The Lost Art of Reading

by Gerald Stanley Lee

IV—Reading for Facts

I
Calling the Meeting to Order

Reading for persons makes a man a poet or artist, makes him dramatic with his mind—puts the world-stage into him.

Reading for principles makes a man a philosopher. Reading for facts makes a man——

“It doesn’t make a man,” spoke up the Mysterious Person.

“Oh, yes,” I said, “if he reads a few of them—if he takes time to do something with them—he can make a man out of them, if he wants to, as well as anything else.”

The great trouble with scientific people and others who are always reading for facts is that they forget what facts are for. They use their minds as museums. They are like Ole Bill Spear. They take you up into their garret and point to a bushel-basketful of something and then to another bushel-basket half-full of some more. Then they say in deep tones and with solemn faces: “This is the largest collection of burnt matches in the world.”

It’s what reading for facts brings a man to, generally—fact for fact’s sake. He lunges along for facts wherever he goes. He cannot stop. All an outsider can do in such cases, with nine out of ten scientific or collecting minds, is to watch them sadly in a dull, trance-like, helpless inertia of facts, sliding on to Ignorance.

What seems to be most wanted in reading for facts in a world as large as this is some reasonable principle of economy. The great problem of reading for facts—travelling with one’s mind—is the baggage problem. To have every fact that one needs and to throw away every fact that one can get along without, is the secret of having a comfortable and practicable, live, happy mind in modern knowledge—a mind that gets somewhere—that gets the hearts of things.

The best way to arrange this seems to be to have a sentinel in one’s mind in reading.

Every man finds in his intellectual life, sooner or later, that there are certain orders and kinds of facts that have a way of coming to him of their own accord and without being asked. He is half amused sometimes and half annoyed by them. He has no particular use for them. He dotes on them some, perhaps, pets them a little—tells them to go away, but they keep coming back. Apropos of nothing, in the way of everything, they keep hanging about while he attends to the regular business of his brain, and say: “Why don’t you do something with Me?”

What I would like to be permitted to do in this chapter is to say a good word for these involuntary, helpless, wistful facts that keep tagging a man’s mind around. I know that I am exposing myself in standing up for them to the accusation that I have a mere irrelevant, sideways, intellectually unbusinesslike sort of a mind. I can see my championship even now being gently but firmly set one side. “It’s all of a piece—this pleasant, yielding way with ideas,” people say. “It goes with the slovenly, lazy, useless, polite state of mind always, and the general ball-bearing view of life.”

It seems to me that if a man has a few involuntary, instinctive facts about him, facts that fasten themselves on to his thoughts whether he wants them there or not, facts that keep on working for him of their own accord, down under the floor of his mind, passing things up, running invisible errands for him, making short-cuts for him—it seems to me that if a man has a few facts like this in him, facts that serve him like the great involuntary servants of Nature, whether they are noticed or not, he ought to find it worth his while to do something in return, conduct his life with reference to them. They ought to have the main chance at him. It seems reasonable also that his reading should be conducted with reference to them.

It is no mere literary prejudice, and it seems to be a truth for the scientist as well as for the poet, that the great involuntary facts in a man’s life, the facts he does not select, the facts that select him, the facts that say to him, “Come thou and live with us, make a human life out of us that men may know us,” are the facts of all others which ought to have their way sooner or later in the great struggling mass-meeting of his mind. I have read equally in vain the lives of the great scientists and the lives of the great artists and makers, if they are not all alike in this, that certain great facts have been yielded to, have been made the presiding officers, the organisers of their minds. In so far as they have been great, no facts have been suppressed and all facts have been represented; but I doubt if there has ever been a life of a powerful mind yet in which a few great facts and a great man were not seen mutually attracted to each other, day and night,—getting themselves made over into each other, mutually mastering the world.

Certainly, if there is one token rather than another of the great scientist or poet in distinction from the small scientist or poet, it is the courage with which he yields himself, makes his whole being sensitive and free before his instinctive facts, gives himself fearless up to them, allows them to be the organisers of his mind.

It seems to be the only possible way in reading for facts that the mind of a man can come to anything; namely, by always having a chairman (and a few alternates appointed for life) to call the meeting to order.

II
Symbolic Facts

If the meeting is to accomplish anything before it adjourns sine die, everything depends upon the gavel in it, upon there being some power in it that makes some facts sit down and others stand up, but which sees that all facts are represented.

In general, the more facts a particular fact can be said to be a delegate for, the more a particular fact can be said to represent other facts, the more of the floor it should have. The power of reading for facts depends upon a man’s power to recognise symbolic or sum-total or senatorial facts and keep all other facts, the general mob or common run of facts, from interrupting. The amount of knowledge a man is going to be able to master in the world depends upon the number of facts he knows how to avoid.

This is where our common scientific training—the manufacturing of small scientists in the bulk—breaks down. The first thing that is done with a young man nowadays, if he is to be made into a scientist, is to take away any last vestige of power his mind may have of avoiding facts. Everyone has seen it, and yet we know perfectly well when we stop to think about it that when in the course of his being educated a man’s ability to avoid facts is taken away from him, it soon ceases to make very much difference whether he is educated or not. He becomes a mere memory let loose in the universe—goes about remembering everything, hit or miss. I never see one of these memory-machines going about mowing things down remembering them, but that it gives me a kind of sad, sudden feeling of being intelligent. I cannot quite describe the feeling. I am part sorry and part glad and part ashamed of being glad. It depends upon what one thinks of, one’s own narrow escape or the other man, or the way of the world. All one can do is to thank God, silently, in some safe place in one’s thoughts, that after all there is a great deal of the human race—always is—in every generation who by mere circumstance cannot be educated—bowled over by their memories. Even at the worst only a few hundred persons can be made over into reductio-ad-absurdum Stanley Halls (that is, study science under pupils of the pupils of Stanley Hall) and the chances are even now, as bad as things are and are getting to be, that for several hundred years yet, Man, the Big Brother of creation, will insist on preserving his special distinction in it, the thing that has lifted him above the other animals—his inimitable faculty for forgetting things.

III
Duplicates: A Principle of Economy

I do not suppose that anybody would submit to my being admitted—I was black-balled before I was born—to the brotherhood of scientists. And yet it seems to me that there is a certain sense in which I am as scientific as anyone. It seems to me, for instance, that it is a fairly scientific thing to do—a fairly matter-of-fact thing—to consider the actual nature of facts and to act on it. When one considers the actual nature of facts, the first thing one notices is that there are too many of them. The second thing one notices about facts is that they are not so many as they look. They are mostly duplicates. The small scientist never thinks of this because he never looks at more than one class of facts, never allows himself to fall into any general, interesting, fact-comparing habit. The small poet never thinks of it because he never looks at facts at all. It is thus that it has come to pass that the most ordinary human being, just living along, the man who has the habit of general information, is the intellectual superior of the mere scientists about him or the mere poets. He is superior to the mere poet because he is interested in knowing facts, and he is superior to the minor scientist because he does not want to know all of them, or at least if he does, he never has time to try to, and so keeps on knowing something.

When one considers the actual nature of facts, it is obvious that the only possible model for a scientist of the first class or a poet of the first class in this world, is the average man. The only way to be an extraordinary man, master of more of the universe than any one else, is to keep out of the two great pits God has made in it, in which The Educated are thrown away—the science-pit and the poet-pit. The area and power and value of a man’s knowledge depend upon his having such a boundless interest in facts that he will avoid all facts he knows already and go on to new ones. The rapidity of a man’s education depends upon his power to scent a duplicate fact afar off and to keep from stopping and puttering with it. Is not one fact out of a thousand about a truth as good as the other nine hundred and ninety-nine to enjoy it with? If there were not any more truths or if there were not so many more things to enjoy in this world than one had time for, it would be different. It would be superficial, I admit, not to climb down into a well and collect some more of the same facts about it, or not to crawl under a stone somewhere and know what we know already—a little harder. But as it is—well, it does seem to me that when a man has collected one good, representative fact about a thing, or at most two, it is about time to move on and enjoy some of the others. There is not a man living dull enough, it seems to me, to make it worth while to do any other way. There is not a man living who can afford, in a world made as this one is, to know any more facts than he can help. Are not facts plenty enough in the world? Are they not scattered everywhere? And there are not men enough to go around. Let us take our one fact apiece and be off, and be men with it. There is always one fact about everything which is the spirit of all the rest, the fact a man was intended to know and to go on his way rejoicing with. It may be superficial withal and merely spiritual, but if there is anything worth while in this world to me, it is not to miss any part of being a man in it that any other man has had. I do not want to know what every man knows, but I do want to get the best of what he knows and live every day with it. Oh, to take all knowledge for one’s province, to have rights with all facts, to be naive and unashamed before the universe, to go forth fearlessly to know God in it, to make the round of creation before one dies, to share all that has been shared, to be all that is, to go about in space saying halloa to one’s soul in it, in the stars and in the flowers and in children’s faces, is not this to have lived,—that there should be nothing left out in a man’s life that all the world has had?