The plan of reading I have laid out is merely suggestive. What I chiefly wanted to show was that all books cannot be treated alike, that we cannot lay down dogmatic inflexible rules to apply to every volume. Our method of reading will vary with the nature of a book or of the subject it treats. It will depend upon the books we have already read and even upon the books we contemplate reading later.
The good you get out of reading will depend entirely on how you allow it to affect you. If every book you read suggests more problems, gives you worth-while questions and topics to think about in spare moments, enriches your intellectual life and stimulates your thought, it is performing its proper function. But if you read solely to answer problems you cannot answer for yourself, if every time you are puzzled about anything you run to a book to have it explained, and accept without question the explanation there given; in short, if you use your reading to save yourself from thinking, you had better stop reading altogether. Smoking is a far less harmful form of dissipation.
I have not yet definitely indicated the ratio which time given to reading should bear to time devoted to thinking. I have avoided this because of the many factors to be taken into account. But if the reader happens to have a spare hour to devote to the improvement of his mind, he will not go very far wrong if he gives thirty minutes to reading and thirty minutes to thinking. His thinking may be on the subject he has read, or part of it may be on other problems. That is not so important. But the reader must not imagine that his thinking need be restricted to these thirty minutes or any other thirty minutes. The glorious advantage of thinking is that it can be fitted in at any odd moment. The entire apparatus for carrying it on is always with you. You do not even need a book for it. I remind the reader of this at the risk of repeating myself.
It was pointed out at the beginning of this chapter that the reading of any book is not an end in itself, but should be subordinated to the larger end of obtaining the best from reading in general. But for the sake of clearness our end was temporarily considered as the mastery of some particular subject. I indicated a plan of reading to best serve that end. I also promised that needful qualifications would come later.
In stating the law of diminishing returns it was pointed out that it applied to whole subjects as well as to books, that “past a certain point every book we read on a subject, while it will probably add to our knowledge, will not yield as much return as a book of equal merit on another subject new to us.”
While this is true it applies to but a small extent when subjects are read by the method just outlined, for while we do not get as much out of any book as we would out of one of equal merit on another subject, we read it so much faster that the return per time and energy expended is practically as great. This fast reading is made possible by our previous knowledge on the old subject. If the book on the new subject were read in the same manner, we might get little or nothing from it.
With this objection out of the way I suggest that the reader get a specialty. Books read in the ordinary unsystematic fashion, now on this subject and now on that, leave little permanent impression. Even if they do, we feel that though our range of reading may be wide we have at best but a smattering of many things. In the final analysis a smattering of knowledge is in most cases of no more use than total ignorance. Better by far be ignorant of many things and know one thing well, than know many things badly.
Besides the utility of having a specialty is the pleasure we derive. There is always an intense satisfaction in feeling that one is an “expert,” an “authority” in some subject. When some Congressman makes an inaccurate remark which trespasses on your specialty you can write a letter to the Times or the Sun explaining the error of his ways, and incidentally exhibiting your own limitless erudition. When your friends get into an argument on some question within your chosen field they will remark, “Ask John Jones. He ought to know.” And even when you have to confess abysmal ignorance on some question outside of your domains, you may still have the satisfaction of believing that people are excusing you within themselves with an “Oh, well, but he knows a lot about someology.”
One writer estimates that “fifteen minutes a day or a half hour three days a week devoted to one definite study will make one a master in that field in a dozen years.”[20] This statement should interest those people who “haven’t the time” to take up any specialty outside their own business, but who spend at least half an hour every day in newspaper or magazine reading—with nothing to show for it at the end of twenty years.