HOW TO READ A BOOK

by Mortimer J Adler

  Sometimes you can detect that a book is practical by ita title. If it contains such phrases as "the art of" or "how to," you can spot it at once. If the title names fields which you know are practical, such as economics or politics, engineering or business, law or medicine, you can classify the books readily.

  There are still other signs. I once asked a student if he could tell from the titles which of two books by John Locke was practical and which was theoretical. The two titles were: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and An Essay Concerning the Origin, Extent and End of Civil Government, The student had caught on from the titles. He said that the problems of government were practical, and that the analysis of understanding was theoretical.

  He went further. He said he had read Locke's introduction to the book on understanding.

  There Locke expressed his design as being to inquire into the "origin, certainty, and extent of human knowledge." The phrasing resembled the title of the book on government, with one important difference. Locke was concerned with the certainty or validity of knowledge in the one case, and with the end of government in the other.

  Now, said the student, questions about the validity of something are theoretic, whereas to raise questions about the end of anything, the purpose it serves, is practical.

  That student had several ways of catching on to the kind of book he was reading and, I may add, he was a better reader than most. Let me use his example to offer you a piece of general advice. Make your first effort to diagnose a book from its title and the rest of the front matter. If that is insufficient, you will have to depend on signs to be found in the main body of the text. By paying attention to the words and keeping the basic categories in mind, you should be able to classify a book without reading very far.

  A practical book will soon betray its character by the frequent occurrence of such words as "should" and "ought," "good" and "bad," "ends" and "means." The characteristic statement in a practical book is one that says that something should be done; or that this is the right way of doing something; or that one thing is better than another as an end to be sought, or a means to be chosen. In contrast, a theoretical book keeps saying "is," not

  "should" or "ought." It tries to show that something is true, that these are the facts; not that things would be better if they were otherwise, and this is the way to make them better.

  Before turning now to the subdivision of theoretical books, let me caution you against supposing that the problem is as simple as telling whether you are drinking tea or coffee. I have merely suggested some signs whereby you can begin to make these discriminations. The better you understand everything that is involved in the distinction between the theoretical and the practical, the better you will be able to use the signs.

  You will learn to mistrust names and, of course, titles. ^uu will find that although economics is primarily and usually a practical matter, there are, nevertheless, books on economics which are purely theoretical. You will find authors who do not know the difference between theory and practice, just as there are novelists who do not know the difference between fiction and sociology. You will find books that seem to be partly of one sort and partly of an-1 other, such as Spinoza's Ethics. It remains, nevertheless, to ; your advantage as a reader to detect the way the author approaches his problem. For this purpose the distinction between theoretical and practical is primary.

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  You are already familiar with the subdivision of theo-.retica] books into history, science, and philosophy. Everybody, except the professors of those subjects, knows the differences here in a rough way. It is only when you try to refine the obvious, and give the distinctions great precision, that you get into difficulties. Since I do not want you to get as confused as the professors, I shall not try to define what history is, or science and philosophy. Rough approximation will suffice for us to be able to distinguish the theoretic books we read as being of one sort or another.

  In the case of history, the title usually does the trick. If the word "history" does not appear in the title, the rest of the front matter informs us that this is a book about something which happened in the past, not necessarily in antiquity, for it may have been only yesterday. You remember the schoolboy who characterized the study of arithmetic by the oft-repeated question: "What goes into?" History can be similarly characterized by: "What happened next?" History is knowledge of particular events or things which not only existed in the past but underwent a series of changes in the course of time. The historian narrates these happenings and often colors his narrative with some comment on, or insight into, the significance of the events.

  Science is not concerned with the past as such. It treats of matters that can happen at any time or place. Everyone knows that the scientist seeks laws or generalizations. He wants to find out how things happen for the most part or in every case, not, as the historian, how some particular things happened at a given time and place in the past.

  The title enables us to tell whether a book offers us instruction in science less frequently than it does in the case of history. The word "science" sometimes appears, but more usually the name of the subject matter occurs, such as psychology or geology or physics. Then we must know whether that subject matter belongs to the scientist, as geology clearly does, or to the philosopher, as metaphysics clearly does. The trouble is with the cases that are not so clear, such as physics and psychology which have been claimed, at various times, by both scientists and philosophers. There is even trouble with the words "philosophy" and "science" themselves, for they have been variously used. Aristotle called his book on Physics a scientific treatise, though according to current usage we should regard it as philosophical; and Newton entitled his great work Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, though it is tor us one of the masterpieces of science.

  Philosophy is like science and differs from history in that it seeks general truths rather than an account of particular past events. But the philosopher does not ask the same sort of questions as the scientist, nor does he employ the same kind of method to answer them.

  If you are interested in pursuing the matter further, I am going to recommend that you try to read Jacques Maritain's Degrees of Knowledge which offers a sound grasp of the method and aim of modern science, as well as a rich apprehension of the scope and nature of philosophy. Only a contemporary writer can treat of this distinction adequately, because it is only in the last hundred years or so that we have fully appreciated what is involved in the problem of distinguishing and relating philosophy and science. And among contemporary writers, Jacques Maritain is rare in being able to do justice to both science and philosophy.

  Since titles and subject-matter names are not likely to help us discriminate whether a book is philosophical or scientific, how can we tell? I have one criterion to offer that I think will always work, although you may have to read a great deal of the book before you can apply it. If a theoretic book refers to things which lie outside the scope of your normal, routine, daily experience, it is a scientific work. If not, it is philosophical.

  Let me illustrate. Galileo's Two New Sciences requires you to imagine, or to see for yourself in a laboratory, the experiment of the inclined plane. Newton's Opticks refers to experiences in dark rooms with prisms, mirrors, and specially controlled rays of light.

  The special experience to which the author refers may not have been obtained by him in a laboratory. You, too, may have to travel far and wide to get that sort of experience.

  The facts which Darwin reports in The Origin of Species, he observed in the course of many years of fieldwork; yet they are facts which can be and have been rechecked by other observers making a similar effort. They are not facts which can be checked in terms of the ordinary daily experience of the average man.

  In contrast, a philosophical book appeals to no facts or observations which lie outside the experience of the ordinary man. A philosopher refers the reader to his own normal and common experience for the verification or support
of anything he has to say. Thus, Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a philosophical work in psychology, whereas Freud's writings are scientific. Locke makes every point in terms of the experience you have of your own mental processes. Freud can make most of his points only by reporting to you what he observed under the clinical conditions of the psychoanalyst's office—things that most people never dream of, or, if they do, not as the psycho-analyst sees them.

  The distinction I have suggested is popularly recognized when we say that science is experimental or depends upon elaborate observational researches, whereas philosophy is really armchair thinking. The contrast is not intended invidiously. There are some problems which can be solved in an armchair by a man who knows how to think about them in the light of common, human experience. There are other problems, of course, that no amount of the best armchair thinking can solve. What is needed is investigation of some sort—experiments or research in the field—to extend experience beyond the normal, everyday routine. Special experience is required.

  I do not mean that the philosopher is a pure thinker and that the scientist is merely an observer. Both have to observe and think, but they think about different sorts of observation. One has' to make the observations specially, under special conditions, and so forth, before he can think to solve the problem. The other can rely upon his ordinary experience.

  This difference in method always reveals itself in philosophical and scientific books, and that is how you can tell which sort of book you are reading. If you note the sort of experience that is being referred to as a condition of understanding what is being said, you will know whether the book is scientific ot philosophical. The rules of extrinsic reading are more complicated in the case of scientific books. You may actually have to witness an experiment or go to a museum, unless you can use your imagination to construct something you have never observed, which the author is describing as the basis for his most important statements.

  Not only are the extrinsic conditions for reading scientific and philosophical books different, but so also are the rules of intrinsic reading subject to different application in the two cases. Scientists and philosophers do not think in exactly the same way. Their styles in arguing are different. You must be able to find the terms and propositions which constitute these different sorts of argumentation. That is why it is important to know the kind of book you are reading.

  T'he same is true of history. Historical statements are different from scientific and philosophical ones. An historian argues differently and interprets facts differently.

  Furthermore, most history books are narrative in form. And a narrative is a narrative, whether it be fact or fiction. The historian must write poetically, by which I mean he must obey the rules for telling a good story. The intrinsic rules for reading a history are, therefore, more complicated than for science and philosophy, because you must combine the kind of reading that is appropriate to expository books with the kind proper for poetry or fiction.

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  We have discovered one interesting thing in the course of this discussion. History presents complications for intrinsic reading, because it curiously combines two types of writing. Science presents complications in the way of extrinsic reading, because it requires the reader somehow to follow the report of special experiences. I do not mean that these are the only complications in either intrinsic or extrinsic reading. We shall find others later. But so far as the two mentioned are concerned, philosophy would appear to be the simplest type of reading. It is so only in the sense that a mastery of the rules tor reading expository works is by itself most conducive to mastering philosophical books.

  You may object to all this making of distinctions upon distinctions as of little moment for one who wants to learn to read. I think I can meet your objections here, though it may take more than I can say now to convince you fully. In the first place, let me remind you that you have already acknowledged the reason for distinguishing between poetry and science. You realized that one cannot read fiction and geometry in the same way. The same rules will not work for both sorts of books, nor will they work in the same way for different kinds of instructive books, such as histories and philosophies.

  In the second place, let me call your attention to an obvious fact. If you walked into a classroom in which a teacher was lecturing or otherwise instructing students, you could tell very soon, I think, whether the class was one in history, science, or philosophy.

  There would be something in the way the teacher proceeded, the kind of words he used»

  the type of arguments he employed, the sort of problems he proposed, which would give him away as belonging to one department or another. And it would make a difference to you to know this, if you were going to try to listen intelligently to what went on.

  Fortunately, most of us are not aJ dull as the boy who sat through half a semester of philosophy without knowing that the history course for which he had registered met elsewhere.

  In short, the methods of teaching different kinds of subject matter are different. Any teacher knows this. Because of the difference in method and subject matter, the philosopher usually finds it easier to teach students who have not been previously taught by his colleagues, whereas the scientist prefers the student whom his colleagues have already prepared. Philosophers generally find it harder to teach one another than scientists do. I mention these well-known facts to indicate what I mean by the inevitable difference in teaching philosophy and science.

  Now, if there is a difference in the art of teaching in different fields, there must be a reciprocal difference in the art of being taught. The activity of the student must somehow be responsive to the activity of the instructor. The relation between books and their readers is the same as that between living teachers and their students. H&nce, as books differ in the kinds of knowledge they have to communicate, they proceed to instruct us differently; and, if we are to follow them, we must leam to read each kind in an appropriate-manner.

  Having taken all the trouble of this chapter to make the point, I am now going to let you down. Or, perhaps, you will be relieved to learn that in the following chapters, which discuss the remaining rules of reading, I am going to treat all books which convey knowledge, and which we read for information and enlightenment, as it they were of the same sort. They are of the same sort in the most general way. They are all expository rather than poetic. And it is necessary to introduce you to these rules in the most general way first, before qualifying them for application to the subordinate kinds of expository literature.

  The qualifications will be intelligible only after you have grasped the rules in general. I shall try, therefore, to postpone any further discussion of subordinate kinds undl Chapter Fourteen. By that time you will have surveyed all the rules of reading and understood something of their application to any sort of book conveying knowledge. Then it will be possible to suggest how the distinctions we have made in this chapter call for qualifications in the rules.

  When you are all done, you may see better than you do now why the first rule of the first reading of any book is to know what kind of book it is. I hope you do, because I am sure thai the expert reader is a man of many fine discriminations.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Seeing the Skeleton

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  every book has a skeleton hidden between its boards. Your job is to find it. A book comes to you with flesh on its bare bones and clothes over its flesh. It is all dressed up. I am not asking you to be impolite or cruel. You do not have to undress it or tear the flesh off its limbs to get at the firm structure that underlies the soft. But you must read the book with X-ray eyes, for it is an essential part of your first apprehension of any book to grasp its structure.

  You know how violently some people are opposed to vivisection. There are others who feel as strongly against analysis of any sort. They simply do not like to have things taken apart, even if the only instrument used in cutting up is the mind. They somehow feel that something i
s being destroyed by analysis. This is particularly true in the case of works of art. If you try to show them the inner structure, the articulation of the parts, the way the joints fit together, they react as if you had murdered the poem or the piece of music.

  That is why I have used the metaphor of the X ray. No harm is done to the living organism by having its skeleton lighted up. The patient does not even feel as if his privacy had been infringed upon. Yet the doctor has discovered the disposition of the parts. He has a visible map of the total layout. He has an architect's ground plan. No one doubts the usefulness of such knowledge to help further operations on the living organism.

  Well, in the same way, you can penetrate beneath the moving surface of a book to its rigid skeleton. You can see the way the parts are articulated, how they hang together, and the thread that ties them into a whole. You can do this without impairing in the least the vitality of the book you are reading. You need not fear that Humpty-Dumpty will be all in pieces, never to come together again. The whole can'remain in animation while you proceed to find out what makes the wheels go round.

  I had one experience as a student which taught me this lesson. Like other boys of the same age, I thought I could write lyric poetry. I may have even thought I was a poet.

  Perhaps that is why I reacted so strongly against a teacher of English literature who insisted that we be able to state the unity of every poem in a single sentence and then give a prosaic catalogue of its contents by an orderly enumeration of all its subordinate parts.

  To do this with Shelley's Adonais or with an ode by Keats seemed to me nothing short of rape and mayhem. When you got finished with such cold-blooded butchery, all the