The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas is another book whose style of exposition puts the leading sentences into high relief. It proceeds by raising questions.
Each section is headed by a question. There are many indications of the answer which St. Thomas is trying to defend. A whole series of objections opposing the answer is stated. The place where St. Thomas begins to argue his point is marked by the words, "I answer that." There is no excuse tor not being able to locate the important sentences in such a book, those expressing the reasons as well as the conclusions, yet I must report that it is all a blur for students who treat everything they read as equally important. That usually means that everything is equally unimportant.
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Apart from books whose style or format calls attention to what most needs interpretation by the reader, the spotting of sentences is a job the reader must perform for himself. There are several things he can do. I have already mentioned one. If he is sensitive to the difference between passages he can understand readily and those he cannot, he will probably be able to locate the sentences which carry the main burden of meaning. Perhaps you are beginning to see how essential a part of reading it is to be perplexed and know it. Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature. If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess.
Another clue to the important sentences is found in the words which compose them. If you have already marked the important words, they should lead you to the sentences which deserve further attention. Thus the first step in interpretative reading prepares for the second. But the reverse may also be the case. It may be that you will mark certain words only after you have become puzzled by the meaning of a sentence. The fact that I have stated these rules in a fixed order does not mean that you have to follow them in that order. Terms constitute propositions. Propositions contain terms. If you know the terms the words express, you have caught the proposition in the sentence. If you understand the proposition conveyed by a sentence, you have arrived at the terms also.
This suggests one further clue to the location of the principal propositions. They must belong to the main arguments of the book. They must be either premises or conclusions.
Hence, if you can detect those sentences which seem to form a sequence, a sequence in which there is a beginning and an end, you probably have put your finger on sentences which are important.
I said a sequence in which there is a beginning and an end. Every argument which men can express in words takes time to state, more obviously so than a single sentence. You may speak a sentence in one breath, but there are pauses in an argument. You have to say one thing first, then another, and still another. An argument begins somewhere, goes somewhere, gets somewhere. It is a movement of thought. It may begin with what is really the conclusion and then proceed to give the reasons for it. Or it may start with the evidences and reasons and bring you to the conclusion which follows therefrom.
Of course, here as elsewhere, the clue will not work unless you know how to use it. You have to recognize an argument when you see one. Despite some disappointing experiences in teaching, I still persist in my opinion that the human mind is as naturally sensitive to arguments as the eye is to colors. The eye will not see if it is not kept open, and the mind will not follow an argument if it is not awake. I explain my disappointment with students in this connection by saying that they are mostly asleep while they read a book or listen to what goes on in class.
Several years ago, Mr. Hutchins and I began to read some books with a new group of students. They had had almost no training in reading and had read very little when we first met them. One of the first books we read was Lucretius' account of The Nature of Things. We thought this would be interesting for them. Most of our students are extreme materialists to begin with. And this work by Lucretius is a powerful exposition of the extreme materialistic position. It is the most extensive statement we have of the position of the ancient Greek atomists.
Because they were beginners in reading (though most of them were college juniors and seniors), we read the book slowly, at the rate of about thirty pages a time. Even so, they had difficulty in knowing what words to mark, what sentences to underline. Everything Lucretius said seemed to them of equal importance. Mr. Hutchins decided that it would be a good exercise for them to write out just the conclusions which Lucretius reached or tried to prove in the next part. "Don't tell us," he said, "what Lucretius thinks about the gods or women, or what you think about Lucretius. We want the argument in a nutshell, and that means finding the conclusions first."
The main argument in the section they had to read was an attempt to show that the atoms differ only in shape, size, weight, and speed of motion. They have no qualities at all, no colors or smells or textures. All the qualities we experience are entirely subjective—in us rather than in things.
The conclusions could have been written down in a few propositions. But they brought in statements of every sort. Their failure to extract conclusions from everything else was not due to lack of training in logic. They had no difficulty in following the line of an argument once it was presented to them. But they had to have the argument lifted out of the text for them. They were not good enough readers yet to do that for themselves.
When Mr. Hutchins did the job, they saw how the statements written on the board formed an argument. They could see the difference between the premises—the reasons or evidences—and the conclusions they supported. In short, they had to be taught how to read, not how to reason.
I repeat, we did not have to teach them logic or explain in detail what an argument was.
They could recognize one as soon as it was put on the board in a few simple statements.
But they could not find arguments in a book because they had not yet learned to read actively, to disengage the important sentences from all the rest, and to observe the connections the author made. Reading Lucretius as they read the newspaper, they naturally did not make such discriminations.
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Now let us suppose that you have located the leading sentences. Another step is required by the rule. You must discover the proposition or propositions each of these sentences contains. This is just another way of saying that you must know what the sentence means. You discover terms by discovering what a word means in a given usage. You discover propositions similarly by interpreting all the words that make up the sentence, and especially its principal words.
Obviously, you cannot do this unless you know a little-grammar. You must know the role which adjectives and adverbs play, how verbs function in relation to nouns, how modifying words and clauses restrict or amplify the meaning of the words they modify, and so forth. You must be able to dissect a sentence according to the rules of syntax. I said before that I was going to assume you knew this much grammar. I cannot believe you do not, though you may have grown a little rusty from lack of practice in the rudiments of the art of reading.
There are only two differences between finding the terms which words express and the propositions in sentences. One is that you employ a larger context in the latter case. You bring all the surrounding sentences to bear on the sentence in question, just as you used the surrounding words to interpret a particular word. In both cases, you proceed from what you do understand to the gradual elucidation of what is at first relatively unintelligible.
The other difference lies in the fact that complicated sentences usually express two or more propositions. You have not completed your interpretation of an important sentence until you have separated out of it all the different, though perhaps related, propositions it contains. Skill in doing this is easily exercised. Take some of the complicated sentences in this book and try to state in your own words each of the things that is being asserted.
Number them and relate them.
"State in your own words!" That suggests the best test I know for telling wheth
er you have understood the proposition or propositions in the sentence. If, when you are asked to explain what the author means by a particular sentence, all you can do is to repeat his very words, with some minor alterations in order, you had better suspect that you do not know what he means. Ideally, you should be able to say the same thing in totally different words. The ideal can, of course, be approximated in degrees. But if you cannot get away at all from the author's words, it shows that only words have passed from him to you, not thought or knowledge. You know his words, not his mind. He was trying to communicate knowledge, and all you received were words.
The process of translation from a foreign language into English is relevant to the test I have suggested. If you cannot state in an English sentence what a French sentence says, you know you do not understand the meaning of the French. Such translation is entirely on the verbal level, because even when you have formed a faithful English replica, you still may not know what the writer of the French sentence was trying to convey. I have read a lot of translations which reveal such ignorance.
The translation of one English sentence into another, however, is not merely verbal. The new sentence you have formed is not a verbal replica of the original. If accurate, it is faithful to the thought alone. That is why the making of such translations is the best test you can apply to yourself, if you want to be sure you have caught the proposition, not merely swallowed the words. I have tried it countless times on students. It never fails to detect the counterfeit of understanding. The student who says he knows what the author means, but can only repeat the author's sentence to show that he does, would not be able to recognize the author's proposition if it were presented to him in other words.
The author may himself express the same proposition in different words in the course of his writing. The reader who has not seen through the words to the proposition they convey is likely to treat the equivalent sentences as if they were statements of different propositions. Imagine a person who did not know that "24-2== 4" and "4 — 2 = 2" were different notations for the same arithmetic relationship— the relationship of four as the double of two, or two as the half of four.
You would have to conclude that that person simply did not understand the equation.
The same conclusion is forced on you concerning yourself or anybody else who cannot tell when equivalent statements of the same proposition are being made, or who cannot himself offer an equivalent statement when he claims to understand the proposition a sentence contains.
These remarks have a bearing on the problem of reading two books about the same subject matter. Different authors frequently say the same thing in different words, or different things using almost the same words. The reader who cannot see through the language to the terms and propositions will never be able to compare such related works. Because of their verbal differences, he is likely to misread the authors as disagreeing, or to ignore their real differences because of verbal resemblances in their statements. I would go further and say that a person who cannot read two related books in a discriminating way cannot read either of them by itself.
There is one other test of whether you understand the proposition in a sentence you have read. Can you point to some experience you have had which the proposition describes or to which the proposition is in any way relevant? Can you exemplify the general truth which has been enunciated by referring to a particular instance of it? To imagine a possible case is often as good as reporting an actual one. If you cannot do anything at all to exemplify or illustrate the proposition, either imaginatively or by reference to actual experiences, you should suspect that you do not know what is being said.
All propositions are not equally susceptible to this test. It may be necessary to have the special experience which only a laboratory can afford to be sure you have grasped certain scientific propositions. We shall return to this point later in the discussion of reading scientific books. But here the main point is clear. Propositions do not exist in a vacuum. They refer to the world in which we live. Unless you can show some acquaintance with actual or possible facts to which the proposition refers or is relevant somehow, you are playing with words, not dealing with thought and knowledge.
Let me give you one illustration. A basic proposition in metaphysics is expressed by the following words: "Nothing acts except what is actual." I have had many students repeat these words to me with an air of satisfied wisdom. They have thought they were discharging their duty to me and to the author by so perfect a verbal repetition. But the sham was too obvious, I would first ask them to state the proposition in other words.
Seldom could they say, tor instance, that if something does not exist, it cannot do anything. Yet this is an immediately apparent translation—apparent, at least, to anyone who understood the proposition in the original sentence.
Failing to get a translation, I would then ask tor an exemplification of the proposition. If any one of them told me that people do not run away from what is merely possible —
that a baseball game is not postponed on account of possible showers—I would know at once that the proposition had been grasped.
The vice of "verbalism" can be defined as the bad habit of using words without regard for the thoughts they should convey and without awareness of the experiences to which they should refer. It is playing with words. As the two tests I have just suggested indicate, "verbalism" is the besetting sin of those who fail to read interpretatively. Such readers never get beyond the words. They possess what they read as a verbal memory which they can recite emptily. Strangely enough, one of the charges made by progressive educators against the liberal arts is that they tend to verbalism, when the facts clearly show that it is progressive education's neglect of the three R's which does exactly that. The failure in reading—the vicious verbalism—of those who have not been trained in the arts of grammar and logic shows how lack of such discipline results in slavery to words rather than mastery of them.
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We have spent enough time on propositions. Let us now turn to the third rule, which requires the reader to deal with collections of sentences. I said before that there was a reason for not formulating this third rule by saying that the reader should find the most important paragraphs. The reason is that there are no settled conventions among writers about how to construct paragraphs. Some great writers, such as Montaigne and Locke, write extremely long paragraphs;
others, such as Machiavelli and Hobbes, write relatively short ones. In recent times, under the influence of newspaper and magazine style, most writers tend to cut their paragraphs to fit quick and easy reading. I must confess to you that in the course of writing this book I have often made two para' graphs out of what seemed to me to be naturally one, because I have been told that most readers like short paragraphs. This paragraph, for instance, is probably too long. If I had wanted to coddle my readers, I should have started a new one with the words, "Some great writers."
It is not merely a matter of length. The point that is troublesome here has to do with the relation between language and thought. The logical unit to which the third rule directs our attention is the argument—a sequence of propositions, some of which give reasons for another. This logical unit is not uniquely related to any recognizable unit of writing, as terms are related to words and phrases, and propositions to sentences. An argument, as we have seen, may be expressed in a single complicated sentence. Or it may be expressed in a number of sentences that are only part of one paragraph. Sometimes an argument may coincide with a paragraph, but it may also happen that an argument runs through several paragraphs.
There is one further difficulty. There are many paragraphs in any book which do not express an argument at all—perhaps not even part of one. They may consist of collections of sentences that detail evidence or report how the evidence has been gathered. As there are sentences that are of secondary importance, because they are merely digressions or side remarks, so also can there be paragraphs of this sort.
Bec
ause of all this, I suggest the following rule: Find if you can the paragraphs in a book which state its important arguments; but if the arguments are not thus expressed, your task is to construct thsm, by taking a sentence from this paragraph, and one from that, until you have gathered together the sequence of sentences which state the propositions that compose the argument.
After you have discovered the leading sentences, the construction of paragraphs should be relatively easy. There are various ways of doing this. You can do it by actually writing out on a pad the propositions that together form an argument. Or you can put a number in the margin to indicate the place where the sentences occur that should be tied together in a sequence.
Authors are more or less helpful to their readers in this matter of making the arguments plain. Good authors try to reveal, not conceal, their thought. Yet not even all good authors do this in the same way. Some, such as Euclid, Galileo, Newton (authors who write in a geometrical or mathematical style), come close to the ideal of making a single paragraph an argumentative unit. With the exception of Euclid, there are almost none who make every paragraph an argument. The style of most writing in non-mathematical fields of science tends to present two or more arguments in a single paragraph or to have an argument run through several.
In proportion as a book is more loosely constructed, the paragraphs tend to become more diffuse. You often have to search through all the paragraphs of a chapter to find the sentences you can construct into the statement of a single argument. I have read some books which make you search in vain, and some which do not even encourage the search.
A good book usually summarizes itself as its arguments develop. If the author summarizes his arguments for you at the end of a chapter, or at the end of an elaborate section, you should be able to look back over the preceding pages and find the materials he has brought together in the summary. In The Origin of Species, Darwin summarizes his whole argument for the reader in a last chapter, entitled "Recapitulation and Conclusion." The reader who has worked through the book deserves that help. The one who has not, cannot use it.
HOW TO READ A BOOK Page 20