HOW TO MAKE AN INDEX.
CHAPTER I.
Introduction.
"I for my part venerate the inventor of Indexes; and I know not to whom to yield the preference, either to Hippocrates, who was the great anatomiser of the human body, or to that unknown labourer in literature who first laid open the nerves and arteries of a book."
—Isaac Disraeli, Literary Miscellanies.
T is generally agreed that that only is true knowledge which consists of information assimilated by our own minds. Mere disjointed facts kept in our memories have no right to be described as knowledge. It is this understanding that has made many writers jeer at so-called index-learning. Thus, in the seventeenth century, Joseph Glanville, writing in his Vanity of Dogmatizing, says: "Methinks 'tis a pitiful piece of knowledge that can be learnt from an index, and a poor ambition to be rich in the inventory of another's treasure." Dr. Watts alluded to those whose "learning reaches no farther than the tables of contents"; but then he added a sentence which quite takes the sting from what he had said before, and shows how absolutely needful an index is. He says: "If a book has no index or table of contents, 'tis very useful to make one as you are reading it."
Swift had his say on index-learning, too. In the Tale of a Tub (Section VII.) he wrote: "The most accomplisht way of using books at present is twofold: Either serve them as some men do Lords, learn their titles exactly, and then brag of their acquaintance. Or secondly, which indeed is the choicer, the profounder and politer method, to get a thorough insight into the Index, by which the whole book is governed and turned, like fishes by the tail. For to enter the palace of Learning at the great gate, requires an expense of time and forms; therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back-door. For, the Arts are all in a flying march, and therefore more easily subdued by attacking them in the rear.... Thus men catch Knowledge by throwing their wit on the posteriors of a book, as boys do sparrows with flinging salt upon their tails. Thus human life is best understood by the wise man's Rule of regarding the end. Thus are the Sciences found like Hercules' oxen, by tracing them backwards. Thus are old Sciences unravelled like old stockings, by beginning at the foot."
Thomas Fuller, with his usual common-sense, wisely argues that the diligent man should not be deprived of a tool because the idler may misuse it. He writes: "An Index is a necessary implement and no impediment of a book except in the same sense wherein the carriages [i.e. things carried] of an army are termed impedimenta. Without this a large author is but a labyrinth without a clue to direct the reader therein. I confess there is a lazy kind of learning which is only indical, when scholars (like adders which only bite the horses' heels) nibble but at the tables, which are calces librorum, neglecting the body of the book. But though the idle deserve no crutches (let not a staff be used by them but on them), pity it is the weary should be denied the benefit thereof, and industrious scholars prohibited the accommodation of an index, most used by those who most pretend to contemn it."
The same objection to "indical" learning is urged to-day, but it is really a futile one. No man can know everything; he may possess much true knowledge, but there is a mass of matter that the learned man knows he can never master completely. He does not care to burden his mind with what might be to him useless lumber. In this case his object is only to know where he can find the information when he wants it. Indexes are of the greatest help to these men, and for their purposes the indexes ought to be well made. But it is needless to labour this point, for has not Johnson, in his clear and virile language, said the last word on the matter?—"Knowledge is of two kinds; we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we inquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues and the backs of books."