How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [120]
But, after all, we still have to read the periodicals that accomplish these digests of current news and information. If we wish to be informed, we cannot avoid the task of reading, no matter how good the digests are. And the task of reading them is, in the last analysis, the same task as that which is performed by the editors of these magazines on the original material that they make available in more compact form. They have saved us labor, so far as the extent of our reading is concerned, but they have not saved us and cannot entirely save us the trouble of reading. In a sense, the function they perform 254 HOW TO READ A BOOK
profits us only if we can read their digests of information as well as they have done the prior reading in order to give us the digests.
And that involves reading for understanding as well as information. Obviously, the more condensed a digest is, the more selection has occurred. We may not have to worry about this very much if 1,00 pages are cut down to 90, say; but if 1,00 pages are cut to ten, or even one, then the question of what has been left out becomes critical. Hence the greater the condensation, the more important it is that we know something of the character of the condensor; the same caveat we mentioned before applies here with even greater force. Ultimately, perhaps, this comes down to reading between the lines of an expert condensation. You cannot refer to the original to find out what was left out; you must somehow infer this from the condensation itself. Reading digests, therefore, is sometimes the most demanding and difficult reading that you can do.
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HOW TO READ
SCIENCE A N D MAT H E MATICS
The title of this chapter may b e misleading. We do not propose to give you advice about how to read every kind of science and mathematics. We will confine ourselves to discussing only two kinds: the great scientific and mathematical classics of our tradition, on the one hand, and modem scientific popularizations, on the other hand. What we say will often be applicable to the reading of specialized monographs on abstruse and limited subjects, but we cannot help you to read those. There are two reasons for this. One is, simply, that we are not qualified to do it.
The other is this. Until approximately the end of the nineteenth century, the major scientific books were written for a lay audience. Their authors-men like Galileo, and Newton, and Darwin-were not averse to being read by specialists in their fields; indeed, they wanted to reach such readers. But there was as yet no institutionalized specialization in those days, days which Albert Einstein called "the happy childhood of science." Intelligent and well-read persons were expected to read scientific books as well as history and philosophy; there were no hard and fast distinctions, no boundaries that could not be crossed. There was also none of the disregard for the general or lay reader that is manifest in contemporary scien-255
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tific writing. Most modem scientists do not care what lay readers think, and so they do not even try to reach them.
Today, science tends to be written by experts for experts.
A serious communication on a scientific subject assumes so much specialized knowledge on the part of the reader that it usually cannot be read at all by anyone not learned in the field.
There are obvious advantages to this approach, not least that it serves to advance science more quickly. Experts talking to each other about their expertise can arrive very quickly at the frontiers of it-they can see the problems at once and begin to try to solve them. But the cost is equally obvious. You-the ordinary intelligent reader whom we are addressing in this book-are left quite