CHAPTER EIGHT Catching on From the Title just by their titles, you might not be able to tell in the case of Main Street and Middletown which was social science and which was fiction. Even after you had read them both you might still hesitate. There is so much social science in some contemporary novels, and so much fiction in most of sociology, that it is hard to keep them apart. (It was recently announced, for instance, that The Grapes of Wrath had been made required reading in the social-science courses of several colleges.)
As I have already said, books can be read in several ways. One can understand why some literary critics review a novel by dos Passes or Steinbeck as if they were considering a scientific research or a piece of political oratory; or why some are tempted to read Freud's latest book, on Moses, as a romance. In many cases, the fault is with the book and author.
Authors sometimes have mixed motives. Like other human beings, they are subject to the failing of wanting to do too many things at once. If they are confused in their intentions, the reader cannot be blamed for not knowing which pair of reading glasses to put on. The best rules of reading will not work on bad books—except, perhaps, to help you find out that they are bad.
Let us put aside that large group of contemporary books which confuse science and fiction, or fiction and oratory. There are enough books—the great books of the past and many good contemporary books—which are perfectly deal in their intention and which, therefore, deserve a discriminating reading from us. The first rule of reading requires us to be discriminating. I should say the first rule of the first reading. It can be expressed as follows: you must know what kind of book you are reading, and you should know this as early in the process as possible, preferably before you begin to read.
You must know, for instance, whether you are reading fiction—a novel, a play, an epic, or a lyric—or whether it is an expository work of some sort—a book which conveys knowledge primarily. Picture the confusion of a person who plodded through a novel, all the while supposing it to be a philosophical discourse; or of one who meditated on a scientific treatise as if it were a lyric. You cannot, because I have asked you to imagine what is almost impossible. For the most part, people know the kind of book they are reading before they start. They picked it out to read because it was of that kind. This is certainly true of the main distinction in types of books. People know whether they want amusement or instruction, and seldom go to the wrong counter for what they want.
Unfortunately, there are other distinctions which are not so simple and so commonly recognized. Since we have temporarily excluded imaginative literature from consideration, our problem here has to do with subordinate distinctions within the field of expository books. It is not merely a question of knowing which books are primarily instructive, but which are instructive in a particular way. The kinds of information or enlightenment which a history and a philosophical book afford are not the same. The problems dealt with by a book on physics and one on morals are not the same, nor are the methods that the writers employ in solving such different problems.
You cannot read books that differ thus, in the same way. I do not mean that the rules of reading are as radically different here as in the case of the basic distinction between poetry and science. All these books have much in common. They deal in knowledge. But they are also different, and to read them well we must read them in a manner appropriate to their differences.
I must confess that at this point I feel like a salesman who, having just persuaded the customer that the price is not too high, cannot avoid mentioning the sales tax which is additional. The customer's ardor begins to wilt. The salesman overcomes this obstacle by some more smooth talk, and then is forced to say that he cannot make delivery for several weeks. If the buyer does not walk out on him at that point, he is lucky. Well, I have no sooner finished persuading you that certain distinctions are worth observing, than I have to add: "But there are still more." I hope you will not walk out on me. I promise you that there is an end to the making of distinctions in types of reading. The end is in this chapter.
Let me repeat the rule again: you must know what kind of (expository) book you are reading, and you should know this as early in the process as possible, preferably before you begin to read. Everything is clear here except the last clause. How, you may ask, can the reader be expected to know what sort of book he is reading before he begins to read?
May I remind you that a book always has a title and, more than that, it usually has a subtitle, a table of contents, a preface or introduction by the author? I shall neglect the publisher's blurb. After all, you may have to read a book which has lost its jacket.
What is conventionally called the "front matter" is usually sufficient for the purpose of classification, anyway. The front matter consists of the title, subtitle, table of contents, and preface. These are the signals the author flies in your face to let you know which way the wind is blowing. It is not his fault if you will not stop, look, and listen.
The number of readers who pay no attention to the signals is larger than you might suspect, unless you happen to be one of those who are honest enough to admit it. I have had this experience again and again with students. I have asked them what a book was about. I have asked them to tell me, in the most general terms, what sort of book it was. This, I have found, is a good way, almost an indispensable way, to begin a discussion.
Many students are unable to answer this first and simplest question about the book. Sometimes they apologize by saying that they haven't finished reading it yet, and therefore do not know. That's no excuse, I point out. Did you look at the title? Did you study the table of contents? Did you read the preface or introduction? No, they did not. The front matter of a book seems to be like the ticking of a clock— something you notice only when it is not there.
One reason why titles and prefaces are ignored by so many readers is that they do not think it important to classify the book they are reading. They do not follow this first rule. If they tried to follow it, they would be grateful to the author for helping them. Obviously, the author thinks it is important for the reader to know the kind o£ book he is being given. That is why he goes to the trouble of making it plain in the preface, and usually tries to make his title more or less descriptive. Thus, Einstein and Infeld, in their preface to The Evolution of Physics, tell the reader that they expect him to know "that a scientific book, even though popular, must not be read in the same way as a novel." They also construct, as many authors do, an analytical table of contents to advise the reader in advance of the details of their treatment. In any case, the chapter headings listed in the front serve the purpose of amplifying the significance of the main title.
The reader who ignores all these things has only himself to blame if he is puzzled by the question: What kind of book is this? He is going to get more perplexed. If he cannot answer that question, and if he never asks it of himself, he is going to be unable to ask or answer a lot of other questions about the book.
Recently Mr. Hutchins and I were reading two books together with a class of students. One was by Machiavelli, the other by Thomas Aquinas. In the opening discussion, Mr. Hutchins asked whether the two books were of the same kind. He happened to pick on a student who had not finished his reading of them. The student used that as an excuse to avoid answering. "But," said Mr. Hutchins, "how about their titles?" The student had failed to observe that Machiavelli had written about The Prince, and St. Thomas about The Governance of Princes. When the word "prince" was put on the board and underlined, the student was willing to guess that both books were about the same problem.
''But what sort of problem is it?" Mr. Hutchins persisted.
"What kind of books are these?" The student now thought he saw a lead, and reported that he had read the two prefaces. "How does that help?" Mr. Hutchins asked. "Well," said the student, "Machiavelli wrote his little guidebook on how to be a dictator and get away with it for Lorenzo de' Medici, and St. Thomas wrote his for the King of Cyprus."
We did not stop at that point to correct the error in this statement. St. Thomas was not trying to help tyrants get away with it. The student had used one word, however, which almost answered the question. When asked which word it was, he did not know. When told that it was "guidebook," he did not realize the significance of what he had said. I asked him if he knew in general what sort of book a guidebook was? Was a cookbook a guidebook? Was a moral treatise a guidebook? Was a book on the art of writing poetry a guidebook? He answered all these questions affirmatively.
We reminded him of a distinction that had been made in class before between theoretical and practical books. "Oh," he said, with a burst of light, "these are both practical books, books which tell you what should be done rather than what is the case." At the end of another halt-hour, with other students drawn into the discussion, we finally managed to get the two books classified as practical works in politics. The rest of the period was spent in trying to find out whether the two authors understood politics in the same way, and whether their books were equally practical or practical in the same way.
I report this story not merely to corroborate my statement about the general neglect of titles, but to make a further point. The clearest titles in the world, the most explicit front matter, will not help you classify a book, even if you pay attention to these signs, unless you have the broad lines of classification already in mind.
You will not know the sense in which Euclid's Elements of Geometry and William James's Principles of Psychology are books of the same sort if you do not know that psychology and geometry are both theoretic sciences; nor will you further be able to distinguish them as different unless you know that there are different kinds of science. Similarly, in the case of Aristotle's Politics and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, you can tell how these books are alike and different only if you know what a practical problem is, and what different kinds of practical problems are.
Titles sometimes make the grouping of books easy. Anyone would know that Euclid's Elements, Descartes' Geometry, and IIilbert's Foundations of Geometry were three mathematical books, more or less closely related in subject matter. This is not always the case. It might not be so easy to tell from the titles that St. Augustine's City of God, Hobbes' Leviathan, and Rousseau's Social Contract were political treatises, although a careful perusal of their chapter headings would reveal the problem common to these three books.
To group books as being of the same kind is not enough, however. To follow this first rule of reading you must know what that kind is. The title will not tell you, nor all the rest of the front matter, nor even the whole book itselt sometimes, unless you have some categories you can apply to classify books intelligently. In other words, this rule has to be made a little more intelligible for you if you are to follow it intelligently. This can be done only by a brief discussion of the main kinds of expository books.
Perhaps you read the weekly literary supplements. They classify the books received that week under a series of headings, such as: fiction and poetry, or belles-lettres; history and biography; philosophy and religion; science and psychology; economics and social science; and there is usually a long listing under "miscellaneous." These categories are all right as rough approximations, but they fail to make some basic distinctions and they associate some books which should be separated.
They are not as bad as a sign I have seen in certain bookstores, which indicates the shelves where there are books on "philosophy, theosophy, and new thought." They are not as good as the standard library scheme of classification, which is more detailed, but even that is not quite right for our purposes. We need a scheme of classification which groups books with an eye to the problems of reading, and not for the purpose of selling them or putting them on shelves.
I am going to propose, first, one major distinction, and then, several further distinctions subordinate to the major one. I will not bother you with distinctions which do not matter so far as your skill in reading is concerned.
The major distinction is between theoretical and practical boN^s. Everyone uses the words "theoretical" and "practical," but few know what they mean, least of all the hard headed practical man who distrusts all theorists, especially it they are in the government. For many, "theoretical" means visionary or even mystical, and "practical" means something that works, something that has an immediate cash return. There is an element of truth in this. The practical has to do with what works in some way, at once or in the long run. The theoretical concerns something to be seen or understood. If we polish the rough truth that is here grasped, we come to the distinction between knowledge and action as the two ends a writer may have in mind.
But, you may say, are we not dealing here with books which convey knowledge? How can action come in? You forget that intelligent action depends on knowledge. Knowledge can be used in many ways, not only for controlling nature and inventing useful machines but also for directing human conduct and regulating man's operations in various fields of skill. What I have in mind here is exemplified by the distinction between pure and applied science, or, as it is sometimes inaccurately phrased, science and technology.
Some books and some teachers are interested only in the knowledge itself which they have to communicate. This does not mean that they deny its utility, or that they insist knowledge is good only for its own sake. They simply limit themselves to one kind of teaching, and leave the othel kind to other men. These others have an interest beyond knowledge for its own sake. They are concerned with the problems of human life which knowledge can be used to solve. They communicate knowledge, too, but always with an emphasis upon its application.
To make knowledge practical we must convert it into rules of operation. We must pass from knowing what is the case to knowing what to do about it if we wish to get somewhere. I can summarize this by reminding you of a distinction you have already met in this book, between knowing that and knowing how. Theoretic books teach you that something is the case. Practical books teach you how to do something which you think you should.
This book is practical, not theoretic. Any "guidebook," to use the student's phrase, is a practical book. Any book which tells you either what you should do or how to do it is practical. Thus you see that the class of practical books includes all expositions of arts to be learned, all manuals of practice in any field, such as engineering or medicine or cooking, and treatises which are conventionally classified as morals, such as books on economic, ethical, or political problems.
One other instance of practical writing should be mentioned. An oration—a political speech or a moral exhortation—certainly tries to tell you what you should do or how you should feel about something. Anyone who writes practically about anything not only tries to advise you but also tries to get you to follow his advice. Hence there is an element of oratory in every moral treatise. It is also present in books which try to teach an art, such as this one. I, for example, have tried to persuade you to make the effort to learn to read.
Although every practical book is somewhat oratorical—or perhaps, as we would say today, goes in for propaganda—it does not follow that oratory is coextensive with the practical. You know the difference between a political harangue and a treatise on politics, or economic propaganda and an analysis of economic problems. The Communist Manifesto is a piece of oratory, but Das Kapital is much more than that.
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.
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.
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.
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