V—Reading for Results
I
The Blank Paper Frame of Mind
The P. G. S. of M. read a paper in our club the other day which he called “Reading for Results.” It was followed by a somewhat warm discussion, in the course of which so many things were said that were not so that the entire club (before any one knew it) had waked up and learned something.
The P. G. S. of M. took the general ground that most of the men one knows nowadays had never learned to read. They read wastefully. Our common schools and colleges, he thought, ought to teach a young man to read with a purpose. “When an educated young man takes up a book,” he said, “he should feel that he has some business in it, and attend to it.”
I said I thought young men nowadays read with purposes too much. Purposes were all they had to read with. “When a man feels that he needs a purpose in front of him, to go through a book with, when he goes about in a book looking over the edge of a purpose at everything, the chances are that he is missing nine tenths of what the book has to give.”
The P. G. S. of M. thought that one tenth was enough. He didn’t read a book to get nine tenths of an author. He read it to get the one tenth he wanted—to find out which it was.
I asked him which tenth of Shakespeare he wanted. He said that sometimes he wanted one tenth and sometimes another.