The Lost Art of Reading

by Gerald Stanley Lee

I—Unscientific

I
On Being Intelligent in a Library

I have a way every two or three days or so, of an afternoon, of going down to our library, sliding into the little gate by the shelves, and taking a long empty walk there. I have found that nothing quite takes the place of it for me,—wandering up and down the aisles of my ignorance, letting myself be loomed at, staring doggedly back. I always feel when I go out the great door as if I had won a victory. I have at least faced the facts. I swing off to my tramp on the hills where is the sense of space, as if I had faced the bully of the world, the whole assembled world, in his own den, and he had given me a license to live.

Of course it only lasts a little while. One soon feels a library nowadays pulling on him. One has to go back and do it all over again, but for the time being it affords infinite relief. It sets one in right relations to the universe, to the original plan of things. One suspects that if God had originally intended that men on this planet should be crowded off by books on it, it would not have been put off to the twentieth century.

I was saying something of this sort to The Presiding Genius of the State of Massachusetts the other day, and when I was through he said promptly: “The way a man feels in a library (if any one can get him to tell it) lets out more about a man than anything else in the world.”

It did not seem best to make a reply to this. I didn’t think it would do either of us any good.

Finally, in spite of myself, I spoke up and allowed that I felt as intelligent in a library as anybody.

He did not say anything.

When I asked him what he thought being intelligent in a library was, he took the general ground that it consisted in always knowing what one was about there, in knowing exactly what one wanted.

I replied that I did not think that that was a very intelligent state of mind to be in, in a library.

Then I waited while he told me (fifteen minutes) what an intelligent mind was anywhere (nearly everywhere, it seemed to me). But I did not wait in vain, and at last, when he had come around to it, and had asked me what I thought the feeling of intelligence consisted in, in libraries, I said it consisted in being pulled on by the books.

I said quite a little after this, and of course the general run of my argument was that I was rather intelligent myself. The P. G. S. of M. had little to say to this, and after he had said how intelligent he was awhile, the conversation was dropped.

---

The question that concerns me is, What shall a man do, how shall he act, when he finds himself in the hush of a great library,—opens the door upon it, stands and waits in the midst of it, with his poor outstretched soul all by himself before IT,—and feels the books pulling on him? I always feel as if it were a sort of infinite crossroads. The last thing I want to know in a library is exactly what I want there. I am tired of knowing what I want. I am always knowing what I want. I can know what I want almost anywhere. If there is a place left on God’s earth where a modern man can go and go regularly and not know what he wants awhile, in Heaven’s name why not let him? I am as fond as the next man, I think, of knowing what I am about, but when I find myself ushered into a great library I do not know what I am about any sooner than I can help. I shall know soon enough—God forgive me! When it is given to a man to stand in the Assembly Room of Nations, to feel the ages, all the ages, gathering around him, flowing past his life; to listen to the immortal stir of Thought, to the doings of The Dead, why should a man interrupt—interrupt a whole world—to know what he is about? I stand at the junction of all Time and Space. I am the three tenses. I read the newspaper of the universe.

It fades away after a little, I know. I go to the card catalogue like a lamb to the slaughter, poke my head into Knowledge—somewhere—and am lost, but the light of it on the spirit does not fade away. It leaves a glow there. It plays on the pages afterward.

There is a certain fine excitement about taking a library in this fashion, a sense of spaciousness of joy in it, which one is almost always sure to miss in libraries—most libraries—by staying in them. The only way one can get any real good out of a modern library seems to be by going away in the nick of time. If one stays there is no help for it. One is soon standing before the card catalogue, sorting one’s wits out in it, filing them away, and the sense of boundlessness both in one’s self and everybody else—the thing a library is for—is fenced off for ever.

At least it seems fenced off for ever. One sees the universe barred and patterned off with a kind of grating before it. It is a card-catalogue universe.

I can only speak for one, but I must say for myself, that as compared with this feeling one has in the door, this feeling of standing over a library—mere reading in it, sitting down and letting one’s self be tucked into a single book in it—is a humiliating experience.

II
How It Feels

I am not unaware that this will seem to some—this empty doting on infinity, this standing and staring at All-knowledge—a mere dizzying exercise, whirling one’s head round and round in Nothing, for Nothing. And I am not unaware that it would be unbecoming in me or in any other man to feel superior to a card catalogue.

A card catalogue, of course, as a device for making a kind of tunnel for one’s mind in a library—for working one’s way through it—is useful and necessary to all of us. Certainly, if a man insists on having infinity in a convenient form—infinity in a box—it would be hard to find anything better to have it in than a card catalogue.

But there are times when one does not want infinity in a box. He loses the best part of it that way. He prefers it in its natural state. All that I am contending for is, that when these times come, the times when a man likes to feel infinite knowledge crowding round him,—feel it through the backs of unopened books, and likes to stand still and think about it, worship with the thought of it,—he ought to be allowed to. It is true that there is no sign up against it (against thinking in libraries). But there might as well be. It amounts to the same thing. No one is expected to. People are expected to keep up an appearance, at least, of doing something else there. I do not dare to hope that the next time I am caught standing and staring in a library, with a kind of blank, happy look, I shall not be considered by all my kind intellectually disreputable for it. I admit that it does not look intelligent—this standing by a door and taking in a sweep of books—this reading a whole library at once. I can imagine how it looks. It looks like listening to a kind of cloth and paper chorus—foolish enough; but if I go out of the door to the hills again, refreshed for them and lifted up to them, with the strength of the ages in my limbs, great voices all around me, flocking my solitary walk—who shall gainsay me?

III
How a Specialist can Be an Educated Man

It is a sad thing to go into a library nowadays and watch the people there who are merely making tunnels through it. Some libraries are worse than others—seem to be made for tunnels. College libraries, perhaps, are the worst. One can almost—if one stands still enough in them—hear what is going on. It is getting to be practically impossible in a college library to slink off to a side shelf by one’s self, take down some gentle-hearted book one does not need to read there and begin to listen in it, without hearing some worthy person quietly, persistently boring himself around the next corner. It is getting worse every year. The only way a readable library book can be read nowadays is to take it away from the rest of them. It must be taken where no other reading is going on. The busy scene of a crowd of people—mere specialists and others—gathered around roofing their minds in is no fitting place for a great book or a live book to be read—a book that uncovers the universe.

On the other hand, it were certainly a trying universe if it were uncovered all the time, if one had to be exposed to all of it and to all of it at once, always; and there is no denying that libraries were intended to roof men’s minds in sometimes as well as to take the roofs of their minds off. What seems to be necessary is to find some middle course in reading between the scientist’s habit of tunnelling under the dome of knowledge and the poet’s habit of soaring around in it. There ought to be some principle of economy in knowledge which will allow a man, if he wants to, or knows enough, to be a poet and a scientist both. It is well enough for a mere poet to take a library as a spectacle—a kind of perpetual Lick Observatory to peek at the universe with, if he likes, and if a man is a mere scientist, there is no objection to his taking a library as a kind of vast tunnel system, or chart for burrowing. But the common educated man—the man who is in the business of being a human being, unless he knows some middle course in a library, knows how to use its Lick Observatory and its tunnel system both—does not get very much out of it. If there can be found some principle of economy in knowledge, common to artists and scientists alike, which will make it possible for a poet to know something, and which will make it possible for a scientist to know a very great deal without being—to most people—a little underwitted, it would very much simplify the problem of being educated in modern times, and there would be a general gratefulness.

Far be it from me to seem to wish to claim this general gratefulness for myself. I have no world-reforming feeling about the matter. I would be very grateful just here to be allowed to tuck in a little idea—no chart to go with it—on this general subject, which my mind keeps coming back to, as it runs around watching people.

There seem to be but two ways of knowing. One of them is by the spirit and the other is by the letter. The most reasonable principle of economy in knowledge would seem to be, that in all reading that pertains to man’s specialty—his business in knowledge—he should read by the letter, knowing the facts by observing them himself, and that in all other reading he should read through the spirit of imagination—the power of taking to one’s self facts that have been observed by others. If a man wants to be a specialist he must do his knowing like a scientist; but if a scientist wants to be a man he must be a poet; he must learn how to read like a poet; he must educate in himself the power of absorbing immeasurable knowledge, the facts of which have been approved and observed by others.

The weak point in our modern education seems to be that it has broken altogether with the spirit or the imagination. Playing upon the spirit or the imagination of a man is the one method possible to employ in educating him in everything except his specialty. It is the one method possible to employ in making even a powerful specialist of him; in relating his specialty to other specialties; that is, in making either him or his specialty worth while.

Inasmuch as it has been decreed that every man in modern life must be a specialist, the fundamental problem that confronts modern education is, How can a specialist be an educated man? There would seem to be but one way a specialist can be an educated man. The only hope for a specialist lies in his being allowed to have a soul (or whatever he chooses to call it), a spirit or an imagination. If he has This, whatever it is, in one way or another, he will find his way to every book he needs. He will read all the books there are in his specialty. He will read all other books through their backs.

IV
On Reading Books through Their Backs

As this is the only way the majority of books can be read by anybody, one wonders why so little has been said about it.

Reading books through their backs is easily the most important part of a man’s outfit, if he wishes to be an educated man. It is not necessary to prove this statement. The books themselves prove it without even being opened. The mere outside of a library—almost any library—would seem to settle the point that if a man proposes to be in any larger or deeper sense a reader of books, the books must be read through their backs.

Even the man who is obliged to open books in order to read them sooner or later admits this. He finds the few books he opens in the literal or unseeing way do not make him see anything. They merely make him see that he ought to have opened the others—that he must open the others; that is, if he is to know anything. The next thing he sees is that he must open all the others to know anything. When he comes to know this he may be said to have reached what is called, by stretch of courtesy, a state of mind. It is the scientific state of mind. Any man who has watched his mind a little knows what this means. It is the first incipient symptom in a mind that science is setting in.

The only possible cure for it is reading books through their backs. As this scientific state of mind is the main obstacle nowadays in the way of reading books through their backs, it is fitting, perhaps, at this point that I should dwell on it a little.

I do not claim to be a scientist, and I have never—even in my worst moments—hoped for a scientific mind. I am afraid I know as well as any one who has read as far as this, in this book, that I cannot prove anything. The book has at least proved that; but it does seem to me that there are certain things that very much need to be said about the scientific mind, in its general relation to knowledge. I would give the world to be somebody else for awhile and say them—right here in the middle of my book. But I know as well as any one, after all that has passed, that if I say anything about the scientific mind nobody will believe it. The best I can do is to say how I feel about the scientific mind. “And what has that to do with it?” exclaims the whole world and all its laboratories. What is really wanted in dealing with this matter seems to be some person—some grave, superficial person—who will take the scientific mind up scientifically, shake it and filter it, put it under the microscope, stare at it with a telescope, stick the X-ray through it, lay it on the operating table—show what is the matter with it—even to itself. Anything that is said about the scientific mind which is not said in a big, bow-wow, scientific, impersonal, out-of-the-universe sort of way will not go very far.

And yet, the things that need to be said about the scientific mind—the things that need to be done for it—need to be said and done so very much, that it seems as if almost any one might help. So I am going to keep on trying. Let no one suppose, however, that because I have turned around the corner into another chapter, I am setting myself up as a sudden and new authority on the scientific mind. I do not tell how it feels to be scientific. I merely tell how it looks as if it felt.

I have never known a great scientist, and I can only speak of the kind of scientist I have generally met—the kind every one meets nowadays, the average, bare scientist. He always looks to me as if he had a grudge against the universe—jealous of it or something. There are so many things in it he cannot know and that he has no use for unless he does. It always seems to me (perhaps it seems so to most of us in this world, who are running around and enjoying things and guessing on them) that the average scientist has a kind of dreary and disgruntled look, a look of feeling left out. Nearly all the universe goes to waste with a scientist. He fixes himself so that it has to. If a man cannot get the good of a thing until he knows it and knows all of it, he cannot expect to be happy in this universe. There are no conveniences for his being happy in it. It is the wrong size, to begin with. Exact knowledge at its best, or even at its worst, does not let a man into very many things in a universe like this one. A large part of it is left over with a scientist. It is the part that is left over which makes him unhappy. I am not claiming that a scientist, simply because he is a scientist, is any unhappier or needs to be any unhappier than other men are. He does not need to be. It all comes of a kind of brutal, sweeping, overriding prejudice he has against guessing on anything.

V
On Keeping Each Other in Countenance

I do not suppose that my philosophising on this subject—a sort of slow, peristaltic action of my own mind—is of any particular value; that it really makes any one feel any better except myself.

But it has just occurred to me that I may have arisen, quite as well as not, without knowing it, to the dignity of the commonplace.

“The man who thinks he is playing a solo in any human experience,” says this morning’s paper, “only needs a little more experience to know that he is a member of a chorus.” I suspect myself of being a Typical Case. The scientific mind has taken possession of all the land. It has assumed the right of eminent domain in it, and there must be other human beings here and there, I am sure, standing aghast at learning in our modern day, even as I am, their whys and wherefores working within them, trying to wonder their way out in this matter.

All that is necessary, as I take it, is for one or the other of us to speak up in the world, barely peep in it, make himself known wherever he is, tell how he feels, and he will find he is not alone. Then we will get together. We will keep each other in countenance. We will play with our minds if we want to. We will take the liberty of knowing rows of things we don’t know all about, and we will be as happy as we like, and if we keep together we will manage to have a fairly educated look besides. I am very sure of this. But it is the sort of thing a man cannot do alone. If he tries to do it with any one else, any one that happens along, he is soon come up with. It cannot be done in that way. There is no one to whom to turn. Almost every mind one knows in this modern educated world is a suspicious, unhappy, abject, helpless, scientific mind.

It is almost impossible to find a typical educated mind, either in this country or in Europe or anywhere, that is not a rolled-over mind, jealous and crushed by knowledge day and night, and yet staring at its ignorance everywhere. The scientist is almost always a man who takes his mind seriously, and he takes the universe as seriously as he takes his mind. Instead of glorying in a universe and being a little proud of it for being such an immeasurable, unspeakable, unknowable success, his whole state of being is one of worry about it. The universe seems to irritate him somehow. Has he not spent years of hard labour in making his mind over, in drilling it into not-thinking, into not-inferring things, into not-knowing anything he does not know all of? And yet here he is and here is his whole life—does it not consist in being baffled by germs and bacilli, crowed over by atoms, trampled on by the stars? It is getting so that there is but one thing left that the modern, educated scientific mind feels that it knows and that is the impossibility of knowledge. Certainly if there is anything in this wide world that can possibly be in a more helpless, more pulp-like state than the scientific mind in the presence of something that cannot be known, something that can only be used by being wondered at (which is all most of the universe is for), it has yet to be pointed out.

He may be better off than he looks, and I don’t doubt he quite looks down on me as,

A mere poet,

The Chanticleer of Things,

Who lives to flap his wings—

It’s all he knows,—

They’re never furled;

Who plants his feet

On the ridge-pole of the world

And crows.

Still, I like it very well. I don’t know anything better that can be done with the world, and as I have said before I say again, my friend and brother, the scientist, is either very great or very small, or he is moderately, decently unhappy. At least this is the way it looks from the ridge-pole of the world.

VI
The Romance of Science

Science is generally accredited with being very matter-of-fact. But there has always been one romance in science from the first,—its romantic attitude toward itself. It would be hard to find any greater romance in modern times. The romance of science is the assumption that man is a plain, pure-blooded, non-inferring, mere-observing being and that in proportion as his brain is educated he must not use it. “Deductive reasoning has gone out with the nineteenth century,” says The Strident Voice. This is the one single inference that the scientific method seems to have been able to make—the inference that no inference has a right to exist.

So far as I can see, if there are going to be inferences anyway, and one has to take one’s choice in inferring, I would rather have a few inferences on hand that I can live with every day than to have this one huge, voracious inference (the scientist’s) which swallows all the others up. For that matter, when the scientist has actually made it,—this one huge guess that he hasn’t a right to guess,—what good does it do him? He never lives up to it, and all the time he has his poor, miserable theory hanging about him, dogging him day and night. Does he not keep on guessing in spite of himself? Does he not live plumped up against mystery every hour of his life, crowded on by ignorance, forced to guess if only to eat? Is he not browbeaten into taking things for granted whichever way he turns? He becomes a doleful, sceptical, contradictory, anxious, disagreeable, disapproving person as a matter of course.

One would think, in the abstract, that a certain serenity would go with exact knowledge; and it would, if a man were willing to put up with a reasonable amount of exact knowledge, eke it out with his brains, some of it; but when he wants all the exact knowledge there is, and nothing else but exact knowledge, and is not willing to mix his brains with it, it is different. When a man puts his whole being into a vise of exact knowledge, he finds that he has about as perfect a convenience for being miserable as could possibly be devised. He soon becomes incapable of noticing things or of enjoying things in the world for themselves. With one or two exceptions, I have never known a scientist to whom his knowing a thing, or not knowing it, did not seem the only important thing about it. Of course when a man’s mind gets into this dolefully cramped, exact condition, a universe like this is not what it ought to be for him. He lives too unprotected a life. His whole attitude toward the universe becomes one of wishing things would keep off of him in it—things he does not know. Are there not enough things he does not know even in his specialty? And as for this eternal being reminded of the others, this slovenly habit of “general information” that interesting people have—this guessing, inferring, and generalising—what is it all for? What does it all come to? If a man is after knowledge, let him have knowledge, knowledge that is knowledge, let him find a fact, anything for a fact, get God into a corner, hug one fact and live with it and die with it.

When a man once gets into this shut-in attitude it is of little use to put a word in, with him, for the daily habit of taking the roof off one’s mind, letting the universe play upon it instead of trying to bore a hole in it somewhere. “What does it avail after all, after it is all over, after a long life, even if the hole is bored,” I say to him, “to stand by one’s little hole and cry, ‘Behold, oh, human race, this Gimlet Hole which I have bored in infinite space! Let it be forever named for me.’” And in the meantime the poor fellow gets no joy out of living. He does not even get credit for his not-living, seventy years of it. He fences off his little place to know a little of nothing in, becomes a specialist, a foot note to infinite space, and is never noticed afterwards (and quite reasonably) by any one—not even by himself.

VII
Monads

I am not saying that this is the way a scientist—a mere scientist, one who has the fixed habit of not reading books through their backs—really feels. It is the way he ought to feel. As often as not he feels quite comfortable. One sees one every little while (the mere scientist) dropping the entire universe with a dull thud and looking happy after it.

But the best ones are different. Even those who are not quite the best are different. It is really a very rare scientist who joggles contentedly down without qualms, or without delays, to a hole in space. There is always a capability, an apparently left-over capability in him. What seems to happen is, that when the average human being makes up his mind to it, insists on being a scientist, the Lord keeps a remnant of happiness in him—a gnawing on the inside of him which will not let him rest.

This remnant of happiness in him, his soul, or inferring organ, or whatever it may be, makes him suspect that the scientific method as a complete method is a false, superficial, and dangerous method, threatening the very existence of all knowledge that is worth knowing on the earth. He begins to suspect that a mere scientist, a man who cannot even make his mind work both ways, backwards or forwards, as he likes (the simplest, most rudimentary motion of a mind), inductively or deductively, is bound to have something left out of all of his knowledge. He sees that the all-or-nothing assumption in knowledge, to say nothing of not applying to the arts, in which it is always sterile, does not even apply to the physical sciences—to the mist, dust, fire, and water out of which the earth and the scientist are made.

For men who are living their lives as we are living ours, in the shimmer of a globule in space, it is not enough that we should lift our faces to the sky and blunder and guess at a God there, because there is so much room between the stars, and murmur faintly, “Spiritual things are spiritually discerned.” By the infinite bones of our bodies, by the seeds of the million years that flow in our veins, material things are spiritually discerned. There is not science enough nor scientific method enough in the schools of all Christendom for a man to listen intelligently to his own breathing with, or to know his own thumb-nail. Is not his own heart thundering the infinite through him—beating the eternal against his sides—even while he speaks? And does he not know it while he speaks?

By the time a man’s a Junior or a Senior nowadays, if he feels the eternal beating against his sides he thinks it must be something else. He thinks he ought to. It is a mere inference. At all events he has little use for it unless he knows just how eternal it is. I am speaking too strongly? I suppose I am. I am thinking of my four special boys—boys I have been doing my living in, the last few years. I cannot help speaking a little strongly. Two of them—two as fine, flash-minded, deep-lit, wide-hearted fellows as one would like to see, are down at W——, being cured of inferring in a four years’ course at the W—— Scientific School. Another one, who always seemed to me to have real genius in him, who might have had a period in literature named after him, almost, if he’d stop studying literature, is taking a graduate course at M——, learning that it cannot be proved that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. He has already become one of these spotlessly accurate persons one expects nowadays. (I hardly dare to hope he will even read this book of mine, with all his affection for me, after the first few pages or so, lest he should fall into a low or wondering state of mind.) My fourth boy, who was the most promising of all, whose mind reached out the farthest, who was always touching new possibilities, a fresh, warm-blooded, bright-eyed fellow, is down under a manhole studying God in the N—— Theological Seminary.

This may not be exactly a literal statement, nor a very scientific way to criticise the scientific method, but when one has had to sit and see four of the finest minds he ever knew snuffed out by it,—whatever else may be said for science, scientific language is not satisfying. What is going to happen to us next, in our little town, I hardly dare to know. I only know that three relentlessly inductive, dull, brittle, blasé, and springless youths from S—— University have just come down and taken possession of our High School. They seem to be throwing, as near as I can judge, a spell of the impossibility of knowledge over the boys we have left.

I admit that I am in an unreasonable state of mind.[3] I think a great many people are. At least I hope so. There is no excuse for not being a little unreasonable. Sometimes it almost seems, when one looks at the condition of most college boys’ minds, as if our colleges were becoming the moral and spiritual and intellectual dead-centres of modern life.

I will not yield to any man in admiration for Science—holy and speechless Science; holier than any religion has ever been yet; what religions are made of and are going to be made of, nor am I dating my mind three hundred years back and trying to pick a quarrel with Lord Bacon. I am merely wondering whether, if science is to be taught at all, it had not better be taught, in each branch of it, by men who are teaching a subject they have conceived with their minds instead of a subject which has been merely unloaded on them, piled up on top of their minds, and which their minds do not know anything about.

No one seems to have stopped to notice what the spectacle of science as taught in college is getting to be—the spectacle of one set of minds which has been crunched by knowledge crunching another set. Have you never been to One, oh Gentle Reader, and watched It, watched It when It was working, one of these great Endowed Fact-machines, wound up by the dead, going round and round, thousands and thousands of youths in it being rolled out and chilled through and educated in it, having their souls smoothed out of them? Hundreds of human minds, small and sure and hard, working away on thousands of other human minds, making them small and sure and hard. Matter—infinite matter everywhere—taught by More Matter,—taught the way Matter would teach if it knew how—without generalising, without putting facts together to make truths out of them.

It would seem, looking at it theoretically, that Science, of all things in this world, the stuff that dreams are made of; the one boundless subject of the earth, face to face and breath to breath with the Creator every minute of its life, would be taught with a divine touch in it, with the appeal to the imagination and the soul, to the world-building instinct in a man, the thing in him that puts universes together, the thing in him that fills the whole dome of space and all the crevices of being with the whisper of God.

But it is not so. Science is great, and great scientists are great as a matter of course; but the sciences in the meantime are being taught in our colleges—in many of them, most of them—by men whose minds are mere registering machines. The facts are put in at one end (one click per fact) and come out facts at the other. The sciences are being taught more and more every year by moral and spiritual stutterers, men with non-inferring minds, men who live in a perfect deadlock of knowledge, men who cannot generalise about a fly’s wing, bashful, empty, limp, and hopeless and doddering before the commonplacest, sanest, and simplest generalisations of human life. In The Great Free Show, in our common human peep at it, who has not seen them, staggering to know what the very children, playing with dolls and rocking-horses, can take for granted? Minds which seem absolutely incapable of striking out, of taking a good, manly stride on anything, mincing in religion, effeminate in enthusiasm—please forgive me, Gentle Reader, I know I ought not to carry on in this fashion, but have I not spent years in my soul (sometimes it seems hundreds of years) in being humble—in being abject before this kind of mind? It is only a day almost since I have found it out, broken away from it, got hold of the sky to hoot at it with. I am free now. I am not going to be humble longer, before it. I have spent years dully wondering before this mind; wondering what was the matter with me that I could not love it, that I could not go where it loved to go, and come when it said “Come” to me. I have spent years in dust and ashes before it, struggling with myself, trying to make myself small enough to follow this kind of a mind around, and now the scales are fallen from my eyes. When I follow An Inductive Scientific Mind now, or try to follow it through its convolutions of matter-of-fact, its involutions of logic, its wriggling through axioms, I smile a new smile and my heart laughs within me. If I miss the point, I am not in a panic, and if, at the end of the seventeenth platitude that did not need to be proved, I find I do not know where I am, I thank God.

I know that I am partly unreasonable, and I know that in my chosen station on the ridge-pole of the world it is useless to criticise those who do not even believe, probably, that worlds have ridge-poles. It is a bit hard to get their attention—and I hope the reader will overlook it if one seems to speak rather loud—from ridge-poles. Oh, ye children of The Literal! ye most serene Highnesses, ye archangels of Accuracy, the Voices of life all challenge you—the world around! What are ye, after all, but pilers-up of matter, truth-stutterers, truth-spellers, sunk in protoplasm to the tops of your souls? What is it that you are going to do with us? How many generations of youths do you want? When will souls be allowed again? When will they be allowed in college?

Well, well, I say to my soul, what does it all come to? Why all this ado about it one way or the other? Is it not a great, fresh, eager, boundless world? Does it not roll up out of Darkness with new children on it, night after night? What does it matter, I say to my soul-a generation or so—from the ridge-pole of the world? The great Sun comes round again. It travels over the tops of seas and mountains. Microbes in their dewdrops, seeds in their winds, stars in their courses, worms in their apples, answer it, and the hordes of the ants in their ant-hills run before it. And what does it matter after all, under the great Dome, a few hordes of factmongers more or less, glimmering and wonderless, crawlers on the bottom of the sea of time, lovers of the ooze of knowledge, feeling with slow, myopic mouths at Infinite Truth?

But when I see my four faces—the faces of my four special boys, when I hear the college bells ringing to them, it matters a great deal. My soul will not wait. What is the ridge-pole of the world? The distance of a ridge-pole does not count. The extent of a universe does not seem to make very much difference. The next ten generations do not help very much on this one. I go forth in my soul. I take hold of the first scientist I meet—my whole mind pummelling him. “What is it?” I say, “what is it you are doing with us and with the lives of our children? What is it you are doing with yourself? Truth is not a Thing. Did you think it? Truth is not even a Heap of Things. It is a Light. How dare you mock at inferring? How dare you to think to escape the infinite? You cannot escape the infinite even by making yourself small enough. It is written that thou shalt be infinitely small if thou art not infinitely large. Not to infer is to contradict the very nature of facts. Not to infer is not to live. It is to cease to be a fact one’s self. What is education if one does not infer? Vacuums rolling around in vacuums. Atoms cross-examining atoms. And you say you will not guess? Do you need to be cudgelled with a whole universe to begin to learn to guess? What is all your science—your boasted science, after all, but more raw material to make more guesses with? Is not the whole Future Tense an inference? Is not History—that which has actually happened—a mystery? You yourself are a mere probability, and God is a generalisation. What does it profit a man to discover The Inductive Method and to lose his own soul? What is The Inductive Method? Do you think that all these scientists who have locked their souls up and a large part of their bodies, in The Inductive Method, if they had waited to be born by The Inductive Method, would ever have heard of it? Being born is one inference and dying is another. Man leaves a wake of infinity after him wherever he goes, and of course it’s where he doesn’t go. It’s all infinity—one way or the other.”

---

And it came to pass in my dream as I lay on my bed in the night, I thought I saw Man my brother blinking under the dome of space, infinite monad that he is: I saw him with a glass in one hand and a Slide of Infinity in the other, and, in my dream, out of His high heaven God leaned down to me and said to me, “What is THAT?”

And as I looked I laughed and prayed in my heart, I scarce knew which, and “Oh, Most Excellent Deity! Who would think it!” I cried. “I do not know, but I think—I think—it is a man, thinking he is studying a GERM—one tiny particle of inimitable Immensity ogling another!”

And a very pretty sight it is, too, oh Brother Monads—if we do not take it seriously.

And what we really need next, oh comrades, scientists—each under our separate stones—is the Laugh Out of Heaven which shall come down and save us—laugh the roofs of our stones off. Then we shall stretch our souls with inferences. We shall lie in the great sun and warm ourselves.

VIII
Multiplication Tables

It would seem to be the main trouble with the scientific mind of the second rank that it overlooks the nature of knowledge in the thirst for exact knowledge. In an infinite world the better part of the knowledge a man needs to have does not need to be exact.

These things being as they are, it would seem that the art of reading books through their backs is an equally necessary art to a great scientist and to a great poet. If it is necessary to great scientists and to great poets it is all the more necessary to small ones, and to the rest of us. It is the only way, indeed, in which an immortal human being of any kind can get what he deserves to have to live his life with—a whole cross-section of the universe. A gentleman and a scholar will take nothing less.

If a man is to get his cross-section of the universe, his natural share in it, he can only get it by living in the qualities of things instead of the quantities; by avoiding duplicate facts, duplicate persons, and principles; by using the multiplication table in knowledge (inference) instead of adding everything up, by taking all things in this world (except his specialty) through their spirits and essences, and, in general, by reading books through their backs.

The problem of cultivating these powers in a man, when reduced to its simplest terms, is reduced to the problem of cultivating his imagination or organ of not needing to be told things.

However much a man may know about wise reading and about the principles of economy in knowledge, in an infinite world the measure of his knowledge is bound to be determined, in the long run, by the capacity of his organ of not needing to be told things—of reading books through their backs.