ON READING.

Writing is justly denominated an art; I think that reading claims the same distinction.  To adorn ideas with elegance is an act of the mind superior to that of receiving them; but to receive them with a happy discrimination is the effect of a practised taste.

Yet it will be found that taste alone is not sufficient to obtain the proper end of reading.  Two persons of equal taste rise from the perusal of the same book with very different notions:  the one will have the ideas of the author at command, and find a new train of sentiment awakened; while the other quits his author in a pleasing distraction, but of the pleasures of reading nothing remains but tumultuous sensations.

To account for these different effects, we must have recourse to a logical distinction, which appears to reveal one of the great mysteries in the art of reading.  Logicians distinguish between perceptions and ideas.  Perception is that faculty of the mind which notices the simple impression of objects:  but when these objects exist in the mind, and are there treasured and arranged as materials for reflection, then they are called ideas.  A perception is like a transient sunbeam, which just shows the object, but leaves neither light nor warmth; while an idea is like the fervid beam of noon, which throws a settled and powerful light.

Many ingenious readers complain that their memory is defective, and their studies unfruitful.  This defect arises from their indulging the facile pleasures of perceptions, in preference to the laborious habit of forming them into ideas.  Perceptions require only the sensibility of taste, and their pleasures are continuous, easy, and exquisite.  Ideas are an art of combination, and an exertion of the reasoning powers.  Ideas are therefore labours; and for those who will not labour, it is unjust to complain, if they come from the harvest with scarcely a sheaf in their hands.

There are secrets in the art of reading which tend to facilitate its purposes, by assisting the memory, and augmenting intellectual opulence.  Some our own ingenuity must form, and perhaps every student has peculiar habits of study, as, in sort-hand, almost every writer has a system of his own.

It is an observation of the elder Pliny (who, having been a voluminous compiler, must have had great experience in the art of reading), that there was no book so bad but which contained something good.  To read every book would, however, be fatal to the interest of most readers; but it is not always necessary, in the pursuits of learning, to read every book entire.  Of many books it is sufficient to seize the plan, and to examine some of their portions.  Of the little supplement at the close of a volume, few readers conceive the utility; but some of the most eminent writers in Europe have been great adepts in the art of index reading.  I, for my part, venerate the inventor of indexes; and I know not to whom to yield the preference, either to Hippocrates, who was the first great anatomiser of the human body, or to that unknown labourer in literature, who first laid open the nerves and arteries of a book.  Watts advises the perusal of the prefaces and the index of a book, as they both give light on its contents.