How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [39]
Another practical book is Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Here the reader is aided by the author's own statement of "the plan of the work" at the very beginning. But that takes several pages. The unity can be more briefly stated as follows :
This is an inquiry into the source of national wealth in any economy that is built on a division of labor, considering the relation of the wages paid labor, the profits returned to capital, and the rent owed the landowner, as the prime factors in the price of commodities. It discusses the various ways in which capital can be more or less gainfully employed, and relates the origin and use of money to the accumulation and employment of capital. Examining the development of opulence in different nations and under different conditions, it compares the several systems of political economy, and argues for the beneficence of free trade.
If a reader grasped the unity of The Wealth of Nations in this way, and did a similar job for Marx's Das Kapital, he would be well on the way toward seeing the relation between two of the most influential books of the past two centuries.
82 HOW TO READ A BOOK
Darwin's The Origin of Species provides us with a good example of the unity of a theoretical book in science. Here is a statement of it:
This is an account of the variation of living things during the course of countless generations and the way in which this results in new groupings of plants and animals; it treats both of the variability of domesticated animals and of variability under natural conditions, showing how such factors as the struggle for existence and natural selection operate to bring about and sustain such groupings; it argues that species are not fixed and immutable groups, but that they are merely varieties in transition from a less to a more marked and permanent status, supporting this argument by evidences from extinct animals found in the earth's crust, and from comparative embryology and anatomy.
That may seem like a big mouthful, but the book was an even bigger one for a great many readers in the nineteenth century, partly because they did not go to the trouble of finding out what it was really about.
Finally, let us take Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding as a theoretical book in philosophy. You may recall our observing that Locke himself summarized his work by saying that it was "an inquiry into the origin, certainty and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion and assent." We would not quarrel with so excellent a statement of plan by the author, except to add two subordinate qualifications to do justice to the first and third parts of the essay: it will be shown, we would add, that there are no innate ideas, but that all human knowledge is acquired from experience; and language will be discussed as a medium for the expression of thought, its proper use and most familiar abuses to be indicated.
There are two things we want you to note before we proceed. The first is how frequently you can expect the author, especially a good one, to help you to state the plan of his book.
Despite that fact, most readers are at a total loss if you ask X-Raying a Book 83
them to say briefly what the whole book is about. Partly this is owing to the widespread inability to speak concise English sentences. Partly it is owing to neglect of this rule in reading.
But it also indicates that many readers pay as little attention to the author's introductory words as they ordinarily do to his title.
The second point is a word of caution. Do not take the sample summaries we have given you as if they were, in each case, a final and absolute formulation of the book's unity. A unity can be variously stated. There is no one