HOW TO MAKE ABSTRACTS.
Let the ambitious student make an Abstract of any chapter of John Stuart Mill’s Logic, and then compare his work with the Analysis of this same chapter by the Rev. A. H. Killick (published by Longmans), and he will at once see the enormous difference between the essentials and the non-essentials—the difference between the subject of discussion and the explanation or exposition of it. The student’s abstract, if printed, would extend over twenty to thirty pages. Mr. Killick’s only occupies two to five pages. But do not reverse the process and read Mr. Killick’s Analysis first and then make your Abstract. The latter, however, is the easier, the usual, and the useless method. Let the student continue this comparison till he attains very nearly the brevity and discrimination displayed by Mr. Killick. Or, if he prefers History, let him write a summary of any chapter of Green’s “Short History of the English People,” and then compare his digest with Mr. C. W. A. Tait’s Analysis of the same chapter (now bound up with Green’s History, as lately published in England). It would be a capital training for the student to abstract the whole of Green’s work and compare his abridgment of each chapter with that of Mr. Tait. After considerable practice in this way in making Abstracts and comparing his work with that of such Masterly Abstractors as Dr. Killick and Mr. Tait, the student who needs this training is prepared to make abstracts of his own text-books.
Any other work of which an Abstract is published will serve the student as well as the above. There were formerly published Abstracts of several law books. And there may be other works whose abstracts are available to the ambitious student.
Abstracts would be very amusing if they did not indicate an almost total failure of educational training in the matter of thinking for one’s self. Recently a Pupil brought me a work on Physiology, written for general readers, and pointing to a paragraph in it that occupied nearly a whole page, exclaimed, “The only way I can make an abstract of that paragraph is to learn it by heart!” A glance at it showed me that I could express the gist and pith of it in the following sentence:—“The pulse beats 81 times per minute when you are standing, 71 times when sitting, and 66 times when lying down.” After a re-perusal of the paragraph he remarked, “You are right. That is all one cares to remember in that long passage.” To his request for me to memorise the Abstract, I replied by asking what is the “Best Known” in it. Why, “pulse,” of course. It is merely occupied with the number of times the pulse beats per minute in different positions of the body. Now correlate (memorising your correlations as you proceed) “pulse” to “standing,” and “standing” to a word expressing 81 (feet); “sitting” to a word that translates 71 (caught); and “lying down” to a word that spells in figures 66 (judge). The bodily positions being exhaustively enumerated need not be correlated together. Pulse … beating … fighting … stand-up fight … STANDING … stand … small table … table legs … FEET. SITTING … rest … arrest … CAUGHT. LYING DOWN … lies … perjury … trial … JUDGE.
These efforts in abstracting will qualify the young student to distinguish the main ideas from the subordinate ones, and he will then know when reading a book what to attend to and what to reject. Try a short essay first, then a longer one; and at last, when you are familiar with the method, attack any book, and you will cope with it successfully. Not much practice in this way will be required to enable you to know, from a glance at the table of contents, just what to assail and what to disregard. And in all your first attempts in reading a technical work, make out an Abstract of each chapter in writing, and then deal only with this Abstract. Whenever the Subject is not treated in a desultory manner, but with logical precision, you will soon be able to find Suggestive or Prompting Words in the Sequence of Ideas and in the successive Links in the Chain of Thought that runs through the exposition. If there is no such Sequence of Ideas or Chain of Thought running through it, it may serve as an amusement, but is little likely to command serious study. In a short time you will be able, in the language of Dr. Johnson, “to tear out the heart of any book.” Hazlitt said that Coleridge rarely read a book through, “but would plunge into the marrow of a new volume and feed on all the nutritious matter with surprising rapidity, grasping the thought of the author and following out his reasonings to consequences of which he never dreamt.” Such a result is rarely attained even by the ablest of men—but it is the ultimate goal at which every student should aim—an aim in which he will be largely assisted by the ART OF ASSIMILATIVE MEMORY.
There are four methods of learning abstracts: one is by Synthesis; the other is by the Analytic-Synthetic Method, the third is mostly by Assimilative Analysis, and the fourth method is by the memory developed and trained by the System, but which is not consciously used.
(1) It is the novelties of Fact, Opinion, Illustration, &c., set forth in your Abstract that you correlate together, thus: You correlate the Title of the First Chapter to the Title of the Book; next, the Titles of the Chapters to each other; and then you correlate, in each chapter, the first leading idea or proposition to the title of the chapter, the second leading idea to the first, &c., &c. In this way you will proceed until you have absorbed all the new ideas, facts, statistics or illustrations, or whatever you wish to retain. You can then test yourself on the work by calling to mind whatever you have thus cemented together. If this is well done you will never have to do it again.
(2) We have already seen how to apply the Analytic-Synthetic Method in learning by heart selections in Prose or Poetry, and same method can be used in memorising an Abstract of such parts of a book as are new to the reader. This method, too, once used in addition to what has been done by the pupil, will make a further resort to it unnecessary.
(3) And the same remark applies to the third method.
(4) The fourth method is the pupil’s final method.