 I have a way every two or three days or so of an afternoon of going down to our library, hiding into the little gate by the shelves and taking a long empty walk there. I have found that nothing quite takes the place of it for me, wandering up and down the aisles of my ignorance, letting myself be loomed at, staring doggedly back. I always feel when I go out the great door as if I had won a victory. I have at least faced the facts. I swing off to my tramp on the hills where is the sense of space as if I had faced the bully of the world, the whole assembled world in his own den and he had given me a license to live. Of course it only lasts a little while, one soon feels a library nowadays pulling on him, one has to go back and do it all over again, but for the time being it affords infinite relief. It sets one in right relations to the universe, to the original plan of things. One suspects that if God had originally intended that men on this planet should be crowded off by books on it, it would not have been put off to the 20th century. I was saying something of this sort to the presiding genius of the state of Massachusetts the other day, and when I was through he said promptly, the way a man feels in a library, if anyone can get him to tell it, lets out more about a man than anything else in the world. It did not seem best to make a reply to this, I didn't think it would do either of us any good. Finally, in spite of myself, I spoke up and allowed that I felt as intelligent in a library as anybody. He did not say anything. When I asked him what he thought being intelligent in a library was, he took the general ground that it consisted in always knowing what one was about there, in knowing exactly what one wanted. I replied I did not think that that was a very intelligent state of mind to be in in a library. Then I waited while he told me, fifteen minutes, what an intelligent mind was anywhere, nearly everywhere it seemed to me, but I did not wait in vain and at last when he had come around to it and had asked me what I thought the feeling of intelligence consisted in, in libraries, I said it consisted in being pulled on by the books. I said quite a little after this and of course the general run of my argument was that I was rather intelligent myself. The PGS of M had little to say to this and after he had said how intelligent he was a while, the conversation was dropped. The question that concerns me is what shall a man do, how shall he act when he finds himself in the hush of a great library? Opens the door upon it, stands and waits in the midst of it with his poor outstretched soul all by himself before it and feels the books pulling on him. I always feel as if it were a sort of infinite crossroads. The last thing I want to know in a library is exactly what I want there. I am tired of knowing what I want. I am always knowing what I want. I can know what I want almost anywhere. If there is a place left on God's earth where a modern man can go and go regularly and not know what he wants a while, in heaven's name why not let him. I am as fond as the next man I think of knowing what I am about, but when I find myself ushered into a great library I do not know what I am about any sooner than I can help. I shall know soon enough, God forgive me, when it is given to a man to stand in the assembly room of nations to feel the ages, all the ages gathering around him flowing past his life to listen to the immortal stir of thought to the doings of the dead, why should a man interrupt, interrupt the whole world to know what he is about? I stand at the junction of all time and space. I am the three tenses. I read the newspaper of the universe. It fades away after a while. I know I go to the card catalog like a lamb to the slaughter, poke my head into knowledge somewhere and am lost, but the light of it on the spirit does not fade away. It leaves a glow there. It plays on the pages afterward. There is a certain fine excitement about taking a library in this fashion. A sense of spaciousness of joy in it, which one is almost always sure to miss in libraries, most libraries, by staying in them. The only way one can get any real good out of a modern library seems to be by going away in the nick of time. If one stays, there is no help for it. One is soon standing before the card catalog, sorting one's wits out in it, filing them away, and the sense of boundlessness both in oneself and everybody else, the thing a library is for, is fenced off forever. At least it seems fenced off forever. One sees the universe barred and patterned off with a kind of grating before it. It is a card catalog universe. I can only speak for one, but I must say for myself that as compared with this feeling one has in the door, this feeling of standing over a library, mere reading in it, sitting down and letting oneself be tucked into a single book in it, is a humiliating experience. How it feels. I am not unaware that this will seem to some this empty doting on infinity, the standing and staring at all knowledge, a mere dizzying exercise, whirling one's head round and round in nothing for nothing. And I am not unaware that it would be unbecoming in me or in any other man to feel superior to a card catalog. A card catalog, of course, as a device for making a kind of tunnel for one's mind in a library, for working one's way through it, is useful and necessary to all of us. Certainly if a man insists on having infinity in a convenient form, infinity in a box, it would be hard to find anything better to have it in than a card catalog. There are times when one does not want infinity in a box. He loses the best part of it that way. He prefers it in its natural state. All that I am contending for is that when these times come, the times when a man likes to feel infinite knowledge crowding around him, feel it through the backs of unopened books and likes to stand still and think about it, worship with the thought of it, he ought to be allowed to. It is true that there is no sign up against it, against thinking in libraries, but there might as well be. It amounts to the same thing no one is expected to. People are expected to keep up an appearance, at least of doing something else there. I do not dare to hope that the next time I am caught standing and staring in a library with a kind of blank, happy look, I shall not be considered by all my kind intellectually disreputable for it. I admit that it does not look intelligent, this standing by a door and taking in a sweep of books, this reading a whole library at once. I can imagine how it looks. It looks like listening to a kind of cloth and paper chorus. Foolish enough, but if I go out of the door to the hills again, refreshed for them and lifted up to them with the strength of the ages in my limbs, great voices all around me, flocking my solitary walk, who shall gain say me? How a specialist can be an educated man. It is a sad thing to go into a library nowadays and watch the people there who are merely making tunnels through it. Some libraries are worse than others seem to be made for tunnels, college libraries perhaps are the worst. One can almost, if one stands still enough in them, hear what is going on. It is getting to be practically impossible in a college library to slink off to a side shelf by oneself, take down some gentle-hearted book one does not need to read there, and begin to listen in it without hearing some worthy person quietly, persistently boring himself around the next corner. It is getting worse every year. The only way a readable library book can be read nowadays is to take it away from the rest of them. It must be taken where no other reading is going on. The busy scene of a crowd of people, mere specialists and others gathered around roofing their minds in is no fitting place for a great book or a live book to be read, a book that uncovers the universe. On the other hand, it was certainly a trying universe if it were uncovered all the time, if one had to be exposed to all of it and to all of it at once, always. And there is no denying that libraries were intended to roof men's minds in sometimes, as well as to take the roofs of their minds off. What seems to be necessary is to find some middle course in reading between the scientists' habit of tunneling under the dome of knowledge and the poet's habit of soaring around in it. There ought to be some principle of economy and knowledge which will allow a man, if he wants to or knows enough, to be a poet and a scientist both. It is well enough for a mere poet to take a library as a spectacle, a kind of perpetual lick observatory to peak at the universe with, if he likes, and if a man is a mere scientist, there is no objection to his taking a library as a kind of vast tunnel system or chart for burrowing. But the common educated man, the man who is in the business of being a human being, unless he knows some middle course in a library, knows how to use its lick observatory and its tunnel system both, does not get very much out of it. If there can be found some principle of economy and knowledge common to artists and scientists alike which will make it possible for a poet to know something and which will make it possible for a scientist to know a very great deal without being, to most people, a little underwitted, it would very much simplify the problem of being educated in modern times and there would be a general gratefulness. Far be it from me to seem to wish to claim this general gratefulness for myself, I have no world reforming feeling about the matter, I would be very grateful just here to be allowed to tuck in a little idea, no chart to go with it, on this general subject which my mind keeps coming back to as it runs around watching people. There seem to be but two ways of knowing, one of them is by the spirit and the other is by the letter. The most reasonable principle of economy and knowledge would seem to be that in all reading that pertains to a man's specialty, his business and knowledge, he should read by the letter, knowing the facts by observing them himself and that in all other reading he should read through the spirit of imagination, the power of taking to one's self facts that have been observed by others. If a man wants to be a specialist, he must do his knowing like a scientist, but if a scientist wants to be a man, he must be a poet, he must learn how to read like a poet, he must educate in himself the power of absorbing immeasurable knowledge, the facts of which have been approved and observed by others. The weak point in our modern education seems to be that it has broken altogether with the spirit or the imagination. Playing upon the spirit or the imagination of a man is the one method possible to employ in educating him in everything except his specialty. It is the one method possible to employ in making even a powerful specialist of him in relating his specialty to other specialties that is in making either him or his specialty worthwhile. In as much as it has been decreed that every man in modern life must be a specialist, the fundamental problem that confronts modern education is, how can a specialist be an educated man? There would seem to be but one way a specialist can be an educated man, the only hope for a specialist lies in his being allowed to have a soul, or whatever he chooses to call it, a spirit or an imagination. If he has this, whatever it is, in one way or another, he will find his way to every book he needs. He will read all the books there are in his specialty. He will read all other books through their backs. On reading books through their backs, as this is the only way the majority of books can be read by anybody, one wonders why so little has been said about it. Reading books through their backs is easily the most important part of a man's outfit if he wishes to be an educated man. It is not necessary to prove this statement. The books themselves prove it without even being opened. The mere outside of a library, almost any library, would seem to settle the point that if a man proposes to be in any larger or deeper sense a reader of books, the books must be read through their backs. Even the man who is obliged to open books in order to read them sooner or later admits this. He finds the few books he opens in the literal or unseeing way do not make him see anything. They merely make him see that he ought to have opened the others, that he must open the others. That is, if he is to know anything. The next thing he sees is that he must open all the others to know anything. When he comes to know this, he may be said to have reached what is called by the stretch of courtesy a state of mind. It is the scientific state of mind. Any man who has watched his mind a little knows what this means. It is the first incipient symptom in a mind that science is setting in. The only possible cure for it is reading books through their backs. As this scientific state of mind is the main obstacle nowadays in the way of reading books through their backs, it is fitting perhaps at this point that I should dwell on it a little. I do not claim to be a scientist, and I have never, even in my worst moments, hoped for a scientific mind. I'm afraid I know as well as anyone who has read as far as this in this book that I cannot prove anything. The book has at least proved that. But it does seem to me that there are certain things that very much need to be said about the scientific mind in its general relation to knowledge. I would give the world to be somebody else for a while and say them right here in the middle of my book, but I know as well as anyone after all that has passed that if I say anything about the scientific mind, nobody will believe it. The best I can do is to say how I feel about the scientific mind, and what has that to do with? Exclaims the whole world in all its laboratories. What is really wanted in dealing with this matter seems to be some person, some grave superficial person who will take the scientific mind up scientifically, shake it and filter it, put it under the microscope, stare at it with a telescope, stick the x-ray through it, lay it on the operating table, show what is the matter with it, even to itself. Anything that is said about the scientific mind, which is not said in a big bow-wow scientific impersonal out of the universe sort of way will not go very far. And yet, the things that need to be said about the scientific mind, the things that need to be done for it, need to be said and done so very much that it seems as if almost anyone might help. So I'm going to keep on trying. Let no one suppose, however, that because I have turned around the corner into another chapter, I am setting myself up as a sudden and new authority on the scientific mind. I do not tell how it feels to be scientific. I merely tell how it looks as if it felt. I have never known a great scientist, and I can only speak of the kind of scientist I have generally met. The kind everyone meets nowadays, the average bear scientist. He always looks to me as if he had a grudge against the universe, jealous of it or something. There are so many things in it he cannot know and that he has no use for unless he does. It always seems to me, perhaps it seems so to most of us in the world, who are running around and enjoying things and guessing on them, that the average scientist has a kind of dreary and disgruntled look, a look of feeling left out. Nearly all the universe goes to waste with a scientist. He fixes himself so that it has to. If a man cannot get the good out of a thing until he knows it and knows all of it, he cannot expect to be happy in this universe. There are no conveniences for his being happy in it. It is the wrong size to begin with. Exact knowledge at its best or even at its worst does not let a man into very many things in a universe like this one. A large part of it is left over with a scientist. It is the part that is left over which makes him unhappy. I'm not claiming that a scientist, simply because he is a scientist, is any unhappier or needs to be any unhappier than other men are. He does not need to be. It all comes of a kind of brutal, sweeping, overriding prejudice he has against guessing on anything. On keeping each other in countenance. I do not suppose that my philosophizing on this subject, a sort of slow, peristaltic action of my own mind, is of any particular value, that it really makes anyone feel any better except myself. But it has just occurred to me that I may have arisen quite as well as not without knowing it to the dignity of the commonplace. The man who thinks he is playing a solo in any human experience, says this morning's paper, only needs a little more experience to know that he is a member of a chorus. I suspect myself of being a typical case. The scientific mind has taken possession of all the land. It has assumed the right of eminent domain in it, and there must be other human beings here and there, I am sure, standing aghast at learning in our modern day, even as I am, their wise and wherefores working within them, trying to wonder their way out in this matter. All that is necessary as I take it is for one or the other of us to speak up in the world, barely peep in it, make himself known wherever he is, tell how he feels, and he will find he is not alone. Then we will get together. We will keep each other in countenance. We will play with our minds if we want to. We will take the liberty of knowing rows of things we don't know all about, and we will be as happy as we like, and if we keep together we will manage to have a fairly educated look besides. I'm very sure of this, but it is the sort of thing a man cannot do alone. If he tries to do it with anyone else, anyone that happens along, he has soon come up with. He cannot be done in that way. There is no one to whom to turn. Almost every mind one knows in this modern educated world is a suspicious, unhappy, abject, helpless, scientific mind. It is almost impossible to find a typical educated mind either in this country or in Europe or anywhere that is not a rolled over mind, jealous and crushed by knowledge day and night, and yet staring at its ignorance everywhere. The scientist is almost always a man who takes his mind seriously, and he takes the universe as seriously as he takes his mind. Instead of glorying in a universe and being a little proud of it for being such an immeasurable, unspeakable, unknowable success, his whole state of being is one of worry about it. The universe seems to irritate him somehow. Has he not spent years of hard labor in making his mind over and drilling it into not thinking, into not inferring things, into not knowing anything he does not know all of? And yet here he is, and here is his whole life. Does it not consist in being baffled by germs and bacilli, crowed over by atoms trampled on by the stars? It is getting so that there is but one thing left that the modern educated scientific mind feels that it knows and that is the impossibility of knowledge. Certainly, if there is anything in this wide world that can possibly be in a more helpless, more pulp-like state than the scientific mind in the presence of something that cannot be known, something that can only be used by being wondered at, which is almost of the universe's fore, it has yet to be pointed out. He may be better off than he looks and I don't doubt he quite looks down on me as Amir poet, the shanticleer of things, who lives to flap his wings, it's all he knows, they're never furled, who plants his feet on the ridgepole of the world and crows. Still, I like it very well. I don't know anything better that can be done with the world and as I have said before I say again, my friend and brother, the scientist, is either very great or very small or he is moderately, decently unhappy. At least this is the way it looks from the ridgepole of the world. The romance of science. Science is generally accredited with being very matter of fact but there has always been one romance in science from the first. It's romantic attitude toward itself. It would be hard to find any greater romance in modern times. The romance of science is the assumption that man is a plain, pure-blooded, non-inferring, mere observing being and that in proportion as his brain is educated, he must not use it. Detuctive reasoning has gone out with the 19th century, says the strident voice. This is the one single inference that the scientific method seems to have been able to make, the inference that no inference has a right to exist. So far as I can see, if there are going to be inferences anyway and one has to take one's choice in inferring, I would rather have a few inferences on hand that I can live with every day than to have this one huge, voracious inference, the scientists, which swallows all the others up. For that matter, when the scientist has actually made it, this one huge guess that he hasn't a right to guess, what good does it do him? He never lives up to it and all the time he has his poor, miserable theory hanging about him, dogging him day and night. Does he not keep on guessing in spite of himself? Does he not live plumped up against mystery every hour of his life, crowded on by ignorance, forced to guess if only to eat? Is he not brow-beaten into taking things for granted, which ever way he turns? He becomes a doleful, skeptical, contradictory, anxious, disagreeable, disapproving person as a matter of course. One would think in the abstract that a certain serenity would go with exact knowledge and it would if a man were willing to put up with a reasonable amount of exact knowledge, eke it out with his brains, some of it, but when he wants all the exact knowledge there is and nothing else but exact knowledge and is not willing to mix his brains with it, it is different. When a man puts his whole being into a vice of exact knowledge, he finds that he has about as perfect a convenience for being miserable as could possibly be devised. He soon becomes incapable of noticing things or of enjoying things in the world for themselves. With one or two exceptions, I have never known a scientist to whom his knowing a thing or not knowing it did not seem the only important thing about it. Of course, when a man's mind gets into this dolefully cramped exact condition, a universe like this is not what it ought to be for him. He lives too unprotected a life. His whole attitude toward the universe becomes one of wishing things would keep off of him in it, things he does not know. Are there not enough things he does not know even in his specialty? And as for this eternal being reminded of the others, this slovenly habit of general information that interesting people have, this guessing and furring and generalizing, what is it all for? What does it all come to? If a man is after knowledge, let him have knowledge, knowledge that is knowledge. Let him find a fact, anything for a fact, get God into a corner, hug one fact and live with it and die with it. When a man gets into this shut-in attitude, it is of little use to put a word in with him for the daily habit of taking the roof off one's mind, letting the universe play upon it instead of trying to bore a hole in it somewhere. What does it avail after all? After it is all over, after a long life, even if the hole is bored, I say to him, to stand by one's little hole and cry, behold, oh human race, this gimlet hole which I have bored in infinite space, let it be forever named for me. And in the meantime, the poor fellow gets no joy out of living. He does not even get credit for his not living 70 years of it. He fences off his little place to know a little of nothing in it, becomes a specialist, a footnote to infinite space and is never noticed afterwards. And quite reasonably, by anyone, not even by himself. Monads. I'm not saying that this is the way a scientist, a mere scientist, one who has the fixed habit of not reading books through their backs really feels is the way he ought to feel. As often as not he feels quite comfortable, one sees one every little while, the mere scientist, dropping the entire universe with a dull thud and looking happy after it. But the best ones are different. Even those who are not quite the best are different. It is really a very rare scientist who joggles contentedly down without qualms or without delays to a hole in space. There is always a capability and apparently leftover capability in him. What seems to happen is that when the average human being makes up his mind to it, insists on being a scientist, the Lord keeps a remnant of happiness in him, a gnawing on the inside of him which will not let him rest. This remnant of happiness in him, his soul or inferring organ or whatever it may be, makes him suspect that the scientific method as a complete method is a false, superficial and dangerous method threatening the very existence of all knowledge that is worth knowing on the earth. He begins to suspect that a mere scientist, a man who cannot even make his mind work both ways, backwards or forwards as he likes, the simplest most rudimentary motion of a mind, inductively or deductively is bound to have something left out of all of his knowledge. He sees that the all or nothing assumption in knowledge to say nothing of not applying to the arts in which it is always sterile does not even apply to the physical sciences, to the mist, dust, fire and water out of which the earth and the scientist are made. For men who are living their lives as we are living ours in the shimmer of a globule in space, it is not enough that we should lift our faces to the sky and blunder and guess at a God there because there is so much room between the stars and murmur faintly, spiritual things are spiritually discerned. By the infinite bones of our bodies, by the seeds of the million years that flow in our veins, material things are spiritually discerned. There is not science enough nor scientific method enough in the schools of all Christendom for a man to listen intelligently to his own breathing with or to know his own thumbnail is not his own heart thundering the infinite through him beating the eternal against his sides even while he speaks. And does he not know it while he speaks? By the time a man's a junior or a senior nowadays, if he feels the eternal beating against his sides, he thinks it must be something else. He thinks he ought to. It is a mere inference. At all events he has little use for it unless he knows just how eternal it is. I am speaking too strongly. I suppose I am. I am thinking of my four special boys. Boys I have been doing my living in the last few years. I cannot help speaking a little strongly. Two of them, two as fine, flash-minded, deep-lit, wide-hearted fellows as one would like to see are down at W. Being cured of inferring in a four years course at the W. Scientific School, another one who always seemed to me to have real genius in him who might have had a period in literature named after him almost if he'd stopped studying literature is taking a graduate course at M. Learning that it cannot be proved that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, he has already become one of these spotlessly accurate persons one expects nowadays. I hardly dare to hope he will even read this book of mine with all his affection for me after the first few pages or so lest he should fall into a low or wondering state of mind. My fourth boy, who was the most promising of all, whose mind reached out the farthest, who was always touching new possibilities, a fresh warm-blooded bright-eyed fellow is down under a manhole studying God in the N. Theological Seminary. This may not be exactly a literal statement nor a very scientific way to criticize the scientific method, but when one has had to sit and see four of the finest minds he ever knew snuffed out by it, whatever else may be said for science, scientific language is not satisfying. What is going to happen to us next in our little town, I hardly dare to know. I only know that three relentlessly inductive, dull, brittle, blasé, and springless youths from S. University have just come down and taken possession of our high school. They seem to be throwing, as near as I can judge, a spell of the impossibility of knowledge over the boys we have left. I admit that I am in an unreasonable state of mind, I think a great many people are. At least I hope so. There is no excuse for not being a little unreasonable. Sometimes it almost seems when one looks at the condition of most college boys' minds as if our colleges were becoming the moral and spiritual and intellectual dead centers of modern life. I will not yield to any man in admiration for science, wholly in speechless science, holier than any religion has ever been yet, what religions are made of and are going to be made of, nor am I dating my mind 300 years back and trying to pick a quarrel with Lord Bacon. I am merely wondering whether, if science is to be taught at all, it had not better be taught in each branch of it by men who are teaching a subject they have conceived with their minds instead of a subject which has been merely unloaded on them, piled up on top of their minds and which their minds do not know anything about. No one seems to have stopped to notice what the spectacle of science has taught in college is getting to be. The spectacle of one set of minds which has been crunched by knowledge, crunching another set. Have you never been to one, oh gentle reader and watched it, watched it when it was working, one of these great endowed fact machines wound up by the dead going round and round thousands and thousands of youths in it being rolled out and chilled through and educated in it, having their souls smoothed out of them, hundreds of human minds, small and sure and hard, working away on thousands of other human minds, making them small and sure and hard, matter, infinite matter everywhere taught by more matter, taught the way matter would teach if it knew how without generalizing, without putting facts together to make truths out of them. It would seem looking at it theoretically that science of all things in this world, the stuff that dreams are made of, the one boundless subject of the earth, face to face and breath to breath with the creator every minute of its life would be taught with a divine touch in it, with the appeal to the imagination and the soul, to the world building instinct in a man, the thing in him that puts universes together, the thing in him that fills the whole dome of space and all the crevices of being with the whisper of God. But it is not so. Science is great and great scientists are great as a matter of course, but the sciences in the meantime are being taught in our colleges, in many of them, most of them, by men whose minds are mere registering machines. The facts are put in at one end, one click per fact, and come out facts at the other. The sciences are being taught more and more every year by moral and spiritual stutterers, men with non-inferring minds, men who live in a perfect headlock of knowledge, men who cannot generalize about a fly's wing, bashful, empty, limp, and hopeless, and doddering before in the common place, sanest and simplest generalizations of human life. In the great free show, in our common human peep at it, who has not seen them, staggering to know what the very children playing with dolls and rocking horses can take for granted, minds which seem absolutely incapable of striking out, of taking a good manly stride on anything, mincing in religion, effeminate in enthusiasm, please forgive me, gentle reader, I know I ought not to carry on in this fashion, but have I not spent years in my soul, sometimes it seems, hundreds of years, in being humble, in being abject before this kind of mind? It is only a day almost since I have found it out, broken away from it, got hold of the sky to hoot at it with, I am free now, I am not going to be humble longer before it, I have spent years dully wondering before this mind, wondering what was the matter with me that I could not love it, that I could not go where it loved to go, and come when it said, come to me, I have spent years in dust and ashes before it, struggling with myself, trying to make myself small enough to follow this kind of a mind around, and now the scales are fallen from my eyes. When I follow an inductive scientific mind, now, or try to follow it through its convolutions of matter of fact, its involutions of logic, its wriggling through axioms, I smile a new smile, and my heart laughs within me. If I miss the point, I am not in panic, and if at the end of the 17th platitude that did not need to be proved, I find I do not know where I am. I thank God. I know that I am partly unreasonable, and I know that in my chosen station on the ridgepole of the world, it is useless to criticize those who do not even believe, probably, that worlds have ridgepoles. It is a bit hard to get their attention, and I hope the reader will overlook it if one seems to speak rather loud from ridgepoles. Oh ye children of the literal, ye most serene highnesses, ye archangels of accuracy, the voices of life all challenge you, the world around. What are ye after all? But pilers up of matter, truth stutters, truth spellers, sunk in protoplasm to the tops of your souls. What is it that you are going to do with us? How many generations of youth do you want? When will souls be allowed again? When will they be allowed in college? Well, well, I say to my soul, what does it all come to? Why all this adieu about it one way or the other? Is it not a great, fresh, eager, boundless world? Does it not roll up out of darkness with new children on it night after night? What does it matter, I say to my soul, a generation or so from the ridgepole of the world? The great sun comes around again, it travels over the tops of seas and mountains, microbes in their dewdrops, seeds in their winds, stars in their courses, worms in their apples, answer it, and the hordes of the ants in their ant hills run before it. And what does it matter, after all, under the great dome, a few hordes of factmongers, more or less glimmering and wonderless crawlers on the bottom of the sea of time, lovers of the ooze of knowledge, feeling with slow, myopic mouths, at infinite truth? But when I see my four faces, the faces of my four special boys, when I hear the college bells ringing to them, it matters a great deal. My soul will not wait. What is the ridgepole of the world? The distance of a ridgepole does not count. The extent of a universe does not seem to make very much difference. The next 10 generations do not help very much on this one. I go forth in my soul. I take hold of the first scientist I meet. My whole mind is pummeling him. What is it? I say, what is it you are doing with us and with the lives of our children? What is it you're doing with yourself? Truth is not a thing. Did you think it? Truth is not even a heap of things. It is a light. How dare you mock it, inferring? How dare you to think to escape the infinite? You cannot escape the infinite even by making yourself small enough. It is written that thou shalt be infinitely small if thou art not infinitely large. Not to infer is to contradict the very nature of facts. Not to infer is not to live. It is to cease to be a fact oneself. What is education if one does not infer? Vacuums rolling around in vacuums. Atoms cross examining atoms. And you say you will not guess? Do you need to be cudgled with the whole universe to begin to learn to guess? What is all your science? Your boasted science, after all, but more raw material to make more guesses with? Is not the whole future tense and inference? Is not history, that which has actually happened, a mystery? You yourself are a mere probability and God is a generalization. What does it profit a man to discover the inductive method and to lose his own soul? What is the inductive method? Do you think that all these scientists who have locked their souls up and a large part of their bodies in the inductive method if they had waited to be born by the inductive method would ever have heard of it? Being born is one inference and dying is another. Man leaves a wake of infinity after him wherever he goes. And of course it's where he doesn't go. It's all infinity, one way or the other. And it came to pass in my dream as I lay on my bed in the night. I thought I saw man, my brother blinking under the dome of space, infinite monad that he is. I saw him with a glass in one hand and he slide of infinity in the other. And in my dream, out of his high heaven, God leaned down to me and said to me, what is that? And as I looked, I laughed and prayed in my heart. I scarce knew which and oh, my excellent deity. Who would think it? I cried. I do not know, but I think, I think it is a man thinking he is studying a germ. One tiny particle of inimitable immensity ogling another. And a very pretty sight it is too, oh brother, monads, if we do not take it seriously. And what we really need next, oh comrades, scientists, each under our separate stones is to laugh out of heaven, which shall come down and save us, laugh the roofs of our stones off, then we shall stretch our souls with inferences. We shall lie in the great sun and warm ourselves. Multiplication tables. It would seem to be the main trouble with the scientific mind of the second rank that it overlooks the nature of knowledge in the thirst for exact knowledge. In an infinite world, the better part of the knowledge a man needs to have does not need to be exact. These things being as they are, it would seem that the art of reading books through their backs is an equally necessary art to a great scientist and to a great poet. If it is necessary to great scientists and to great poets, it is all the more necessary to small ones and to the rest of us. It is the only way indeed in which an immortal human being of any kind can get what he deserves to have to live his life with. A whole cross-section of the universe. A gentleman and a scholar will take nothing less. If a man is to get his cross-section of the universe, his natural share in it, he can only get it by living in the qualities of things instead of the quantities. By avoiding duplicate facts, duplicate persons and principles, by using the multiplication table of knowledge, inference, instead of adding everything up by taking all things in this world except his specialty through their spirits and essences and in general by reading books through their backs. The problem of cultivating these powers in a man when reduced to its simplest terms is reduced to the problem of cultivating his imagination or organ of not needing to be told things. However much a man may know about wise reading and about the principles of economy and knowledge in an infinite world, the measure of his knowledge is bound to be determined in the long run by the capacity of his organ of not needing to be told things of reading books through their backs. And of section 13. Section 14 of The Lost Art of Reading by Gerald Stanley Lee. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. On reading for principles. On changing one's conscience. We were sitting by my fireplace, several of our club. I had just been reading out loud a little thing of my own. I have forgotten the title. It was something about books that other people ought to read, I think. I stopped rather suddenly, rather more suddenly than anybody had hoped. At least nobody had thought what he ought to say about it. And I saw that the company, after a sort of general vague air of having exclaimed properly, was settling back into the usual helpless silence one expects after the appearance of an idea at clubs. Why doesn't somebody say something? I said, PGS of M, we are thinking. Oh, I said, I tried to feel grateful, but everybody kept waiting. I was a good deal embarrassed and was getting reckless and was about to make the very serious mistake in a club of seeing if I could not rescue one idea by going out after it with another. When the mysterious person, who is the only man in our club whose mind ever really comes over and plays in my yard, in the goodness of his heart spoke up, I have not heard anything in a long time. He began, the club looked at him rather anxiously, which has done, which has made me feel less ashamed of myself than this paper. I, it seemed to me that this was not exactly a fortunate remark, I said I didn't doubt I could do a lot of good that way, probably if I wanted to, going around the country making people less ashamed of themselves. But I don't mean that I feel really ashamed of myself about books I have not read, said the mysterious person. What I mean is that I have a kind of slinking feeling that I ought to, a feeling of being ashamed for not being ashamed. I told the MP that I thought New England was full of people just like him, people with a lot of leftover consciences. The PGS of M wanted to know what I meant by that. I said I thought there were thousands of people one sees them everywhere in Massachusetts, fairly intelligent people, people who are capable of changing their minds about things, but who can't change their consciences. Their consciences seem to keep hanging on to them in the same set way, somehow, with or without their minds. Some people's consciences don't seem to notice much so far as I can see whether they have minds connected with them or not. Don't you know what it is? I appealed to the PGS of M to get everything all fixed up with your mind and your reason and your soul, that certain things that look wrong are all right, the very things of all others that you ought to do and keep on doing, and then have your conscience keep right on the same as it always did, tatting them up against you. The PGS of M said something about not spending very much time thinking about his conscience. I said I didn't believe in it, but I thought that if a man had one, it was apt to trouble him a little off and on, especially if the one he had was one of these leftover ones. If you had one of these consciences, I mean the kind of conscience that pretends to belong to you and acts as if it belonged to someone else. I said one of these dead frog leg reflex action consciences working and twitching away on you day and night the way I have, you'd have to think about it sometimes. You'd get so ashamed of it, you'd feel trifled with so, you'd, the PGS of M said something about not being very much surprised over my case. He said that people who changed their minds as often as I did couldn't reasonably expect consciences spry enough. His general theory seemed to be that I had a conscience once and wore it out. It's getting to be so that with everybody nowadays, he said, nobody is settled, everything is blown about. We do not respect tradition either in ourselves or in the life about us. No one listens to the voice of experience. There she blows, I said. I knew it was coming sooner or later. I added that one of the great inconveniences of life, it seemed to me, was the intolerance of experienced people. On the intolerance of experienced people, it is generally assumed by persons who have taken the pains to put themselves in this very disagreeable class that people in general, all other people, are as inexperienced as they look. If a man speaks on a subject at all in their presence, they assume he speaks autobiographically. These people are getting thicker every year. One can't go anywhere without finding them standing around with a kind of, how do you know? And did it happen to you? Air, every time a man says something, he knows by, well, by seeing it, perfectly plain seeing it. One doesn't need to stand up to one's neck and experience in a perfect muck of experience in order to know things, in order to know they are there. People who are experienced within an inch of their lives submerged in experience until all you can see of them as a tired look are always calling out to the man who sees a thing as he is going by, sees it, I mean, with his mind, sees it without having to put his feet in it. They are always calling out to him to come back and be with them and know life as they call it and duck under to experience. Now, to say nothing of living with such persons, it is almost impossible to talk with them. It isn't safe even to philosophize when they are around. If a man ventures the assertion in their presence that what a woman loves and a lover is complete subjugation, they argue that either he is a fool and is asserting what he has not experienced or he is still more of one and has experienced it. The idea that a man may have several principles around him that he has not used yet does not occur to them. The average amateur mother, when she belongs to this type, becomes a perfect bigot toward a maiden aunt who advances perhaps some harmless little throwable idea. She swears by the shibboleth of experience and every new baby she has makes her more disagreeable to people who have not had babies. The only way to get acquainted with her is to have a baby. She assumes that a motherless woman has a motherless mind. The idea that a rich and bountiful womanhood, which is saving its motherhood up, which is free from the absorption and the haste, keenly observant and sympathetic, may come to a kind of motherly insight. Distinctly, the result of not being experienced does not occur to her. The art of getting the result, the spirit of experience, without paying all the cost of the experience itself needs a good word spoken for it nowadays. Someone has yet to point out that the value and power of what might be called the maiden aunt attitude toward life. The world has had thousands of experienced young mothers for thousands of years, experienced out of their wits, piled up with experiences they don't know anything about. But in the meantime, the most important contribution to the bringing up of children in the world that has ever been known, the kindergarten, was thought of in the first place by a man who was never a mother, and has been developed entirely in the years that have followed since by maiden aunts. The spiritual power and manifoldness and largeness, which is the most informing quality of a really cultivated man, comes from a certain refinement in him, a gift of knowing by tasting. He seems to have touched the spirits of a thousand experiences we know he never has had, and they seem to have left the souls of sorrows and joys in him. He lives in a kind of beautiful magnetic fellowship with all real life in the world. This is only possible by a sort of unconscious economy in the man's nature, a gift of not having to experience things. Avoiding experience is one of the great creative arts of life. We shall have enough before we die. It is forced upon us. We cannot even select it, most of it. But in so far as we can select it, in one's reading, for instance, it behooves a man to avoid experience. He at least wants to avoid experience enough to have time to stop and think about the experience he has, to be sure he is getting as much out of his experience as it is worth. On having one's experience done out. But how can one avoid an experience? By heading it off with a principle. Principles are a lot of other people's experiences. In a convenient form a man can carry around with him to keep off his own experiences with. No other rule for economizing knowledge can quite take the place, it seems to me, of reading four principles. It economizes for a man both ways at once. It not only makes it possible for a man to have the whole human race working out his life for him, instead of having to do it all himself, but it makes it possible for him to read anything he likes. To get something out of almost anything he does not like, which he is obliged to read. If a man has a habit of reading four principles for the law behind everything, he cannot miss it. He cannot help learning things, even from people who don't know them. The other evening when the PGS of M came into my study, he saw the morning paper lying unopened on the settle by the fireplace. Haven't you read this yet? He said, no, not today. Where are you anyway? Why not? I said I hadn't felt up to it yet, didn't feel profound enough, something to that effect. The PGS of M thinks a newspaper should be read in 10 minutes. He looked over at me with a sort of slow, pitying Boston Public Library expression he has sometimes. I behaved as well as I could, took no notice for a minute. The fact is I have changed, I said, about papers and some things. I have times of thinking I'm improved considerably. I added recklessly. Still the same pain to Boston Public Library expression only turned on a little harder. Seems to me, I said, when a man can't feel superior to other people in this world, he might at least be allowed the privilege of feeling superior to himself once in a while. Spells of it. He intimated that the trouble with me was that I wanted both. I admitted that I had cravings for both. I said I thought I'd be a little easier to get along with if they were more satisfied. He intimated that I was easier to get along with than I ought to be or than I seemed to think I was. He did not put it in so many words. The PGS of M never says anything that can be got hold of and answered. I finally determined to answer him whether he had said anything or not. Well, I said, I may feel superior to other people sometimes. I may even feel superior to myself, but I haven't got to the point where I feel superior to a newspaper, to a whole world at once. I don't try to read it in 10 minutes. I don't try to make a whole day of a whole world, a footnote to my oatmeal mush. I don't treat the whole human race trooping past my breakfast as a parentheses in my own mind. I don't try to read a great serious boundless thing like a daily newspaper, unfolded out of starlight, leaner of a thousand sunsets around a world and talk at the same time. I don't say there's nothing in it. I interrupt a planet to chew my food, throw a planet on the floor and look for my hat. Nations lunging through space to say good morning to me, continents flashed around my thoughts, seas for the boundaries of my day's delight, the great God shining over all. And may he preserve me from ever reading a newspaper in 10 minutes. I've spent as much time as anyone, I think in my day first and last and feeling superior to newspapers. I can remember when I used to enjoy it very much, the feeling I mean, I have spent whole half days at it going up and down columns thinking they were not good enough for me. Now when I take up a morning paper, half dread, half delight, I take it up softly. My whole being trembles in the balance before it. The whole procession of my soul, shabby, loveless, provincial, tawdry is passed in review before it. It is the grandstand of the world, the vast and awful roll call of the things I ought to be, the things I ought to love and the great world voice sweeps over me. It reaches its way through all my thoughts, through the minutes of my days. Where is thy soul? Oh, where is thy soul? The morning paper up and down its columns calls to me. There are days that I ache with the echo of it. There are days when I dare not read it until the night. Then the voice that is in it grows gentle with the darkness it may be, and is stilled with sleep. When Reading a Newspaper in Ten Minutes I am not saying it does not take a very intelligent man to read a newspaper in ten minutes, squeeze a planet at breakfast and drop it. I think it does, but I am inclined to think that the intelligent man who reads a newspaper in ten minutes is exactly the same kind of intelligent man who could spend a week reading it if he wanted to and not waste a minute. And he might want to. He simply reads a newspaper as he likes. He is not confined to one way. He does not read it in ten minutes because he has a mere ten-minute mind, but because he merely has the ten minutes. Rapidly reading and slow reading are both based with such a man on appreciation of the paper and not upon a narrow literary Boston public library feeling of being superior to it. The value of reading, like other matter, depends on what a man does with it. All that one needs in order not to waste time in general reading is a large complete set of principles to stow things away in. Nothing really needs to be wasted if one knows where everything belongs in one's mind or tries to, if one takes the trouble to put it there, reading a newspaper is one of the most colossal, tremendous, and boundless acts that can be performed by anyone in the whole course of a human life. If there's any place where a man needs to have all his wits about him to put things into, if there's any place where the next three inches can demand as much of a man as a newspaper where is it? The moment he opens it, he lays his soul open and exposes himself to all sides of the world in a second, to several thousand years of a world at once. A book is a comparatively safe, unintelligent place for a mind to be in. There are at least four walls to it, a few scantlings over one, protecting one from all space. A man has at least some remotest idea of where he is of what may drop on him in a book. It may tax his capacity of stowing things away, but he always has a notice, almost always. It sees that he has time and room. It has more conveniences for fixing things. The author is always there besides a kind of valet to anybody, to help people along pleasantly, to anticipate their wants. It's what an author is for, one expects it. But a man finds it is different in a morning paper, rolled out of dreams and sleep into it, empty, helpless, before a day, all the telegraph machines of the world thumping all the night, clicked into one's thoughts before one thinks, no man really has room in him to read a morning paper. No man's soul is athletic or swift enough, nations in a sentence, thousands of years in a minute, philosophies, religions, legislatures, Pileozoics, church socials, side by side, stars and gossip, fools, heroes, comets, infinity on parade and over the precipice of the next paragraph, headlong, who knows what? Reading a morning paper is one of the supreme acts of presence of mind in a human life. General information, but what is going to become of us? Someone says, if a man has to go through the supreme act of presence of mind in a whole human life every morning and every morning before he goes to business, it takes as much presence of mind as most men have mornings, barely to get up. Well, of course, I admit, if a man's going to read a newspaper to toe the line of all his convictions, if he insists on taking the newspaper as a kind of this morning's junction of all knowledge, he will have to expect to be a rather anxious person. One could hardly get one paper really read through in this way in one's whole life. If a man is always going to read the news of the globe in such a serious, sensitive, suggestive, improving, atlas-like fashion, it would be better if he had never learned to read at all. At all events, if it's a plain question between a man's devouring his paper or letting his paper devour him, of course, the only way to do is to begin the day by reading something else, or by reading it in 10 minutes and forgetting it in 10 more. One would certainly rather be headlong, a mere heedless superficial globetrotter with one's mind than not to have any mind, to be wiped out at one's breakfast table, to be soaked up into infinity every morning, to be drawn off evaporated into all knowledge, to begin one's day scattered around the edges of all the world, one would do almost anything to avoid this. And it is what always happens if one reads for principles, pal-mal. All that I'm claiming for reading for principles is that if one reads for principles, one really cannot miss it in reading. There is always something there and a man who treats a newspaper as if it were not good enough for him falls short of himself. The same is true of dyssultery reading, so-called, of the habit of general information and of the habit of going about noticing things, noticing things over one's shoulder. I'm inclined to think that dyssultery reading is as good, if not better for a man than any other reading he can do if he organizes it, has habitual principles and swift channels of thought to pour into it. I do not think it is all unlikely from such peeps as we common mortals get into the minds of men of genius that their dyssultery reading in the fine strenuous sense has been the making of them. The intensely suggestive habit of thought, the prehensile power in a mind, the power of grasping wide apart facts and impressions of putting them into proper handfuls where anything can be done with them that one likes could not possibly be cultivated to better advantage than by the practice of masterful and regular dyssultery reading. Certainly the one compelling trait in the work of genius, whether in music, painting or literature, the trait of untracefulness, the semi miraculous look, the feeling things give us sometimes in a great work of art of being at once impossible together and inevitable together, has its most natural background in what would seem at first probably to most minds incidental or accidental habits of observation. One always knows a work of art of the second rank by the fact that one can place one's hand on big blocks of material in it almost everywhere, material which has been taken bodily and moved over from certain places. And one always knows a work of art of the first rank by the fact that it is absolutely defiant and elusive. There is a sense of infinity, a gathered from everywhere sense in it, of things which belong and have always belonged side by side and exactly where they are put, but which no one had put there. It would be hard to think of any intellectual or spiritual habit more likely to give a man a bisexual or at least a cross fertilizing mind than the habit of masterful, willful, elemental dyssultery reading. The amount of dyssultery reading a mind can do and do triumphantly may be said to be perhaps the supreme test of the actual energy of the mind, of the vital heat in it, of its melting down power, its power of melting everything through and blending everything in to the great central essence of life. No more adequate plan or as the architects call it, no better elevation for a man could possibly be found than in a daily newspaper of the higher type. For scope, points of view, topics, directions of interest, catholicity, many-sidedness, world-wideness for all the raw, material, a large and powerful man must needs be made out of, nothing could possibly excel a daily newspaper. Plenty of smaller artists have been made in the world and will be made again in it. Hot House or Parlor Artists, men whose work has very little floor space in it, one or two-story men and there is no denying that they have their place, but there never has been yet and there never will be, I venture to say, a noble or colossal artist or artist of the first rank who shall not have as many stories in him as a daily newspaper. The immortal is the universal in a man looming up. If the modern critic who is looking about in this world of ours for the great artist would look where the small ones are afraid to go, he would stand a fair chance of finding what he is looking for. If one were to look about for a general plan, a rough draft or sketch of the mind of an immortal, he will find that mind spread out before him in the interests and passions, the giant sorrows and delights of his morning paper. I am not coming out in this chapter to defend morning papers. One might as well pop up in one's place on this globe wherever one is on it and say a good word for sunrises. What immediately interests me in this connection is the point that if a man reads for principles in this world, he will have time and take time to be interested in a great many things in it. The point seems to be that there is nothing too great or too small for a human brain to carry away with it. If it will have a place to put it, all one has to do to get the good of a man, a newspaper, a book or any other action, a paragraph or even the blowing of a wind is to lift it over to its principle, see it and delight in it as a part of the whole of the eternal and of the running gear of things. Reading for principles may make a man seem very slow at first, several years slower than other people, but as every principle he reads with makes it possible to avoid at least one experience and at the smallest calculation a hundred books, he soon catches up. It would be hard to find a better device for reading books through their backs for traveling with one's mind than the habit of reading for principles. A principle is a sort of universal car coupling. One can be joined to any train of thought in all Christendom with it and rolled in luxury around the world in the private car of one's own mind. But it is not so much as a luxury as a convenience that reading for principles appeals to a vigorous mind. It is the shortcut to knowledge. The man who is once started in reading for principles is not long in distancing the rest of us because all the reading that he does goes into growth, is saved up in a few handy prompt generalizations. His whole being becomes alert and supple. He has the underhold in dealing with nature, grips hold the law of the thing and rules it. He is capable of far reaches where others go step by step. In every age of the world of thought he goes about giant like, lifting worlds with a laugh, doing with the very playing of his mind work which crowds of other minds toiling on their crowds of facts could not accomplish. He is only able to do this by being a master of principles. He has made himself a man who can handle a principle, a sum total of 1,000 facts as easily as other men, men with bare scientific minds can handle one of the facts. He thinks like a God, not a very difficult thing to do. Any man can do it after 30 or 40 years and if he gives himself the chance if he reads for principles keeps his imagination the way Emerson did for instance, sound and alive all through. He does not need to deny that the bare scientific method, the hugging of the outside of a thing, the being deliberately superficial and literal, the needing to know all of the facts is a useful and necessary method at times. But outside of his specialty he takes the ground that the scientific method is not the normal method through which a man acquires his knowledge but a secondary and useful method for verifying the knowledge he has. He acquires knowledge through the constant exercise of his mind with principles. He is full of subtle experiences he never had. He appears to other minds perhaps to go to the truth with a flash but he probably does not. He does not have to go to the truth. He has the truth on the premises right where he can get at it in its most convenient, most compact and spiritual form. To write or think or act he has but to strike down through the impressions, the experiences, the saved up experiences of his life and draw up their principles. A great deal has been said from time to time among the good of late about the passing of the sermon as a practical working force. A great deal has been said among the literary about the passing of the essay. Much has been said also about the passing of poetry and the passing of religion in our modern life. It would not be hard to prove that what has been called under the pressure of the moment the passing of religion and poetry and of the sermon and the essay could fairly be traced to the temporary failure of education, the disappearance in the modern mind of the power of reading for principles. The very farmhands of New England were readers for principles once, men who looked back of things. Philosophers, philosophers grew like the grass on a thousand hills. Everybody was a philosopher a generation ago. The temporary obscuration of religion and poetry and the sermon and the essay at the present time is largely due to the fact that generalization has been trained out of our typical modern minds. We are mobbed with facts. We are observers of the letter of things rather than of the principles and spirit of things. The letter has been heaped upon us. Poetry and religion and the essay and the sermon are all alike in that they are addressed to what can be taken for granted in men, to some totals of experience, the power of seeing some totals. They are addressed to generalizing minds. The essayist of the highest rank induces conviction by playing upon the power of generalization by arousing the associations and experiences that have formed the principles of his reader's mind. He makes his appeal to the philosophic imagination. It is true that a man may not be infallible and depending upon his imagination or principle gathering organ for acquired knowledge and in the nature of things it is subject to correction and verification but as a positive, practical, economical working organ in a world as large as this an imagination answers the purpose as well as anything. To a finite man who finds himself in an infinite world it is the one possible practicable outfit for living in it. Reading for principles is its most natural gymnasium. But I had finished writing these chapters on the philosophic mind and was just reading them over thinking how true they were and how valuable they were for me and how I must act on them when I heard a soft poo from somewhere down in the depths of my being. When I had stopped and thought I saw it was my soul trying to get my attention I do not want you always reading for principles said my soul stoutly reading for a philosophic mind. I do not want a philosophic mind on the premises. Very well I said you do not want one yourself my soul said you would be bored to death with one with a mind that's always reading for principles. I'm not so sure I said you always are with other people's well there's Meacons I admitted you wouldn't want Meacons kind of mind would you Meacons is always reading for principles I refused to answer it once I knew I didn't want Meacons but I wanted to know why then I fell to thinking hence this chapter Meacons has changed I said to myself the trouble with him isn't that he reads for principles but he is getting so he cannot read for anything else what a man really wants it seems to me is the use of a philosophic mind he wants one where he can get at it where he can have all the benefit of it without having to live with it it's quite another matter when a man gives his mind up his own everyday mind the one he lives with lets it be coldly deliberately philosophized through and through it's kind of a disease when Meacons visits me now the morning after he is gone I take a piece of paper and sum his visit up in a row of propositions when he came before five years ago his visit was summed up in a great desire in me a lift a vow to the universe he had the same ideas but they all glowed out into a man they came to me as a man and for a man a free emancipated emancipating world-loving world-making man a man out in the open making all the world his comrade his appeal was personal visiting with him now is like sitting down with a stick or pointer over you being compelled to study a map he doesn't care about anything about me except as one more piece of paper to stamp his map on and he doesn't care anything about the world he has the map of except that it is the world that goes with the map when a man gets into the habit of always reading for principles back of things back of real live particular things he becomes inhuman he forgets the things meekens boar's people because he is becoming inhuman he treats human beings over and over again unconsciously when he meets them as mere generalizations on legs his mind seems a great sea of abstractions just a few real things floating palely around in it for illustrations when i try to rebuke him for being a mere philosopher or man without hands he is setting his universe in order he says making his surveys he may be living in his philosophic mind now breaking out his intellectual roads but he is going to travel on them later he explains in the meantime i noticed one thing about the philosophic mind it not only does not do things it cannot even be talked with it is not interested in things in particular there's something garrously pedagogically unreal about it at least there is about meekens you cannot so much as mention a real or particular thing to meekens but he brings out a row of fifteen or twenty principles that go with it which his mind has peeked around and found behind it by the time he has floated out about fifteen of them of these principles back of a thing you begin to wonder if the thing was there for the principles to be back of you hope it wasn't as fond as i am of him i cannot get at him nowadays in a conversation he was always just around back of something he is a ghost i come home praying heaven every time i see him not to let me evaporate he talks about the future of humanity by the week but i find he doesn't notice humanity in particular you cannot interest him in talking to him about himself or even in letting him do his own talking about himself he is a mere detail to himself you are another detail what you are and what he is are both mere footnotes to a philosophy all history is a footnote to it or at best a marginal illustration there is no such thing as communing with meekens unless you use as i do a torpedo or battering ram as a starter if you let him have his way he sits in his chair and in his deep beautiful voice addresses a row of remarks to the future in general the only thing big enough or worthwhile to talk to he sits perfectly motionless except the whites of his eyes and talks deeply and tenderly and instructively to the next a few hundred years to posterity to babes not yet in their mother's wombs while his dearest friends sit by if ever there was a man who could take a whole room full of warm vital people sitting right next to him pulsing and glowing in their joys and their sins and with one single heroic motion of an imperious hand drop them softly into fatuity and oblivion in five minutes and leave them out of the world before their own eyes it is theophilus meekens i try sometimes but i cannot really do it he does not really commune with things or with persons at all he gets what he wants out of them you feel him putting people when he meets them through his philosophy he makes them over while they wait into extracts a man may keep on afterward living and growing throbbing and being but he does not exist to meekens except in his bottle a man cannot help feeling with meekens afterward the way milk feels probably if it could only express it when it's been put through one of these separators had the cream taken off of it half the world is skim milk to him but what does it matter to meekens he has them in his philosophy he does the same way with things as with people he puts in all nature as a parenthesis and a rather condescending explanatory one at that a symbol a kind of beckoning an index finger to God he never notices a tree for itself a great elm would have to call out to him fairly shouted him right under its arms oh theophilus meekens author of the habit of eternity author of the evolution of the ego look at me I also am alive even as thou art canst thou not stop one moment and be glad with me have I not a thousand leaves glistening and gloring in the great sun have I not a million roots feeling for the stored up light in the ground reaching up God to me out of the dark have I not it is one of the principles of the flux of society breaks in theophilus meekens as illustrated in all the processes of the natural world the sap of this tree said he for instance brushing the elm tree off into space that the future of mankind depends and always must depend upon the flux of society be said I in holy wrath I stopped him suddenly the elm tree still holding its great arms above us do you suppose that God I said is in any such small business as to make an elm tree like this like this look at it man and put it on earth having it waving around on it just to illustrate one of your sermons now my dear fellow I'm not going to have you lounging around in your mind with an elm tree like this any longer I want you to come right over to it said I taking hold of him and sit down on one of its roots and lean up against his trunk and learn something live with it a minute get blessed by it the flux of society can wait I said meekens is always tractable enough when shouted at or pounded on a little we sat down under the tree for quite a while perfectly still I can't say what it did for meekens but it helped me just barely leaning against the trunk of it helped me under these circumstances a great deal no one will believe it I suppose but we hadn't gotten any more than fifteen feet away from the shadow of that tree when the principles of the flux of society said he demand now my dear fellow I said there are a lot more elm trees we really ought to take in on this walk we I say said meekens his great voice roaring on my little polite opposing sentence like surf over a pebble that the principles then I grew rough I always do when meekens treats what I say just as a pebble to get more roar out of on the great bleak shore of his thoughts no one says anything I cried if anyone says anything if you say another word my dear fellow on this walk I will sing old hundred as loud as I can all the way home he promised to be good after a half mile or so I caught him looking at me harking back to an old wonderfully sweet gentle human understanding smile he has or used to have before he was a philosopher then he quietly mentioned a real thing and we talked about real things for four miles I remember we sat under the stars that night after the world was folded up in a sleep and I think we really felt the stars as we sat there not as a roof for theories of the world but we felt them as stars share the night with them lit our hearts at them then we silently happily at last both of us like awkward wondering boys went to bed and of section fourteen section fifteen of the lost art of reading by Gerald Stanley Lee this LibriVox recording is in the public domain book three details the confessions of an unscientific mind reading down through one inside it is always the same way I know sooner get a good pleasant interesting working idea like this reading for principles arranged and moved over and set up in my mind then some insinuating persistent concrete human being comes along works his way into illustrated and spoils it here is meekens for instance I've been thinking on the other side of my thought every time I have thought of him I have no more sympathy than anyone with a man who spends all his time going round and round in his reading and everything else swallowing a world up in principles why should a good live sensible man I feel like saying go about in a world like this stowing his truths into principles where half the time he cannot get at them himself and no one else would want to going about swallowing one's experience up in principles is very well so far as it goes but it is far better to go about swallowing up one's principles into one's self a man who has lived and read into himself for many years does not need to read very many books he has the gist of nine out of ten new books that are published he knows or as good as knows what is in them by taking a long slow look at his own heart so does everybody else on being lonely with a book the PGS of M said that as far as he could make out judging from the way I talked my main ambition in the world seemed to be to write a book that would throw all publishers and libraries out of employment and what will your book amount to when you get it done he said if it's convincing the way it ought to be it will merely convince people they ought to have read it and that's been done before I said almost any book could do it I ventured to add that I thought people grew intelligent enough in one of my books even in the first two or three chapters not to read the rest of it I said all I hope to accomplish was to get people to treat other men's books in the same way that they treated mine treat everything that way take things for granted get the spirit of the thing then go out and gloat on it do something with it live with it anything but this going on page after page using the spirit of a thing all up reading with it reading down through in a book seems a great deal more important to me then merely reading the book through I expected that the PGS of M would ask me what I meant by reading down through but he didn't he was still at large worrying about the world I have no patience with it your idea he broke out it's all in the air it's impractical enough anyway just as an idea and it's all the more impractical when it's carried out so far as I can see at the rate you're carrying on said the PGS of M what with improving the world and all with your book there isn't going to be anything but you and your book left might be worse I said what one wants in a book after the first three or four chapters or in a world either it seems to me is not its facts merely nor its principles but oneself one's real relation of one's real self I mean to some real fact if worst came to worst and I had to be left all alone I'd rather be alone with myself I think then with anybody it's a deal better than being lonely the way we all are nowadays with such a lot of other people crowding around that one has to be lonely with and books and newspapers and things besides one has to be lonely so much in civilization there are so many things and persons that insist on ones coming over and being lonely with them that being lonely in a perfectly plain way all by oneself the very thought of it seems to me comparatively speaking a relief it's not what it ought to be but it's something I feel the same way about being lonely with a book I find that the only way to keep from being lonely in a book that is to keep from being crowded onto the outside of it after the first three or four chapters is to read the first three or four chapters all over again read them down through I have to get hold of my principles in them and then I have to work over my personal relation to them when I make sure of that when I make sure of my personal relation to the author and to his ideas and there is a fairly acquainted feeling with both of us then I can go on reading for all I am worth or all he is worth anyway whichever breaks down first and no more said about it everything means something to everybody when one reads down through the only way an author and reader can keep from wasting each other's time it seems to me at least from having spells of wasting it is to begin by reading down through 3. Keeping other minds off what I really mean by reading down through in a book I suppose is reading down through in it to myself I daresay this does not seem worthy it is quite possible too that there is no real defense for it I mean for being so much interested in myself in the middle of other people's books my theory about it is that the most important thing in this world for a man's life is his being original in it being original consists I take it not in being different but in being honest really having something in one's own inner experience which one has anyway and which one knows one has and which one has all for one's own whether anyone else has ever had it or not being original consists in making over everything one sees and reads into one's self making over what one reads into one's self may be said to be the only way to have a really safe place for knowledge if a man takes his knowledge and works it all over into what he is sense and spirit it may cost more at first but it is more economical in the long run because none of it can possibly be lost and it can all be used on the place I do not know how it is with others nowadays but I find that this feeling of originality in an experience in my own case is exceedingly hard to keep it has to be struggled for of course one has a theory in a general way that one does not want an original mind if he has to get it by keeping other people's minds off and yet there is a certain sense in which if he does not do it at certain times have regular periods of keeping other people's minds off he would lose for life the power of ever finding his own under them most men one knows nowadays if they were to spend all the rest of their lives peeling other men's minds off would not get down to their own before they died it seems to be supposed that what a mind is for at least in civilization is to have other men's minds on top of it it is the same way in books at least I find it so myself when I get to reading in a book reading so fast I cannot stop in it nearly all books, especially the good ones have a way of overtaking a man writing his originality down it seems to be assumed that if a man ever did get down to his own mind by accident whether in a book or anywhere else he would not know what to do with it and this is not an unreasonable assumption even the man who gets down to his mind regularly hardly knows what to do with it part of the time but it makes having a mind interesting there's a kind of pleasant lusty feeling in it a feeling of reality and honesty that makes having a mind even merely one's own mind seem almost respectable four reading backwards Sir Joshua Reynolds gives the precedence to the outside to authority instead of originality in the early stages of education because when he went to Italy he met the greatest experience of his life he found that much of his originality was wrong if Sir Joshua Reynolds had gone to Italy earlier he would never have been heard of except as a copyist, lecturer, or color commentator the real value of Sir Joshua Reynolds discourses on art is the man in spite of the lecturer what the man stands for is be original get headway of personal experience some power of self-teaching then when you have something to work on organs that act and react on what is presented to them confront your Italy whatever it may be and the past and give yourself over to it the result is paradox and power a receptive creative man an obeying and commanding but self-centered and self-poised man world-open subject to the whole world and yet who has a whole world subject to him either by turns or at will what Sir Joshua conveys to his pupils is not his art but his mere humility about his art i.e. his most belated experience his finishing touch as an artist the result is that having accidentally received an ideal education having begun his education properly with self-command he completed his career with a kind of renal zocracy a complacent teachery leveling down command of others while Sir Joshua Reynolds was an artist he became one because he did not follow his own advice the fact that he would have followed it if he had had a chance shows what his art shows namely that he did not intend to be any more original than he could help it is interesting however that having acquired the blemish of originality in early youth he never could get rid of enough of it before he died not to be tolerated among the immortals his career is in many ways the most striking possible illustration of what can be brought to pass when a human being without genius is by accident brought up with the same principles and order of education and training that men of genius have education by one's self education by others under the direction of one's self Sir Joshua Reynolds would have been incapable of education by others under direction of himself if he had not been kept ignorant and creative and English long enough to get a good start with himself before he went down to Italy to run a race with 500 years in his naive almost desperate shame over the plight of being almost a genius he overlooks this but his fame is based upon it he devoted his old age to trying to train young men into artists by teaching them to despise their youth in their youth because when he was an old man he despised his what seems to be necessary is to strike a balance in one's reading it's all well enough indeed there's nothing better than having one's originality written down one wants it written down half the time the trouble comes in making provision for catching up for getting one's breath after it I have found for instance that it has become absolutely necessary so far as I am concerned if I am to keep my little minds start in the world to begin the day by not reading the newspaper in the morning unless I can get headway some thought or act or cry or joy of my own something that is definitely in my own direction first there seems to be no hope for me all day long most people I know would not agree to this they like to take a swig of all space a glance at everybody while the world goes round before they settle down to their own little motor on it they like to feel that the world is all right before they go ahead so would I but I have tried it again and again the world is too much for me in the morning my own little motor comes to a complete stop I simply want to watch the big one going round and round I cannot seem to stop somehow begun puttering once more with my little one if I begin at all I have to begin at once in my heart I feel the big one over me all the while circling over me, blessing me but I keep from noticing I know no other way and drive on the world is getting to be has to be to me a purely afternoon or evening affair I have a world of my own for morning use I hold to it one way or the other with a cheerful smile or like grim death until the clock says 12 and the sun turns the corner and the book drops it does not seem to make very much difference what kind of a world I am in or what is going on in it so that it is all my own and the only way I know to do is to say or read or write or use the things first in it which make it my own the most the one thing I want in the morning is to let my soul light its own light appropriate some one thing glow it through itself when I have satisfied the hunger for making a bit of the great world over into my world I am ready for the world as a world streets and newspapers of it silent and looking in it until sleep falls it is because men lie down under it allow themselves to be rolled over by it that the modern newspaper against its will has become the great distracting machine of modern times as I live and look about me everywhere I find a great running to and fro of editors across the still earth every editor has his heard is a kind of bell-weather has a great paper heard of flocking at his heels is not the world here I say and am I not here to look at it can I really see a world better by joining a cook's excursion on it sweeping around the earth in a column seeing everything in a column looking over the shoulder of a crowd sometimes it seems as if the whole modern reading book and paper outfit were simply a huge crunching mass machine a machine for arranging every man's mind from the outside originality may be said to depend upon a balance of two things the power of being interested in other people's minds and the power of being more interested in one's own in its last analysis it is the power a man's mind has of minding its own business which even in another man's book makes the book real and absorbing to him it is the least compliment one can pay a book the only honest way to commune with a real man either in a book or out of it is to do one's own share of talking both the book and the man say better things when talked back to in reading a great book one finds it allows for this in reading a poor one the only way to make it worthwhile to find anything in it is to put it there the most self-respecting course when one finds one's self in the middle of a poor book is to turn right around in it and write it one's self as has been said by often taught her in the fourteenth chapter of his great masterpiece if you find that you cannot go on gentle reader in the reading of this book pray read it backwards the original man the man who insists on keeping the power in a mind of minding its own business is much more humble than he looks all he feels is that his mind has been made more convenient to him than to anybody else and that if anyone is going to use it he must it is not a matter of assuming that one's own mind is superior a very poor mind on the premises put right in with one's own body carefully fitted to it to one's very nerves and senses is worth all the other minds in the world it may be conceit to believe this and it may be self-preservation but in any case keeping an interest in one's own mind is excusable even the humblest man must admit that the first the most economical, the most humble the most unnecessary thing for a man to do in reading in this world if he can do it is to keep up an interest in his own mind four reading for facts one, calling the meeting to order reading for persons makes a man a poet or artist makes him dramatic with his mind puts the world stage into him reading for principles makes a man a philosopher reading for facts makes a man it doesn't make a man spoke up the mysterious person oh yes, I said if he reads a few of them if he takes time to do something with them he can make a man out of them if he wants to as well as anything else the great trouble with scientific people and others who are always reading for facts is that they forget what facts are for they use their minds as museums they are like old Bill Spear they take you up into their garret and point to a bushel basket full of something and then to another bushel basket half full of some more then they say in deep tones and with solemn faces this is the largest collection of burnt matches in the world it's what reading for facts brings a man to, generally, fact for facts sake he lunges along for facts wherever he goes he cannot stop all an outsider can do in such cases with 9 out of 10 scientific or collecting minds is to watch them sadly in a dull, trans-like, helpless inertia of facts sliding onto ignorance what seems to be most wanted in reading for facts in a world as large as this is some reasonable principle of economy the great problem of reading for facts traveling with one's mind is the baggage problem to have every fact that one needs and to throw away every fact that one can get along without is the secret of having a comfortable and practicable, live, happy mind in modern knowledge a mind that gets somewhere that gets the hearts of things the best way to arrange this seems to be to have a sentinel in one's mind in reading every man finds in his intellectual life, sooner or later that there are certain orders and kinds of facts that have a way of coming to him of their own accord and without being asked he is half amused sometimes and half annoyed by them he has no particular use for them he dotes on them some perhaps pets them a little tells them to go away but they keep coming back apropos of nothing in the way of everything and they keep hanging about while he attends to the regular business of his brain and say why don't you do something with me what I would like to be permitted to do in this chapter is to say a good word for these involuntary, helpless, wistful facts that keep tagging a man's mind around I know that I am exposing myself and standing up for them to the accusation that I have a mere, irrelevant, sideways, intellectually un-business-like sort of a mind I can see my championship even now being gently but firmly set one side it's all of a piece this pleasant yielding way with ideas people say it goes with the slovenly, lazy, useless, polite state of mind always and the general ball-bearing view of life it seems to me that if a man has a few involuntary instinctive facts about him facts that fasten themselves onto his thoughts whether he wants them there or not facts that keep on working for him of their own accord down under the floor of his mind passing things up running invisible errands for him making shortcuts for him it seems to me that if a man has a few facts like this in him facts that serve him like the great involuntary servants of nature whether they are noticed or not he ought to find it worth his while to do something in return conduct his life with reference to them they ought to have the main chance at him it seems reasonable also that his reading should be conducted with reference to them it is no mere literary prejudice and it seems to be a truth for the scientist as well as for the poet that the great involuntary facts in a man's life the facts he does not select the facts that select him the facts that say to him come thou and live with us make a human life out of us that men may know us are the facts of all others which ought to have their way sooner or later in the great struggling mass meeting of his mind I have read equally in vain the lives of the great scientists and the lives of the great artists and makers if they are not all alike in this that certain great facts have been yielded to have been made the presiding officers the organizers of their minds insofar as they have been great no facts have been suppressed and all facts have been represented but I doubt if there has ever been a life of a powerful mind yet in which a few great facts and a great man were not seen mutually attracted to each other day and night getting themselves made over into each other mutually mastering the world certainly if there is one token rather than another of the great scientist or poet in distinction from the small scientist or poet it is the courage with which he yields himself makes his whole being sensitive and free before his instinctive facts gives himself fearless up to them allows them to be the organizers of his mind it seems to be the only possible way in reading for facts that the mind of a man can come to anything namely by always having a chairman and a few alternates appointed for life to call the meeting to order two symbolic facts if the meeting is to accomplish anything before it adjourns Sinedi everything depends upon the gavel in it upon there being some power in it that makes some facts sit down and others stand up but which sees that all facts are represented in general the more facts a particular fact can be said to be a delegate for the more a particular fact can be said to represent other facts the more of the floor it should have the more power of reading for facts depends upon a man's power to recognize symbolic or some total or senatorial facts and keep all other facts the general mob or common run of facts from interrupting the amount of knowledge a man is going to be able to master in the world depends upon the number of facts he knows how to avoid this is where our common scientific training the manufacturing of small scientists in the bulk breaks down the first thing that is done with a young man nowadays if he is to be made into a scientist is to take away any last vestige of power his mind may have of avoiding facts everyone has seen it and yet we know perfectly well when we stop to think about it that when in the course of his being educated a man's ability to avoid facts is taken away from him it soon ceases to make very much difference whether he is educated or not he becomes a mere memory let loose in the universe goes about remembering everything hit or miss I never see one of these memory machines going about mowing things down remembering them but that it gives me a kind of sad sudden feeling of being intelligent I cannot quite describe the feeling I am part sorry and part glad and part ashamed of being glad it depends upon what one thinks of one's own narrow escape or the other man or the way of the world all one can do is to thank God silently in some safe place in one's thoughts that after all there is a great deal of the human race always is in every generation who by mere circumstance cannot be educated bold over by their memories even at the worst only a few hundred persons can be made over into reductio ad absurdum Stanley Hall's that is study science under pupils of the pupils of Stanley Hall and the chances are even now as bad as things are and are getting to be that for several hundred years yet man the big brother of creation will insist on preserving his special distinction in it the thing that has lifted him above the other animals his inimitable faculty for forgetting things three duplicates a principle of economy I do not suppose that anybody would submit to my being admitted I was being blackballed before I was born to the brotherhood of scientists and yet it seems to me that there is a certain sense in which I am as scientific as anyone it seems to me for instance that it is a fairly scientific thing to do a fairly matter of fact thing to consider the actual nature of facts and to act on it when one considers the actual nature of facts the first thing one notices is that there are too many of them the second thing one notices about facts is that they are not so many as they look they are mostly duplicates the small scientist never thinks of this because he never looks at more than one class of facts never allows himself to fall into any general interesting fact comparing habit the small poet never thinks of it because he never looks at facts at all it is thus that it has come to pass that the most ordinary human being just living along the man who has the habit of general information is the intellectual superior of the mere scientists about him or the mere poets he is superior to the mere poet because he is interested in knowing facts and he is superior to the minor scientist because he does not want to know all of them or at least if he does he never has time to try and so keeps on knowing something when one considers the actual nature of facts it is obvious that the only possible model for a scientist of the first class or a poet of the first class in this world is the average man the only way to be an extraordinary man master of more of the universe than anyone else is to keep out of the two great pits God has made in it in which the educated are thrown away the science pit and the poet pit the area and power and value of a man's knowledge depend upon his having such a boundless interest in facts that he will avoid all facts he knows already and go on to new ones the rapidity of a man's education depends upon his power to sent a duplicate fact a far off and to keep from stopping and puttering with it is not one fact out of a thousand about a truth as good as the other 999 to enjoy it with if there were not any more truth or if there were not so many more things to enjoy in this world than one had time for it would be different it would be superficial I admit not to climb down into a well and collect some more of the same facts about it or not to crawl under a stone somewhere and know what we know already a little harder but as it is well it does seem to me that when a man has collected one good representative fact about a thing or at most two it's about time to move on and enjoy some of the others there is not a man living dull enough it seems to me to make it worthwhile to do any other way there is not a man living who can afford in a world made as this one is to know any more facts than he can help are not facts of plenty enough in the world are they not scattered everywhere and there are not many enough to go around let us take our one fact a piece and be off and be men with it there is always one fact about everything which is the spirit of all the rest the fact a man was intended to know and to go on his way rejoicing with it may be superficial with all and merely spiritual but if there is anything worthwhile in this world to me it is not to miss any part of being a man in it than any other man has had I do not want to know what every man knows but I do want to get the best of what he knows and live every day with it oh, to take all knowledge for one's province to have rights with all facts to be naive and unashamed before the universe to go forth fearlessly to know God in it to make the round of creation before one dies to share all that has been shared to be all that is to go about in space saying hello to one's soul in it in the stars and in the flowers and in children's faces is not this to have lived that there should be nothing left out in a man's life that all the world has had end of section 15