CHAPTER TEN Coming to Terms where are we?
We have seen that any good book deserves three readings. They have to be done separately and consciously when we are learning to read, though they can be done together and unconsciously when we are expert. We have discovered that there are four rules for the first, or analytical, reading. They are: (i) classify the book according to kind and subject matter; (2) state what the whole book is about with the utmost brevity; (3) define its major parts in their order and relation, and analyze these parts as you have analyzed the whole; (4) define the problem or problems the authors trying to solve.
You are now prepared to go on with the second reading, and its four rules. You are already somewhat acquainted with the first of these rules. It was stated in the second chap ter of this book: spot the important words an author uses and figure out how he uses them. We then put this rule into operation by running down the various meanings of such words as "reading" and "learning." When in any context you knew precisely what I meant when I used these words, you had come to terms with me.
Coming to terms is nearly the last stage in any successful business negotiation. All that remains is to sign on the dotted line. But in the reading of a book, coming to terms is the first stage of interpretation. Unless the reader comes to terms with the author, the communication of knowledge from one to the other does not take place. A term, as you will see shortly, is the basic element of communicable knowledge.
But you can see at once that a term is not a word—at least, not just a word without any further qualifications. If a term and a word were exactly the same, you would only have to find the important words in a book and you would know its basic terms immediately. But a word can have many meanings, especially an important word. If the author uses a word in one meaning, and the reader reads it in another, words have passed between them, but they have not come to terms. Where there is unresolved ambiguity in communication, there is no communication, or at best it must be incomplete.
Just look at the word "communication" for a moment. Its root is related to the word "common." We speak of a community when people have something in common. Communication is an effort on the part of one man to share something with another: his knowledge, his decisions, his sentiments. It succeeds only when it results in a common something, as an item of knowledge which two men have in common.
Now when there is ambiguity in communication, all that is in common are the words which one man speaks or writes and another hears or reads. So long as ambiguity remains, there are no meanings in common between writer and reader. For the communication to be successfully completed, therefore, it is necessary for the two parties to use the same words with the same meanings. When that happens, communication happens, the miracle of two minds with but a single thought.
A term can be defined as an unambiguous word. That is not quite accurate, for strictly there are no unambiguous words. What I should have said is that a term is a word used unambiguously. The dictionary is full of words. They are almost all ambiguous in the sense that they have many meanings. Look up any word and find this out for yourself, if you think there are many exceptions to this generalization. But a word which has several meanings can be used in one sense at a time. When you and I together, as writer and reader, somehow manage for a time to use a given word with one meaning, then, during that time of unambiguous usage, we have come to terms. I think we did manage to come to terms in the matter of reading and learning, for instance.
You cannot find terms in dictionaries, though the materials for making them are there. Terms occur only in the process of communication. They occur when a writer tries to avoid ambiguity and a reader helps him by trying to follow his use of words. There are, of course, many degrees of success in this business. Coming to terms is the ideal limit toward which writer and reader should strive. Since this is one of the. primary achievements of the art of writing and reading, we can think of terms as an artistic use of words, a skilled use of words for the sake of communicating knowledge.
Let me restate the rule for you. As I phrased it originally, it was: spot the important words and figure out how the author is using them. Now I can make that a little more precise and elegant: find the important words and through them come to terms with the author. Note that the rule has two parts. The first step is to locate the words which make a difference. The second is to determine their meanings, as used, with precision.
This is the first rule for the second way of reading, the interpretative reading. The other rules, to be discussed in the next chapter, are like this first one in an important respect. They, also, require you to take two steps: a step dealing with the language as such, and a step beyond the language to the thought which lies behind it.
If language were a pure and perfect medium for thought, these steps would not be separate. If every word had only one meaning, if words could not be used ambiguously, if, in short, each word was an ideal term, language would be a diaphanous medium. The reader would see straight through the writer's words to the content of his mind. If that were the case, there would be no need at all for this second way of reading. Interpretation would be unnecessary.
But you know that that is far from being the case. There is no use in crying about it, no use in faking up impossible schemes for an ideal language, as the philosopher Leibnitz and some of his followers have tried to do. The only thing to do is to make the best of language as it is, and the only way to do that is to use language as skillfully as possible.
Because language is imperfect as a medium, it also functions as an obstacle to communication. The rules of interpretative reading are directed to overcoming that obstacle. We can expect a good writer to do his best to reach us through the barrier language inevitably sets up, but we cannot expect him to do it all. In fact, we must meet him halfway. We, as readers, must try to tunnel through from our side. The chance of a meeting of minds through language depends on the willingness of both reader and writer to work toward each other. Just as teaching will not avail unless there is a reciprocal activity o£ being taught, so no author, regardless of his skill in writing, can achieve communication without a reciprocal skill on the part of readers. The reciprocity here is founded on the fact that the rules of good reading and writing are ultimately the same in principle. If that were not so, the diverse skills of writing and reading would not bring minds together, however much effort was expended, any more than the men who tunnel through from opposite sides of a mountain would ever meet unless they made their calculations according to the same principles of engineering.
You have noted that each of the rules of interpretative reading involves two steps. Let me shift from the engineering analogy to explain how they are related. They can be likened to the two steps a detective takes in pursuing the murderer. Of all the things which lie around the scene of the crime, he must pick~out those he thinks are likely to be clues. He must then use these clues in running down the culprit. Interpreting a book is a kind of detective work. Finding the important words is locating the clues. Coming to terms through them is running down the author's thought.
If I were to get technical for a moment, I should say that ihese rules have a grammatical and a logical aspect. The grammatical step is the one which deals with words. The logical step deals with their meanings or, more precisely, with terms. So far as communication is concerned, both steps are indispensable. If language is used without thought, nothing is being communicated. And thought or knowledge cannot be communicated without language. As arts, grammar and logic are concerned with language in relation to thought and thought in relation to language. That is why I said earlier that skill in reading and writing is gained through these liberal arts, especially grammar and logic.
This business of language and thought—especially the distinction between words and terms—is so important that I am going to risk being repetitious to be sure you understand the main point. The main point is that one word can be the vehicle for many terms. Let me illustrate this schematically in the following manner. The word "reading" has been used in many senses in the course of our discussion. Let us take three of the meanings: (i) reading in the sense of getting amusement; (2) reading in the sense of getting information, and (3) reading in the sense of gaining insight.
Now let us symbolize the word "reading" by the letter X, and the three meanings by the letters a, b, and c. What is symbolized, then by Xa, Xb, and Xc, are not three words, for X remains the same throughout. But they are three terms, on the condition, of course, that you and I know when X is being used in one definite sense, and not another. If I write Xa in a given place, and you read Xb, we are writing and reading the same word, but not in the same way. The ambiguity prevents communication. Only when you think the word as I think it do we have one thought between us. Our minds cannot meet in X, but only in Xa or Xb or Xc. Thus we come to terms.
You are prepared now, I hope, to consider the rule which requires a reader to come to terms. How does he go about taking the first step? How does he find the important worda in a book?
You can be sure of one thing. Not all the words an author uses are important. Better than that, you can be sure that most of his words are not. Only those words which he uses in a special way are important tor him, and for us as readers. This is not an absolute matter, of course, but one of degree. Words may be more or less important. Our only concern is with the tact that some words in a book are more important than others. At one extreme are the words which the author uses as the proverbial man in the street does. Since the author is using these words as ordinary men do in ordinary discourse, the reader should have no trouble with them. He is familiar with their ambiguity and he has grown accustomed to the variation in their meanings as they occur in this context or that.
For example, the word "reading" occurs in Sir Arthur Eddington's fine book on The Nature of the Physical World, He speaks of "pointer-readings," the readings of dials and gauges on scientific instruments. He is using the word "reading" in one of its ordinary senses. It is not for him a technical word. He can rely on ordinary usage to convey what he means to the reader. Even if he used the word "reading" in a different sense somewhere else in his book-in a phrase, let us say, such as "reading nature"—he could be confident that the reader would note the shift to another of the word's ordinary meanings. The reader who could not do this could not talk to his friends or carry on his daily business.
But Sir Arthur cannot use the word "cause" so light-heartedly. That may be a word of common speech, but Sir Arthur is using it in a definitely special sense when he discusses the theory of causation. How that word is to be under-Btood makes a difference which both he and the reader must bother about. For the same reason, the word "reading" is important in this book. We cannot get along with using it in an ordinary way.
I repeat that an author uses most words as men ordinarily do in conversation, with a range of meanings, and trusting to context to indicate the shifts. Knowing this fact should be of some help to you in detecting the more important words. There is one qualification here. We must not forget that at different times and places the same words are not equally familiar items in daily usage. A contemporary like Eddington or me will employ most words as they are ordinarily used today, and you will know what these are because you are alive today. But in reading the great books of the past, it may be more difficult to detect the words the author is using as most men did at the time and place he was writing. The translation of books from foreign languages complicates the matter further.
You can see, therefore, why eliminating the ordinary words may be a rough discrimination. Nevertheless, it remains true that most of the words in any book can be read just as one would use them in talking to one's friends. Take any page of this book and count the words which we are using that way: all the prepositions, conjunctions, and articles, and certainly most of the verbs, nouns, and adjectives. In this chapter so far, I would say that there have been only a few important words: "word," "term," "ambiguity," "communication," "important"; of these, "term" is clearly the most important. All the others are important in relation to it.
You cannot locate the important words without making an effort to understand the passage in which they occur. This situation is somewhat paradoxical. If you do understand the passage, you will, of course, know which words in it are the most important. If you do not fully understand the passage, it is probably because you do not know the way the author is using certain words. It you mark the words that trouble you, you may hit the very ones the author is using specially^ That this is likely to be so follows from the fact that you should have no trouble with the words the author uses in an ordinary way.
From your point of view as a reader, the most important words are those which give you trouble. As I have said, it is likely that these words are important for the author as well. The opposite is possible, of course. They may not be.
It is also possible that words which are important for the author do not bother you, and precisely because you understand them. In that case, you have already come to terms with the author. Only where you'fail to come to terms have you work still to do.
So far we have been proceeding negatively by eliminating the ordinary words. You discover some of the important words by the fact that they are not ordinary for you. That is why they bother you. But is there any other way of spotting the important words? Are there any positive signs which point to them?
There are several positive signs I can suggest. The first and most obvious sign is the explicit stress an author places upon certain words and not others. He may do this in many ways. He may use such typographical devices as quotation marks or italics to mark the word for you. He may call your attention to the word by explicitly discussing its various senses and the way he is going to use it here and there. Or he may emphasize the word by defining the thing which the word is used to name.
No one can read Euclid without knowing that such words as "point," "line," "plane," "angle," "figure," "parallel," and so forth are of the first importance. These are the words which name geometrical entities that Euclid defines. There are other important words, such as "equals," "whole," and "part," but these do not name anything which is defined. You know that they are important from the fact that they occur in the axioms. Euclid helps you here by making his primary propositions explicit at the very beginning. You can guess that the terms which compose such propositions are basic, and that underlines for you the words which express these terms. You may have no difficulty with these words, because they are words of common speech, and Euclid appears to be using them that way.
If all authors wrote as Euclid did, you may say, this business of reading would be much easier. Unfortunately, that is not possible, although some men have thought that any subject matter can be expounded in the geometrical manner. I shall not try to explain why the procedure—the method of exposition and proof—which works in mathematics is not applicable in other fields of knowledge. For our purposes, it is sufficient to note what is common to every sort of exposition. Every field of knowledge has its own technical vocabulary. Euclid makes his plain right at the beginning. The same is true of any writer, such as Newton or Galileo, who writes in the geometrical manner. In books differently written or in other fields, the technical vocabulary must be discovered by the reader.
If the author has not pointed out the words himself, the reader may locate them through having some prior knowledge of the subject matter. If he knows something about biology or economics before he begins to read Darwin or Adam Smith, he certainly has some leads toward discerning the technical words. The various steps of the first reading may be helpful here. If you know what kind of book it is, what it is about as a whole, and what its major parts are, you are greatly aided in separating the technical vocabulary from the ordinary words. The author's title, chapter headings, and preface may be useful in this connection.
Now you know that "wealth" is a technical word for Adam Smith, and "species" is one for Darwin. And as one technical word leads to another, you cannot help but -discover other technical words in a similar fashion. You can soon make a list of the important words used by Adam Smith: labor, capital, land, wages, profits, rent, commodity, price, exchange, productive, unproductive, money, and so forth. And here are some you cannot miss in Darwin: variety, genus, selection, survival, adaptation, hybrid, fittest, creation.
Where a field of knowledge has a well-established technical vocabulary, the task of locating the important words in a book treating that subject matter is relatively easy. You can spot them positively through having some acquaintance with the field, or negatively by knowing what words must be technical, because they are not ordinary. Unfortunately, there are many fields in which a technical vocabulary is not well established.
Philosophers are notorious for having private vocabularies. There are some words, of course, which have a traditional standing in philosophy. Though they may not be used by all writers in the same sense, they are nevertheless technical words in the discussion of certain problems. But philosophers often find it necessary to coin new words, or to take some word from common speech and make it a technical word. This last procedure is likely to be most misleading to the reader who supposes that he knows what the word means, and therefore treats it as an ordinary word.
In this connection, one clue to an important word is that the author quarrels with other writers about it. When you find an author telling you how a particular word has been used by others, and why he chooses to use it differently, you can be pretty sure that that word makes a great difference to him.
I have emphasized the notion of technical vocabulary, but you must not take this too narrowly. The relatively small set of words which express the author's main ideas, his leading concepts, constitutes his special vocabulary. They are the words which carry his analysis. If he is making an original communication, some of these words are likely to be used by him in a very special way, although he may use others in a fashion which has become traditional in that field. In either case, these are the words which are most important for him. They should be important for you as a reader also, but in addition any other word whose meaning is not clear is important for you.
The trouble with most readers is that they simply do not pay enough attention to words to locate their difficulties. They fail to distinguish the words they do not understand sufficiently from those they do. All the things I have suggested to help you find the important words in a book will be of no avail unless you make a deliberate effort to note the words you must work on to find the terms they convey. The reader who fails to ponder, or at least to mark, the words he does not understand is likely to end up as badly as the locomotive engineer who drives past red signals in the hope .that the traffic congestion will straighten itself out.
If you are reading a book that can increase your understanding, it stands to reason that all its words will not be equally intelligible. If you proceed as if they were all ordinary words, all on the same level of general intelligibility as the words of a newspaper article, you will not make the first step toward an interpretative reading. You might just as well be reading a newspaper, for the book cannot enlighten you if you do not try to understand ,it.
I know how inveterately most of us are addicted to pas' sive reading. The outstanding fault of the passive reader is his inattention to words, and his consequent failure to come to terms with the author. Some years ago Professor Malcolm Sharp, of the University of Chicago Law School, and I gave a special course for students who were planning to study law. One of our primary aims was to teach them how to read and write. A lawyer should possess these abilities. The faculty of the Law School had come to suspect that the colleges could not be counted on to develop these skills. Our experience with these students, who had reached their junior year, showed their suspicion to be well founded.
We soon discovered how passively they read. John Locke's second essay Of Civil Government had been assigned, and they had had several weeks in which to read about a hundred pages. The class met. Mr. Sharp and I asked relatively simple, leading questions about Locke's views on government, the relation of natural and civil rights, the nature of liberty, and so forth. They answered these questions, but not in a way which showed any acquaintance with Locke. They could have made the same replies if they had never opened Locke's essay.
Had they read the book? They assured us they had. We even inquired whether they had make the mistake of reading the first essay, rather than the second. There was no mistake, it seemed. The only thing left to do was to show them that, though they may have looked at every page, they had not read the book.
I went to the board and asked them to call out the most important words in the essay. I said I wanted either those words which were most important for Locke or those which they had trouble in understanding. At first there was no response. Only after I put such words as "natural," "civil," "property," and "equality," on the board was I able to get them to contribute. We finally did get a list which included "liberty," "despotism," "consent (of the governed)," "rights," "justice," and so forth.
Before I went further, I paused to ask whether these words were utterly strange to them. No, they were all familiar and ordinary words, they said. One student pointed out that some of these words occurred in the Declaration of Independence. It was said there to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that the just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed. They found other words, such as "despotism," "usurpation," and "liberty," which they thought Locke and the founding fathers probably used in a similar way.
That was our cue. We agreed that the writers of the Declaration and the framers of the Constitution had made these words extremely popular in the tradition of American political discussion. Mr. Sharp added that many of them had probably read Locke's essay and had followed his usage of them. How did Locke use them? What were their meanings, not in general, not in popular speech, but in Locke's political theory, and in the great American documents which may have been influenced by Locke?
I went to the board again to write down the meaning! of the words as they suggested them. But few suggestions were forthcoming, and seldom did a student offer a set of meanings. Few had discovered the fundamental ambiguity of the important words. Mr. Sharp and I then listed the meanings of the words, not one meaning for each, but several. By contrasting the meanings of "natural" and "civil," we tried to show them Locke's distinctions between natural and civil equality, natural and civil liberty, and natural and civil rights.
At the end of the hour, I asked them whether they still thought that they had read the book. A little sheepishly now they admitted that perhaps they hadn't. They had, of course, read it in the way they read the newspaper or a textbook. They had read it passively, without any attention to words and meanings. For the purpose of understanding what Locke had to say that was just the same as not reading it at all. Here were a group of future lawyers who did not know the meaning of the leading words in the Declaration of Independence or the preamble to the Constitution.
My point in telling this story is to show that until passive reading is overcome, the reader proceeds as if he knew what all the words meant, especially if he is reading something in which the important words also happen to be words in popular usage. Had these students developed the habit of active reading, they would have noted the words I have mentioned. They would have known, in the first place, that such words are not only popular but belong to the technical vocabulary of political theory. Recognizing that, they would, in the second place, have wondered about their technical meanings. And finally, if they had tried to determine their significance, they would have found Locke using these words in several senses. Then they might have realized the need to come to terms with the author.
I should add that the lesson was learned. With these same students, we subsequently read more difficult books than Locke's essay. They came to class better prepared for discussion, because they had marked the words that made a crucial difference. They had pursued important words through their shifts of meaning. What is more, they were beginning to enjoy a new experience—the active reading of a book. It came a little late in their college life, but most of them gratefully acknowledged that it was better late than never.
Remember that spotting the important words is only the beginning of the task. It merely locates the places in the text where you have to go to work. There is another step in carrying out this first rule of interpretative reading. Let us turn to that now. Let us suppose that you have marked the words that trouble you. What next?
There are two major possibilities. Either the author is using these words in a single sense throughout or he is using them in two or more senses, shifting his meaning from place to place. In the first alternative, the word stands for a single term. A good example of the use of important words so that they are restricted to a single meaning is found in Euclid. In the second alternative, the word stands for several terms. This is the more usual case. It is illustrated by the usage in Locke's essay.
In the light of these alternatives, your procedure should be as follows. First, try to determine whether the word has one or many meanings. If it has many, try to see whether they are related and how. Finally, note the places where the word is used in one sense or another, and see if the context gives you any clue to the reason for the shift in mean- » ing. This last will enable you to follow the word in its change of meanings with the same flexibility that characterizes the author's usage.
But, you may complain, everything is clear except the main thing. How does one find out what the meanings are? There is only one answer to the question. I fear you may not think it a very satisfactory one. But patience and practice will show you otherwise. The answer is that you have to discover the meaning of a word you do not understand by using the meanings of all the other words in the context which you do understand. This must be the way, however merry-go-roundish it may seem at first.
The simplest way to illustrate this is to consider a definition. A definition is stated in words. If you do not understand any of the words used in the definition, you obviously cannot understand the meaning of the word which names the thing being defined. The word "point" is a basic word in geometry. You may think you know what it means, but Euclid wants to be sure you use it in only one way. He tells you what he means by first defining the thing which he is later going to use the word to name. He says: "A point is that which has no parts."
How does that bring you to terms with him? You know, he assumes, what every other word in the sentence means with sufficient precision. You know that whatever has parts is a complex whole. You know that the opposite of complex is simple. To be simple is the same as to lack parts. You know that the use of the words "is" and "that which" means that the thing referred to must be an entity of some sort. You may even know that there are no physical things without parts, and hence that a point, as Euclid speaks of it, cannot be physical.
This illustration is typical of the process by which you acquire meanings. You operate with meanings you already possess. If every word that was used in a definition had itself to be denned, nothing could ever be defined. If every word in a book you were reading were entirely strange to you, a? it is in the case of a book in a totally foreign lan guage, you could make no prpgress at all.
I suppose that is what people mean when they say of a book that it's all Greek to them. They simply have not tried to understand it. Most of the words in any English book are familiar words. These words surround the strange words, the technical words, the words that may cause the reader some trouble. The surrounding words are the context for the words to be interpreted. The reader has all the materials he needs to do the job.
I am not pretending the job is an easy one. I am only insisting that it is not an impossible one. If it were, no one could read a book to gain in understanding. The fact that a book can give you new insights or enlighten you indicates that it probably contains words you may not readily understand. If you could not come to understand these words by your own efforts, then the kind of reading we are talking about would be impossible. It would be impossible to pass from understanding less to understanding more by your own operations on a book.
If it is not impossible—and it is not—then the only solution is the one I have indicated. Because you understand something to begin with, you can employ your fund of meanings to interpret the words that challenge you. When you have succeeded, you have elevated yourself in understanding. You have approached or reached the understanding with which the author began.
There is no rule of thumb for doing this. The process is something like the trial-and-error method of putting a jigsaw puzzle together. The more parts you put together, the more easily the remaining parts fit. A book comes to you with a large number of words already in place. A word in place is a term. It is definitely located by the meaning which you and the author share in using it. The remaining words must be put into place. You do this by trying to make them fit this way or that. The better you understand the picture which the words so far in place incompletely reveal, the easier it is to complete the picture by making terms of the remaining words. Each word put into place makes the next adjustment easier.
You will make errors, of course, in the process. You will think you have managed to find where a word belongs and how it fits, only to discover later that the placement of another word requires you to make a whole series of readjustments. The errors will get corrected because, so long as they are not found out, the picture cannot be completed. Once you have had any experience at all in this work of coming to terms, you will soon be able to check yourself. You will know whether you have succeeded or not. You will not blithely think you understand when you do not.
In comparing a book to a jigsaw puzzle, I have made one assumption that is not simply or universally true. A good puzzle is, of course, one all of whose parts fit. The picture can be perfectly completed. The same is true of the ideally good book. But there are few books of this sort. In proportion as they are good, their terms will be so well made and put together by the author that the reader can do the work of interpretation fruitfully. Here, as in the case of every other rule of reading, bad books are less readable than good ones. The rules do not work on them, except to show you how bad they are. If the author uses words ambiguously, you cannot find out precisely what he is trying to say. You can only find out that he has not been precise.
But, you may ask, doesn't an author who uses a word in more than a single sense use it ambiguously? And didn't you say that the usual practice is for authors to use words in several senses, especially their most important words?
The answer to the second question is Yes, to the first. No. To use a word ambiguously is to use it in several senses Without distinguishing or relating these meanings. (For example, I have probably used the word "important" ambiguously in this chapter, never quite clear as to whether I mean important for the author or important for you.) The author who does that has not made terms which the reader can come to. But the author who distinguishes the several senses in which he is using a critical word and enables the reader to make a responsive discrimination is offering terms.
You must not forget that one word can represent several terms. One way to remember this is to distinguish between the author's technical vocabulary and his analytical terminology. If you make a list in one column of the important words, and in another of their various meanings, you will see the relation between the vocabulary and the terminology.
There are several further complications. In the first place, a word which has several distinct meanings .can be used either in a single sense or in a combination of senses. Let me take the word "reading" again as an example. In some places, I have used it to stand for reading any kind of book. In others, I have used it to stand for reading books which instruct rather than amuse. In still others, I have used it to stand for reading which enlightens rather than informs.
Now it we symbolize here, as we did before, the three distinct meanings of "reading" by Xa, Xb, and Xc, you can see that the first usage just mentioned is Xabc, the second is Xbc, and the third Xc. In other words, if three meanings are related, one can use a word to stand for all of them, for some of them, or for only one of them at a time. So long as each usage is definite, the word so used is a term.
In the second place, there is the problem of synonyms. You know in general that synonyms are words which have the same meaning or closely related shades of meaning. A pair of synonyms is exactly the opposite of a single word used in two ways. Synonyms are two words used in the same way. Hence one and the same term can be represented by two or more words used synonymously.
We can indicate this symbolically as follows. Let X and V be two different words, such as "enlightenment" and "in-sight." Let the letter a stand for the same meaning which each can express, namely, a gain in understanding. Then Xa and Ya represent the same term, though they are distinct as words. When I speak of reading "for insight" and reading "for enlightenment," I am referring to the same kind of reading, because the two phrases are being used with the same meaning. The words are different, but there is only one term here for you as a reader to grasp.
You can see why this is important. If you supposed that every time an author changed his words, he was shifting his terms, you would make as great an error as to suppose that every time he used the same words, the terms remained the same. Keep this in mind when you list the author's vocabulary and terminology in separate columns. You will find two relationships. On the one hand, a single word may be related to several terms. On the other, a single term may be related to several words.
That this is generally the case results from the nature of language in relation to thought. A dictionary is a record of the usage of words. It shows how men have used tlie same word to refer to different things, and different words to refer to the same thing. The reader's problem is to know what the author is doing with words at any place in the book. The dictionary may help sometimes, but if the writer departs in the least from common usage, the reader is on his own.
In the third place, and finally, there is the matter of phrases. A phrase, as you know, is a group of words which does not express a complete thought as a sentence does. If the phrase is a unit, that is, if it is a whole which can be the subject or predicate of a sentence, it is like a single word. Like a single word, it can refer to something being talked about in some way.
It follows, therefore, that a term can be expressed by a phrase as well as by a word. And all the relations which exist between words and terms hold also between terms and phrases. Two phrases may express the same terms, and one phrase may express several terms, according to the way its constituent words are used.
In general, a phrase is less likely to be ambiguous than a word. Because it is a group of words, each of which is in the context of the others, the single words are more likely to have restricted meanings. That is why a writer is likely to substitute a fairly elaborate phrase for a single word if he wants to be sure that you get his meaning.
One illustration should suffice. To be sure that you come to terms with me about reading, I substitute the phrase "reading for enlightenment" for the single word "reading." To make doubly sure, I may even substitute a more elaborate phrase, such as "the process of passing from understanding less to understanding more by the operation or your mind upon a book." There is only one term herz, namely, the reference to a kind of reading which I am trying to talk about. But that one term has been expressed by a single word, a short phrase, and a longer one.
This has probably been the hardest chapter for you to read so far. I know it has been the hardest for me to write. I think I know the reason why. The rule of reading we have been discussing cannot be made fully intelligible without going into all sorts of grammatical and logical explanations about words and terms.
I assure you I have done very little explaining. To give an adequate account of these matters would take many chapters. I say this to warn you that I have merely touched the most essential points. I hope I have said enough to make the rule a useful guide in practice. The more you put it into practice, the more you will appreciate the intricacies of the problem. You will want to know something about the literal and metaphorical use of words. You will want to know about the distinction between abstract and concrete words, or between proper and common names. You will become interested in the whole business of definitions: the difference between defining words and defining things; why some words are indefinable, and yet have definite meanings, and so forth. You will seek light on what is called "the emotive use of words," that is, the use of words to arouse emotions, to move men to action or change their minds, as distinct from the communication of knowledge.
If the practice of reading elicits these further interests, you will be in a position to satisfy them by reading books on these special subjects. And you will profit more from reading such books, because you will go to them with questions born of your own experience in reading. The study of grammar and logic, the sciences which underlie these rules of interpretation, is practical only to the extent you can relate it to practice.
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