Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 24

Method in Heading—"Inwardly Digesting."

Method in Heading—"Inwardly Digesting."

But it is not in the Selection of books only that care should be taken. It will be found also desirable to have a certain method, in reading. Desultory reading is one thing. Reading with a purpose is another. The particular method is not so very important as the existence of some method. Thus, the reading consecutively and systematically of various histories or accounts of a particular period or transaction, of the biographies of certain groups or classes of notable characters, and various biographies of the same individual, of works on Cognate sciences, &c., is likely to be more profitable and interesting, than the perusal of such works at odd times and seasons. And after all, it is not so much from the "reading" as the "marking and inwardly digesting," that the reader is to derive profit. Now I suspect that most of us take large doses of reading as mere kill-time occupation, when the mind is not very active: but this kind of reading, though it may be harmless, and even "soothing," can be of no avail for intellectual edification. Unless at the close of a paragraph or section, and of the whole work, the reader is ready to give himself an account of the scope and pith of it, he is reading to little purpose. And even if a reader does receive and memorially retain what he has read, it does not necessarily follow that he has read it profitably.