How to Read/Chapter 3

by John Barrett Kerfoot

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CHAPTER III

WATCHING THE WHEELS GO ROUND
I

It is not customary for authors to print their prefatory remarks at the beginning of the third chapter. But this, for reasons that will presently appear, is what I am about to do.

The object of this book, briefly stated, is to help its readers to a more intelligent employment of reading for their own individual ends—whatever those may be.

But since this object, thus summarized, will seem to many to imply the setting forth of some definitely formulated technique,—of a specific formula that needs only to be followed,—there are no doubt those who are already looking to see this book's instructions summed up for them in a set of cut-out-able, pin-up-able, memorizable, and try-it-on-a-dog-able rules. They are looking, let us say, for something analogous to those lists of instructions commonly furnished us in treatises on "How to Grow Thin":—so many of such and such stoopings and flexings before the morning tub; so many miles at a brisk walk after breakfast; so and so many tens and twenties and fifties of such and such rollings and toe-touchings before getting into bed; supplemented by carefully worked-out menus of what we may, and carefully compiled lists of what we may not, eat.

If, however (from the personal contexts of your own preconceptions and desires), you have read any such expectation out of the title of this volume, it is only right that I should, in advance, disabuse your mind of the false hope.

I do not propose to tell you that you must always, in reading, let the light fall on your book from behind, over your shoulder; that you should avoid stories of thrilling adventure and should pick out theological essays when you are trying to read yourself to sleep o' nights: that half an hour, morning and evening, is all that you ought to devote to the daily papers; and that you should keep a small edition of the classics in your coat pocket to read while you are waiting in line at the box office of the movie-theater. I am not even going to divulge to you that legendary secret of the professional "reader,"—that sea serpent among trade tricks,—by which it is said that the initiated are enabled to take in whole paragraphs and even whole pages of print at a glance; instead of plodding along, sentence by sentence, after the manner of the untaught.

This volume, in short, contains no royal road to learning—not even learning to read. It contains a scenario which you, as my partner of the moment, are invited to "produce"—the scenario of an inquiry, leading to conclusions.

If you are inclined to protest that such a scenario must necessarily be lacking in excitement and essentially undramatic, I can only assure you that you are wrong. An inquiry is first cousin to a detective story. A conclusion may be the most thrilling of dénouements. And no scenario of exploration, not even one that leads us to the sources of the Orinoco or lands us in the heart of Thibet, can be fuller of adventure, and more fraught with surprises and flavored with the wine of astonishment, than a voyage of investigation in that hermit kingdom—one's own mind.

If you protest further that you prefer Romance, that you like to have your villains come up with and all the nice people married off in the last chapter, I can only assure you that in every chapter of this book one of the most tricky and treacherous villains—a false Notion—will be pursued and cornered and run through the vitals; that two Ideas of romantic proclivities (and of thoroughly eugenic antecedents), which have been kept from mating by this villain aforesaid, will be led to the altar; and that the happiness-ever-after of these successive couples will be proved by the fact that the next chapter will deal with their children.

If you still shrug your shoulders and say that this would appear to be a scenario for highbrows, I can only assure you that—quite on the contrary—it is a scenario for human beings; that it is for—because it is about—you and me and the man next door.

Moreover, the plan of this scenario is very simple. First, it proposes to induce you (not through my eyes, but through your own) to see just how, whether we ever analyze the process or not, we all must and all do read. Next, it proposes to induce you, in similar manner, to see just why, whether we are conscious of the reasons or not, we any of us ever read at all. And finally, having led you to recognize for yourself the inherent limitations of this universal method of reading, and the latent possibilities that hide for each of us behind this universal desire to read, it proposes to induce you (out of your understanding, not out of mine) to formulate for yourself that attitude toward reading that alone will enable you intelligently and consciously to adapt the means at hand to the development and furthering of your personal purposes.

II

We have already, in the preceding chapters, seen something of the unsuspected processes by which we actually do read. We have located and identified the sources we draw upon for the scenery, the animals, the human characters, and the intellectual conceptions, in terms of which we "produce" an author's scenario for ourselves. And we have located and identified the sources we draw upon for the meanings of the words in which these scenarios are written.

But as yet, in spite of our assumptions to the contrary, we would appear to be mere creatures of chance, helplessly dependent (for material to read with) upon the first memory-picture, or the first word-meaning that our minds get hold of when they reach into the grab-bag of our past experience.

And to a certain extent we are.

If I suddenly present for your interpretation the words

A green tree

not only do I not know what picture your mind will present you with, but you are as ignorant, before the event, as I am, and as powerless to control the choice. Your mind simply reaches down into the "green tree" compartment of your stored experience and fetches up whatever comes handy:—a "generalized notion," or the elm tree in front of your childhood home, or a banyan monster in Madras, or what-not.

And yet, in the last chapter, we summed up our inquiry, as far as prosecuted, in the conclusion (and I assume that you acquiesced in it at the time) that learning to read did not merely mean learning to draw "more and more skillfully" on our stored experience for scenario producing purposes, but also involved enlarging our "personal contexts," developing our responsiveness to verbal contexts, and "learning to draw more and more discriminatingly on these two sources for the word-meanings in which we interpret the directions that our successive partners, the authors, issue to us."

It is now necessary for us to discover how—by what actually employed process or procedure—we achieve and exercise this critical selection.

I assume that, in reading the last chapter, you personally acquiesced in its conclusions. Yet I can imagine you, after a little reflection, addressing me somewhat as follows: "That first chapter on 'Learning to Read' was fine. All it said about our minds being moving-picture concerns; about printed stories being nothing but scenarios; about our only material for their 'producing' being our own experience;—all this is not only astonishingly plain, once it has been pointed out, but it instantly gives to the whole idea of reading a sort of exciting interest. And the second chapter, too, taken by itself, is convincing. Indeed, I've tried the thing out on myself and it works. The 'dictionary meanings' of words are only definitions of generalized notions. I do get the meanings of used words from the contexts, verbal and 'personal.' And yet I can't, for the life of me, make these two chapters hitch up. I don't see how I can be expected to make 'nicely discriminated' word-meanings for myself unless I superintend the process as I go along. But if I stop to examine the meanings I am giving to words as I read them, then I find that I can't 'read.' Instead of a 'mental movie,' or anything resembling one, I get nothing but a jumble of unrelated meanings, memories, associations, and ideas. Are you sure you are right? Or have I somehow gotten off the track?"

III

Suppose we examine the mental mechanics of reading a little more closely—watch the wheels go round a bit—and see if we cannot clear these matters up. It is n't a difficult job if we go about it right. And these questions—

(1) Why is it impracticable to "examine the meanings we are giving to words as we read them?"

(2) Why is it impossible to "read" if we do stop to examine the meanings we are giving to individual words?

(3) What is the actual way in which we do control our word interpretations?

—are of greater importance than appears on the surface. They strike, as it happens, to the very root of our inquiry. Indeed, the answer to the third of them is the root of our inquiry; and is going, therefore, to acquire far-reaching significance for us.

IV

Let us glance back for a moment at the cinematograph.

You know, of course, that a motion-picture film is made up of a great number of individual photographs. That these were originally taken separately, but in rapid succession. That they are thrown on the screen, also separately, and in the original order, and at the original rapid rate—as a matter of fact, at the rate of about twenty per second. And you quite understand (although you cannot detect the fact for yourselves by observation) that it is precisely because each of these separate pictures is actually there, stationary, on the screen, long enough for us to perceive it, yet is always succeeded by another picture (ever so slightly different) too quickly for us to differentiate the impressions we receive from them, that the series merges, to our minds, into a "moving picture."

Now the significant fact that I wish to point out to you—the fact that is going to enable us to "hitch up" our previous discoveries to the facts of actual reading practice—is this: that the separate words on a page of print correspond EXACTLY to the separate pictures of a movie film.

It is not merely true in a sort of metaphorical sense that "reading" results in "mental movies."

It is literally true that the mental mechanics of the two processes are identical.

Let us examine them.

The cinematograph is operated at the rate of about twenty pictures per second. In other words, in one minute of the movies something like twelve hundred pictures, one after the other, twenty to the second, are thrown on the screen before our eyes.

On the other hand, an ordinary reader takes about a minute to read an average page of the usual novel. Such a page contains in the neighborhood of three hundred words. Which is to say that in one minute of "reading" something like three hundred words, one after the other, five to the second, are flashed onto the sensitized screen of the mind.

And, in this case as in the other, it is precisely because each of these words is there, stationary, before our moving eyes, just long enough for us to feel the flavor of its significance, but is always—before we have time to differentiate the impressions made on us—abandoned for another word, different, yet either qualifying or qualified by the first one, that the series merges in our minds into the living flux of "representation" or "understanding" that we call "reading," and that we have elected to describe as a "mental movie."

Here, then, are our first two points already clear to us:—

(1) At five words to the second, it is obviously impossible to "examine the meanings we are giving to the words as we read them."

(2) Yet if, in order to make such an examination possible, we slow down to, say, ten words to the minute, we instantly destroy the cinematographic effect of the merged series. Instead of a "mental movie" we get a "jumble of unrelated meanings, memories, associations and ideas."

In exactly the same way, if we slow a movie film down until each picture remains on the screen for two whole seconds, and is then, after an interval of darkness, succeeded, for two whole seconds more, by the next picture, we instantly turn a "moving picture" into a procession of meaningless monotony.

In both cases we have a watched pot that never boils.

V

Of course this seems to land us in a vicious circle—in a sort of mouse-trap cylinder in which we go round and round without ever getting any forwarder.

Fortunately, however, there is a way out. There is a door to the trap. There is a very practical way in which we not only can, but in actual practice frequently do, examine and control the meanings we give to the words we read.

This method is so simple, so natural, so unnotedly habitual to us, that you will laugh when I point it out. You use it constantly. But you use it so instinctively, so thoughtlessly, and with so little realization of fundamental relationship, not only to what we are now discussing, but to all living, that I am sure you do not know what it is. Nor, for the moment, am I going to tell you. There is, as it happens, a small matter of detail that we must master first.

VI

We now understand (although we cannot detect the matter for ourselves by observation) that we "read" by carrying a "flavor of significance" forward from each printed word and blending it with the "flavors of significance" we take from the words that follow.

The things that we are wanting a means of controlling, therefore, are really "flavors of significance."

But what, in the name of all that is practical and thinkable, may such a thing as a "flavor of significance" look like?

What, as a matter of cold fact, is a "flavor of significance?"

Let us see if we can find out.

VII

Suppose, in actual conversation, I were to ask you the meaning of the word "good."

You would instantly feel that you knew. But you would find considerable difficulty in framing a reply that either of us considered satisfactory. And this (although the inability would doubtless embarrass you) is really quite as it should be. You are a human being, not a dictionary. It is your regular business to feel the notions called up in your mind by code-signals like "good." It is not your regular business to frame adequate definitions of those notions in other code-signals.

But, even in the matter of feeling meanings to yourself, a time element enters. You do not, instantly, feel the full meaning, to you, of the word "good." To do this would take time. Not much time, but some. Time enough, let us say, to feel all the way round the word.

It does n't take you long to feel round a concrete word like "hairbrush." It takes you some time to feel round an abstract word like "unrighteousness."

Try it and see.

Your mind goes round "hairbrush" like a squirrel round a tree. A frisk of its tail and—it's looking at you from the other side. But your mind feels its way round "unrighteousness" like a blindfolded man using his hands for eyes. It may be ten seconds before it comes out with a full report.

Let us say, then, that it takes us, on the average, two seconds to feel the full meaning, to us, of a word.

It follows, does it not, that in reading at the rate of five words to the second, we have, on the average, and as the equivalent of our "flavor of significance," about one tenth of a fully realized meaning to carry forward from each word we read.

Let us see, now, if we can find a magnifying glass that will enable us to see, not a tenth of a fully realized meaning,—that would require a microscope,—but, say, a quarter or a fifth of such a meaning.

VIII

Suppose, instead of asking you the meaning of a word, I were to ask you to play a game with me.

Suppose I were to ask you to speak out to me, frankly, immediately, and automatically,—that is, without thinking the matter over at all,—the very first thing that popped into your head as each of a series of words was spoken to you, slowly, one after the other.

Thus, if I were to give you the word "cow," you would answer "red," or "calf," or "Jersey," or "milk," or whatever notion came up automatically to your mind at the instant of hearing the word.

As a matter of actual fact, if you are of average quickness in your mental reactions, you could, for ordinary words, and after a little practice, give me my answers in from seven to nine tenths of a second. That is to say, you could, on the average, answer me in eight tenths of a second. And as at least half of this time would be taken up in making your reply, each answer would, roughly speaking, represent two fifths of a second's realization of that word's full meaning to you, or (since it takes two seconds, on the average, to attain such a realization complete) one fifth of a fully realized meaning.

Now, suppose that I were to select six words at random. And suppose that I were to propound them, in this fashion, first to one, and then to another of you; and in each case were to write down the answers. The record of words and answers would read somewhat as follows:

Word	First Player's Answer	Second Player's Answer
Water	Wet	Wash
Knife	Sharp	Carve
Good	Mother	Pie
Pepper	Salt	Hot
Blond	Hair	Charlie
Bond	Coupon	Break

Here, then,—crudely exaggerated by the action of a rough magnifying medium, and thus rendered, as it were, visible to the actual eye,—are some fractions of realized meanings; some "flavors of significance," coarser than those we read with, but yet akin to them.

We have only to examine them, for instance, to see that player number one would, at the moment of the test, have been likely to carry forward from the word "good" a "mother-goodness" flavor of significance; and player number two a "pie-goodness" flavor of significance.

Perhaps, if we try, we can make this list give us an answer to our third question.

IX

We see that to player number one, at the moment of the test, the word "bond" suggested investments; while to player number two it suggested a desire for freedom. We can, therefore, conceive that, had they been reading, player number one would have carried forward from the word "bond" a money-satisfaction flavor, and player number two a dissatisfaction-with-slavery flavor.

But these would scarcely prove suitable flavors of significance for the same word in the same sentence. One of them—possibly even both of them—would need to be criticized and "controlled."

How, in actual reading, would these two players accomplish the adjustment?

Let us suppose a case.

Let us suppose that the sentence they were reading began—

The bond that held them together—

By the time that they had read thus far, player number one would be carrying forward a sort of "comfortable-circumstances" attitude toward the union. And player number two would be carrying forward a sort of "readiness-for-divorce" attitude toward it.

And now suppose that the balance of the sentence ran—

was thus a spiritual tie.

Instantly, both readers would find themselves "in wrong."

And instantly, by a mental gesture,—a mere motion of the mind, so familiar and instinctive as to be all but unconscious, each would make his or her own personal correction.

X

Here, then, we have our third question cleared up for us.

We control our "flavors of significance" by hindsight, not by foresight. We do not cut them to measure. We get them ready-made, and refit them when necessary.

And for the most part no readjustments are needed. For, after all, word-meanings are by no means haphazard hand-me-downs. Each of us has, as a matter of fact, and for every word really contained in his vocabulary, a more or less richly composite meaning-notion of his own,—a personal generalization, built up by slow degrees and repeated usings. And it is into these composites, as into grab-bags, that we really reach—reach at the rate of five times per second—for personal "flavors of significance" that shall fit the verbal context.

It is n't often, therefore, that our minds bring up for us such incongruous and unusable flavors of meaning as those just examined in the case of the word "bond."

In an overwhelming majority of cases, the "meanings" we pull out are adequate. And even in the other cases, the needed readjustments are usually slight and are made instinctively, without conscious thought, and almost instantly forgotten.

But the more alert the reader is (and especially the more alert he is on this basis of right understanding of the nature of our reading processes), the more frequently will he detect these errors and inadequacies, and the more often will he make these mental gestures of correction. And each time that he does so he increases the suppleness of his mind, betters his technical skill of interpretation, adds permanently to the richness of that particular word-meaning composite, and, in all these ways, strengthens the foundations of efficiency for his future reading.

XI

Alertness, then, is the first requisite for the reader. And by "alertness" I mean, here, expectant interest, focused attention, and a mental readiness to act.

XII

But before I go on to point out the particular character and type of alertness demanded of the reader by the reading-facts we have established thus far in our inquiry, I want to clear your mind of a misconception that we are forever entertaining, like a bad angel, unawares.

We are all of us given to thinking of "reading" as of a comparatively recent human attainment, based upon the invention of graphic signs.

In reality, however, reading is not an attainment, but a natural function and inborn aptitude of the mind.

A thousand centuries before alphabets were, reading was.

Semi-human hunters read the incised records of the game trails before they had even learned to cook the flesh of their quarry. Immemorially forgotten savages read the faces of their friends and the minds of their enemies before the stone age was dreamed of. Prehistoric precursors of the prophets read the signs of the weather in the skies, and their still prehistoric successors became priests and read the Will of God in their own hearts, untold ages before the first cuneiform inscription was impressed on the first brick in Babylonia.

Nor are these expressions mere figures of speech. It is a "simile" only by inversion to call "reading the signs of the times" a simile. The real simile lies rather in speaking of "reading a book." For the word "read" (to go no further back than its immediate parent) is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning to "take counsel." And its linguistic first cousin is that other ancient expression, "to red up,"—to "red" meaning to tidy, to put in order; and hence to clear up and explain. "Reading," then, is a form of "redding,"—to take counsel by putting things in order. And you can no more (without smothering it to death) keep the human mind from "reading" than you can keep the human body from breathing. And you will note that for all forms of reading—for that of the semi-human hunter no less than for that to which this book is intended to guide you—alertness (meaning expectant interest, focused attention, and a mental readiness to act) is the first requisite.

XIII

In this volume we are dealing with reading in its everyday sense of reading letters, newspapers, magazines, and books—written and printed language in general. And even in this sense it is practically permissible to-day to say that "everybody reads." It is also true that whatever actual reading any of us do is accomplished by the exercise of some alertness. For one no more reads a page of print by mechanically passing one's eyes across and across its lines, and perhaps silently forming the words with one's lips, while one's mind is playing hide and seek elsewhere, than one reads a game trail by following it, eyes on the ground ticking off deer tracks, but mind and imagination walking up Broadway.

Let us be clear about this.

It happens to all of us, at times, to discover that, while we've imagined we were reading, we really were n't; to find, on turning over a page, that we've no idea as to what was on it. Generally, in such cases, if we take the trouble to examine our own minds, we find that while we were automatically going through the mental and physical motions of reading, we were really being lazily and undirectedly alert about something else—going over the month's accounts, or wondering why some friend acted so offish when we last met.

Again, it sometimes happens to all of us to realize, on turning over a page, that a single sentence on it, say three quarters of the way up from the bottom, is the only thing on it that we seem really to have taken in. If we turn back and read the sentence over again, we can generally discover exactly what it was that caused our minds to stop wool-gathering for an instant and roused us to a half-hearted and momentary alertness.

XIV

For right reading, however, it is not enough to be alert.

The alertness must be both informed and disciplined. It must be based on understanding and trained to the point of unconscious performance.

Let me illustrate this last statement.

I said, a while back, that the mind "reads" as naturally as the body breathes. Yet the first thing that a would-be opera singer has to learn is how to breathe. It is n't enough that she breathe naturally. Her breathing must be both informed and disciplined. She must understand both the mechanism at her disposal and the purposes of its employment. And she must so train herself in the technique of performance that her lungs function without conscious thought for the adequate achievement of her changing personal aims.

XV

Or, let us take a cruder analogy.

Alertness is a prerequisite in driving an automobile. But it is not enough to be alert. Here, too, the alertness must be both informed and disciplined: based on understanding and trained to the point of unconscious performance.

The kind of alertness that grasps the steering wheel so tightly as to breed cramps in the wrists is more of a handicap than a help. Yet this stage—the stage of exaggeratedly conscious alertness—has to be passed through. The kind of alertness that is so preoccupied with technique that it keeps telling itself which pedal to push in an emergency is also more of a handicap than a help. But this stage—the stage of reducing conscious performance to a subconscious habit—must also be passed through.

The driver who is ignorant of the mechanism of his engine keeps going by the grace of God—or of some man in Detroit, Michigan. But the driver whose mind is busy with his engine when he is threading the intricacies of traffic is likely to get into trouble with the police.

No one is master of the automobile—no one is capable of driving one entirely "on his own," anywhere that it will go for the accomplishment of his own ends, to the full of its inherent possibilities and to the limit of his own capacity—until he has gradually built up, on a constantly broadening basis of understanding,—understanding of the working of internal-combustion engines in general, of the idiosyncracies of his own machine in particular, of the rules of the road, of the psychology of other drivers and of himself, and of the character of his own pursuit,—an alertness that is seldom conscious of itself, yet always many-sidedly operative, and that is usually able, by becoming conscious of itself, to detect the causes of its own shortcomings, and by correcting these to add to its own efficiency.

XVI

And it is no otherwise with reading.

It is only by thus building up, on a constantly broadening basis of understanding, an informed and disciplined alertness, that we learn to drive that other internal-combustion engine, our own mind, along the roads of print toward our chosen objective—be this an afternoon's enjoyment or an intellectual goal.

XVII

Do not, however, mistake me. The most ordinary reader exercises alertness. He has to in order to read. Some measure of expectant interest, no matter how slight; some degree of focused attention, no matter how vague; some mental readiness to act, no matter how sluggish, he must bring to the task. Else the very act of reading ceases to take place.

But the ordinary reader, because he misunderstands the nature of reading, misdirects these elements of alertness; if, indeed, he directs them at all.

The ordinary reader thinks of a story as a concrete thing contained in a book, just as he thinks of a lemonade as a concrete thing contained in a glass. And he assumes that, just as he sucks the one in, ready-mixed, through a straw, so he drinks the other in, ready-made, through his eyes.

Naturally, his expectant interest is centered on "what the author has to say." His attention is focused outside himself. His mental readiness to act is largely reduced to a readiness to suck faster if he likes it and to suck slower if he does n't.

And—I want to underscore this fact—the thing works. It does n't work the way he supposes, but it arrives—after a fashion. He reads, not because he understands what he is doing, but because he is built that way. He keeps going, as we said of the auto-driver, by the grace of God. If it were really true, as the proverb seems to imply, that God helps only those who help themselves, we should most of us be stalled motors by the wayside.

XVIII

But really "learning to read" is another matter.

And the reader who has once grasped in outline the true nature of reading, and who wishes to build up for himself on that foundation a better and more personally remunerative technique, should begin by altering the character of his alertness.

He knows that the words the author prints are but signals to his mind—but push-buttons that his eyes press as they pass over them. He knows that the flux of "notions" they call up, the associative memories, and mental pictures, and character conceptions, and idea complexes, that these form themselves into, are his word-notions, his memories, his mind pictures, his character conceptions, his idea constructions. And he will, therefore, practice centering his expectant interest, not on "what the author is saying," but on "what the author is saying to him."

He knows, moreover, that whatever happens when we read happens inside ourselves. And he will, therefore, practice keeping his real attention turned inward.

And he knows that he, and he alone, is the one who can, when occasion arises, stage-manage and control this internal upwelling of notions and memories, pictures and ideas. And he will, therefore, practice the development of a mental readiness to act that consists in readiness to act as stage manager on his own initiative; adjusting himself as well as he may to the author's mood, and producing to the best of his equipment the author's scenario.

XIX

This, then, is the root of our inquiry:—this fact that, in reading, we deliberately and of our own choice expose ourselves to suggestion; respond automatically and personally to the successive stimuli of words and word-groups; and then consciously or unconsciously criticize and control our automatic responses.

This (although he does n't know it) is what the tramp on a park bench, scanning the draggled pages of last week's paper, is doing.

And this is all that the keenest mind in Christendom does when it reads.

The road between the two, as far as mere technique goes, lies along the line of teaching one's self little by little to do this common act of reading with an informed and disciplined alertness; an alertness based on a constantly broadening understanding of one's own mind-workings and of one's own aims, and trained to a greater and greater suppleness of unconscious performance.

XX

Before closing this chapter, however, I want to point out the importance, in connection with all that follows in this volume, that this discovered method of our "control" of word-meanings is going to assume for us.

It looks an insignificant little discovery—this fact that we first react automatically to words and then criticize the reaction, and that this is absolutely the only method we have, either of getting at our word-meanings (which are, so to say, the molecules of our thought) or of controlling them. And yet, in reality, it is the root of self-knowledge and the key to all that has any right to be called culture.

Talkers of cant tell us, in effect if not in words, that culture is something that we can receive from without; something that exists, independently of its possessors; something that can be imparted, and accepted, and built into our consciousness and our personalities like bricks into a wall. They would have us believe that culture is a sort of censored and sublimated sophistication—a knowing (through an eager submission of ourselves to the best authorities) of what to feel and what not to; what to like and what not to; what to admire and what not to; what to think and what not to.

Do not believe them. Culture is always unique, for it is an individual achievement—a by-product of personal living.

Its essential entity is an "attitude toward the cosmos." Its component elements—the things from which it is built up—are recognized relationships between the life inside us and the world without. And the ultimate atoms out of which these component elements are constructed are neither more nor less than "controlled meanings"—spontaneous personal feelings, subsequently criticized.

Culture is a gradually coördinated accumulation of criticized reactions—of the "controlled meanings" that we ourselves have given to hunger and thirst and satiety; to love and friendship and hate; to hope and fear and indifference; to words and sentences and books; to art and philosophy and religion;—in a word, to life.

Much fun has been made of those who say, "I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like." The fun-makers are intellectual snobs, if, indeed, they are not shallow-pated fools. For, granted that they themselves know anything about art (and not merely about what they think they ought to think about it), they started from that identical beginning—the beginning of "knowing what they liked" and nothing more.

To "know what we like" is nearer to culture than to know what we ought to like. For to know the latter, beforehand, is often to be prevented from ever knowing whether we really like it or not. But to like a thing, or to dislike it, is to have reacted to it; to have lived with regard to it; to have given it a meaning.When we have criticized this meaning,—when we have learned how and why we like it or dislike it, and have approved or disapproved of our spontaneous feeling,—we have taken a step toward culture.

And the only reason that culture is in any way derivable from books is that reading is a form of living.