and most 
 needful to be used by us to the fullest of their 
 real power to serve us, are, and can only be, 
 aids to intelligent experimentation on our in- 
 dividual parts. 
 
 For what actually happens in us when we 
 read, and the way we combine these actual 
 happenings with all that has previously hap- 
 
 142
 
 A SENSE OF DIRECTION 
 
 pened in us both in living and reading — this 
 is the sole, the determining, the final reality 
 for each of us. And when we have studied all 
 the charts there are, when we have listened to 
 all the advice that is offered to us, all actual 
 progress toward our ultimate destination 
 (whatever that may be) is made by our push- 
 ing ahead, up channel, and taking soundings 
 as we go. 
 
 XVIII 
 
 It is no part of the purpose of this book to 
 influence your choice of a goal. 
 
 We all start from the same port and none of 
 us are "bound through" — for the channel is 
 longer than our individual lives and lengthens 
 with the life of the race. But we sail, under 
 sealed orders, bound for many havens. No 
 two of us have the same equipment, the same 
 driving power, the same draught, or the same 
 radius of possible attainment. We are all born 
 with a multitude of latent tendencies. We 
 develop, or fail to develop, these in different 
 orders and in different degrees as we go. And 
 as we variously increase this development, 
 we variously enlarge our outlooks and alter 
 
 H3
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 our conscious objectives. And there are as 
 many resultant routes as there are points 
 of destination and people moving toward 
 them. 
 
 But it is all the same from the standpoint 
 of our present inquiry. 
 
 Our aim in reading may be the most aim- 
 less pursuit of pleasure. Or it may be the 
 most concentrated utilitarian seeking for 
 knowledge. Or it may be the most many- 
 sided desire for self-enhancement through 
 coordinated understanding. It may all be 
 done through "wanting to forget," or through 
 "wanting to play," or through "wanting to 
 know," or through such alternations or com- 
 binations of these reasons as develop with 
 our development. It makes no difference to 
 our present inquiry. For the force behind 
 any one of these urges, or the force behind 
 any possible combination of them, can only 
 expend itself either in driving us along some 
 personal line of development in the direction 
 that we have just determined and have called 
 the inevitable channel of the mind, or in driv- 
 ing us rudderlessly round and round some 
 vicious circle of stagnation. 
 
 144
 
 A SENSE OF DIRECTION 
 
 XIX 
 
 Fortunately we now hold in our hands two 
 mariners' instruments of precision to help us 
 in navigating this channel — a sextant with 
 which to locate our position on the course, 
 and a compass to tell us when we are headed 
 right. 
 
 Standing at noon with a sextant to his eye, 
 the sailor, by measuring the height of the sun 
 above the ocean's rim, can figure his latitude 
 in mid-Atlantic. And any one of us who will 
 measure, with the glass of honest self-scrutiny, 
 the height of his interest in life above the mean 
 level of new-fledged grown-up-ism, can locate 
 his position on the chart and stick a pin in it. 
 
 As for the compass, it is a delicate instru- 
 ment, but very simple. In reading, as we are 
 now aware, we know but two urges to action. 
 The first of these, the impulse to "find our- 
 selves," no matter how casual or how con- 
 centrated its manifesting may be, is always in 
 some shape a seeking for truth. To the second, 
 the impulse to "escape from ourselves," two 
 courses are open. It may turn from a truth- 
 quest that has tired us to a truth-quest that 
 
 145
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 stimulates, amuses, or allures — may seek a 
 change of truth, like a city-dweller seeking the 
 sea, or a hillsman descending to the plains. 
 Or it may turn from the discouragement of 
 living to the anodyne of reading lies about 
 life. 
 
 And the arrow of this interest impulse, for- 
 ever oscillating on the pivot of our mood, is 
 the needle of the compass. When, and only 
 when, it swings toward truth, it points the 
 channel. 
 
 And "truth"? 
 
 Inevitably at this point the Pontius Pilate in 
 us — the finite in us, saving its face before the 
 infinite — shrugs its shoulders and asks the 
 unanswerable question, "What is Truth?" 
 
 But let us not drag this metaphysical anise- 
 seed bag across the trail of our inquiry. 
 
 A human philosopher, trying to take in 
 Truth with a capital Tin order to define it, is 
 like a Spanish mackerel, trying to swallow 
 the ocean in which it swims in order to com- 
 prehend it. Many fishes have drowned and 
 many philosophers gone mad in the frantic 
 gluttony of these ambitions. So let us be at 
 once more moderate and more practical. Let 
 146
 
 A SENSE OF DIRECTION 
 
 us write "truth " with the lower case t of our 
 mortal limitations and define it in terms of 
 the only pursuit of it that is open to us — a 
 seeking-out of the discoverable relationships 
 between the world inside us and the world 
 without.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE WORLD OUTSIDE US AND THE 
 WORLD WITHIN 
 
 I 
 
 The pursuit of truth as we have just defined 
 it — the searching-out of discoverable rela- 
 tionships between the life within us and the 
 life without — is not a new or a specialized 
 activity that is here being presented as worthy 
 of your attention. On the contrary, it is an- 
 other of those things that we have all been 
 doing — another of those basic, inevitable, 
 and universal activities that we have all been 
 engaged in, sometimes consciously, but far 
 more often without realizing it, in every hour 
 of our lives and in every paragraph of our 
 reading. 
 
 And it is the purpose of the present chapter 
 to do three things: (i) To bring home to each 
 of us, in the familiar and recognizable terms 
 of our common knowledge and experience, the 
 fact that the searching-out of these relation- 
 ships is, quite simply and literally, the essen- 
 
 148
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 tial reality of what we are actually and con- 
 stantly doing when we read. (2) To show the 
 immense advantage we can gain for ourselves 
 by reading with this understanding as an op- 
 erative part of our equipment. And (3) to 
 point out a few practical ways of applying the 
 lever of this advantage in our actual practice. 
 
 11 
 
 We all realize at once that the investiga- 
 tions and experiments of a Pasteur are search- 
 ings for relationships between the life inside 
 us and the life outside. 
 
 We see at a glance that the physician, and 
 the bacteriologist, and the organic chemist, 
 and the comparative psychologist, and the 
 philosopher, and the theologian, are all, quite 
 literally, pursuing truth in these terms. 
 
 But we do not, as a rule, realize that every 
 man and woman who reads in the morning 
 paper a paragraph describing a tenement fire, 
 or a society ball, or a murder in the slums, is 
 doing the same thing. Indeed, if we happen 
 never to have thought of the matter from this 
 angle, this statement of it appears wholly 
 absurd to us. The idea involved is one that 
 
 149
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 we have never "distilled" and haven't in 
 stock. It is an idea that cannot, by being 
 stated, be put into our heads. But it happens 
 to be a realization the necessary ingredients 
 of which we now have on hand and can there- 
 fore proceed to compound. 
 
 in 
 
 If there is one fact that we have grown 
 thoroughly to understand and accept, it is the 
 fact that we have nothing to read with except 
 our own experience — the seeing and hearing 
 and smelling and tasting and touching that 
 we have done; the fearing and hoping and 
 hating and loving that has happened in us; 
 the intellectual and spiritual reactions that 
 have resulted; and the assumptions, under- 
 standings, prides, prejudices, hypocrisies, fer- 
 vors, foolishnesses, finenesses, and faiths that 
 have thereby been precipitated in us like 
 crystals in a chemist's tube. 
 
 We are all, therefore, quite ready to nod our 
 heads in agreement over the statement that 
 we read in terms of mental conceptions made 
 out of this accumulated experience, just as a 
 child builds castles from its wooden blocks. 
 
 ISO
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 We are, in other words, agreed upon the 
 character of our building-material. 
 
 But we have not, as yet, turned the spot- 
 light of our inquiry upon the character of 
 these buildings themselves. We have not yet, 
 except by the vaguest of implications, de- 
 termined what it is that these outwardly dis- 
 similar structures, that we are forever build- 
 ing up and tearing down again on the nursery 
 floors of our imagination, really represent. 
 And this is the question that we are now about 
 to ask ourselves. 
 
 When we rustle the pages of the "Morning 
 Advertiser" or open the "Evening Howl"; 
 when we read the current numbers of our 
 favorite magazines; when we enter the lists 
 with Ivanhoe or camp with Achilles before 
 Troy; when we repeople the cave-man's cave 
 or fore-furnish the mansions of the blessed, — 
 what is the real character of the castles we are 
 rearing with our building-blocks of past ex- 
 perience? 
 
 Let us put the cart before the horse and 
 face the answer before we pursue the inquiry: 
 All these structures represent ourselves. 
 
 Of course I know that in reading this sen- 
 
 151
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 tence you are setting me down as a cynic. 
 You have an uncomfortable feeling that I am 
 "knocking" human nature. You would like 
 to think that you are a bit bruised in your 
 idealism. But I have hopes of regaining your 
 confidence. For, to begin with, it is not the es- 
 sential you that is shocked by this statement; 
 it is some of those "assumptions, prejudices, 
 and hypocrisies that have been precipitated 
 in you" that are shocked. The essential 
 you makes an involuntary motion of recog- 
 nition toward the statement and is shame- 
 facedly ready, somehow, to rejoice in it. And, 
 as we shall see presently, the essential you is 
 eminently right. For it is ourselves — our- 
 selves subdivided and reassembled, ourselves 
 dressed up and disguised and commissioned to 
 play a part, ourselves outfitted and sent forth 
 on adventure-tours of investigation, and then 
 recalled to make reports — that we read with. 
 And in this complex and many-mannered 
 reaching out and harking back it is ourselves 
 that we are, in endless alternation, building 
 into and building out of the world as we go. 
 But let me introduce you to a young castle- 
 builder that I met the other day. 
 
 152
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 IV 
 
 He was standing, straddle-legged, on River- 
 side Drive, looking down to one of the jutting 
 piers from which covered carts of ashes were 
 being dumped into waiting scows. He was 
 about five — dressed in a sort of tight-fitting 
 union suit, hand-knitted out of white wool. 
 And as I passed him I heard him announce 
 to his nurse in tones of irrevocable deci- 
 sion, "When I'm big I'm going to be an ash- 
 man." 
 
 Now the chances are that before the news of 
 his determination reaches you he will have 
 changed his mind. He may even, meanwhile, 
 have made and unmade other choices of pro- 
 fession. And the odds are overwhelmingly in 
 favor of his ultimately turning out something 
 widely different from them all — say a stock- 
 broker. But somewhere, deep down inside the 
 bank president or bookkeeper that he and Life 
 will some day compromise on his becoming, 
 there will remain that ashman possibility ■ — - 
 that undeveloped ashman-self — that I re- 
 cently saw him in the act of realizing. There 
 will remain, also, the policeman possibility, 
 
 153
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 and the possibilities of the engine-driver, the 
 plumber's assistant, the recruiting sergeant, 
 the drum major, and the sandwich man, each 
 of which he will for a while have seen himself 
 capable of being. And there will remain other 
 deep-buried possibilities. Hundreds — thou- 
 sands — of possibilities and of combinations of 
 them. There will be possibilities that he will 
 have glimpsed and forgotten. There will be 
 possibilities that he will have developed a 
 little and abandoned. There will be possibili- 
 ties the existence of which he will never have 
 so much as suspected. In short, there will be 
 in him the more or less undeveloped germs of 
 all the innumerable potential selves that life, 
 as he will have lived it, will have given him no 
 chance to be. 
 
 And this, at the moment that you read 
 these words, is true of you. It is true of me 
 as I write them. It is true of us all. We are 
 populous with unrealized selves: with might- 
 have-been's; with partially-were's; with some- 
 times-are's; with may-yet-be's. And the char- 
 acter-structures that we rear when we are 
 reading are working models of these potential 
 selves. 
 
 154
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 v 
 
 When, a moment since, I spoke of "entering 
 the lists with Ivanhoe," I spoke inaccurately 
 on purpose in order, now, to call your atten- 
 tion to the truth. We do not "enter the lists 
 with Ivanhoe." We enter the lists as Ivanhoe. 
 When we read Homer, we do not "camp with 
 Achilles before Troy." What really happens 
 is this: Out of the experience-material at our 
 command, — out of our visits to militia en- 
 campments, perhaps, and to museums, out of 
 our own tent experience on fishing trips or at 
 garden parties, out of our memories of pic- 
 tures and our realizations from other reading, 
 — we contrive the Homeric encampment on 
 the Trojan plain. We erect, more or less viv- 
 idly and informedly according to our habit 
 and our equipment, the hero's tent with the 
 shields hung upon its outer walls and the 
 spears set up before its tight-closed door. And 
 having done all this we install therein a work- 
 ing model of Achilles made out of our own at- 
 tributes. It is not Achilles who hides behind 
 that imagined canvas. It is some quickly 
 achieved amalgam of our touchy selves and 
 
 155
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 of the potential hero lurking in us, that sulks 
 there while the armies wait. And it is the 
 same when we read of a murder in the "Even- 
 ing Howl." It is not the actual murderer who 
 then reenacts his crime, or the actual victim 
 who dies another death. It is the potential 
 assassin in us who lifts a knife, and the po- 
 tential victim in us who shudders as she drops. 
 
 And yet, this is only half the truth. 
 
 For having, out of our own potentialities, 
 made an Ivanhoe to ride into the lists, we re- 
 tire, as it were, to the side-lines and watch the 
 Ivanhoe we have created and sent forth. Hav- 
 ing contrived a personal and heroically sulky 
 Achilles out of our own attributes, we straight- 
 way scale the imagined walls of Troy and look 
 down with new eyes upon the ancient world. 
 Having made a murderer and a victim out of 
 the might-have-been's and the may-yet-be's 
 within us, we sit, as it were, in reserved seats 
 at our own movies, and experience (in vary- 
 ing degrees according to our natures and our 
 moods at the moment) the passions of par- 
 ticipants and the emotions of onlookers. 
 
 In fine, having, at the instigation of the 
 author, explored a new corner of the world 
 
 i 5 6
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 within us and made a new synthesis of what 
 we found there, we proceed, in the person of 
 the character thus created, to explore new 
 aspects of the outer world. 
 
 VI 
 
 Let us pause a moment, here, to draw a 
 subtle yet highly important distinction. In 
 every elaborate narrative, historical, fictional, 
 or what-not, there are figures — men, women, 
 and children — that we visualize, whose 
 words we listen to, whose actions we vita- 
 graph, whose very heft and bulk and, it may 
 be, contact with ourselves, we vividly realize 
 and are aware of; yet with whom we do not at 
 all, in the sense above set forth, identify our- 
 selves. And the fact that we do not, any more 
 than if they were trees or houses or other in- 
 animate portions of the external world, con- 
 struct these figures as working models of our 
 potential selves, may seem, at first glance, to 
 vitiate the analysis and exposition above ar- 
 rived at. 
 
 But a moment's consideration will suffice to 
 give us the explanation. These figures are mere 
 objects in the external world. The fact that 
 
 157
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 they are animate objects — the fact that they 
 are animate human objects even — does not 
 in the least alter their relation of externality 
 to the character or characters with whom for 
 the moment we are ourselves identified. 
 
 But mark the change that may, at any 
 moment, take place in the equilibrium of our 
 attitude. Let one of these figures cease to be 
 a mere animated object in the story's world, 
 and become, for a page or a paragraph even, 
 the experiencing subject of the story's emotions, 
 let one of them change, for so little as two 
 minutes, from being a part of that outer- 
 world-that-is-being-explored and become the 
 explorer, and instantly we begin to "judge 
 him by ourselves," to "put ourselves in his 
 place." In the one case we construct these 
 figures, exactly as we construct the trees and 
 houses, the horses and cattle of the story's 
 requirements, from the stored observation 
 and accumulated materialism of our past ex- 
 perience. In the other we construct them, no 
 matter how fleetingly and sketchily, as vicari- 
 ous embodiments of our potential selves. In 
 the one case we regard them as a part of that 
 "world outside us" with which we are seeking 
 
 I 5 8
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 discoverable relationships. In the other case 
 we regard them as a phase of the "world 
 within us" momentarily dramatized and en- 
 gaged in the search. 
 
 VII 
 
 And this brings us to a point where, as the 
 children say, we are "very warm." We are 
 now so near to the idea that we have set out to 
 grasp and make our own that we should only 
 need, if we knew the way, to reach out the 
 fingers of our minds and curl them round it. 
 
 We have discovered the character of the 
 buildings that we are constantly erecting, as 
 we read, out of the building-blocks of our past 
 living. We know now that all these structures 
 represent, either phases of the world within 
 us, or phases of the world without. And we 
 know that in all our reading we are in some 
 manner confronting some potentiality of our 
 own with some conceivable situation. As yet, it 
 is true, we have only demonstrated these facts 
 with regard to fiction, history, epic poetry, or 
 some form of narrative composition. But we 
 shall shortly satisfy ourselves that the same 
 conditions hold true in the reading of the 
 
 159
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 driest scientific treatise or of the most ab- 
 stract philosophical speculation. 
 
 It only remains, therefore, for us to con- 
 vince ourselves — not on the authority of 
 some one's say-so, but from our own criticism 
 of our own experience — that the actual rele- 
 vancy to ourselves of these constantly varied 
 confrontations, and the source of the enjoy- 
 ment derived from making them, lies, as we 
 have assumed, in their being seekings-out of 
 discoverable relationships between the two 
 worlds from which they are taken. 
 
 Let us see if we can do this. 
 
 You and I and almost every American of 
 our generation have, at some flaming moment 
 of realization, thanked God that he or she had 
 not been handicapped as was Helen Keller; 
 and have marveled at the triumph of her al- 
 most incredible climbing out of the prison of 
 herself into consciousness of the world and 
 into communion with her fellow men. And 
 it is even possible to ask ourselves whether, 
 had Miss Keller not been vouchsafed the 
 few months of sight and hearing that were 
 hers in infancy, she could later on have been 
 released from her solitary confinement. 
 
 1 60
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 But we are less likely to have realized that, 
 at the instant of birth, every one of us is im- 
 prisoned, incomunicado, in our undeveloped 
 selves; and that it is not in initial situation, 
 but in means at hand for escape from that 
 situation, that we differ from a child born 
 into eternal darkness and unbreakable silence. 
 
 For we, unlike such a misfortunate, are 
 born into a world visibly peopled by our kind. 
 From the first, the instructions of our instincts 
 are supplemented by impulses of imitativeness 
 derived from without. We see, with uncom- 
 prehending eyes, long before we are con- 
 sciously stirred to perception. We suck in ex- 
 planations through our senses long before we 
 know that we are to have need of them. But 
 such a Helen Keller as we have imagined, 
 having almost no way of recognizing the exist- 
 ence of others, would have almost no way of 
 picking the lock of her own meaning. It 
 would not merely be that the things that 
 touched her body would be non-existent to 
 her except as contacts: the very things that 
 she touched herself with — ■ her own fingers and 
 toes — would be inexplicable to her because 
 she knew no others like them. 
 
 161
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 We have all, in our time, thrilled at the 
 thought of Robinson Crusoe, discovering in 
 the sand of his island beach a footprint that 
 was not his own. But think of some Helen 
 Keller, marooned before she was born on a far 
 more isolate island, stretching out what she 
 did not know was a human hand and finding 
 in the void a face the facsimile of hers! 
 
 That face we can think of as her first book. 
 It would be printed in raised characters for 
 the blind. Slowly, like one spelling out unfa- 
 miliar words, we can imagine her reading its 
 features in terms of her own. And then, in the 
 two-edged moment of final realization, we 
 can imagine her first conception of personal 
 identity unfold into her first inkling of an 
 ordered world. 
 
 VIII 
 
 But let me tell you of an actual experience 
 of my own. 
 
 Little by little, when I was a boy, I became 
 conscious of the fact that in learning the al- 
 phabet, and in learning to count, 1 had some- 
 how involuntarily assigned positions in space 
 to the letters and numerals of these series. 
 162
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 Indeed I had built these letters and numer- 
 als into definite and visualizable structures, 
 which never changed, which were almost al- 
 ways present at the back of my consciousness 
 when I was dealing with letters or numbers, 
 and upon which, as upon a scaffolding, I lo- 
 cated say the letter P, or the number 45, when 
 I had occasion to deal with either as a part 
 of a system. Thus the numerals from 1 to 1 1 
 were to me a set of steps that led up to a plat- 
 form that was 12. Between this platform and 
 another (which was 20) the teens, like a rope 
 ladder, hung in a sagging curve. And from 20 
 to 100 the figures climbed in a series of rigid 
 scaling-ladders of nine rungs each, that were 
 set up between platforms that receded as they 
 rose. The alphabet, on the other hand, ran 
 directly away frorn me, rising and falling like 
 a one-track scenic railway. Even the Lord's 
 Prayer was organized. It ran down, like a 
 trail into some canon, from "Our Father," at 
 the top in the sun, to a dark, deep bottom 
 where "Amen" echoed in the gloom. 
 
 And as I grew older, and no one in my hear- 
 ing ever mentioned having such notions, I 
 came to assume that no one had them. I be- 
 
 163
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 gan to fancy myself, in this respect, different 
 from my kind — mentally deformed. The 
 consciousness of the thing became a secret 
 trouble of which I was ashamed; and there 
 were even times when I wondered if it might 
 not be the beginning of insanity. 
 
 And then, on a happy evening, a youn£ 
 physician of my adolescent acquaintance 
 happened in the course of conversation to 
 mention this almost universal child-habit of 
 contriving space-symbols for mind-sequences. 
 He spoke of the fact that as we grow up we 
 gradually cease to need them, and hence dis- 
 card and forget them; so that many people in 
 later life are quite unconscious of ever having 
 had or used them. He asked me whether, by 
 chance, I still remembered mine. 
 
 Can you not imagine the eagerness with 
 which I described to him my prayer-canon, 
 my numerical scaling-ladders, my alphabetical 
 scenic railway? Can you not picture the in- 
 terest with which I leaned over his shoulder 
 while he took pencil and paper and drew for 
 me diagrams of his own symbol-conceptions 
 and of those of others? 
 
 For myself, I shall never forget that even- 
 
 164
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 ing. For on it, like the Helen Keller we have 
 imagined, I reached out into the dark and 
 found a duplicate of myself. On it I got my 
 first inkling of the truth I am here illustrating 
 for you. 
 
 IX 
 
 For it is only as members of a species that 
 we are comprehensible to our own intelli- 
 gence. 
 
 It is only by our likeness to others that we 
 understand ourselves. It is only by their like- 
 ness to us that we understand others. And 
 these two understandings are not independ- 
 ent of each other and separate. They are 
 complementary to each other and reciprocal 
 — like the indrawing and exhaling of our 
 breath. The life within us and the life with- 
 out are halves of a whole. 
 
 Of course it may occur to you to challenge 
 the statement that we only arrive at an un- 
 derstanding either of ourselves or of one 
 another through our mutual resemblances; 
 because, for each one of us, so large a part of 
 these reciprocal understandings consists of 
 estimated differences. But these differences, 
 
 165
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 when we come to sift them, always turn out 
 to be differences of degree and never differ- 
 ences of kind. To you, a ruby lantern sus- 
 pended in darkness may be a jewel and a joy; 
 while a green lantern, similarly placed, may be 
 almost a matter of indifference. And to me 
 these conditions may be reversed. Yet if we 
 compare notes we readily understand each 
 other. But a man who was color blind, and to 
 whom, in consequence, red and green were 
 utterly and forever undistinguishable, could 
 only make shift to understand our feelings in 
 regard to them by telling himself that, what- 
 ever they were, they must be of a nature an- 
 alogous to his OAvn feelings in regard to blue 
 and orange. And a man born blind, although 
 from repeated assurances he might have come 
 to accept it as a fact that he was somehow 
 different from us others, could never in the 
 remotest sense conceive the nature of the 
 difference. 
 
 x 
 
 And what we have thus come to realize as 
 true in regard to the life we share with other 
 humans, is equally true of the life we share in 
 
 1 66
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 a less complete manner with all that is ani- 
 mate on earth. It is through their disclosed 
 resemblances to ourselves, and by our conse- 
 quent fragmentary ability to "put ourselves 
 in their places," that alone we are able to 
 understand the impulses that move these 
 other lives and to estimate the differences in 
 degree that mark the gulfs between us. 
 
 And I hope that at this point you will cry 
 out in protest against my apparent neglect 
 of our manifest ability to know the "facts" 
 about an insect or an animal without in the 
 least understanding it or caring to. For this 
 brings us face to face with the last point nec- 
 essary to be elucidated for the complete 
 grasping of the idea that we are engaged in 
 introducing "into our heads." 
 
 For the only means we have of "knowing 
 the facts" about an insect or an animal, is the 
 noting of the relationships that it bears to the 
 material world — that is to say, to the environ- 
 ment that we share in common with it. And 
 our sole means of acquiring knowledge, under- 
 standing, or mastery over this environment — ■ 
 over the world without us — or of instinc- 
 tively and progressively adapting ourselves 
 
 167
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 to its iron-clad requirements, is the conscious 
 or unconscious seeking-out of its relation- 
 ships to ourselves — to the world within us. 
 For these two worlds are also halves of a 
 whole. 
 
 XI 
 
 Just as it is true, then, that it is only as 
 members of a species that we — or it — are 
 comprehensible to our own intelligence; so it 
 is true that it is only as members of the physi- 
 cal universe that we as such members, or it as 
 such a universe, are in any measure to be 
 grasped by us. 
 
 And exactly as we read a novel, or a history, 
 or an epic, or any narrative of human activity, 
 by confronting successive "characters," — ■ 
 successive dramatized syntheses of our own 
 inner selves, — with various aspects of the 
 world and of life, so we read a work on mathe- 
 matics, or a description of a mechanical de- 
 vice, or a speculation in abstract science or 
 philosophy, by confronting successive syntheses 
 of our previously gathered perceptions and ideas 
 on the subject with the successive new condi- 
 tions proposed by the author. 
 
 168
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 We do not read this way because we have 
 studied the matter out and have determined 
 that it is a good way to do. We do it because 
 we are built that way and have to. We read 
 this way because, the world within us and the 
 world without being related as they are, it is 
 the only way we have of reading. And all of 
 our reactions to reading — all our laughter 
 and tears, all our elations and depressions, all 
 our delights and disgusts, our acceptances and 
 rejections, our understandings and percep- 
 tions and acquiescences and disagreements — 
 are the direct and sole result of supposedly 
 discovered relationships between these two 
 worlds, made in the course of these mental 
 and imaginative confrontations. Thus laugh- 
 ter is a reaction to relationships discovered 
 where they were least expected, or to relation- 
 ships appearing to exist, but suddenly dis- 
 covered to be preposterous. 
 
 XII 
 
 And now, before we go on to consider the 
 advantages we can gain by making this idea 
 that we have now grasped an operative ele- 
 ment in our actual reading, let us pause a 
 
 169
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 moment and look back, with this new under- 
 standing in mind, at the separate steps of our 
 earlier inquiry. We shall see that the facts 
 that we have there successively established 
 are beginning to join hands in a ramifying 
 network of significance, and that our previous 
 conclusions are already establishing among 
 themselves cross-references of connection. 
 
 When, for example, we recall the first chap- 
 ter of this book, we see more many-sidedly 
 than at first why it is only through the story 
 that we tell ourselves that an author's story 
 gains meaning for us. 
 
 When we remember our examination into 
 the function of the dictionary, we see fresh 
 reasons why we have constantly to contrive 
 new meanings of our own for the words of 
 others. 
 
 When we now look back at those vague and 
 egotistical sounding phrases, "a desire to find 
 ourselves" and a desire to "get away from 
 ourselves," we find that we have acquired 
 a more complex but also a more ordered con- 
 ception of the true meanings of these expres- 
 sions; and that the sanctions that underlie 
 them have become less questionable to us. 
 
 170
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 We see, also, more clearly and comprehend- 
 ingly why it is that only those "meanings" 
 (which is to say those ideas of relationship) 
 that we have first internally felt and then 
 objectively criticized (which is to say meas- 
 ured up with other accepted meanings and 
 relationships) can — whether they be the 
 meanings of words or the meaning of the 
 world — become a part of individual culture 
 for us. 
 
 We see new reasons why that sense of direc- 
 tion which we defined for ourselves in the last 
 chapter, and found to coincide with the line of 
 development of the individual and the race, is 
 not a matter of our arbitrary choice, but of 
 inherent necessity — why it is that we must 
 somehow move along it, or somewhere stag- 
 nate on the way. 
 
 We see, as we could not see at the beginning 
 of the present chapter, that the living that we 
 ourselves do is never really comprehended by 
 us until (with or without the aid of books) we 
 have read and re-read it into other lives; and 
 that the infinitely various livingness of others 
 is never really grasped by us until we have 
 read and re-read it into as many as may be of
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 those potential selves that life has denied us 
 the chance to be. 
 
 And we see, finally, that "the adventure of 
 learning to read," that we spoke of on an 
 earlier page, — the lifelong adventure of 
 learning progressively to reemploy the living 
 that we do for the further exploring of these 
 two infinitely interesting worlds, — is not two 
 adventures, but the inseparable halves of one 
 adventure. 
 
 XIII 
 
 And now we come to the second point of 
 our present discussion — the advantages that 
 will acrue to us if we make deliberate use 
 of this idea in our reading. 
 
 We have seen that all our reactions to read- 
 ing, no matter how momentary or how mo- 
 mentous they may be, are in reality reactions 
 to relationships consciously realized or uncon- 
 sciously sensed as existing, either directly be- 
 tween some aspect of our inner selves and 
 some aspect of the outer world, or directly be- 
 tween various aspects of the outer world, each 
 of which bears its own relation to our inner 
 selves. And what we are really asking our- 
 
 172
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 selves is how (since we seem to achieve these 
 reactions instinctively and spontaneously and 
 without taking thought about them) it can 
 possibly advantage us deliberately to note 
 their nature and consciously to inquire from 
 time to time into their hidden meanings. 
 
 And the answer (which is twofold) is based 
 on the fact that we are forced by the very con- 
 ditions of our being either to read on into new 
 realizations of relationship, or to read round 
 and round in the worn circle of those we have. 
 And the first half of this answer is that every 
 road of reading, no matter what its character 
 may be or what may be our purpose in follow- 
 ing it, will sooner or later be blocked for us by 
 unrealized relationships unless we learn little 
 by little to deal recognizingly and inquiringly 
 with relationships as they arise. And the sec- 
 ond half of the answer is that every relation- 
 ship thus consciously noted and more or less 
 criticized and coordinated with others of its 
 kind, becomes a part of our reading capital — 
 becomes a building-block in itself, employable 
 at need either as a unit in future construc- 
 tions, or as an entering wedge in future analy- 
 ses. 
 
 173
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 XIV 
 
 And this brings us to our third point — the 
 problem of method. 
 
 How are we to set about developing this 
 seeking-out of relationships into an actively 
 operative factor in our actual reading, with- 
 out making a labor of what should be an en- 
 grossing adventure and a zestful satisfying of 
 our natural appetites? 
 
 And before attempting to answer this ques- 
 tion — ■ before indicating a practicable ap- 
 proach to a method whose later developments 
 are always individual adaptations of personal 
 means to personal ends — it will be well for us 
 to place before ourselves, on the one hand, a 
 reminder, and, on the other hand, a caution. 
 
 Let us be careful to remember, then, that to 
 speak of our inborn and instinctive craving 
 for recognized relationships between our com- 
 plex selves and our involved environment as 
 a "natural appetite," is by no means a figure 
 of speech. For a natural appetite is exactly 
 what this craving is. It is as basic and as 
 actual an appetite as that for food. And just 
 as we are guided to the seeking of food by 
 
 174
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 hunger, so we are guided to the seeking of re- 
 lationships by curiosity. And just as we 
 judge the food we find, primarily by our un- 
 criticized likes and dislikes of its taste and 
 smell, so we judge the relationships we dis- 
 cover, primarily by our uncriticized likes 
 and dislikes of their implications. And just 
 as we alter our appreciations and modify our 
 habits in regard to food, and are influenced 
 in our later attitudes toward it by subtle 
 matters of digestive results and gustatory 
 education, so we gradually reorganize our 
 standards of value and extend our range of 
 enjoyment in the seeking of relationships, in- 
 fluenced thereto by the accumulating under- 
 standings that are the result of intellectual 
 digestion. And this fact — this appetite-rela- 
 tion that curiosity bears to our reading — it 
 will be well for us to keep in mind. 
 
 The caution that we must remember, on 
 the other hand, is that all development, along 
 such lines and by such steps as we are about to 
 examine, is a development and must be gone 
 through stage by stage. The juggler who holds 
 us fascinated by the easy dexterity with which 
 he keeps eleven balls cascading in the air 
 
 175
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 above his hands, did not begin with eleven. 
 He began with two — acquiring, so to say, 
 a muscular familiarity with the relations be- 
 tween them and his hands before adding a 
 third ball and beginning to master the relation- 
 ships thus complicated. How much more, 
 then, is it necessary for us to be modest in our 
 beginnings in acquiring control over these far 
 more tricksy and more mutually interdepend- 
 ent playthings, the relationships with which 
 we are now dealing? 
 
 xv 
 
 The first rule, then, that it behooves us to 
 observe for a gradual, unforced, yet effective 
 approach to this better reading, is that we 
 must learn to look upon our curiosity as the 
 prompting of our mental hunger. We must, lit- 
 tle by little, learn to value our curiosity just as 
 we learn, little by little, to value "appetite." 
 And we must learn, little by little, to exercise 
 something of the same common sense and 
 common caution in the satisfying of the one 
 that we do in the satisfying of the other. 
 
 The French have a proverb which says that 
 the man who does not understand his own 
 
 176
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 stomach at thirty is a fool. Let us be honest 
 enough to apply this aphorism to our minds 
 also. 
 
 XVI 
 
 It should not, by now, be necessary, but it 
 may none the less be wise, to point out that 
 any reading that we do which is undertaken 
 through some impulse of "wanting to know" 
 is directly motivated by curiosity. And that 
 any reading that we do which is undertaken 
 through some impulse of "wanting to play" 
 is motivated by that form of potential curios- 
 ity that we call "keenness" and which is at 
 the very least a readiness to be interested. And 
 that no reading undertaken through any 
 impulse of "wanting to forget" can really be- 
 come effective of its object unless one or other 
 of these forms of curiosity shall, like hunger 
 aroused by eating, be stirred to life in us by 
 the act of reading. 
 
 Curiosity, then, is the only conscious stimu- 
 lus we have to begin with; and it continues to 
 be, throughout whatever reading develop- 
 ment may come to us, the underlying motive- 
 power back of all our seekings, all our find- 
 
 177
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 ings, and all our passings-on. And the inten- 
 tion of our first rule is the practical applying 
 of this knowledge, by gradually learning to 
 regard as an appetite all curiosity or keen- 
 ness that impels us toward reading, and to 
 regard all the reading that we do as in some 
 sort a satisfying of an appetite. 
 
 But this being understood, it must be noted 
 that overt curiosity and anticipatory keen- 
 ness, and developing interest, are all, when we 
 begin a book or a magazine article or what- 
 not, apt to be of a general or "blanket" va- 
 riety; and are apt, in the main, to develop 
 cumulatively along some central and special- 
 ized axis; as when, as we frequently say, we 
 become " so interested in a story " that we can 
 "hardly wait to see how it comes out." And 
 we shall have occasion later on to consider the 
 guiding of our curiosity in regard both to the 
 developing relationships involved in a story's 
 unfolding and to the criticizing of indicated 
 conclusions involved in a story's ending. But 
 for the moment we must pass these larger 
 matters by in order to examine certain minor 
 manifestations of curiosity or interest that 
 more immediately concern us. 
 
 178
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 Please note, then, that, even in reading the 
 most engrossing story in the world, the swift 
 surface of the main stream of our interest is 
 constantly flecked by floating feelings of lik- 
 ing and disliking; is constantly flawed by little 
 upwelling bubbles of inquiry; is constantly 
 dimpled by tiny whirlpools of subsidiary curi- 
 osities, — curiosities as to why's and where- 
 fore's and probabilities and fittingness, — all 
 of which, as we now know, are instinctive 
 sensings or half-conscious reachings-out after 
 relationships. And this fact, so universally 
 common in the experience of us all, yet so 
 frequently regarded with impatience or in- 
 difference, brings us to the formulation of our 
 second rule. 
 
 XVII 
 
 For these floating flecks of liking and dis- 
 liking, these momentary impulses of inquiry 
 that appear for a second like bubbles on the 
 surface of our attention, these little swirls of 
 curiosity that form, and are lost again as we 
 read on, are not only the actual, concrete em- 
 bodiments of those spontaneous reactions to 
 "meanings" that we discussed in an earlier 
 
 179
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 chapter; but they constitute our natural 
 promptings toward the kind of reading — the 
 reading that is an adventurous seeking-out of 
 relationships between our two worlds — that 
 we are here discussing. 
 
 Our second rule, therefore, is that we must 
 learn to evaluate our subsidiary curiosities. 
 
 How often has it not happened to each of 
 us, in hurrying across some stone-paved 
 station or down some mosaic-floored hallway, 
 to hear a little tinkle as of metal on marble be- 
 hind us, and to half-wonder for a second what 
 it was, and then, the next day, perhaps, to 
 miss some trinket that we valued and to say, 
 "There! That must have been what dropped 
 when I heard that noise!" 
 
 The promptings of our subsidiary curiosi- 
 ties as we read are the tinkling sounds of rela- 
 tionships dropping in our paths. 
 
 ) 
 
 XVIII 
 
 "But," you may exclaim, "if I am to in- 
 terrupt my reading every time that I am con- 
 scious of a like or a dislike, every time I ex- 
 perience a tendency toward inquiry, every 
 time I am conscious of a blur of puzzlement 
 
 1 80
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 or twinge of curiosity, what is to become of 
 the 'merged series' of my 'mental movies'? / 
 want to read my book. I don't want to run an 
 intellectual detective agency!" 
 
 And this objection, if any such procedure 
 were required of us, would be eminently well 
 taken. But happily this is not the case. We 
 must learn to value our subsidiary curiosities, 
 but, as we shall presently see, there is a very 
 simple and practical way of discriminating 
 between them. Moreover, a large majority of 
 these collateral stirrings of our interest and 
 curiosity that are prompted by our reading, 
 are actually dealt with by such instant and 
 hardly noticed mental gestures as that de- 
 scribed in the case of our reading of the sen- 
 tence, "The bond that held them together 
 was thus a spiritual tie." 
 
 You will now see, by the way, that the 
 "meaning" problem involved in that sentence 
 was, in reality, a relationship problem. 
 
 It is true that the beginner, who is for the 
 first time trying consciously to improve his 
 methods of reading along these lines, will on 
 occasion be rendered self-conscious by his new 
 realization of the multiplicity of such prompt- 
 
 1S1
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 ings. But in practice he will soon find that 
 most of these matters are being dealt with 
 without, so to put it, his mind's bothering 
 nim about them. For in all our activities., 
 mental as well as physical, there is a constantly 
 shifting focus of conscious attention, upborne 
 by a whole sub-system of unconscious ade- 
 quacy and action. And one of the first things 
 that an observer learns about his mind action 
 in reading is that, while the conscious focus of 
 his intelligence is " reading his book," another, 
 half-conscious portion of his mental activity is 
 engaged in correcting slight errors of under- 
 standing, picking up dropped stitches of 
 minor relationship, and generally "redding 
 up" and keeping things decently shipshape 
 behind him as he goes along. 
 
 And as this rear-guard portion of one's 
 reading activity is quite as dependent as the 
 other upon one's reading capital of past ex- 
 perience, of already realized relationships, 
 and of previously cross-referenced under- 
 standings, the longer one practices the better 
 and more purposeful reading we are consider- 
 ing, the more quick-witted and efficient and 
 joyously industrious does this half-conscious 
 
 182
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 portion of our mind become in the prosecu- 
 tion of its humble yet vastly important work. 
 
 XIX 
 
 Yet the fact remains that there are many 
 promptings of our subsidiary curiosity with 
 which this half-conscious and essentially co- 
 operative portion of our minds is incapable of 
 dealing. There are, indeed, many more of 
 them than we have either time or need to deal 
 with at all. And so we must discover some 
 touchstone of discrimination. 
 
 We do not, as a matter of fact, and because 
 we have lost a few lockets and cigarette cases 
 and knives and gold coins by neglecting the 
 tinkle they made in falling, go about forever 
 after investigating every sound we hear be- 
 hind us, or eternally slapping all our pockets 
 in turn to make sure that we are missing noth- 
 ing. We learn, after a while, to discriminate 
 between tinkles. And this discernment is the 
 problem we are now facing. Moreover it in- 
 volves, and brings down to the test of actual 
 practice (as I hope you will see) some of those 
 shrewd distinctions between conscious and 
 unconscious performance that we have previ- 
 
 183
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 ously discussed, and some of the principles of 
 deliberate criticism and control of spontaneous 
 reactions to what we read that we have already 
 inquired into. 
 
 xx 
 
 Here, then, is our third rule — a rule upon 
 which, in the beginning, we can safely rely 
 for a conservative yet valid discrimination 
 and for a gradual but effective habit-form- 
 ing: 
 
 Never neglect any prompting of subsidiary 
 curiosity that is, of itself, sharp enough to shift, 
 though only for a few seconds, the conscious 
 focus of your reading attention. 
 
 Never, for instance, if you are moved to 
 wonder whether or not you would, in his place, 
 have acted as a character in your story is sup- 
 posed to act, fail to weigh the query at least 
 roughly in the scales of your own self-knowl- 
 edge. Never fail, for example, to follow out, to 
 the extent of your actually aroused interest, 
 the side question of an action's effect upon 
 other characters of the tale or upon the tale 
 itself. And if it is a scenario of ideas that you 
 are producing, instead of a fiction scenario, or 
 
 184
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 if it is a story of mechanical or chemical rela- 
 tionships that you are reading, instead of a 
 story of human relationships, never fail to 
 follow up, at least to the momentary sating of 
 your aroused interest, any side issue of causal 
 relationship or of logical sequence that simi- 
 larly forces itself upon your previously other- 
 wise-engaged attention. 
 
 But understand that this advice is not for a 
 moment intended to be taken as an urging to 
 "make yourself do something" because you 
 feel it to be "self-educative" or in any other 
 sense "good discipline." It is, on the con- 
 trary, to be understood as an urging to let 
 yourself do something that you have a natural 
 prompting to do, but which other promptings,. 
 more habitually indulged, and thus grown into 
 tyrannical spoiled-child promptings, are try- 
 ing to keep you from doing. 
 
 In other words, it is not for a moment a 
 priggish, pedantic, bluestocking, high-brow 
 attitude toward a natural and enjoyable oc- 
 cupation that is demanded of us. We are not 
 asked to keep poking ourselves to see if we 
 are alive; or to keep self-consciously taking 
 our mental temperatures to see if we are 
 
 185
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 functioning normally. The fact is just the 
 opposite of this. For right reading, in the di- 
 rection established in the last chapter, is the 
 normal result of an intelligent following of 
 our natural promptings ; and wrong reading — 
 that is to say, reading into some circle of stag- 
 nation — is always the result of their willful 
 or slack-minded suppression. 
 
 Of course, however, it goes without saying 
 that, as one cannot control a spoiled child 
 without effort, so one cannot control a clam- 
 orous, over-indulged, hurry-along-with-the- 
 main-story curiosity without some exercise of 
 will power. And unless this spoiled-child 
 curiosity is controlled and made to behave, it 
 is impossible for us to give play even to the 
 most immediately alluring and ultimately 
 valuable of our subsidiary curiosities. This 
 much of willing effort we must make, then; 
 this much of "self-discipline" we must prac- 
 tice, and must persevere in in spite of initial 
 failures and forgettings, before we can learn to 
 apply this most obvious and natural rule for 
 getting started on the new road. 
 
 1 86
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 XXI 
 
 And here, for the moment, we might leave 
 the matter. For once a reader has learned 
 something of the quickly accumulating read- 
 ing capital that piles up in him through a fol- 
 lowing of these basic rules, and begins to dis- 
 cover the enhancement of his own enjoyment 
 in reading (whatever the character of that 
 enjoyment may be) that flows from that 
 capital's automatic reinvestment, he will in- 
 evitably begin to develop his personal adapta- 
 tions to the new method. And as soon as we 
 reach this border-land of personal adaptation, 
 we approach that country of individual likes 
 and dislikes, of personal reachings-out and 
 drawings-back, of temperamental tendencies, 
 and intellectual affinities of affiliation, that 
 can never (unless it be by some "psycho- 
 analyst" dependent on our aid) be mapped 
 out for us in advance by others. 
 
 But there is one helpful suggestion that 
 may be made before we go on to the consider- 
 ation of other aspects of our inquiry. 
 
 It is quite evident that in reading any arti- 
 cle or essay or book that contains a developed 
 
 187
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 theme, — fictional, argumentative, demon- 
 strational, or what-not, — the intelligent 
 reader, no matter what his personal idiosyn- 
 cracies of method may be, must maintain 
 some sort of just balance between the mass of 
 subsidiary interests we have been discussing, 
 and the main interest of the theme itself. And, 
 since, the more cross-referenced ideas of rela- 
 tionship a reader possesses, the more numer- 
 ous will be his incidental promptings toward 
 the indulging of subsidiary curiosities, it fol- 
 lows that he must, more and more as he goes 
 on, pick and choose between these prompt- 
 ings. 
 
 And we happen to be so built that our un- 
 directed choice is almost certain to fall upon 
 those curiosities that have to do with our re- 
 actions of liking; while we are apt to set aside 
 and suppress those curiosities (as to deriva- 
 tions and results, as to "why's" and "what- 
 then's") that have to do with reactions of 
 disliking. 
 
 The suggestion that I have to make, then, 
 is that you little by little form the deliberate 
 habit of directing your choice toward the in- 
 dulging of any curiosities as to the nature and 
 
 188
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 meanings of instinctive dislikes that you may 
 be lucky enough to have. 
 
 And the reason for this is very simple. 
 
 We have already seen that, sooner or later, 
 any road of reading that we may elect to fol- ; 
 low will be blocked for us by unrealized rela- 
 tionships if we have not dealt recognizingly 
 and inquiringly with earlier and underlying 
 relationships as these presented themselves. 
 And it so happens that the hidden relation- 
 ships involved in our reactions of liking will, 
 comparatively speaking and in the long run, 
 take care of themselves. For when we experi- 
 ence a reaction of liking, we welcome it. And 
 when we reexperience it we re-welcome it; and 
 even savor the recognition and, as it were, 
 roll it for an instant under the tongue of our 
 intelligence. So that little by little we tend, 
 without any other effort on our parts and by 
 the unconscious chemic of our minds, to re- 
 solve it into its component elements. 
 
 But with a reaction of dislike it is very dif- 
 ferent. The first few times that we experience 
 it we may have a prompting of curiosity as to 
 its nature and as to the relationships involved 
 in our recoil from it. But if we continue to 
 
 189
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 ignore these, we soon form the habit of dodging 
 the reaction. Instead of savoring it and rolling 
 it under our tongue, we spit it out at the first; 
 taste. And in the end (since some kind of a 
 "reason why" our minds must have to be 
 happy) we are as like as not to substitute a 
 prejudice for an understanding, and to accept 
 some cant phrase of our own or of some one 
 else's in lieu of an explanation, and thus to es- 
 tablish once for all an " unrealized relation- 
 ship" that may block some future road for us 
 with stagnating results. 
 
 XXII 
 
 We constantly and as a matter of common 
 caution establish for ourselves in our every- 
 day living such arbitrary reminders as this, of 
 things that we know it would be well for us to 
 do, but which we are prone to neglect. 
 
 The "shifting focus of our attention," even 
 in such matters as going down town and com- 
 ing back again, cannot safely be left to work 
 out its own salvation. It is because of this — ■ 
 because each one of the two hundred hurrying 
 humans who are crowding into a subway ex- 
 press is consciously hurrying, or consciously 
 
 190
 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 keeping himself from being crushed, or con- 
 sciously thinking out some left-over business 
 problem, or consciously forecasting some evening 
 pleasure^ instead of consciously putting one foot 
 in front of the other — that we keep a guard on 
 the subway platform to call out to them, 
 "watch your step!" — "watch your step!" 
 — "watch — step!" And a device that we 
 thus employ in the machinery of our daily 
 lives may well be adapted for use in the ma- 
 chinery of our daily reading. 
 
 Suppose, then, that as a beginning you ac- 
 custom yourself to regard any prompting of 
 natural curiosity or interest you may have in 
 regard to any feeling of distaste or disliking, 
 as an official cry of "Watch your step!" Later 
 on, you will find it easy and expedient to ar- 
 range other signals of predetermined signif- 
 icance and watch-dogs of helpful reminder to 
 suit the individual adaptations that you will 
 develop. 
 
 And now, having repeatedly referred to the 
 existence of something that we have called 
 our "intellectual digestion," let us take a 
 closer look at this function of our mind and 
 examine its relation to our reading.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 INTELLECTUAL DIGESTION 
 
 I 
 
 Some wise wag, hiding a parable in a parody, 
 has said that "to eat is human; to digest, 
 divine." And when we come to think about 
 it, we realize that it is exactly here — at 
 the point indicated by the semicolon in this 
 wag's sentence — that we are accustomed 
 (as though at some boundary posting-station 
 where burdens are shifted to other horses and 
 entrusted to new guides) to hand over our re- 
 sponsibilities, quite casually and confidently, 
 to the Unknown Mystery. Three times a day, 
 as self-willed and selective human choosers, 
 we " start something." And three times a day, 
 unless something goes wrong with the mysteri- 
 ous machinery, we experience, with supreme 
 content but with no other concern, the result- 
 ant miracle of transubstantiation. 
 
 And it is just the same with our minds. 
 
 No matter how proud of — I had almost 
 said how "stuck on" — our thinking, and our 
 
 192
 
 INTELLECTUAL DIGESTION 
 
 reasoning pozvers, and our deductive faculties 
 we may be, it requires very little self-knowl- 
 edge to realize that these more or less con- 
 scious and mechanical forms of mental exer- 
 cise are but the chewing oj our mental food. 
 The ultimate miracle of transubstantiation — - 
 the involuntary processes of disintegration 
 and transforming, of selection and rejection, 
 of absorption and assimilation, by which the 
 essentials of ideas and the outcomes of under- 
 standings are finally incorporated in our per- 
 sonalities — all this takes place on the further 
 side of another (or is it the same?) semicolon. 
 No less in our reading than in our eating, 
 there is a point at which, quite casually and 
 confidently, we entrust all further responsibil- 
 ity to the Unknown Mystery within us. In 
 short, if you happen to prefer the statement, 
 there is a chemistry of the brain as well as of 
 the body, whose fundamental mystery eludes 
 us, but whose workings we may none the less 
 study, and in the attainments of whose ends 
 it is thus possible for us to cooperate. 
 
 And it is the purpose of this chapter (i) to 
 examine, in the light of our everyday experi- 
 ence, the more obvious workings of this men- 
 
 193
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 tal chemistry; (2) to point out a misconcep- 
 tion that we constantly labor under in our 
 reading for want of this simple facing of fact; 
 and (3) to indicate the practical relevancy of 
 these matters to the further developing of the 
 reading-methods we are discussing. 
 
 11 
 
 Before, however, we go into the laboratory 
 and prepare the simple experiment needed to 
 demonstrate the actual character of the re- 
 actions we are wanting to understand, it will 
 be just as well to note a few general facts with 
 regard to our habitual actions and attitude in 
 the matter under discussion. For we are con- 
 stantly taking the real state of things into ac- 
 count, while failing specifically to recognize 
 their character. 
 
 Thus we frequently say to each other, " Yes, 
 I'm inclined to agree with you. But suppose 
 we sleep on it." We even have a proverb that 
 says, "The night brings counsel." And noth- 
 ing is more common than for a person who has 
 masticated an idea for an hour and then, so to 
 say, swallowed it and forgotten it, to be re- 
 minded of it the next day, or the next week, 
 
 194
 
 INTELLECTUAL DIGESTION 
 
 and, finding its appearance subtly altered and 
 his attitude correspondingly changed toward 
 it, to say, "No, I've been thinking that over, 
 and I've changed my mind." 
 
 Of course the psychologists hasten to sup- 
 ply us with highly interesting and, inciden- 
 tally, conflicting theories about involuntary 
 cerebration and the continuous activity of the 
 subliminal consciousness. But for our present 
 purpose it does n't make a bit of difference 
 what you call it. The fact remains that, in- 
 tellectually speaking, we are ruminating ani- 
 mals. The man just quoted had not, in any 
 ordinary sense ; been "thinking it over." He 
 had, quite involuntarily and without any con- 
 trol either of the process or the result, been 
 digesting the idea. His subsequent, conscious 
 consideration of the result was to all intents 
 and purposes a "chewing of his cud." 
 
 in 
 
 Our first concern, then, is to see whether 
 we cannot manage to surprise our minds in 
 the actual act, while reading, of carrying out 
 some of the coarser and less intricate transfor- 
 mations of its chemic action — just as, with a 
 
 195
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 couple of glass tubes and a bunsen burner, a 
 chemist will enable us to see Nature at her 
 more obvious tricks of prestidigitation. 
 
 And by way of preparing the laboratory for 
 our experiment, I am going to ask you to re- 
 member, all over again, that the printed mat- 
 ter before your eyes — whether it be on a 
 signboard, or on the front sheet of the morn- 
 ing paper, or on a page of an exciting novel, or 
 in the paragraph that you are now reading 
 — is never a thing in itself, but is always 
 merely printed instructions, like sheet music. 
 
 Somehow or other we do not seem to get 
 mixed up about the nature of sheet music. 
 
 Even musicians, who "read music" as 
 fluently as you and I read print, do not seem, 
 often, to get mixed up about it. 
 
 Practically every one recognizes sheet music 
 for what it actually is; namely, printed in- 
 structions as to what to do with a tin whistle, 
 or a flute, or a violin and a piano, or a quartette 
 of stringed instruments, or a full orchestra 
 with its choirs of strings and brasses and wood- 
 winds and instruments of percussion, in order 
 to make music. 
 
 But, somehow, it is different with reading 
 
 196
 
 INTELLECTUAL DIGESTION 
 
 matter. About the nature and the purpose of 
 that we are constantly getting mixed. 
 
 Suppose, then, that we begin by putting 
 down the facts. 
 
 (i) Reading matter, like sheet music, is 
 just printed instructions. 
 
 (2) It may be merely instructions as to 
 what to do with a set of muscles and with a 
 pair of eyes and a pair of ears; as in the rail- 
 way-crossing sign, stop! look! listen! 
 
 Or (3) it may be trite instructions (like a 
 tin-whistle tune) for stringing a few thread- 
 bare memories together so as to form a mental 
 image of a "statement of fact"; as (I quote 
 from this morning's paper) "The bride was 
 gowned in white satin and wore a tulle veil 
 caught back with orange blossoms." 
 
 Or (4) it may (as in H. G. Wells's novel, 
 "The Research Magnificent") be instruc- 
 tions as to what to do with the full orchestra 
 of one's personal attainment, with all its bal- 
 anced choirs of physical, emotional, mental, 
 and spiritual experience and responsiveness, 
 in order to make, inside one's self, a sym- 
 phonic, soul-stirring vision of the finenesses of 
 human failure. 
 
 197
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 But we are constantly forgetting this. 
 
 We are constantly settling down into the 
 lazy assumption that the text of a story is 
 the story itself; that the words of a poem are 
 the poetry itself; and forgetting that they are 
 only instructions as to what to do with our 
 memories and our imaginations, our reason 
 and our understanding, in order to create in- 
 side ourselves the story or the poem. 
 
 And the fact of which, at the present mo- 
 ment, we need to remind ourselves is that, 
 given a page or a volume of these instructions, 
 the rest is "up to us"; just exactly as in the 
 case of a musician with an instrument in his 
 hand, or of a conductor with an orchestra un- 
 der his baton, when one or other of them opens 
 a volume of sheet music. 
 
 IV 
 
 We all recognize that the sheet-music 
 method of conveying instructions is a make- 
 shift. 
 
 Even the layman knows it for a system of 
 signs, effective on the whole, but nevertheless 
 clumsy. Even the outsider understands that 
 this system of signs is amazingly definite as to 
 
 198
 
 INTELLECTUAL DIGESTION 
 
 main issues, but is often hazy and sometimes 
 wholly inarticulate as to subtleties — that it 
 leaves (not from choice, but from necessity) 
 many niceties of interpretation to the intelli- 
 gence and the personal decision of the per- 
 former. 
 
 But we fail as a rule to see that the same 
 thing, only more so, is true of our word-sys- 
 tem of conveying instructions. Composers 
 and performers alike, we are in the habit of 
 assuming that our word-system, and especially 
 our printed-word-system, not only equals the 
 other in the definiteness of its main instruc- 
 tions, but is capable of being made almost free 
 from minor haziness. 
 
 Yet the facts are quite the other way about. 
 
 The instructions of reading matter have, 
 when carefully examined, scarcely any abso- 
 lute definiteness to them at all. 
 
 They leave (and again not from choice but 
 from necessity) not merely the niceties of in- 
 terpretation, but the first-hand material of the 
 composition itself, to the more or less invol- 
 untary selection of the performer. 
 
 Of course as an idea — as an intellectual 
 realization — this fact has now become fa- 
 
 199
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 miliar to us. We have repeatedly proved it to 
 our own satisfaction and to our consequent 
 acceptation in the earlier stages of our in- 
 quiry. But our present experiment requires 
 something more than this theoretical convic- 
 tion. And I am therefore going to contrive 
 that you shall, in imagination at least, see the 
 thing in operation with your own eyes. 
 
 v 
 
 The box adjoining that of the party I was 
 with at a recent Kneisel concert was occupied 
 by two well-known musicians. And I noticed 
 with some curiosity that during the perform- 
 ance of a Haydn quartette these two were 
 sitting well forward in their seats, with a copy 
 of the score held open on their knees, and were 
 watching with the most intent interest the 
 way in which the experts on the stage were 
 following the instructions of the composer. 
 Of course if the piece being played had been 
 a new one, if, say, it had been one of Schoen- 
 berg's intricate and radical challenges of har- 
 monic convention, this study of the score on 
 the part of these specialists would not have 
 attracted my attention. But the selection 
 
 200
 
 INTELLECTUAL DIGESTION 
 
 being rendered was one of the loveliest of 
 Havdn's well-known works, and the men I 
 was watching must have been familiar with 
 it for years. And they were not only listening 
 with all their ears to the music, but were fol- 
 lowing the printed instructions closely and ex- 
 changing from time to time quick glances of 
 silent comment and appreciation. 
 
 Now it is quite evident that they were not 
 watching to see whether the performers struck 
 the right notes. The definiteness of the instruc- 
 tions on the one hand, and the well-known 
 skill of the performers on the other, made 
 that a foregone conclusion. It was, as we can 
 see, the subtleties of this famous quartette's 
 individual interpretation that they were 
 studying. 
 
 But suppose that two of you were similarly 
 to sit, with the pages of Kipling's 'The 
 Brushwood Boy" open between you; aiid 
 suppose that it were possible — - by some 
 miracle of mind-reading — for you similarly 
 to watch (and to exchange glances about) the 
 way in which I followed the author's instruc- 
 tions as I read that story to myself. 
 
 Do you not see that here would be far 
 
 20 1
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 deeper differences than any of attack and of 
 accent, of execution and inflection, of tempo 
 and of temperament? Do you not see that, so 
 far from my "striking the right notes" being 
 a matter to be taken for granted, the very 
 materials I worked with would be either for- 
 eign to you or non-existent? That the memo- 
 ries I assembled into scenes, and the features 
 I built faces out of, would be unknown to you; 
 and that the combinations I made of them 
 would seem incongruous and inappropriate, 
 since you would lack the associations that I 
 unconsciously chose them for? 
 
 Do you not see that my landscape of Kip- 
 ling's "Dream Country" would be alien to 
 you, and that my cast of his chief characters 
 — the potential my selves with which I peopled 
 that mystic land — would be unrecognizable? 
 Nay, more: do you not see that to no single 
 important word in the entire text would I 
 give your personal meaning; and that the 
 words ihatzvere important to me — the words 
 whose grouped meanings every now and then 
 combined to "make things happen in me" — ■ 
 would often be words that you scarcely noticed? 
 
 202
 
 INTELLECTUAL DIGESTION 
 
 VI 
 
 Of course you see all this. But then all this 
 is merely an imaginative dramatization of 
 what we have already discovered and dis- 
 cussed. And I have contrived this dramatized 
 presentation of the actual workings of a read- 
 er's mind, not primarily for its own sake, but 
 as a demonstrator in chemistry will dispose 
 the paraphernalia and contrive the operative 
 conditions of an experiment in order that, 
 when the preliminary steps have been taken, 
 the ingredients mixed, the lamp lighted, and 
 the reaction intended to be observed is about 
 to take place, he may invite the onlookers to 
 approach the table and keep a closer watch. 
 And it is this final and closer look that I now 
 ask you to take at my supposed reading of 
 "The Brushwood Boy." 
 
 Do you not see that when my readings of 
 certain groups of words "made things happen 
 in me," these happenings would at times con- 
 sist of the minglings (like those of raindrops 
 on a window pane) of bits of old feeling into 
 spurts of new emotion? And do you not see 
 that at other times these " happenings " would 
 
 203
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 be subtler still; would consist of almost chem- 
 ical combinings of separate atoms of familiar 
 understanding into the beginnings of new per- 
 ceptions? And do you not, finally, see that 
 these occurrences would be utterly personal to 
 me, and that, since they would quite literally 
 result in new growths of my personality, they 
 would also be of supreme importance to me? 
 
 VII 
 
 But our object in examining a bit into the 
 workings of these subtleties is by no means a 
 desire to supervise or control their operation. 
 The mere attempt to do this would instantly 
 defeat its own end by stopping the machinery. 
 Our object is to enable us, by understanding 
 the sources of our reactions to reading, to ac- 
 quire little by little a better criterion of values 
 as to their output and to help us in gradually 
 building up that attitude toward all reading 
 that is to be the final object of our search. 
 
 In the last chapter we examined the more 
 or less concrete, conscious, and voluntary 
 seekings-out of relationships from which the 
 rewards of reading (be these restful diversion, 
 pleasurable stimulation, or utilitarian " knowl- 
 
 204
 
 INTELLECTUAL DIGESTION 
 
 edge") are most immediately derived. And 
 here we have managed for a moment to 
 glimpse something of the manifold, minute, 
 unconscious, and involuntary play of similar 
 relationship-establishing that goes on, in the 
 very act of reading, beneath the level of our 
 ordinary attention and notice. And having 
 once recognized the existence and glimpsed 
 the nature of this unconscious mental activity, 
 we can understand how, on the one hand, 
 these quick-forming nuclei of emotion and 
 perception rise, now and then, into conscious 
 recognition (like the tips of coral reefs above 
 the sea surface); and how, on the other hand, 
 it must be through some slow, chemic-like 
 continuance of the same activities that our 
 "second thoughts," our "having-slept-on-it" 
 judgments, and all the constructive results of 
 our unconscious "digestion" of ideas and 
 proposals are derived. 
 
 But our still more immediate object in ex- 
 amining into our subconscious reactions to 
 reading is the recognizing and getting rid of a 
 misconception that we are all prone to enter- 
 tain; namely, the notion that it is the amount 
 that we read, and more especially yet the sun* 
 
 205
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 of what we remember out of what we read, that 
 really matters. 
 
 It is n't. 
 
 What really counts is the sum of what hap- 
 pens in us through reading — the ultimate 
 outcome of those "concrete" combinings and 
 "chemical" transformations by which new 
 tissues are added to our intelligence and new 
 cells to our understanding. What counts is 
 not the quantity of our intellectual food, but 
 the products of our intellectual digestion. 
 
 VIII 
 
 I know a man — he is a contemporary and 
 was once a classmate of my own — who has 
 pushed this misconception to greater lengths 
 than any one I know. Indeed, his mind is less 
 like a digestive apparatus and more like a 
 cold-storage warehouse than anything human 
 I have ever encountered. For some decades 
 now his mental floor-space has been practi- 
 cally filled, so that he no longer adds anything 
 bulky to his stores. But little that has gone 
 into his warehouse has been lost; and nothing 
 that has stayed in it has ever spoiled. 
 
 I have watched him for years — watched 
 
 206
 
 INTELLECTUAL DIGESTION 
 
 him with curiosity and amazement — watched 
 him take out from those icily preservative 
 depths and lay down, as it were on the counter 
 of his conversation, supposedly perishable in- 
 tellectual provender: — the plots of long- 
 forgotten novels, the middle names of now 
 deceased acquaintances, the outlines of old 
 after-dinner arguments, the carcasses of ex- 
 tinct theories, bunches of biographical dates, 
 crates of infertile facts, historical happenings, 
 chemical formulae, literary quotations, — an 
 endless variety, in short, of mental food that 
 should have been consumed and digested 
 years ago when it was fresh and in season, but 
 which he has preserved, staling but intact, for 
 a generation. 
 
 Yet while some of these articles come out 
 a trifle shriveled, — a little sicklied o'er with 
 the cold-storage hue, — no one of them ever 
 shows the slightest sign of having been at- 
 tacked by the digestive juices of my friend's 
 mentality. And never — certainly never in 
 the last twenty years or so — have I seen any 
 reason to suspect that, by the normal proc- 
 esses of intellectual digestion and assimila- 
 tion, he has added a single cell to his respon- 
 
 207
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 siveness to life or revivified by a single red 
 corpuscle the circulation of his outlook on the 
 world. 
 
 And yet, in certain lines, and in the ordinary 
 acceptation of the term, he is " a great reader." 
 
 He is also, for our present purpose, a most 
 useful specimen of a horrible example. For 
 nothing ever happens in him when he reads. 
 Nothing, that is, except the occasional storing 
 away, in some still vacant cranny in his re- 
 frigerated memory, of one more frozen fact 
 or dead idea. 
 
 IX 
 
 You will not — or I trust that you will not 
 — imagine for a moment that I am impugning 
 the value of a good memory. I am merely 
 calling attention to the fact that the storing 
 of one's memory through reading is (or should 
 be) a means to an end and not an end in itself. 
 It is like the outfitting and provisioning of the 
 ship of our adventure. Everything that goes 
 into it that we can use later on is of value. 
 Anything that, in the final test, we neither put 
 to practical living use, or take out, like tinned 
 food, and intellectually digest and live by, is a 
 
 208
 
 INTELLECTUAL DIGESTION 
 
 waste of storage-room and a dead burden of 
 superfluous cargo. 
 
 The man we are talking about has a most 
 remarkable memory. He has (to change the 
 simile) coddled it and pampered it and "sac- 
 rificed himself" in order to "give it every ad- 
 vantage," exactly like a doting mother with 
 an only child. And the result is very similar. 
 This "only child" of his always wants, when 
 there is company, to monopolize the talk. It 
 is as bad as a pet parrot. It fills in every 
 pause with statements of irrelevant fact or of- 
 ferings of superfluous information. Yet even 
 so, we must not do my friend an injustice. 
 His memory has a value both to himself and 
 to those who know him. To himself I imagine 
 it is like a miser's strong box. When he is not 
 engaged in adding to its contents, he takes 
 out its unproductive treasures and hugs him- 
 self in the joy of counting them. And to his 
 acquaintances his memory is like a special sup- 
 plement to the encyclopaedia. One can often 
 turn to it for information that one does not 
 bother to carry round. 
 
 209
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 x 
 
 There is, by the way, a question that it has 
 been his habit to ask me, once a year or so, for 
 a long time. He asks it unexpectedly — ap- 
 parently when he thinks me off my guard or 
 in an "easy" mood, and thus liable to be sur- 
 prised into divulging a professional secret. 
 
 "John," he asks me, "how do you ever 
 manage to remember all you read?' : 
 
 Now it is, of course, useless to attempt a 
 direct answer to such a question from such a 
 man. You might explain to him for an hour; 
 but instead of trying to understand what you 
 meant, he would be trying to remember what 
 you said. So I take refuge in the Socratic 
 method. I ask him a question myself. 
 
 "George," I say, "you eat three meals a day 
 all the year round. How do you manage to 
 hold all you eat?" 
 
 But he fails to get it. 
 
 I can see by the expression of his eyes — • 
 those windows to his warehouse — that he 
 simply thinks that I have once more proved 
 too alert to be caught napping and have once 
 more guarded the secret that he so wants me 
 
 2IO
 
 INTELLECTUAL DIGESTION 
 
 to share with him. For he has noticed that I 
 have "ideas" in stock that he has, somehow, 
 failed to pick up. And he naturally assumes 
 that, since I have them, I must somewhere 
 have read them and remembered them. How 
 else, on the cold-storage basis of accumulat- 
 ing mental capital, can they have gotten into 
 my refrigerator? What he is really asking for 
 is my ammonia formula for preserving an 
 even mental temperature of 36 Fahrenheit. 
 And some day, on his tombstone, we shall find 
 engraved, "Lord, keep my memory cold." 
 
 XI 
 
 Let us each, at this point, do what George 
 apparently never does, and ask ourselves a 
 question. And let us each, before we go on 
 with our discussion, try just for a second or 
 two to find an honest answer. Here is the 
 question: — 
 
 " What did I have for dinner on the tenth of 
 last April ? " 
 
 Doubtless we have all forgotten. 
 
 Yet the mere effort to remember has set 
 blood to flooding the arterial filaments in our 
 brains. And it is quite likely that in this very 
 
 211
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 blood (which has just failed to stir into action 
 the memory cells charged with the details c f 
 that menu) there has flowed some transmuted 
 essence of that unremembered meal. 
 
 And it is no otherwise with reading. 
 
 Two months from now you may remember, 
 or you may have forgotten, the verbal exposi- 
 tions of this chapter. But, assimilated and 
 built into the living tissues of your intelligence, 
 transubstantiated and incorporated in the 
 very thoughts you will be thinking with, there 
 will be (if any thing at all " happens in you " as 
 you read it, and if anything digestively hap- 
 pens in you afterward) the essence of what 
 you have extracted from this intellectual meal. 
 
 XII 
 
 And now we come to the practical point, — 
 the point that may, as yet, seem very blind 
 and unlikely to be practical, — namely, the 
 relevancy of all this to our actual reading. 
 
 For our memories, as we know, are appar- 
 ently arbitrary, self-willed, and inconsistent. 
 They are given to retaining, unasked, a host 
 of things that we think we have no interest in 
 or use for; while mislaying, or losing, things 
 
 212
 
 INTELLECTUAL DIGESTION 
 
 that we have begged them in vain to keep for 
 us. Indeed, the best of them sometimes act 
 like pockets with holes in them — letting 
 five-dollar pocket-knives drop out, but retain- 
 ing the crumpled seat-coupons of a vaudeville 
 show. Yet in spite of this I would seem to be 
 urging you to give over the training of your 
 memories and to be counseling, instead, the 
 centering of your attention upon minute mat- 
 ters of mental activity which, in the long run, 
 take care of themselves. 
 
 But this is very far, indeed, from being the 
 case. 
 
 Let us examine for a moment the real work- 
 ings of our memories. 
 
 XIII 
 
 Modern science is inclined to believe that 
 those brain cells with which the function of 
 memory is connected retain a record of every 
 incident of our lives; that, physiologically 
 speaking, we never forget anything, no matter 
 how often, mentally speaking, we fail to re- 
 member: in short that "remembering" is 
 merely the successful sending-through, to the 
 latent cells where the records are stored, of the 
 
 213
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 stimulating impulses needed to arouse them. 
 Thus our memories are like some micro-cos- 
 mic telephone system in which, the oftener 
 we make a call, the more used do the opera- 
 tors become in "getting the connection" for 
 us. And the specialists assure us, moreover, 
 that these paths of connection — the routings 
 through local exchanges by which our calls are 
 sent — are association paths ; which (translated 
 into the terms of our present inquiry) means 
 paths of somehow recognized relationships. 
 
 Of course these "recognized relationships" 
 may be either warranted in fact or altogether 
 arbitrary. And the quack mind-doctors, who 
 undertake to train our memories by corre- 
 spondence, are very fond of prescribing these 
 arbitrarily established relationships as aids to 
 memorizing. Thus, they will advise you, if 
 you happen to be a follower of Izaak Walton 
 and to have a second cousin living in a town 
 on the Hudson that you can never recall the 
 name of, to fix the town in your memory by 
 the fact that your second cousin's wife's sister 
 has a "fishy" eye and that Fishkill ought to 
 be a good place to catch trout. However, we 
 have progressed far enough in our study of the 
 
 214
 
 INTELLECTUAL DIGESTION 
 
 value to us in our reading of the other kind 
 of recognized relationships, to dismiss these 
 pompous winnowers of mental chaff with a 
 good-natured laugh. 
 
 Nor, for our immediate purpose, is it nec- 
 essary for us to go any deeper into the fascina- 
 ting but complex subj ect of memory. We need, 
 now, only to remind ourselves of a fact of 
 which our experience furnishes us constant 
 proof. 
 
 XIV 
 
 We know, for instance, that if we happen 
 to meet an acquaintance on the street and to 
 stop for a moment's inconsequential chat 
 with him, the chances are that in a week we 
 shall have forgotten all that was said; and 
 that in six months the incident itself may 
 easily have slipped our minds. But suppose 
 that the next morning another acquaintance 
 stops us and says, "Tough about Judson's 
 shooting himself!" — Judson being the man 
 we'd talked to the day before. That puts a 
 new face on the matter; and we will then re- 
 member for good and all that Judson, a few 
 hours before he pulled the trigger, said to us 
 
 215
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 with a queer sort of casualness that this was 
 "a bum world anyway" and that "we would 
 probably be quite as well out of it as in it." 
 
 Yes, this is another "extreme case." But I 
 have chosen it that way on purpose; just as 
 one makes a photographic enlargement of a 
 bit of handwriting in order to examine it. Its 
 extremeness enables us to see instantly that 
 we should remember the character of our 
 talk with Judson because our attention was re- 
 directed to it promptly and because we then 
 discovered a recognized relationship in it. 
 
 And, having seen this, we can also see that 
 if the complete records were open to us, we 
 should no doubt find that these two factors 
 had, in some fortuitous and forgotten way, 
 been actively responsible for even those re- 
 memberings, so often apparently haphazard 
 and senseless, that persist in us from the days 
 of childhood. 
 
 xv 
 
 And so, by another and more roundabout 
 route, but in possession now of still other un- 
 derstandings and of newly acquired senses of 
 relationship, we come back to the further con- 
 
 216
 
 INTELLECTUAL DIGESTION 
 
 sideration of those practical reasons, dealt 
 with in the last chapter, for valuing and in- 
 dulging (by slight exercises of deliberate will 
 power when necessary) the lesser impulses 
 of curiosity and the minor upwellings of in- 
 terest that come to us during reading and 
 after reading. 
 
 Let us sum up our discoveries: — 
 (i) We know now what these lesser curiosi- 
 ties and these passing impulses of interest that 
 intrude for a moment on our engrossment in 
 "the story" really are. They are the con- 
 structive and digestive activities of our un- 
 conscious minds rising into consciousness. 
 They are the top layer of what is happening in 
 us as we read. 
 
 (2) We know, too, that if we habitually and 
 impatiently brush these incidents aside and 
 hurry on, the chances of our "forgetting" 
 them gradually increase toward certainty. 
 Whereas even a moment's turning of atten- 
 tion to them, and a passing noting of their re- 
 lationship to our present enjoyment, or to our 
 past prejudices, or to our other reactions to 
 what we are reading, tends to give them a num- 
 ber in our mental 'phone book. 
 
 217
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 (3) We know now, moreover, that "what 
 happens in us" through reading does n't all 
 happen while we read. It only begins to hap- 
 pen then. Our intellectual digestion goes on 
 working on a book for days and w T eeks; and 
 periodically, during this process, we experi- 
 ence other impulses of curiosity toward it and 
 other upwellings of interest with regard to it 
 — urgings, no less, from that "ruminating 
 animal," our intelligence, to help along in the 
 process of assimilation by chewing the cud of 
 its progressive reflections for it. 
 
 (4) And we know now, too, that as far as 
 "remembering what we read" goes, since 
 memory is a matter of retracing paths of es- 
 tablished relationship, our memories will, in 
 the long run, take care of themselves if we take 
 care of establishing the relationships. 
 
 (5) And so we arrive at our practical realiza- 
 tion of the relevancy of these minute matters 
 to our reading. 
 
 For even when reading is for us only a care- 
 less pleasing of our mental palates, the fugi- 
 tive pleasure we derive from it is due to the 
 unrecognized and quickly forgotten play of 
 the coarser of these reactions. 
 
 218
 
 INTELLECTUAL DIGESTION 
 
 And it is only by the selective indulgence 
 of our natural impulses toward noting the 
 finer of these spontaneous reactions, and 
 through gradually, by noting them, establish- 
 ing familiar paths of relationship among them 
 that all the progressive pleasures, the increas- 
 ing stimulation, the accumulating capital, and 
 the final enhancements and enfranchisements 
 of right reading are to be sought and, in our 
 respectively possible degrees, attained. 
 
 xvi 
 
 In addition, therefore, to the advisory rules 
 laid down in the last chapter for those wish- 
 ing, for whatsoever purpose, to increase their 
 reading efficiency, we now need to emphasize 
 the need of applying these same rules during 
 the subsequent period of intellectual digestion. 
 
 Do not make the " thinking over " of a book 
 a matter of "duty." Do not keep "taking 
 your mental temperature" about it or "pok- 
 ing yourself to see if you are alive" with re- 
 gard to it. 
 
 But, on the other hand, learn to value your 
 curiosity about books after reading them. 
 Learn to evaluate your minor curiosities in re- 
 
 219
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 gard to them after you have read them. Never 
 fail to follow out, to the extent of your aroused 
 interest, any subsequent promptings of in- 
 quiry into their meaning for you, or into your 
 feelings toward them. And, other things being 
 equal, force yourself to give the right of way 
 to curiosities as to your antagonisms and your 
 dislikes, rather than to curiosities as to your 
 acquiescences and your likings. 
 
 And now, by way of taking up some of the 
 larger questions of relationship-seeking in- 
 volved in reading whole books, — questions 
 that have purposely been deferred till we had 
 laid a foundation for their consideration, — 
 let us take up the matter of how to read a 
 novel.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 I 
 
 Thus far we have dealt almost exclusively 
 with the subjective side of reading: with the 
 internal mechanisms of the process; with the 
 character of the raw materials in which we 
 work; with the sources from which we draw 
 these materials; with the urges, largely un- 
 conscious, that we obey in building up, out of 
 these materials, our versions of the author's 
 work; with the limitations imposed upon us, 
 and the general character and trend of the op- 
 portunities opened out to us by the fact of our 
 having to read under these generally unreal- 
 ized and disregarded conditions. 
 
 And we have perhaps seemed, in conse- 
 quence, to be assuming that authors have no 
 rights that a reader is bound to respect, and 
 that the normally accepted and generally read- 
 for objectivity of a book's contents is either 
 non-existent or of negligible value. 
 
 But there has been a definite purpose in 
 
 221
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 this order of procedure. For whereas there 
 are two distinct factors in right reading, and 
 whereas we ordinarily overestimate the im- 
 portance of one of these factors while ignoring 
 the very existence of the other, it has been 
 necessary to restore the balance by a compen- 
 sating overemphasis. And we have attempted 
 to do this while at the same time acquiring a 
 first-hand and vivid realization of the living 
 actuality and the finally governing character 
 of the habitually ignored subjective factor. 
 Moreover, this is the logical approach to a 
 systemized understanding of right reading. 
 For, while individual readers do constantly 
 arrive at an intelligent and expert practice of 
 right reading through the instinctive, uncon- 
 scious, and unanalyzed adapting of these sub- 
 jective means to the complex ends involved, 
 the methods of these individual arrivals are 
 unsystemized and incommunicable. And not 
 alone the best routes of approach to right 
 reading, but the true nature of its rewards and 
 the real goals toward which it leads, cannot be 
 made systematically clear to the inquiring, 
 would-be practitioner of the art while he or 
 she continues to regard the author's concep- 
 
 222
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 tion as a concrete thing actually imprisoned 
 in the text and identically derivable therefrom 
 by each of us. 
 
 ii 
 
 The conception of the author is, of course, 
 forever un-get-at-able except in approxima- 
 tion by any of us. It is not and cannot be 
 "imprisoned in the text." It exists, and can 
 exist, nowhere in the world except in the au- 
 thor's consciousness. And yet this conception 
 of the author is for us, as a matter of fact, 
 more nearly an objectively sharable entity 
 than our inquiries into our subjective reading 
 processes have thus far led us to see. 
 
 For in spite of the variousness (when 
 closely examined) of our personal experiences, 
 temperamental biases, intellectual predisposi- 
 tions, and complex character make-ups, our 
 type resemblances in these matters are (when 
 viewed from a little distance) more noticeable 
 than our individual differences. So that while 
 no two of us ever make for ourselves identi- 
 cal formulations of an author's conception, 
 ow individual formulations fall inevitably 
 into type classifications — into groups within 
 
 223
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 which the general agreements outweigh the 
 specific differences. And as even these type 
 differences, and even racial distinctions and 
 historical alterations of outlook, merge at last 
 into the basic solidarity of our shared human- 
 ity, it follows that in something very like a 
 direct proportion to the universal human rele- 
 vancy of an author's conception our readings 
 of his work tend to a consensus of practical 
 agreement. They will, let us say, group them- 
 selves into a central core of similar formula- 
 tions, surrounded by smaller groups of aberrant 
 type readings, and fringe out into individual 
 freak interpretations. 
 
 Let me illustrate this statement by an ex- 
 ample. 
 
 In the last chapter we used a fancied read- 
 ing of ''The Brushwood Boy" as a means of 
 examining the extreme individuality of our per- 
 sonal reading processes. Yet thousands upon 
 thousands of English-speaking readers, in spite 
 of their thousands of individual readings of the 
 tale, have found themselves in essential agree- 
 ment in their formulation of Kipling's elusive 
 conception of youth's universal longing. And 
 at the same time other, although fewer, thou- 
 
 224
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 sands have found themselves in equally es- 
 sential agreement over their various impa- 
 tient inabilities to "see anything in it." And 
 a woman once actually and seriously declared 
 to me that she thought "The Brushwood 
 Boy" the "most indecent story she had ever 
 read." 
 
 in 
 
 We have now arrived, then, at a point where 
 we can agree to define right reading as a con- 
 structive and critical attempt to formulate, 
 each one for himself, the thing that the author is 
 trying to show us in the terms of those subjec- 
 tive processes and materials that we have dis- 
 cussed in the preceding chapters. And it re- 
 mains for us to discuss the broader practical 
 problems involved in our " adventure of learn- 
 ing to read" when right reading is thus re- 
 garded. 
 
 And I have elected to discuss these broader 
 problems under the chapter heading of "How 
 to Read a Novel," because, while every kind 
 of right reading is demanded of us in special- 
 ized and concentratcdly developed form in 
 some other-than-fktion kind of reading, it is 
 
 225
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 in fiction especially (and more and more so as 
 the modern novel continues to claim the whole 
 of life as its field and to include all of life's at- 
 tainments and relationships in its successive 
 and many-angled "criticisms of life") that ail 
 kinds of right reading are demanded of us in 
 turn and in constructive and critical combina- 
 tion. And, moreover, because it is especially 
 in reading fiction that we are given to mud- 
 dling along without any active exercise of 
 right reading at all and without, therefore, de- 
 riving any of the enhancements that should 
 result to us. 
 
 IV 
 
 Let us begin with the statement that the 
 right reading of a novel consists in a construc- 
 tive and critical formulation for ourselves, in 
 the fullest possible terms of our own experi- 
 ence, of the particular fictional conception that 
 the author is trying to place before us. And 
 in order to get the problems involved in this 
 task intelligently stated, let us examine our 
 relations to fiction and to fictional conceptions. 
 
 Children and young people, as we have al- 
 ready seen, love fiction because it gives form to 
 
 226
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 their unformulated experience; because it sup- 
 plies an imaginative concreteness to their long- 
 ing for adventure; because it makes articulate 
 their unvoiced dreams of personal achieve- 
 ment. They instinctively use it, in other 
 words, even when taking refuge in it from 
 their immediate griefs and boredom, as an ap- 
 proach to wider living. And we, if we would 
 have it continue to serve us, even as a refuge, 
 must do the same. 
 
 But. we are no longer children. We are no 
 longer, on the stream of youth's development, 
 being carried swiftly forward in a constantly 
 altering approach to life and having our 
 dreams automatically changed for us in con- 
 sequence. We have, relatively speaking, ar- 
 rived. Our development, to put it more ac- 
 curately, has slowed down ; so that our dreams, 
 more and more, impinge upon reality; and 
 experience, more and more, intervenes to con- 
 tradict and correct our hopes. And our rela- 
 tion to fiction, even as a refuge, changes ac- 
 cordingly. 
 
 If, under these new conditions, we gradually 
 come to shrink from experience; gradually ac- 
 cept life as a treadmill; gradually close our 
 
 227
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 eyes to its tangled and contradictory implica- 
 tions and seek to take refuge from its new 
 puzzles in the unaltered redreaming of old 
 dreams; — we soon come to the using of fic- 
 tion as a mere drug to deaden consciousness 
 with. And as this is to drift, both in our living 
 and our reading development, into the most 
 vicious of all vicious circles of stagnation, we 
 may, for our present purpose, dismiss such 
 reading of fiction from our consideration. 
 
 But if, as we come in contact with the reali- 
 ties of living, we begin, in any measure what- 
 ever, to develop an interest in the meaning of 
 life; if we experience the slightest promptings 
 of a will to inquire; if, hesitatingly at first, but 
 with growing curiosity and deepening interest, 
 we begin to ask questions of experience; if, 
 from thus asking questions of experience, we 
 come little by little to the seeking of experience 
 in order to question it, — then more and more 
 consciously and purposefully we find ourselves 
 turning to fiction and enjoying it because it 
 synthesizes our own observations of life and 
 extends and amplifies and interprets them. 
 
 Yet this is only one of its functions. For, 
 since new attitudes toward experience are the 
 
 228
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 source of all new hopes and new dreams, it 
 follows that the more we face life from this in- 
 terested angle, and the more we practice the 
 right reading of science and history and phi- 
 losophy and fiction itself as aids to such facing, 
 the more constantly can fiction reassume for 
 us its legitimate function toward the "young" 
 — the more often, that is to say, can it serve 
 us afresh as the mould for new hopes, as the 
 concrete expression of new dreams; in short, 
 as the means of making tentative imaginary 
 syntheses of the broader life we are thus ap- 
 proaching. 
 
 It was to these constantly readjusted and 
 ..;~rganized functions of fiction that we re- 
 ferred in the fifth chapter, in saying that 
 "there are nursery rhymes for every mile of 
 the way ; love-stories for every stage of growth ; 
 adventure-tales for every enlargement of our 
 consciousness and understanding." 
 
 v 
 
 When looked at from this point of view, all 
 reading matter becomes an invitation to us in 
 some way to compare notes with another ob- 
 server; either upon the actuality of the facts 
 
 229
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 of existence, or upon the relations that these 
 facts conceivably bear to one another and to 
 ourselves. And the distinctive feature of 
 fiction is that it invites us to undertake this 
 comparing of notes by formulating for our- 
 selves some particular, imaginative arrange- 
 ment of the more or less characteristic and 
 familiar facts of our common experience, so 
 contrived by the author as to form an artificial 
 synthesis, or appearance of completeness, in the 
 human drama that is being tumultuously enacted 
 before our eyes and within ourselves. 
 
 And the first thing that, as prospective ac- 
 ceptors of such fictional invitations, it is im- 
 portant for us to realize, is that the ultimate 
 basis of every such artificial synthesis or ap- 
 pearance of completeness — and hence the 
 fundamental factor of our personal formula- 
 tion of it — is always a particular way of look- 
 ing at things, a special attitude of mind, a 
 mood of observation. This ultimate fictional 
 basis is never, even in the shallowest and trash- 
 iest yellow-backed time-killer, the plot of the 
 story. And it is never, even in the most stir- 
 ring romance or in the most shuddersome 
 tragedy, that less tangible but more living 
 
 2^0
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 thing that we call "the story itself." It is 
 always an angle of observance, a human 
 mood. Thus the ultimate basis of all detec- 
 tive stories and mystery tales is the mood of 
 momentarily looking at life as a challenge to 
 our ingenuity. And the ultimate basis of all 
 tales of adventurous action is the mood of 
 looking at the world as an openable oyster. 
 And the ultimate basis of all romance is the 
 mood of imagining our dreams fulfilled. And 
 the ultimate basis of all real tragedy is the 
 mood of looking at the inevitable as the great 
 consoler, the one final and sanctioned assumer 
 of our responsibilities. 
 
 So that in electing to read a novel, — in ac- 
 cepting the invitation of a writer of fiction, — 
 we have to become the guests of the author's 
 mood before we can intelligently act as his 
 collaborators. We should in no case forget our 
 guestship until we have felt our way to at 
 least a tentative recognition of the mood the 
 author is asking us to share with him. And 
 so the first thing that is demanded of us in be- 
 ginning a novel is an attitude of active and 
 open-minded inquiry with this fact in mind. 
 If this attitude does not come easy to us, we 
 
 231
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 should force ourselves to assume it until it 
 does. And the first and most effective prelim- 
 inary to the assuming of this attitude is the 
 deliberate and intentional clearing from our 
 minds of all preferences, preconceptions, ex- 
 pectations, and demands with regard to what 
 it is that the author is going to ask of us and 
 show us; at the same time holding ourselves 
 ready, as soon as we have found the clue, to 
 put our entire equipment unreservedly at his 
 disposal for those purposes of "constructive 
 and critical formulation" that we shall pres- 
 ently examine. 
 
 VI 
 
 But before going on to examine these, it will 
 be well to make absolutely certain that we un- 
 derstand, not only the need for this initial 
 open-mindedness, but the importance of con- 
 sciously recognizing and falling in with the 
 author's mood at the earliest possible moment. 
 For we do not, as a rule, realize how con- 
 stantly, in every kind of trying to see what 
 others are pointing out to us, we are hindered 
 and handicapped and defeated by precon- 
 ceptions. 
 
 232
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 For example, one of the surprises we en- 
 counter on our first sea voyage is the discovery 
 of how difficult it is to see a whale. 
 
 It is, let us say, the third day out. Good 
 weather has enabled us to acquire what we 
 ignorantly imagine to be our "sea legs." We 
 no longer speak of "going down stairs." And 
 at seven bells we no longer do surreptitious 
 arithmetic on our fingers and verify the re- 
 sult by covert glances at our watches. In- 
 deed, we quite fancy ourselves old salts. And 
 then, in passing our steamer chair, a ship's 
 acquaintance asks us if we have seen the 
 whale. 
 
 "Whale?" we exclaim eagerly. "No. 
 Where is it?" 
 
 And he explains that it is a mile or so off the 
 weather bow and offers to show it to us. But 
 when we've rushed to the opposite rail and 
 joined the knot of excited people gathered 
 there, we can see nothing — nothing, that is, 
 except water and waves and sun-glints and 
 white caps. And our self-appointed cicerone 
 points and says, "There! Did n't you see him 
 then?" And we squint in the direction of his 
 extended arm and say no, we did n't. And he 
 
 233
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 becomes more and more explanatory, and we 
 grow more and more obfuscated. Until, just as 
 he is on the point of giving us up as hopeless, 
 we happen quite by accident to notice an in- 
 significant feather of white spray spurt up 
 away off on the horizon, and to hear the girl 
 next to us cry, "There he blows!" 
 
 And we say, "That! Is that a whale?" 
 And our friend says, "Why, of course. 
 What did you think it was?" 
 
 And then (according as we happen to be 
 constituted) we either go back to our steamer 
 chair and our novel, saying "Pooh! A nice 
 fuss over nothing!" or else, our curiosity hav- 
 ing been aroused, we take the trouble to back- 
 track our recent mental processes and so dis- 
 cover that as a matter of fact we had not once 
 tried to see what our friend was pointing out 
 to us, but had, instead, been looking demand- 
 ingly for a large, square-headed, black fish 
 with forked flukes and a miniature Old Faith- 
 ful spouting intermittently from its head. In 
 fine we discover that we had been unable to 
 see the whale, not at all because we did not 
 know what a whale looked like, but precisely 
 because we thought we knew. 
 
 234
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 VII 
 
 A few years ago Mr. Will Irwin published a 
 little volume called "The Confessions of a 
 Con Man." And I remember, at the time il 
 appeared, calling the attention of a friend 
 to it and being rather taken to task by him in 
 consequence. " Did you enjoy that ? " he asked 
 me with fine scorn. And when I had owned up 
 that I had, he said, "Why, good heavens, the 
 man does n't give away a single confidence trick 
 that has not been public property for years." 
 
 And this, as it happened, was perfectly 
 true. But it was also, in view of the author's 
 invitation and intention, perfectly immaterial. 
 It was, indeed, the tacit condition upon which 
 the "con man's" unintentional and far more 
 interesting "confessions" had been obtained. 
 For Mr. Irwin, having gained the partial con- 
 fidence of a confidence man, had been wise 
 enough not to make him restive or suspicious 
 by trying to get out of him the latest secrets of 
 his profession — those tricks, new to-day and 
 old to-morrow, by whose newness he gained 
 his living. He had been glad to accept, in lieu 
 of "modern instances," the histories of deceits 
 
 2 J3
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 now out-moded; because, in reminiscing about 
 these, the man spoke openly and revealed him- 
 self without guile. Mr. Irwin had thus sur- 
 prised a secret far more elusive and enduring 
 than that of the "latest" confidence tricks. 
 He had induced the man, without his know- 
 ing it, to "confess" his philosophy of life and 
 to disclose the sanctions of his self-esteem* 
 And in his book Mr. Irwin was offering us the 
 interesting opportunity of looking, in imagi- 
 nation, through a grafter's eyes upon a graft- 
 er's world; of finding out, in imagination, 
 what it might be like to be the proud possessor 
 of sharp wits and to roam a happy hunting- 
 ground where the only animals were the Gul- 
 libles and the Ungullibles. 
 
 But my friend, what with looking intently 
 for a large, square-headed, black fish spouting 
 geysers, had failed to see the whale. 
 
 He had, in fact, when he read the title of 
 Mr. Irwin's book, made up his mind what he 
 wanted Mr. Irwin to show him. He had kept 
 on wanting this and looking for it to the end. 
 And in condemning Mr. Irwin as a writer be- 
 cause Mr. Irwin had been trying to show him 
 something else and he had refused to let him, 
 
 236
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 he had passed judgment on nothing but his 
 own skill as a reader. 
 
 Of course he might not have cared to accept 
 Mr. Irwin's real invitation. And he might 
 quite properly have laid the book down as 
 soon as he had discovered the actual char- 
 acter of its offering. But in omitting a pre- 
 liminary, open-minded seeking-out of the au- 
 thor's attitude of observation, and then, on 
 that basis, either looking at his whale or re- 
 fusing to bother with it, he had failed in the 
 first requirement of the intelligent reader. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Five years ago John Galsworthy published 
 his novel "The Patrician." And in the 
 months that followed its appearance I met 
 several confirmed admirers of Galsworthy's 
 work who seemed disappointed in the new 
 book. They were even inclined to be a bit 
 grouchy over — well, that was exactly where 
 the trouble came in — over, let us say, some 
 indefinable injustice toward them, whether 
 of omission or of commission they could not 
 tell, of which they dimly felt Mr. Galsworthy 
 to have been guilty. This fact interested me at 
 
 237
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 the time and may well interest us now; for 
 its explanation illuminates one of the pitfalls 
 that our preconceptions are constantly dig- 
 ging for our appreciation. 
 
 To begin with, knowing the men, I am per- 
 suaded that "The Patrician," divested of 
 Mr. Galsworthy's name as author, would at 
 once have been recognized by them as the 
 very beautiful piece of work and as the sound 
 and subtle criticism of life that it is. But hav- 
 ing, through a series of years and of nov- 
 els, accustomed themselves to reading Gals- 
 Worthy in the attitude of mind that he had 
 theretofore maintained toward life in his 
 work, they had insisted upon reading "The 
 Patrician" in that mood and had ascribed 
 their consequent puzzlement to the author. 
 
 Galsworthy, in his earlier novels, is suc- 
 cinctly describable as a man who saw with un- 
 usual clearness the hidden interdependences 
 and masked reciprocal relations of human 
 intercourse, and who presented these to us 
 in terms of the ironies resulting from their 
 non-recognition. While utterly free from any 
 rancor against the individual exponents of the 
 amiable and well-intentioned narrow-mi nded- 
 
 238
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 ness that he had portrayed, he was never con- 
 tent until, by the exercise of just that sym- 
 pathetic and tolerant understanding of them 
 that he possessed, he had, as it were, given 
 them enough rope to hang themselves by. 
 Naturally enough, he had been called a cynic. 
 And although behind the openly caustic irony 
 of his novels there had ever lain the essen- 
 tially cleansing humor and healing charity of 
 his comprehension, yet having dubbed him 
 "cynic" his readers had come to seek him out 
 in the confident expectation of finding a sly 
 dog. 
 
 And lo, the author of "The Patrician" was 
 a poet! 
 
 The novel is a wonderful word-picture of a 
 family of aristocrats with its three genera- 
 tions subtly differentiated by their succes- 
 sively lessening consciousness of caste; with 
 its many members, clean-cut as cameos, seen 
 from the authentic and indicative angles of 
 their individual outlooks; with its patriarchs 
 resigned or desperately at bay before the in- 
 roads of modernity, and its high-hearted and 
 stern-minded youths equally yet variously 
 fretting at the curb of caste-tradition. The 
 
 239
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 story is wrought with infinite loving labor, in 
 words weighed to the fraction of intrinsic ap- 
 positeness and in phrases of exquisite imagery. 
 Yet for all its beauty there is a sardonic note 
 in its denouement — the echo of a knell. For 
 the work is not only a portrait, but a prophecy. 
 It is a valedictory as well as an appreciation. 
 It is the swan song of a type. 
 
 In writing it, Mr. Galsworthy asked his 
 readers to assume in turn the outlooks of three 
 generations and from these to construct with 
 him a particular mood of observation toward 
 the passing order of the English nobility. But 
 these guests of his mood in "The Man of 
 Property" and "The Country House" had 
 accepted his new invitation in the spirit of the 
 old and so missed its meaning. 
 
 IX 
 
 Fortunately for the student of right read- 
 ing, it is in the simpler forms of fiction — in 
 love-stories proper, in mystery-mongering 
 tales, in stories of action and adventure and 
 the like — that the mood of the author, the 
 angle of observation from which the novel 
 is written, is most single-minded in itself; is 
 
 24.0
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 most quickly and openly and once-for-all re- 
 vealed; and is thus most easily and certainly 
 to be recognized and fallen in with. In many 
 of these cases the first paragraph or the first 
 page contains a full clue to it. In many such 
 instances one senses the book's mood instinc- 
 tively and adjusts one's self to it spontane- 
 ously and without ever consciously recogniz- 
 ing that it has one. But to allow one's self to 
 do this is bad practice. For it is by the habit 
 and consequent training of consciously estab- 
 lishing this mood relation with one's more 
 naive and obvious authors that one acquires 
 most quickly the ability to collaborate intel- 
 ligently with authors who are dealing with 
 life in more sophisticated and more complex 
 moods. 
 
 For one thing it is very easy to fall into the 
 habit of expecting to have this simple mood- 
 relationship instantly established for us by the 
 author, and of then being " uninterested " if an 
 author does so simple a thing as to begin by 
 thoroughly outlining a situation before he 
 develops his way of looking at what happens 
 there. Yet this is constantly being done. It is, 
 indeed, the rule rather than the exception for 
 
 241
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 us to need to maintain our open-minded at- 
 titude toward the author's selected way of 
 looking at things until we have actively co- 
 operated with him in the formulation of his 
 scenic setting and in the initial conception of 
 his characters. 
 
 And perhaps the large majority of those 
 readers who are naturally inclined toward 
 right reading do this much automatically and 
 without any actual recognition of what they 
 are doing. But it is none the less bad practice 
 on that account. For it is exactly by doing 
 this consciously and watchfully that we can 
 best develop that quick responsiveness to 
 mood, that instant ability to recognize dis- 
 closed angles of observation, and that supple 
 readiness to assume them as they are revealed, 
 that is the first requisite for our intelligent 
 reading of an author whose own fictional at- 
 titude is really that of observing the comedy 
 aspects or the tragedy aspects of the conflict- 
 ing attitudes of others. It is perhaps not too 
 much to say that the failure to develop, in 
 one way or another, this responsiveness and 
 quickness in recognition and adaptation is 
 what most frequently prevents our progress- 
 
 242
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 ing beyond the beginnings of fictional right 
 reading. And it is certain that the higher we go 
 in the scale of fiction, the more necessary does 
 this development become for us. For modern 
 fiction tends more and more toward being a 
 dramatization of outlook, a demonstration of 
 the varying possibilities of points of view. Not 
 only are there countless novels written to-day 
 that invite us, as novels have never invited us 
 before, to look at life through the eyes of the 
 "other half"; whose way of living as well as 
 whose point of view has been ignored or de- 
 spised by us; but much modern fiction of the 
 first order is, in its final intention, a mood- 
 constructor; that is to say, an invitation to 
 us to formulate for ourselves, under the guid- 
 ance of the author, and out of the gradually 
 assembled implications of the development 
 of his story, a final, tentative, point of view 
 of our own — a "one way of looking at life," 
 an achieved synthesis of estimating out- 
 look. 
 
 Take, for example, Arnold Bennett's "The 
 Old Wives' Tale." Here is a novel which fol- 
 lows, in the minutest and most "realistic" de- 
 tail, the personal histories and interwoven at- 
 
 243
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 titudes of two and a half generations of a 
 middle-class English family. In a leisurely, 
 apparently ''plotless," and (by reason of its 
 unemotional treatment of "events") super- 
 ficially uneventful, manner, it carries us, from 
 the youth of its two leading characters and 
 from the middle age of their parents, to the 
 ultimate deaths of every one closely connected 
 with the story except a single and, by then, 
 middle-aged and utterly worthless representa- 
 tive of the third generation — a survivor who 
 by his mere surviving stands before us as the 
 sole and completely negligible result, hu- 
 manly speaking, of the whole intensely hu- 
 man and many-sidedly interesting struggle. 
 Yet it achieves, for those of its readers who 
 have read it with this open-minded and pro- 
 gressively constructive responsiveness, a com- 
 plete, dramatic amalgamation of two points 
 of view that had never before been success- 
 fully combined in fiction: — that of the su- 
 preme importance and significance of life to 
 the individual; and that of the supreme insig- 
 nificance and unimportance of the individual 
 or of any line of individuals to the mysterious, 
 long-sighted purposes of Life. 
 
 244
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 x 
 
 Let us assume, now, that we have grasped 
 the principle involved in this initial, active, 
 and open-minded seeking-out of the attitude 
 the author is asking us to share with him. 
 And let us assume (deferring for the present 
 our consideration of novels wherein the con- 
 trolling mood of the author does not reveal 
 itself either early or simply) that we have de- 
 termined, in every obviously mooded novel 
 that we read, definitely to identify the au- 
 thor's attitude at the earliest possible moment. 
 
 The important point that we next have 
 to note in formulating rules for the right read- 
 ing of novels, is this: That having recognized 
 the mood of the author and having either 
 spontaneously "fallen in with it" or placed 
 ourselves in sympathetic readiness to do so, 
 we must, from then on, view the entire world 
 of the story — its unfolding situations, its 
 developing characters, their deploying rela- 
 tions to each other, and all questions of the 
 relations of ourselves or of the author to these 
 — from the point of view of this governing and 
 basic attitude.
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 Do not misunderstand me. I do not for a 
 moment mean that we should not, in the most 
 ordinary and unself-conscious and zestful sense 
 of the words, " read our book." I mean that we 
 must deal with all upwelling inquiries as to 
 probability, consistency, truth to type, and 
 mutual attitude of characters, with each out- 
 cropping manifestation of personal like and 
 dislike of actors or actions, with all disap- 
 pointments of unconsciously aroused expecta- 
 tion, or impulses toward resentment based on 
 conventional attitudes of mind, — in short, 
 with any and all subsidiary curiosities and 
 any and all promptings to pass judgment that 
 arise in the course of "reading our book," 
 — with primary and specific relation to this 
 established angle of observation. 
 
 Suppose that an author's story deals with 
 a man torn between the conflicting urges of 
 an adventurous Wanderlust and a persistent 
 dream of a wife, children, and the coziness of 
 the feathered nest. 
 
 The author's mood of observation may be 
 that of the romantic portraying of sentiment 
 triumphant over obstacles. Or it may be that 
 of the romanic portrayal of the rolling stone's 
 
 246
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 toying with successive mossbeds. Or it may 
 be a mood of good-natured irony, smiling in 
 sympathetic understanding of the irreconcila- 
 bility of human desires. Or it may be that of 
 looking with hilarious amusement at the spec- 
 tacle of a human donkey, now running franti- 
 cally toward this haystack and now toward 
 that, and finally starving between them. It 
 may be the mood of looking at this hero-of- 
 divided-allegiance through the eyes of any- 
 one of a dozen types of human onlookers. 
 Or it may be a mood of looking at the world 
 and at life through the bi-focused eyes of the 
 hero himself. 
 
 Any one of these attitudes will be humanly 
 valid. The author's development of his story 
 from the chosen point of view may be con- 
 sistently true to mood and revealingly or 
 amusingly interpretative of our own hearts 
 and natures when so regarded. But in just so 
 far as we allow the criteria of judgment that 
 belong to another way of looking at things to 
 color our reactions to the story as presented, 
 in exactly so far shall we fail in our right read- 
 ing of it, and shall we miss whatever dividends 
 of enjoyment or of added responsiveness to 
 
 247
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 life our proper collaboration with the author 
 might have brought to us. 
 
 And of course, since this is manifestly true 
 in the case of a simply conceived and singly 
 mooded story of idealized sentiment or smil- 
 ing satire, it is progressively true, in a geo- 
 metric ratio of importance, in novels where we 
 are asked to look, first from one angle and 
 then from another, at the same series of hu- 
 man actions; or to maintain the attitude of 
 impersonal and inquiring observers toward 
 a conflict of clashing moods and their result- 
 ing misunderstandings; or to build up a new 
 mood of observation never before attained by 
 us, by the constructive and dramatic juxtapo- 
 sition of successive and interrelated and mood- 
 derived realizations of relationship. 
 
 So that one of the most important habits 
 that the reader can form — a habit that con- 
 sciously or unconsciously he must acquire and 
 develop if he is going to increase his ability 
 to read better, and more revealing and more 
 "up-channel" fiction — is this habit of dif- 
 ferential criticism based on the criteria of 
 outlook. 
 
 248
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 XI 
 
 And this brings us finally face to face 
 with those problems of the "constructive and 
 critical" activity demanded of the right read- 
 ers of a novel that we have repeatedly re- 
 ferred to. 
 
 The phrase has a somewhat portentous 
 sound. It suggests responsibilities to be as- 
 sumed; and we are prone to shirk the con- 
 scious assumption of responsibilities. It sug- 
 gests work; and w r e are apt to look askance at 
 the idea of work in connection with the read- 
 ing of fiction, which is always undertaken and 
 always should be undertaken in some degree 
 in the spirit of "play" as we have already de- 
 fined that impulse. But the truth is that we 
 are invariably both constructive and critical 
 in all our reading; and the only real problem 
 before us is that of so directing these per- 
 fectly normal but often misapplied function- 
 ings of our minds that they may more and 
 more correctly and cooperatively minister to 
 our formulation for ourselves of the author's 
 conception. 
 
 249
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 XII 
 
 We have already armed ourselves with a 
 realization of the constructive methods we 
 employ in reading, and of the more or less un- 
 conscious accompaniment of critical activity, 
 corrective, recognitional, and comparative, 
 that is automatically maintained at the backs 
 of our minds as we read. And we have already 
 agreed that it is important for us to identify 
 and fall in with the main observational mood 
 of the novel we are reading; to be ready to do 
 the same with any subsidiary moods (as the 
 points of view of individual characters) that 
 are introduced as parts of its subject-matter; 
 and that we must scrupulously view the entire 
 world of the story, including its subsidiary 
 ways of looking at things, from the selected 
 angle of envisagement. But the very act of 
 identifying this angle is a critical act. And 
 every glance by which we assure ourselves 
 that we are maintaining it, or discover that we 
 are not, is an act of criticism. So that our 
 problem is largely one of directive application. 
 
 Let us, however, begin by considering the 
 simpler problems of construction. 
 
 250
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 And the first rule that we should keep in 
 mind in the matter of "constructive" coop- 
 eration with the author, is that we should 
 hold ourselves ready at any moment, and quite 
 irrespective of our having or not having dis- 
 covered the trend of his intention, to put our 
 entire experiential equipment and the best 
 efforts of our "mental movie" outfit and 
 of our "idea distillery" at his disposal for 
 the production of whatever scenes, character 
 conceptions, or details of situational develop- 
 ment he may ask to have produced. We may, 
 or may not, see why he wants them. The in- 
 ference is that they are going to be needed. 
 Later on, if we discover that he is given to 
 wasteful or unwarranted demands on us in 
 this regard (as, for instance, if he proves to be 
 a landscape-describing crank, or interpolates 
 airings of his own views that are irrelevant 
 and do not "pay their own way"), we may 
 skim or skip judiciously. But "skimming" 
 and "skipping," whether we realize it or not, , 
 is a critical act. It is either a conscious criti- 
 cism of the author, or an unconscious criticism 
 of ourselves. So it should be used with care 
 and in full realization of its meaning. It is an 
 
 251
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 excellent rule to read at least a hundred pages 
 of any novel before refusing the fullest con- 
 structive cooperation in our power to any 
 passage of it. 
 
 XIII 
 
 But there is another kind of constructive 
 activity and ability that is demanded of us in 
 novel-reading besides this simple visualizing 
 of scenes and of action, this preparatory rec- 
 ognition of ideas and attitudes, this primary 
 conceiving of characters and motives. All 
 these things are, so to say, the manufactured 
 parts (manufactured by us at the author's 
 order out of our own stock of experience) that 
 we are gradually, under the author's direction, 
 to assemble into the completed structure of 
 his artificial synthesis — that is to say, into 
 our formulation of his conception of it. And 
 it is because we cannot tell, beforehand, what 
 use is going to be made of these parts, or how 
 important any least one of them may prove to 
 be, that we should cooperate whole-heartedly 
 in their construction as they are called for, 
 and should then keep them open-mindedly 
 at hand ready for whatever use the story re- 
 
 252
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 quires us to make of them. We are likely at 
 any moment to be required to bring separate 
 characters, ideas, impulses, and attitudes into 
 imaginary contact and to construct the atmos- 
 phere and implications of their conjunction; 
 and we should be as alertly and whole-heartedly 
 cooperative in this secondary construction as 
 in the first. 
 
 But whereas, thus far, we have been con- 
 sidering our constructive duties separately, 
 we now arrive at a point where it is no longer 
 possible to leave our critical activities out of 
 account. 
 
 XIV 
 
 The least critical reader of us all passes con- , 
 stant judgment as he reads (i) upon the au- \ 
 thor; (2) upon the characters of the story; and 
 (3) upon himself. 
 
 (1) He yawns and says to himself that the 
 author is a bore. Or he grins and owns that 
 the author is a clever wag. Or he bristles up 
 and says that the author must be an atheist 
 or a libertine. 
 
 (2) He is very charitable to the characters 
 who exhibit his own pet weaknesses. Or he is 
 
 253
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 bitterly condemnatory of the character who 
 yields to his own most dreaded vice. Or he ap- 
 proves the character who acts as he likes to 
 think he acts, and condemns the character who 
 acts, without justification, as he often acts 
 himself, but with a perfectly good excuse. 
 
 (3) He says to himself that he "can't un- 
 derstand" how any one can do this or that. 
 Or he tells himself that he " would have done 
 the same thing" as some one in the story. Or 
 he says that he "has no time" for hard-luck 
 stories, or that this, that, or the other point of 
 view "makes him tired." 
 
 But of course the reader who experiences 
 these feelings or expresses them to himself as 
 he reads, does not necessarily recognize them 
 as criticisms; and is still less likely to recog- 
 nize the self-criticism involved in the third 
 division. But as soon as we see these feelings 
 tabulated as above, we recognize the critical 
 nature of them. And, moreover, a little ex- 
 amination suffices to show us that they are not, 
 really, three kinds of criticism, but three dif- 
 ferent employments of a criticism that is al- 
 ways three-sided. For reading a novel is a 
 triangular operation in which (1) the author, 
 
 254
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 (2) the reader, and (3) their joint production 
 are inseparably linked. There are two creators 
 of every character, of every situation, of every 
 outcome of the conjunction of characters and 
 situations — the author and the reader. Both 
 are responsible, not only for, but to, their 
 joint production. Every criticism felt or ex- 
 pressed by the reader involves all three. And 
 every judgment of the reader, to be a self- 
 helpful and self-guiding judgment, must take 
 into account the relations of the thing judged 
 to the other two. 
 
 xv 
 
 Going back, then, to our interrupted con- 
 sideration of the more complex "construc- 
 tion" involved in the bringing of separate 
 characters, ideas, and attitudes into the im- 
 agined contacts of developing situations, and 
 thus, stage by stage, assembling the total con- 
 ception of a novel, we see that this must be 
 done, not only in open-minded and whole- 
 hearted cooperation of reader with author, but 
 with a discriminating, three-pointed criticism 
 always ready, at the back of the reader's mind, 
 to examine, correct, and co-relate his own 
 
 255
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 instinctive reactions to these combinations 
 and to their results. 
 
 Among the commonest errors of novel- 
 reading, for example, are: For a reader to as- 
 cribe to the author the opinions of one of his 
 characters, and to judge the author's mind or 
 morals or character accordingly, and to read 
 the rest of his book under the bias of that un- 
 critical ascription. Or for a reader to criticize 
 a character, or the author, or both, because the 
 character acts, or fails to act, in accordance 
 with the conventional requirements of another 
 way of looking at things. Or for a reader to 
 call the author a pessimist, or some other hard 
 name, because the logical development of the 
 adopted point of view discloses inevitable 
 human attitudes that the reader did n't an- 
 ticipate when he consented to adopt it. 
 
 And not only are these errors manifestly 
 due to a lack of "critical" as well as "con- 
 structive" activity on the reader's part, or to 
 criticism misapplied and ill-directed, or to a 
 one-sided, or two-sided, instead of the required 
 three-sided criticism of a three-sided problem, 
 but it is also evident that any reader's final 
 formulation of the author's complete concep- 
 
 256
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 tion will be discolored or actually deformed by 
 such carelessly conducted reading. 
 
 XVI 
 
 And this brings us to the last points we have 
 to consider under the head of "How to Read 
 a Novel"; namely, our real relation to fictions 
 as wholes: and the importance (i) of keeping 
 this relation in mind as we read them; (2) of 
 employing it as a criterion of judgment when 
 we face our completed formulations of them; 
 and (3) of remembering it when, as we con- 
 stantly do, we employ past fictional formu- 
 lations as bases of other judgments and 
 as elements in other idea and attitude con- 
 structions. 
 
 In an early chapter we spoke of one of our 
 unconscious urges toward reading as the need, 
 experienced by us all, of somehow creating 
 "oases of orderliness" in the chaos of our re- 
 lations to life. 
 
 And more recently we defined fiction as a 
 contrived synthesis or appearance of complete- 
 ness in the tumultuous flux and flow of the 
 human drama that goes endlessly on within us 
 and about us. 
 
 257
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 And here, in a nutshell, either expressed or 
 implied, are our real relations to novels as 
 wholes. 
 
 We cannot, being ourselves a part of the 
 flux of life, conceive its entirety. Nor can we 
 conceive of the million-stranded, beginning- 
 less and endless portion of it that we do per- 
 ceive, as forming in itself a completeness. All 
 that we can do, and what by the inescapable 
 necessity of our inborn needs we are constantly 
 forced to do, is to keep variously cutting chaos 
 up into sections that can, from certain points 
 of view, be regarded as complete in themselves, 
 and thus examine it piecemeal. 
 
 That is what physics and biology and psy- 
 chology and agriculture and chemistry and 
 astronomy — what science, in a word, is busy 
 doing. That is what fetishism and superstition 
 and faith and theology and morals and ethics 
 and philosophy are at. And that, in its field, 
 is the function of fiction; which variously 
 uses as part of its constructive material the 
 common activities and special attitudes of all 
 these other decipherers of chaos. 
 
 But there is an esthetic as well as an in- 
 tellectual appeal in fiction; and the novel is 
 
 258
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 not alone an "appearance of completeness," 
 playful, diverting, or explanatory, presented 
 to our understanding, but an art form — which 
 is to say a means of at once arousing and satis- 
 fying our emotional need for self-fulfillment. 
 
 XVII 
 
 If you will turn to the first chapter of 
 Genesis and will read its account of God's 
 first labors; his dividing the primal void and 
 formlessness into light and darkness, and his 
 placing of the sun and moon in the firmament; 
 you will find upon reading the sentence — 
 
 And the morning and the evening were the 
 first day 
 
 — that you experience a distinct and pleasura- 
 ble satisfaction in the statement. That satis- 
 faction is essentially an esthetic one. Your 
 mind has found an appearance of complete- 
 ness to recognize and rest upon. Moreover, 
 if you will examine the form of this statement, 
 you will find that no little part of your pleas- 
 ure in it derives from the perfect fitness and 
 rhythm of the words — a fitness that is a con- 
 stituting element of beauty, and a rhythm 
 
 259
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 that first helps to arouse in you an emotional 
 anticipation, and then guides it to its fulfill- 
 ment. 
 
 And here, again in a nutshell, we have the 
 germs both of esthetic reaction and of the 
 functioning of art. 
 
 XVIII 
 
 The novel, then, is a contrived appearance 
 of completeness in the chaotic drama of life; 
 an imagined phase of that drama, more or less 
 arbitrarily fenced off so that from a certain 
 point of view we can regard it as complete in 
 itself; and at the same time so constructed 
 that it rhythmically arouses in us, and then 
 momentarily satisfies, some inherent need of 
 self-fulfillment. 
 
 Manifestly no reading of a novel that does 
 not take all these facts into account, and con- 
 structively and critically cooperate in their 
 realization, can, in the full sense, be a right 
 reading. 
 
 And it is therefore important that, in read- 
 ing a novel, we keep our real relation to fic- 
 tions as wholes in mind. 
 
 Yet this involves a difficulty. 
 
 260
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 Ve only succeed in imagining the phase of 
 living that a novel presents in proportion as 
 we achieve an illusion of its reality in read- 
 ing it. 
 
 Yet if, even in the reading, we regard its 
 ultimate "truth" as anything but relative, 
 we risk missing its real significance to us. 
 
 Yet to the beginner, a full recognition of 
 either of these aspects is destructive of the 
 other. 
 
 However, the two recognitions are not in- 
 compatible. On the contrary, the more we 
 practice the binocular vision of their coinci- 
 dent employment, the more will they prove to 
 enhance our enjoyment and to cross-fertilize 
 our intellectual and esthetic reactions to the 
 story. But personal practice, and a persistent 
 and interested experimenting in first alternat- 
 ing and then combining these ways of looking 
 at a story, is the only rule for attaining their 
 joint employment. 
 
 A child, suddenly recalled to the fact that a 
 theatrical performance he is witnessing is all 
 make-believe, has his illusions roughly de- 
 stroyed and his pleasure killed. An alert 
 and understanding onlooker at a performance 
 
 261
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 of John Galsworthy's "The Pigeon," on the 
 other hand, is simultaneously conscious and 
 draws the final flavor of his appreciation from 
 the combined realization of the play's fine il- 
 lusion of reality, its purely relative " truth " as 
 an ironic criticism of life, and the inherent art 
 of its complexly aroused and subtly satisfied 
 emotions. And the gap between these two at- 
 titudes, or between similar attitudes in the 
 reading of fiction, is not to be bridged without 
 personal interest and personal effort. Yet it 
 is well worth bridging. And the realization 
 that it is bridgable, the reasons for bridging it, 
 and the advice to keep trying with these un- 
 derstandings in mind, are here offered as in- 
 centives to the undertaking and as directions 
 for going about it. And the reasons for wanting 
 to bridge the gap are that it is only by gradu- 
 ally doing so that we grow into a full respon- 
 siveness to fiction's many-faceted offerings 
 to us and consequently into profiting by its 
 many-phased ministerings to our needs. Also 
 that failure to do this is the cause of most of 
 our driftings into stagnation in the reading of 
 fiction. 
 
 And to give a single yet adequate illustra- 
 
 262
 
 HOW TO READ A NOVEL 
 
 tion of this it is necessary only to point out 
 that it is by a realization of fiction's synthetic 
 and artistic relations to us as above outlined, 
 and by a more and more interested reading of 
 it with these in mind, that we gradually escape 
 from the dwarfing tyranny of our demand for 
 a "happy ending" into a realization that we 
 need the self-fulfillment of imagined failure as 
 well as that of imagined success; and that the 
 interpretatively valid completeness of any fic- 
 tional synthesis, and not its " happy " or " un- 
 happy" "ending," is the ultimate source of 
 all real intellectual profit, or esthetic pleasure, 
 or emotional fulfillment to be derived from it. 
 
 XIX 
 
 As to the importance of employing our 
 ripening realization of these relationships as 
 the criterion of our judgment when we face 
 the completed formulation of a novel, and as 
 to the importance of remembering these rela- 
 tionships and these judgments when, as we 
 constantly do, we employ past fictional for- 
 mulations as bases of other judgments on life, 
 and as elements in other idea and attitude con- 
 structions: — the importance of these prac- 
 
 263
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 tices and the value of gradually developing 
 them are by now self-evident. 
 
 For, since the novel is an imaginary synthe- 
 sis by means of which we at once isolate and 
 examine our own conceptions of life and com- 
 pare notes with the author, not to learn to 
 read it as such, and judge it as such, and em- 
 ploy our memories of the experience as such, 
 is to fail in learning to read. And, since the 
 novel is also an art form; not to learn to read 
 it, constructively aware of its rhythmic arous- 
 ings of emotional anticipation, and not to 
 learn to judge it critically by its valid or in- 
 valid satisfyings of their requirements, and 
 not to remember and use the memory of these 
 things for what they are, is to fail both in the 
 flowering and the seeding of fictional right 
 reading.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE COSMOS A LA CARTE 
 I 
 
 There is a simple yet dramatic experiment in 
 elemental physics with which we are all more 
 or less familiar. 
 
 In it a beam of sunlight is passed through a 
 prism and is thereby separated — like a fan 
 that our hands have opened — into the rain- 
 bow-hued shafts of its component color rays. 
 These are then caught upon a screen and the 
 audience allowed to examine them — allowed 
 to see for itself that here and no otherwhere is 
 the magic paint-box from which the world is 
 colored. And finally — that there may be no 
 doubters — the experiment is proved by re- 
 versing it. The divergent rays are passed 
 through a lens that bends them back into 
 focused reunion; and behold, the white beam 
 of the sunlight is itself again. 
 
 It is, in reality, a very similar experiment 
 that we are engaged on in this book. 
 
 265
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 We have passed our ability to read — that 
 ability which, in these days of all but univer- 
 sal literacy, we have come to look upon as 
 something almost as natural, almost as nec- 
 essary, almost as much to be taken for granted 
 at its face value, as sunlight itself — we have 
 passed our ability to read through a prism of 
 analysis and have separated it into the color- 
 ful factors of its component elements. We 
 have next, so to say, thrown these elements on 
 a screen and examined them separately. And 
 we have discovered, to our initial surprise and 
 to our subsequent enlightenment, that we are 
 ourselves magic paint-boxes. We have dis- 
 covered that our ability to read is made up of 
 nothing less, and of nothing more, than of all 
 the individual colorings, all the personal ex- 
 periences, all the inborn impulses and unfold- 
 ing forces of our individual lives. 
 
 And now it remains for us to prove the 
 value of our experiment by reversing it; to re- 
 construct, that is to say, from the disunited 
 elements of our ability to read and from the 
 determined method of their proper employ- 
 ment, a single, illuminating entity — an atti- 
 tude toward reading. 
 
 266
 
 THE COSMOS A LA CARTE 
 
 And the lens with which I have elected to 
 do the necessary focusing — the phrase that I 
 have chosen in which to sum up this attitude 
 
 — is the title of this chapter. 
 
 You very likely feel that "the Cosmos a la 
 carte" is a "hifalutin" phrase. It no doubt 
 strikes some of you as — how shall I put it? 
 
 — as a trifle "strong"; as "going some"; as, 
 let us say, "a little bit of too much." Some of 
 you are no doubt inclined to smile and politely 
 pass it up as hyperbole. Some of you are no 
 doubt inclined to frown and set it down as 
 "hot air." 
 
 Let me be quite frank and say that I meant 
 you to. 
 
 There is nothing like " stepping down a step 
 that is n't there" for making us realize the 
 levelness of a piece of ground. 
 
 There is nothing like being certain that we 
 have caught some one in the very act of loose- 
 minded overstatement, and then finding that 
 he is, after all, well within the facts, for jolting 
 us into a recognition of neglected truth. 
 
 And this phrase is n't "hifalutin." It is n't 
 hyperbolic. It is n't "hot air." It is merely a 
 slightly fanciful way of calling attention to 
 
 267
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 the most basic, the most primal, the most uni- 
 versally operative attitude of all life. 
 
 If you doubt this, allow me to introduce 
 you to one of our poorest relations and most 
 distant cousins, the amoeba. 
 
 ii 
 
 The amoeba, as you doubtless know, is one 
 of the protozoa — one of the first, or lowest, 
 forms of life. It is an invisible pellicule of 
 protoplasm; a microscopic animalcule con- 
 sisting of a single life-cell. It has no mouth, 
 no stomach, no sense-organs, no limbs. It 
 lives in the sea and it moves from place to 
 place by occasionally protruding portions of 
 its jelly-like substance and sculling with these 
 temporary fins. And when, on its tiny jour- 
 neys, it encounters bits of floating matter 
 smaller than itself, it wraps its soft cell-stuff 
 round them, — engulfs these microscopic 
 atoms in its own microscopic mass, — and 
 either absorbs them, if they prove absorbable, 
 or rejects them if they don't. And this — ex- 
 cept occasionally to divide itself in two and 
 thus double the size of its own family — is all 
 that it ever does. 
 
 268
 
 THE COSMOS A LA CARTE 
 
 Here, then, on the lowest rung of the ladder 
 of life, here, still lingering at the source from 
 which we have all derived, is a literal and liv- 
 ing embodiment of my "hifalutin" phrase. 
 For the amoeba's sole attitude toward the 
 cosmos is that the cosmos is edible. And it 
 spends its life making experiments with the 
 menu. 
 
 in 
 
 "But what," you may perhaps ask, "has 
 this to do with reading?" 
 
 The proper and final answer to that ques- 
 tion is "Everything." But first, let us move a 
 few million years up the scale of development. 
 
 Did you ever notice that a human baby, 
 when it arrives "trailing clouds of glory be- 
 hind it," also brings along the amoeba attitude 
 toward the cosmos? That it, too, regards the 
 universe solely as edible, and conveys every 
 fragment of it that its little hands get hold of 
 to its mouth? 
 
 Let us see how this happens and what it 
 means. 
 
 Millions of years separate Man as we know 
 him — Man with his complex physical organ- 
 
 269
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 ization and his developed mentality — from 
 the one-celled creatures that were his earliest 
 ancestors. But the individual human baby is 
 not thus separated. The individual baby, 
 newly born, is but a few short months removed 
 from having been a microscopic, one-celled or- 
 ganism itself. Moreover, in those few months, 
 it has physically rehearsed (like a scholar, 
 who reviews in a day the lessons of a term) 
 the whole physical history of the race's climb. 
 It has been in turn a two-celled, a four-celled, 
 an eight-celled organism. It has been the cup- 
 shaped cell-mass that corresponds to a sponge. 
 It has been a worm-like creature with a puls- 
 ing tube for a heart. It has been a fish-like be- 
 ing and breathed through gills. It has had the 
 two-chambered heart of a fish, and the three- 
 chambered heart of a frog, before it developed 
 the four-chambered heart of a mammal. It has 
 been a "quadruped" with four limbs alike. 
 It has worn hair from head to heel. It has 
 grown, and discarded, a long tail. 
 
 And even when it is born, it is not yet, ex- 
 cept in intention and promise, a human being. 
 It is still merely a creature on the road to be- 
 coming human — a creature that has already 
 
 270
 
 THE COSMOS A LA CARTE 
 
 developed the body of a baby, but that still 
 retains the mind of an amoeba. 
 
 On the physical side, the long recapitula- 
 tory journey from protozoon to man is well 
 advanced. But on the psychic side the jour- 
 ney is not yet begun. The entire development 
 from "amoeba attitude" to "man attitude" 
 remains to be carried out. All the marvelous 
 overtones of Man's emotional, intellectual, and 
 spiritual appetites have still to be evolved from, 
 and superimposed on, the basic hunger of the 
 protozoon. 
 
 IV 
 
 Do you doubt the possibility of this transi- 
 tion ? 
 
 Did you ever watch a baby a few days old 
 nuzzle at its mother's breast, and then fall 
 asleep in the very act of suckling — at the in- 
 stant, that is to say, of achieved satisfaction? 
 And did you ever watch the same baby, a few 
 weeks later, although its hunger had been 
 sated, fret for its mother's lullaby; and then 
 fall asleep, suddenly, in the middle of a 
 rhythm ? 
 
 If you have, you have watched one of the 
 
 271
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 many beginnings of that other recapitulatory 
 journey — the journey from physical hunger 
 to mental appetites. 
 
 For this latter falling to sleep also marks 
 the instant of an achieved satisfaction. A sat- 
 isfaction still physical, but no longer gastric. 
 The satisfaction of what is, as yet, a mere 
 faint bodily appetite; but which will, some 
 day, develop into a spiritual hunger. 
 
 For what has happened is this: the baby 
 (not being deaf, like the imagined "Helen 
 Keller" of our discussion of "The World 
 Outside Us and the World Within") has sensed 
 a relationship, other than that of food and 
 hunger, between the world outside it and its 
 inner life. It has sensed the relationship be- 
 tween the physical rhythm of its mother's 
 song, and the physical rhythms of its own 
 body; the rhythms of its beating heart, its 
 pulsing arteries, its expanding and contract- 
 ing lungs, its breath alternately intaken and 
 exhaled. And where, awhile ago, it was con- 
 tent and fell asleep when it had hungered and 
 been fed, it now instinctively craves and cla- 
 mors for a periodic renewal of this other, com- 
 fortable sensing; and sleeps when that is sated. 
 
 272
 
 THE COSMOS A LA CARTE 
 
 It has discovered a new dish on the cosmic 
 menu. 
 
 It has, let us put it, sensed something in the 
 world outside it, that is not food, and that yet, 
 somehow, belongs to it. 
 
 And have we not already, in the course of 
 our previous inquiry, seen a child, a little 
 further advanced on this journey, — "the in- 
 habitant," we then described it, "of a world 
 where there was already rhyme, but not yet 
 reason," — reading Mother Goose with a 
 satisfaction that was not wholly physical, yet 
 not wholly mental; and discovering in the 
 process something that was its own — "finding 
 itself" as we said? 
 
 Have we not, indeed, already, in our seek- 
 ing for a Sense of Direction, followed one 
 phase of this journey up through childhood 
 and adolescence to the final culmination of 
 maturity; and found, at every stage, — from 
 the rhymes of Mother Goose to the gospels of 
 the elect, — that the travelers were but discov- 
 ering their own; formulating what belonged 
 to them ; " finding," as we said, " themselves " ? 
 
 It is the universal impetus — this search 
 for our own. 
 
 273
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 It is the essence of that upward urge that 
 has immemorially driven our race; that has 
 driven it from being "amcebas" into being 
 men; that will yet drive it into being what no 
 man can now foresee. 
 
 Not merely in metaphor, but in biologic 
 fact, the acts and attitudes that we speak of 
 as "drinking in beauty," as "having an om- 
 nivorous mind," as "hungering and thirsting 
 after righteousness," are sublimated forms of 
 the primal hunger. They are subtler searchings 
 for our own on the menu of a Cosmos a la carte. 
 
 In short, this search is the Law of Life. 
 
 And it is also the focus-giving fact that we 
 are seeking. 
 
 For, since reading, as we have seen, is a form 
 of living, we can best state our right attitude 
 toward it in terms of Life-law. And so, in order 
 to get our definition of that attitude into a 
 concrete form that we can examine and ad- 
 just ourselves to, we will put it that Reading 
 
 SHOULD BE A ZESTFUL, CONSCIOUS, DISCRIMI- 
 NATING SEARCH FOR OUR OWN. 
 
 274
 
 THE COSMOS A LA CARTE 
 
 v 
 
 Do you remember that, in our early discus- 
 sions, when we discovered that we have to 
 find our own materials in which to retell for 
 ourselves an author's story, and that we even 
 have to find our own meanings for the words 
 in which the story is written, we discovered 
 that we do not always find the right word- 
 meaning first ? That we "react automatically " 
 to words and then criticize the reactions? 
 
 And do you remember that it was there 
 pointed out that this method — to feel first, 
 and then examine our feelings; to react spon- 
 taneously to life, and then accept or reject the 
 reactions — is the only method we have of 
 finding personal meanings, whether for words 
 or for the world ? 
 
 And do you remember that it was further 
 pointed out, there and thereafter, that the 
 understanding of these facts and the employ- 
 ment of this method are the only sources of 
 genuine cultural growth and attainment? 
 
 Please note, then, that this method is the 
 method of the amoeba, which first engulfs its 
 atom, and then either absorbs or rejects it. 
 
 275
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 It is the ancestral method. By it, and by it 
 only, can we discriminate our own, anywhere 
 in life. And by it, and by it only, can we make 
 that, which should be our own, ours. Please 
 note, also, that our friend George — he of the 
 cold-storage mind — does not use this method. 
 He engulfs as many atoms as he can hold; but 
 neither absorbs, nor rejects, any. He is the 
 kind of reader that Lord Bacon must have had 
 in mind when he said that "reading maketh 
 a full man." He mistakes the Cosmos for a 
 table d'hote. 
 
 VI 
 
 But we are adopting a very different atti- 
 tude; and our discussion of "Intellectual Di- 
 gestion" in the seventh chapter was really un- 
 dertaken in order to lay the foundation for a 
 proper understanding, at this point, (i) of the 
 true nature of this reading-search for our own, 
 and (2) of the way we can best translate this 
 understanding into efficient practice. For not 
 everything in any book "belongs to us." And, 
 of what does, only so much is ever actually 
 made ours through reading as we intellectu- 
 ally digest, in addition to mentally engulfing. 
 
 276
 
 THE COSMOS A LA CARTE 
 
 Let us now look, then, with this in mind, at 
 a few obvious facts of reading, the meaning of 
 which we seldom seek for. 
 
 There are many books in every department 
 (and there are few of us who have not had 
 some experience with them) that we read, 
 with fresh profit, at successive stages of our 
 development; books in which, at each reread- 
 ing, we find something now "belonging to us" 
 that was not even potentially "ours" before. 
 
 Sometimes this is because we have, in the 
 mean while, acquired the necessary raw ma- 
 terials of experience with which to read these 
 books more fully. 
 
 Sometimes this is merely because, in the 
 mean while, we have developed new skill in 
 the right using of our old material. 
 
 Sometimes it is because, in the mean while, 
 we have developed new needs that were dor- 
 mant in our younger selves. 
 
 But, generally speaking, these new discov- 
 eries, in books that we have already read, of 
 things that are potentially ours, and these 
 new successes at making them so, are the out- 
 come of all three of these causes combined in 
 various proportions. 
 
 277
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 Again, there are many books in every de- 
 partment (and again there are few of us who 
 have not had some experience with them) 
 that we read once with conscious enjoyment or 
 personal profit; but of which a later reading 
 leaves us puzzled to understand " what we ever 
 saw in them." 
 
 Sometimes this is because, at our first read- 
 ing, they synthesized certain portions of ex- 
 perience for us (and these syntheses may be 
 either the explanatory ones of elementary 
 science or the imaginative ones of simple- 
 mooded fiction) that we now know our way 
 through blindfold, and so no longer realize the 
 sense of rightful ownership we felt in our first 
 finding of them thus simply grouped. 
 
 Sometimes this is because, while in our 
 first reading we found these books adequate 
 moulds into which to pour some inchoate 
 hope or dream or tentative realization of re- 
 lationship, fictional, philosophical, historical, 
 or what-not, the fuller store of our later mould- 
 needing material finds them inadequate to its 
 purposes, and we forget their former ade- 
 quacy. 
 
 Sometimes this is because, at our first read- 
 278
 
 THE COSMOS A LA CARTE 
 
 ing, these books ministered to a typical but 
 temporary need — childish, adolescent, or de- 
 velopmental — that we have since outgrown, 
 have perhaps forgotten, and have even possi- 
 bly come, while remembering, to despise. 
 
 But again, generally speaking, all of these 
 reasons are present in varying proportions 
 when we thus discover that a book, once 
 seemingly full of what by right belonged to us, 
 is now comparatively empty, wholly worth- 
 less, or even despicable. 
 
 And a proper balancing against each other 
 of these two sets of facts from our common 
 reading experience will go far toward making 
 clear to us the true meaning, both of what 
 progressively and changingly constitutes "our 
 own," and of the step-by-step methods of our 
 only efficient search for it. 
 
 VII 
 
 Even Science and Philosophy, we must re- 
 member, constantly invent explanations and 
 hypotheses; find them useful while they cover, 
 and seem to co-relate, all the facts till then 
 observed in a particular field; swear by them 
 more or less dogmatically while maintained; 
 
 279
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 use them as stepping-stones to new investi- 
 gations and as tests of new discoveries; end 
 by discarding them when outgrown and dis- 
 credited, and frequently look back upon them 
 with contempt. 
 
 And this is but another way of expressing 
 the use we have made of those books once 
 found full of meaning, but later discovered to 
 be empty. 
 
 And even Science and Philosophy, those 
 great, organized, supposedly authoritative 
 forms of humanity's search for its own in the 
 chaos of experience, are constantly going back 
 and discovering that their own growth has 
 enabled them to find new meanings and new 
 mysteries in chapters of the Great Book that 
 they had already read and had thought to 
 have read fully. 
 
 And this is but another way of expressing 
 the fresh discoveries we make in old books 
 whose real "conceptions" were bigger than 
 our first formulations of them. 
 
 VIII 
 
 But what the Science, and the Philosophy, 
 and the You and the I of any particular mo 
 
 280
 
 THE COSMOS A LA CARTE 
 
 ment are all prone to lose sight of, is the fact 
 that it is partly with the actually digested and 
 assimilated essences of these old and perhaps 
 exploded explanations, of these old and per- 
 haps abandoned hypotheses, of these old and 
 perhaps now despicable " readings," that they, 
 and we, in our respective fields, are now pursu- 
 ing our enlarging search. 
 
 Thus the chemist of to-day is thinking in 
 part with the truths digested out of the crude 
 syntheses of alchemy. 
 
 Thus the idealist of to-day is more be- 
 holden than he sometimes likes to acknowl- 
 edge to those who first made idols and wor- 
 shiped them. For the idol was the wooden 
 synthesis of a crude idealism ; and in the higher 
 truth of all human worship there circulates 
 to-day some transubstantiated essence of the 
 idolater's gropings after truth. 
 
 Thus John Smith, formulating for himself 
 (in reading W. H. Hudson's romance of Cen- 
 tral America, "Green Mansions") a new syn- 
 thesis of relations between the naive brutali- 
 ties of savage life, the scientific marvels of 
 nature-study, and the basic yearnings of the 
 human heart, may unwittingly be building 
 
 281
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 into his creative structure something of what 
 he first wonderingly found and made his own 
 in reading that once gladly accepted, but 
 now ridiculous-seeming "appearance of com- 
 pleteness," Mayne Reid's "Afloat in the 
 Forest." 
 
 IX 
 
 Our minds, it seems, like our bodies, grow 
 by what they feed on. But, like our bodies, 
 our minds do not grow by means of the con- 
 taining husks and form-giving fibers that in 
 time they digestively reject, but by whatso- 
 ever of the nutritive contents of these they 
 assimilate and make their own. 
 
 And now, with this idea also in mind, let us 
 again look at some of the obvious facts of our 
 common reading experience. 
 
 One may read a volume on science, or an 
 essay upon some philosophical conception, 
 and be so poorly equipped with technical 
 knowledge that one does little more, in the 
 reading, than formulate for one's self a vague 
 idea — the hazy conception of a point of view 
 bigger than one's own. 
 
 Later on, one may come to discard this idea 
 
 282
 
 THE COSMOS A LA CARTE 
 
 as fallacious, or arrive at regarding this point 
 of view as dwarfing. 
 
 And yet, meanwhile, they may have func- 
 tioned for us — these experimental syntheses 
 ■ — as incentives to further searchings, as dis- 
 closers of new possibilities, as touchstones 
 and criteria of "ownership." 
 
 On the other hand, one may read such a 
 book and be utterly incapable of grasping the 
 synthetic idea contained in it; yet may inci- 
 dentally formulate for one's self, in reading 
 it, a dozen subsidiary realizations of fact-re- 
 lationship or idea-relationship that one uses 
 thereafter as building-blocks in future formu- 
 lations; that one gradually combines with 
 other similar realizations, the personal mean- 
 ings of which one slowly and digestively as- 
 similates into one's attitude toward the world. 
 
 And the same thing is true of fiction. 
 
 One may read a story and get little from 
 reading it beyond the vividly emotionalized 
 facing of a situation; or the eager, "I-told- 
 you-so" notion of a proved moral; or a sense 
 of violent antipathy to "that way of looking 
 at things." 
 
 And one may — indeed, one must — use 
 
 283
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 these hazy findings of what belongs to one as 
 parts of one's future equipment. 
 
 But, on the other hand, one may read a 
 novel and discover no wholeness to it at all; 
 yet have a dozen things "happen in one" in 
 the course of the reading that prove, later, to 
 have been true "findings of one's own." 
 
 And of course the same thing is true of a 
 history, an autobiography, a religious treatise, 
 or any other printed invitation to compare 
 notes on life, past, present, or to come. 
 
 x 
 
 All our reading, then, no matter how un- 
 skillful or how unsophisticated it may be, 
 proves on examination to be eclectic. 
 
 And we see, moreover, that this eclecticism, 
 even when unconscious and undirected, is ex- 
 ercised in two typical manners: (i) it seizes 
 upon, and makes future use of, the synthetic 
 aspects of the book read; or (2) it seizes upon, 
 and makes future use of, component details 
 used by the author in his attempted synthesis. 
 Or it does both. 
 
 And the efficient application to practice of 
 our defined attitude toward reading must 
 
 284
 
 THE COSMOS A LA CARTE 
 
 therefore be sought through a gradual develop- 
 ing in ourselves of a more conscious, zestful, and 
 discriminating eclecticism: — an eclecticism 
 eager for the discovery, in everything we read, 
 of "our own" in either of these forms; and an 
 eclecticism progressively able and willing to 
 accept either, at its full value, without prej- 
 udice to the other, while at the same time 
 looking hopefully for the greater discovery 
 of their complete combining. S.uch a combin- 
 ing, for instance, as comes to us when a great 
 novel helps us to build the disregarded facts of 
 our common lives, the partial philosophies of 
 our daily using, the accepted " science " of our 
 passing civilization, into successively reveal- 
 ing syntheses of understanding, and finally 
 welds these rhythmically assembled parts into 
 the interpretative "completeness" of an out- 
 look, and at the same time leads our art- 
 roused sense of "need" to an art-achieved ful- 
 fillment. Or such a combining, again, as one 
 may find in the writings of the French en- 
 tomologist, Henri Fabre. Fabre had the scien- 
 tist's passion for truth, the unassuming cul- 
 ture of the scholar, the unifying imagination 
 of the poet, the dramatist's sense of the tragic 
 
 285
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 and mysterious, the outlook of the philosopher 
 and the creativeness of the artist. His books 
 are about bugs. But their insect actors cast 
 shadows on the stars. 
 
 XI 
 
 But there is a reverse side to every medal. 
 And besides developing a more open-minded 
 and receptive and discriminating eclecticism 
 in the realm of what really belongs to us, we 
 need also to discourage — at least to the 
 extent of recognizing its true character — 
 another kind of eclecticism that we all prac- 
 tice more or less unintelligently in the realm 
 of what, in the strictest sense, does not as yet 
 belong to us. 
 
 And here again our seventh chapter in- 
 quiry into the matter of Intellectual Digestion 
 will help us to an easier understanding. 
 
 The mere acceptance — the "swallowing 
 whole" — of statements of alleged fact, no 
 matter how trustworthy, or of pronounced 
 opinions, no matter how " authoritative," may 
 stock our memories with useful material — ■ 
 useful for certain experiments, or as points of 
 departure for future inquiry, or as subject- 
 
 286
 
 THE COSMOS A LA CARTE 
 
 matter for future testing-out. But, so far from 
 such mere acceptance making these things 
 "ours," it frequently results in preventing our 
 ever discovering in them that which should 
 by rights belong to us. 
 
 If, for example, in the exercise of this bas- 
 tard eclecticism, one uncritically accepts as 
 personally and finally valid the orders of some 
 critic, or specialist, or teacher (no matter how- 
 celebrated) as to what we must think of a 
 picture, or what we must find in a book, or 
 how we must regard some political theory, or 
 what we must believe in religion, one closes by 
 that supine act of acceptance the only door 
 that opens into real "ownership" in that par- 
 ticular synthesis of recognizable relationship. 
 
 "But," many readers are likely to exclaim 
 at this point, "are we not to accept, then, as 
 valid, the declaration of Science that it is so 
 and so many million miles to the sun; that so 
 much oxygen and so much hydrogen, properly 
 combined, form water; and all the thousands 
 of other authoritative declarations about 
 things that we need to know, but have no 
 chance to find out for ourselves?" And the 
 answer to this question is very simple, for the 
 
 287
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 question has to do with a difficulty that is 
 really only a confusion. The fact being that 
 we accept the statements of others only in so 
 far, and for so long, as their truth does not 
 personally concern us. 
 
 Science tells us that it is ninety-four million 
 miles to the sun; and we accept the statement 
 humbly and gratefully and admiringly. 
 
 Later on, Science comes round and says 
 that it is sorry, but it finds that it has made a 
 mistake. It is only ninety-two and a half mil- 
 lion miles to the sun. And we accept the new 
 statement just as readily and as humbly as 
 the first. But the real reason for this is that 
 the only personal use we make of this " knowl- 
 edge" is to use the supposed distance to the 
 sun as a means of trying to conceive the dis- 
 tances of inter-stellar space; and for this pur- 
 pose one of these distances is as useful as the 
 other. 
 
 Again, Science tells us to-day that under cer- 
 tain circumstances two atoms of oxygen and 
 one of hydrogen will rush joyously together 
 and form a molecule of water; and that under 
 other circumstances these same atoms will 
 find each other's company unsupportable and 
 
 288
 
 THE COSMOS A LA CARTE 
 
 will rush apart and resume their original 
 status. And we accept the statement, humble 
 and marveling. But if, to-morrow, Science 
 came round and told us that it was sorry, but 
 it found that it had overlooked something; 
 namely, that it was only when a little radium 
 was present, — say an eightieth of a grain in 
 a gallon of water, — that these things ever 
 happened, we should accept the new state- 
 ment as complacently as the first; and should 
 continue to discriminate just as eclectically 
 as before between the bottled waters offered 
 us by the Undine Spring Company and the 
 Hygienic Distilling Corporation. For the 
 truth is that the only personal use most of us 
 ever make of the statements of Science about 
 the composition of water is to use them as im- 
 aginative items in our building-up of a con- 
 ception of the marvelously intricate nature of 
 matter, of the almost human loves and hates 
 and liaisons and fallings-out of "chemical 
 affinity," and of the relations these bear to 
 modern industry and modern thought. And 
 for this purpose one of these statements is as 
 serviceable as the other. 
 
 But suppose one was a manufacturing 
 
 289
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 chemist, excited by the new declaration be- 
 cause it suggested the possibility of his ex- 
 tracting radium from Lake Michigan. Do 
 you imagine for a moment that he would ac- 
 cept the new declaration without personal in- 
 vestigation? Or build a plant until he had 
 digested out of that investigation's results the 
 "personal meanings" of the discovery? 
 
 But enough of Science. Let us come down 
 to the practical plane of household practice. 
 You get, let us say, your bread from a baker. 
 But in glancing over the pages of Mrs. Roast- 
 em's cookbook, you come upon the statement 
 that four eggs are the proper number to use 
 in making corn muffins. If Mrs. Roastem is 
 your favorite authority, you accept the state- 
 ment unconditionally, and even pass the in- 
 formation on to inquiring friends, rather proud 
 that the corner of Authority's mantle should 
 thus for a moment rest on your shoulder. And 
 if, next year, a new edition of Mrs. Roastem's 
 book advises three eggs instead of four, you 
 accept the revision without question, and per- 
 haps even boast to your advisees that Mrs. R. 
 has found a way of making muffins with three 
 eggs. 
 290
 
 THE COSMOS A LA CARTE 
 
 But suppose that you make up your mind 
 to try your own hand at making corn muffins. 
 Which authority finally determines for you 
 what is "your own" in that recipe — Mrs. 
 Roastem, or your palate and your digestion? 
 
 XII 
 
 There are, as a matter of fact, but three 
 services, broadly speaking, that any teacher 
 or expounder or commentator or critic can 
 render us. 
 
 One of these is the important and necessary, 
 but none-the-less humble, service of supply- 
 ing our memories with storable raw materials 
 of alleged "facts," of supposed relationships, 
 and of the existence of this, that, or the other 
 decision about these, arrived at by this, that, 
 or the other investigator. 
 
 The other two services are of a higher order; 
 of opposed but mutually complementary char- 
 acter, and hence of equal value. 
 
 One of them is to help us (by inducing us 
 constructively and critically to agree with 
 them) to a more intelligent synthetic formula- 
 tion of our own reactions to life. 
 
 The other is to help us (by inducing us 
 
 291
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 , constructively and critically to disagree with 
 them) to more intelligent syntheses of these 
 same personal reactions. 
 
 And there is no more fatal bar to the pro- 
 gressive and successful reduction to practice 
 of our accepted attitude toward reading than 
 habitually to allow the first of these author 
 services to take for us the place of the other 
 two. 
 
 XIII 
 
 One might fill a book with examples of the 
 emotional and intellectual and spiritual lanes- 
 leading-to-our-own that are blocked and 
 turned into no-thoroughfares for us by this 
 practice. 
 
 But one common and typical instance will 
 suffice — an instance so common that we con- 
 stantly see examples of it; and so typical that 
 we should always regard them as final reduc- 
 tions-to-absurdity of the idea that we do not 
 need to seek our own, or to digest it out of 
 what we find, but can rest content in being 
 told by another what it is. 
 
 We all know people who will read a book in 
 the firm conviction that they are getting a 
 
 292
 
 THE COSMOS A LA CARTE 
 
 great deal out of it, and who, in that convic- 
 tion, voraciously " swallow whole " all its state- 
 ments, opinions, theories, and explanations; 
 but who, if they chance upon some declara- 
 tion in it that they know of their own knowl- 
 edge to be inaccurate, will "unswallow" 
 everything they had taken in (which, having 
 digested none of it, they are able to do) and 
 will toss the book aside, declaring that "if it is 
 wrong in that it may be wrong in everything" 
 and that it is of no further use to them, since 
 they no longer know "what to believe and 
 what not to." 
 
 These are the people who, a few generations 
 since, ceased to believe in God when they be- 
 gan to believe in Darwin. 
 
 And the root of their trouble — and of ours, 
 since it is a trouble from which none of us is 
 free — lies in the fact that they have not yet 
 even begun to learn the thing that none of us 
 has wholly learned; namely, that, while under- 
 standing and faith must both feed on external 
 things, they must both be generated within us. 
 
 293
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 XIV 
 
 Understanding and faith : These are the two 
 forms that all our successful seekings for our 
 own take on. They are equally changeable 
 and fallible. They are equally subject to the 
 laws of growth by digestion and assimilation. 
 They are equally incapable of reaching "ul- 
 timate truth." Yet they are the equal and 
 final storehouses of the harvest of living. 
 
 All that is significant to the seer in his "at- 
 titude toward the Cosmos" and toward the 
 unknowable Power that stands behind it or 
 pervades it, is summed up in these two terms. 
 And all that is significant to the miser, gloat- 
 ing on the dulling dollars in an old hair trunk, 
 is similarly to be summed up. 
 
 And since, while generated within us, un- 
 derstanding and faith both feed on external 
 things, — on the concreteness of our own con- 
 tacts with life and on such comparings of notes 
 as we are able to carry on with our fellows, — 
 the homely problem of the "balanced ration" 
 enters into all our dealings with their nourish- 
 ment. 
 
 We have already seen that our own con- 
 
 294
 
 THE COSMOS A LA CARTE 
 
 crete contacts with life and our own germinal 
 "ideas" derived therefrom are the basic raw 
 materials of our reading. We have already 
 seen that it is in part with such increments 
 of understanding and faith as we digest out of 
 our old reading that we carry on our new. 
 And we must not forget that these new read- 
 ings must, taken together with our new liv- 
 ing, constitute in some sort a "balanced ra- 
 tion," if the understanding and faith we build 
 from them are to be sound and serviceable. 
 
 We cannot practice to the full the right 
 reading of modern fiction if we are utterly 
 ignorant of modern thought. We cannot prac- 
 tice to the full the right reading of even the 
 simplest conceptions of modern thought if we 
 are utterly ignorant of modern science. We 
 cannot bring to the reading of the simplest 
 scientific textbook the "curiosity" that fur- 
 nishes the motive power of our reading if we 
 walk the modern world without something of 
 that will to inquire into its phenomena that 
 every child possesses. 
 
 Right reading is not a trick. It is a struc- 
 ture. It is built up from the digested satisfy- 
 ings of a myriad curiosities — curiosities from 
 
 295
 
 HOW TO READ 
 
 which, on the one hand, its materials are de- 
 rived, and from which, on the other, its meth- 
 ods are assembled, like the growing formula- 
 tion of a novel's conception. And its aim is an 
 efficient readiness and ability, based on prac- 
 tice and experiment, to make imaginative 
 combinations of this material at the instiga- 
 tion of the author, in the zestful seeking for 
 what these may disclose in, and for, ourselves. 
 
 Perhaps you are one of those who have kept 
 hanging up, in your heart, a motto, worked in 
 mental worsted on a bit of intellectual bristol 
 board — a motto reading " Live, and let live." 
 If so, and if you would learn right reading, 
 take this motto down and hang up in its place 
 one with the inscription, "Live, and compare 
 notes." And then, when you are "reading 
 your book," remember George of the cold- 
 storage mind, and remember the amoeba. 
 
 Is there a simile in the sentence before you? 
 Engulf it. Test yourself quickly with it for 
 anything that it may disclose to, or in, or for, 
 you, either of beauty or of meaning or of 
 humor. Absorb what you find; or toss the 
 empty husk of words aside, and pass on. Is 
 there a statement in a paragraph? A moral 
 
 296
 
 THE COSMOS A LA CARTE 
 
 implication in an incident? A criticism of life 
 implicit in a tale? An "outlook" in an out- 
 come? An esthetic stimulus in a style? An 
 art-enhancement in a writer's creation? En- 
 gulf them. Taste them. Test them by, and 
 for, yourself. Smack your mind's lips over 
 them; or make a wry face, and pass on. 
 
 When, and only when, you are doing this, 
 are you really reading — seeking your own 
 with a zestful and discriminating eclecticism. 
 
 And when you are doing this, you are, like 
 the amoeba, taking your Cosmos a la carte. 
 
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