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If, after completing Part Two of this book, you (1) agreed that reading analytically is worthwhile, and (2) accepted the rules of reading as essentially supportive of that aim, then you must have begun to try to read in the manner we have described. If you did not, it is not just because you were lazy or tired. It is because you did not really mean either (1) or (2).
The problem of knowing how to read imaginative literature is inherently much more difficult than the problem of knowing how to read expository books. Nevertheless, it seems to be a fact that such skill is more widely possessed than the art of reading science and philosophy, politics, economics, and history. How can this be true?
Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.
If we must escape from reality, it should be to a deeper, or greater, reality. This is the reality of our inner life, of our own unique vision of the world. To discover this reality makes us happy; the experience is deeply satisfying to some part of ourselves we do not ordinarily touch.
The imaginative writer tries to maximize the latent ambiguities of words, in order thereby to gain all the richness and force that is inherent in their multiple meanings. He uses metaphors as the units of his construction just as the logical writer uses words sharpened to a single meaning.
The logic of expository writing aims at an ideal of unambiguous explicitness. Nothing should be left between the lines. Everything that is relevant and statable should be said as explicitly and clearly as possible. In contrast, imaginative writing relies as much upon what is implied as upon what is said.
history, that is, is allowed to rest somewhere in between the two main divisions of the kinds of books, then it is usually admitted that history is closer to fiction than to science.
historian must always make up something. He must either find a general pattern in, or impose one on, events; or he must suppose that he knows why the persons in his story did the things they did.
The causes of every human action, Tolstoy thought, were so manifold, so complex, and so deeply hidden in unconscious motivations that it is impossible to know why anything ever happened.
is necessary to read more than one account of the history of an event or period if we want to understand it. Indeed, this is the first rule of reading history.
any good history is also universal.
As far as the first question is concerned, every history has a particular and limited subject. It is surprising, then, how often readers do not trouble to find out what this is.
A good historian must combine the talents of the storyteller and the scientist. He must know what is likely to have happened as well as what some witnesses or writers said actually did happen.
it is possible that no kind of literature has a greater effect on the actions of men than history.
History suggests the possible, for it describes things that have already been done.
One of the greatest of all biographies is Boswell’s Life of Johnson,
A definitive biography is a slice of history—the history of a man and of his times, as seen through his eyes.
Izaak Walton’s Lives of his friends, the poets John Donne and George Herbert,
John Tyndall’s account of his friend Michael Faraday in Faraday the Discoverer.
just as Plutarch shows Alexander the Great modeling his own life on that of Achilles (whose life he learned about from Homer), so many later conquerors have tried to model their lives on that of Plutarch’s Alexander.
much of what anyone writes on any subject is autobiographical.
we should not spend so much time trying to discover a writer’s secrets that we do not find out what he says plainly.
Read biography as history and as the cause of history; take all autobiographies with a grain of salt; and never forget that you must not argue with a book until you fully understand what it is saying.
1. What does the author want to prove? 2. Whom does he want to convince? 3. What special knowledge does he assume? 4. What special language does he use? 5. Does he really know what he is talking about? For the most part it is safe to assume that all current events books want to prove something.
Many authors write only for readers who agree with them. If you disagree sharply with a reporter’s assumptions, you may only be irritated if you try to read his book.
Readers do not have to be wary when reading Aristotle, or Dante, or Shakespeare. But the author of any contemporary book may have—though he does not necessarily have—an interest in your understanding it in a certain way. Or if he does not, the sources of his information may have such an interest.
Reader’s Digest and the scores of similar periodicals is, first of all, a skill in reading, and only then one of writing simply and clearly. It does for us what few of us have the technique—even if we had the time—to do for ourselves. It cuts the core of solid information out of pages and pages of less substantial stuff.
Reading digests, therefore, is sometimes the most demanding and difficult reading that you can do.
Until approximately the end of the nineteenth century, the major scientific books were written for a lay audience. Their authors—men like Galileo, and Newton, and Darwin—were not averse to being read by specialists in their fields; indeed, they wanted to reach such readers. But there was as yet no institutionalized specialization in those days, days which Albert Einstein called “the happy childhood of science.”
Most modern scientists do not care what lay readers think, and so they do not even try to reach them.
A serious communication on a scientific subject assumes so much specialized knowledge on the part of the reader that it usually cannot be read at all by anyone not learned in the field. There are obvious advantages to this approach, not least that it serves to advance science more quickly.
Experts talking to each other about their expertise can arrive very quickly at the frontiers of it—they can see the problems at once and begin to try to solve them. But the cost is equally obvious. You—the ordinary intelligent reader whom w...
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The attitude of scientists to historians of science could be summed up in that famous remark of George Bernard Shaw’s: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”
try to read at least some of the great scientific classics of our tradition. In fact, there is really no excuse for not trying to read them. None of them is impossibly difficult, not even a book like Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, if you are willing to make the effort.
As a layman, you do not read the classical scientific books to become knowledgeable in their subject matters in a contemporary sense. Instead, you read them to understand the history and philosophy of science.
In the great works of science, there is no oratory or propaganda, though there may be bias in the sense of initial presuppositions. You detect this, and take account of it, by distinguishing what the author assumes from what he establishes through argument.
explicitly ask you to take this or that for granted. Scientific objectivity is not the absence of initial bias. It is attained by frank confession of it.
a scientist, unlike a historian, tries to get away from locality in time and place. He tries to say how things are generally, how things generally behave.
Anyone who desires to acquire an understanding of the history of science must not only read the classical texts, but must also become acquainted, through direct experience, with the crucial experiments in that history.
We are not told, or not told early enough so that it sinks in, that mathematics is a language, and that we can learn it like any other, including our own.
Since mathematics is a language, it has its own vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, and these have to be learned by the beginning reader. Certain symbols and relationships between symbols have to be memorized.
Euclid, whose Elements of Geometry is one of the most lucid and beautiful works of any kind that has ever been written.
Take Newton’s Principia for an example. The book contains many propositions, both construction problems and theorems, but it is not necessary to read all of them in detail, especially the first time through. Read the statement of the proposition, and glance down the proof to get an idea of how it is done; read the statements of the so-called lemmas and corollaries; and read the so-called scholiums, which are essentially discussions of the relations between propositions and of their relations to the work as a whole. You will begin to see that whole if you do this, and so to discover how the
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Oddly enough, however, even if mathematics is absolutely terrifying to you, its absence from certain works may cause you even more trouble. A case in point is Galileo’s Two New Sciences, his famous treatise on the strength of materials and on motion. This work is particularly difficult for modern readers because it is not primarily mathematical; instead, it is presented in the form of a dialogue.
excellent popular books as Whitehead’s Introduction to Mathematics, Lincoln Barnett’s The Universe and Dr. Einstein, and Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle,
have to do with what ought to be done or sought, and they belong to the division of philosophy that is sometimes called practical, and is more accurately called normative.
Up to about 1930, or perhaps even a little later, philosophical books were written for the general reader.
1. THE PHILOSOPHICAL DIALOGUE: The first philosophical style of exposition, first in time if not in effectiveness, is the one adopted by Plato in his Dialogues.
“A master like Plato,” we said—but there is no one “like” Plato. Other philosophers have attempted dialogues—for example, Cicero and Berkeley—but with little success. Their dialogues are flat, dull, almost unreadable.
2. THE PHILOSOPHICAL TREATISE OR ESSAY: Aristotle was Plato’s best pupil; he studied under him for twenty years. He is said to have also written dialogues, but none of these survives entirely. What does survive are curiously difficult essays or treatises on a number of different subjects.
