How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [41]
You should understand that the limitations on the degree to which you can approximate the rule are not only ones of time and effort. You are a finite, mortal creature; but a book is also finite and, if not mortal, at least defective in the way all things made by man are. No book deserves a perfect outline because no book is perfect. It goes only so far, and so must you. This rule, after all, does not call for your putting things into the book that the author did not put there. Your outline is of the book itself, not the subject matter that the book is about. Perhaps the outline of a subject matter could be extended indefinitely, but not your outline of the book, which gives the subject matter only more or less definitive treatment.
Hence you should not feel that we are urging you merely to be lazy about following this rule. You could not follow it out to the bitter end even if you wanted to.
The forbidding aspect of the formula for setting forth the order and relation of the parts may be somewhat lessened by a few illustrations of the rule in operation. Unfortunately, it is more difficult to illustrate this rule than the other one about stating the unity. A unity, after all, can be stated in a sentence 86 HOW TO READ A BOOK
or two, at most a short paragraph. But in the case of a large and complex book, a careful and adequate outline of the parts, and their parts, and their parts down to the least structural unit that is comprehensible and worthwhile identifying, would take a great many pages to write out.
Theoretically, the outline could be longer than the original. Some of the great medieval commentaries on the works of Aristotle are longer than the works they comment on. They include, of course, more than an outline, for they undertake to interpret the author sentence by sentence. The same is true of certain modem commentaries, such as the great ones on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. And a variorum edition of a Shakespeare play, which includes an exhaustive outline as well as other things, is many times as long-perhaps ten times as long
-as the original. You might look into a commentary of this sort if y"u want to see the rule followed as close to pedection as man can do. Aquinas, for instance, begins each section of his commentary with a beautiful outline of the points that Aristotle has made in a particular part of his work; and he always says explicitly how that part fits the structure of the whole, especially in relation to the parts that come before and after.
Let us take something easier than a treatise of Aristotle.
Aristotle is probably the most compact of prose writers; you would expect that an outline of one of his works would be extensive and difficult. Let us also agree that, for the sake of the example, we will not carry the process out to the relative perfection that would be possible if we had a great number of pages available.
The United States Constitution is an interesting, practical document, and a very well-organized piece of writing. If you examine it, you should have no difficulty in finding its major parts. They are pretty clearly indicated, though you have to do some thinking to make the main divisions. Here is a suggested outline of the document:
FIRST: The Preamble, setting forth the purpose ( s ) of the Constitution; X-Raying a Book 87
SEcoND: The first Article, dealing with the legislative department of the government; Tmru>: The second Article, dealing with the executive department of the government; FoURTH: The third Article, dealing with the judicial department of the government; FIFTH: The fourth Article, dealing with the relationship between the state governments and the federal government; SIXTH: The fifth, sixth, and seventh Articles, dealing with the amendment of the Constitution, its status as the supreme