A child's guide to reading

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

If there is one central idea which it is hoped a young reader might find in the foregoing pages, it is this: that literature is for everyone, young or old, who has the capacity to enjoy it, that no special fitness is required but the gift of a little imagination, that no particular training can prepare us for the reading of books except the very act of reading. For literature is addressed to the imagination; that is, a work which touches the imagination becomes Literature as distinguished from all other printed things. By virtue of its imagination it becomes permanent, it remains intelligible to the human being of every race and age, the only conditions of intelligibility being that the reader shall be literate and that the book shall be in the language in which the reader has been brought up or in a foreign tongue which he has learned to read. We have insisted on a kind of liberty, equality, and union in the world of writers and readers, and have, perhaps needlessly, made a declaration of independence against all scholars, philosophers, and theorists who try to put obstacles in our way and arrogate to themselves exclusive rights and privileges, special understandings of the world’s literature. We believe that literature is intended for everybody and that it is addressed to everybody by the creative mind of art. We believe that all readers are equal in the presence of a book or work of art, but we hastily qualify this, as we must qualify the political doctrine of equality. No two men are really equal, no two persons will get the same pleasure and benefit from any book. But the inequalities are natural and not artificial. Of a thousand persons of all ages who read the “Iliad,” the hundred who get the most out of it will include men, women, and children, some who have “higher” education and some who have not, well-informed men and uninformed boys. The hundred will be those who have the most imagination. The boy of fourteen who has an active intelligence can understand Shakespeare better than the least imaginative of those who have taken the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at our universities. The man of imagination, even if he has taken the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, will find deeper delight and wisdom in Shakespeare than the uninformed boy. Readers differ in individual capacities and in the extent of their experience in intellectual matters. But class differences, especially school-made differences, are swept away by the power of literature, which abhors inessential distinctions and goes direct to the human intelligence.

The direct appeal of literature to the human intelligence and human emotions is what we mean by our principle of union. Nothing can divorce us from the poet if we have a spark of poetry in us. The contact of mind between poet and reader is immediate, and is effected without any go-between, any intercessor or critical negotiator.

Now, what happens to the principles of our declaration of independence and the constitution of our democracy of readers when we open to a page of one of Darwin’s works on biology, or a page of the philosopher Plato, and find that we do not get the sense of it at all? We can understand the “Iliad,” the “Book of Job,” “Macbeth,” “Faust”; they mean something to us, even if we do not receive their whole import. But here, in two great thinkers who have influenced the whole intellectual world, Plato and Darwin, we come upon pages that to us mean absolutely nothing. The works of Plato and Darwin are certainly literature. But they are something else besides: they are science, and the understanding of them depends on a knowledge of the science that went before the particular pages that are so meaningless to us. Here is a kind of literature, the mere reading of which requires special training.

We may call this the Literature of Information as distinguished from the Literature of Imagination. The distinction is not sharp; a book leans to one side or the other of the line, but it does not fall clear of the line. A work of imagination, a poem, a novel, or an essay, may contain abundant information, may be loaded with facts; on the other hand, the greatest of those who have discovered and expounded facts, Darwin, Gibbon, Huxley, have had literary power and imagination. But most great works of imagination deal with universal experiences, they treat human nature and common humanity’s thought and feelings about the world. As Hazlitt says, nature and feeling are the same in all periods. So the common man understands the “Iliad,” and the story of Joseph and his brothers, and “The Scarlet Letter” and “Silas Marner.”

In Macaulay’s “Essay on Milton” is a very misleading piece of philosophizing on the “progress of poesy.” It is a pity, when there are so many better essays—Macaulay wrote twenty better ones—that this should be selected for reading in the schools as part of the requirements for college entrance. Macaulay sees that the “Iliad” is as great a poem as the world has known. He also sees that science in his own time is progressing by leaps and bounds, that, in his own vigorous words, “any intelligent man may now, by resolutely applying himself for a few years to mathematics, learn more than the great Newton knew after half a century of study and meditation.” He accordingly reasons, or rather makes the long jump, that whereas science progresses, poetry declines with the advance of civilization, and the wonder is that Milton should have written so great a poem in a “civilized” age. Macaulay was young when he wrote the essay; he seldom muddled ideas as badly as that. Poetry, if we view the history of the world in five-century periods, neither advances nor declines. It fluctuates from century to century, but it keeps a general permanent level. Now and again appears a new poet to add to the number of poems, but poetry does not change. Neither does the individual poem. The “Iliad” is precisely what it was two thousand years ago, and two thousand years from now it will be neither diminished nor augmented. Creative art, dealing with universal ideas and feelings and needing only a well-developed language to work in, can produce a masterpiece in any one of forty countries any time the genius is born capable of doing the work. This statement is too simple to exhaust a large subject. The point is that once man has reached a certain point of culture, has come to have a language and a religion and a national tradition, more civilization or less, more science or less, neither helps nor hinders his art. The arrival of a great poet can be counted on every two or three centuries. It is because poetry and other forms of imaginative literature are independent of time and progress that the reader’s ability to understand them is independent of time and progress. Our boys can understand the “Iliad.” Fetch a Greek boy back from ancient Athens and give us his Greek tongue and we can interest him in Milton’s story of Satan in half a day. But it will take a year or two to make him understand an elementary schoolbook about electricity. The great ideas about human nature and human feelings and about the visible world and the gods men dream of and believe in, these are the stuff of Imaginative Literature; they have been expressed over and over again in all ages and are intelligible to a Chinaman or an Englishman of the year one thousand or the year two thousand. That is why we are all citizens in the democracy of readers. That is why we do not need special knowledge to read “Hamlet,” why the most direct preparation for the reading of “Hamlet” is the reading of “Macbeth” and “Lear.”

Now, all special subjects, biology, geology, zoölogy, political economy, are continually being forced by the imaginative power of great writers into the realm of Imaginative Literature. Poetry is full of philosophy. Our novels are shot through and through with problems of economics. Great expositors like Huxley and Mill are working over and interpreting the discoveries of science, relating them to our common life and making, not their minute facts but their bearing, clear to the ordinary man. So that there is a great deal of science and philosophy within the reach of the untrained reader. And a wide general reading prepares any person, by giving him a multitude of hints and stray bits of information, to make his way through a technical volume devoted to one special subject. The moral talks of Socrates to Athenian youths lead one on, as Socrates seems to have intended to lead those boys on, into the uttermost fields of philosophy. The genial essayists, Stevenson, Lamb, Emerson, are all tinged with philosophy and science, at least the social and political sciences. And when an idle reader approaches a new subject, economics, chemistry, or philosophy, he often finds with delight that he has been reading about it all his life. He is like the man in Molière’s comedy who was surprised to find that he had always been speaking prose.

Yet there remains a good deal of the Literature of Information which can be understood only after a gradual approach to it through other works. You must learn the elements of chemistry before you can understand the arguments of the modern men of science about radium. You must read some elementary discussions of economics before you can take part in the arguments about protection and free trade, socialism, banking, and currency.

At this point the Guide to Reading parts company with you and leaves you in the hands of the economists, the historians, the chemists, the philosophers. Special teachers and advisers will conduct you into those subjects. They are organized subjects. The paths to them are steep but well graded and paved. If you wander upon these paths without guidance you will not harm yourself, and, if you do not try to discuss what you do not understand, you will not harm anyone else. The list of works in philosophy and science which I append includes some that I, an errant reader, have stumbled into with pleasure and profit. I do not know surely whether any one of them is the best in its subject or whether it is the proper work to read first. I only know in general that a civilized man should for his own pleasure and enlightenment set his wits against a hard technical book once in a while for the sake of the exercise, and that although for purposes of wisdom and happiness the Literature of the Ages contains all that is necessary, everybody ought to go a little way into some special subject that lies less in the realm of literature than in the realm of science.

LIST OF WORKS IN SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

Supplementary to Chapter XIII

In this list are a few volumes of scientific and philosophic works, notable for their literary excellence, or for their clearness to the general reader, or for the historical and human importance of the author. There is no attempt at order or system except the alphabetical sequence of authors. Some philosophic and scientific works will be found in the list of essays, on page 192.

In Appleton’s Library of Useful Stories.

In Everyman’s Library and many cheap editions.

A popular writer on scientific and philosophic subjects.

These books are especially suitable for young readers.

For the uninformed reader.

The second of the two books named is especially for young readers. The book from which it is taken, Darwin’s “Journal” of the voyage is in Everyman’s Library. For expositions of Darwin’s theories, see Huxley’s “Darwiniana,” Wallace’s “Darwinism” and David Starr Jordan’s “Footnotes to Evolution.”

A popular exposition of theories of matter that have developed since the discovery of radioactivity. Intelligible to any (intelligent) high-school pupil.

The English translation in Bohn’s Library.

The second volume is in Everyman’s Library.

In the English translation by Edmund Atkinson with Helmholtz’s “Autobiography” and an introduction by Tyndall.

Translated by Francis Greenwood Peabody.

Huxley is the greatest man of letters among modern English men of science. A volume of his essays is in Everyman’s Library.

Especially for young people.

Especially for young readers.

An important work on modern economic and business problems.

The excellent English translation affords within easy compass a view of philosophy equal to several elementary courses in philosophy at a university. It may be begun by any young man or woman of, say, eighteen.

The “Republic” is in Everyman’s Library and in other cheap editions. Several of the dialogues are to be found under the title, “Trial and Death of Socrates” in the Golden Treasury Series. See also Walter Pater’s “Plato and Platonism.” The great Plato in English is Jowett’s.

Among the most sensible, sympathetic and human of modern works on sociology.

“The Spirit of Modern Philosophy” is a beautifully written introduction to the study of philosophy.

Contains all the philology that anyone needs.

The last volume is in Everyman’s Library, with an introduction by Lord Avebury.

In Everyman’s Library.

The story of a professor of economics and sociology who became a laborer. Interesting as a story and a good popular introduction to the problems of labor and wages.

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