It may be worth an honest effort for students and teachers to try to grasp the meaning of such writers; but if after a fair trial the mind is left empty of meaning, it is wise to follow the advice of Locke with regard to obscure ancient authors:
“In reading of them, if they do not use their words with a due clearness and perspicuity, we may lay them aside, and, without any injury done them, resolve thus with ourselves:
“Si non vis intelligi, debes negligi.”[37]
Several months or years of study may be required to prepare the mind for grasping the ideas or phraseology of new departments of investigation. No one can comprehend the treatises on physiological psychology without devoting several weeks to the anatomy of the brain.
The words, phrases, and sentences of the printed or written page should call up in the mind of the reader that for which they stand in the mind of the author. What the stream of thought should be in reading a book is well worthy of careful consideration. G. H. Lewes, in “Problems of Life and Mind,” claims that “our thought is a constant interchange of ideas and images, some trains of thought being carried on mainly by images more or less vivid, others mainly by ideas with only a faint escort of images.” It should be said, by way of explanation, that he does not use the word “ideas” in the Platonic sense of patterns fixed in nature, of which the individual objects in any given class are but imperfect copies, and by participation in which they have their being; nor in the sense of a mental image or picture, which (in opposition to Sir William Hamilton), the Century Dictionary claims, has been the more common meaning of the term in English literature since the sixteenth century. In Lewes’s pages ideas never stand for images, nor for copies of sensations. Sully says that the term idea is used to include both images and concepts, marking off the whole region of the representative from the presentative, but that, like the term notion, it now tends to be confined to concepts. With Lewes all ideas are thoughts, but not all thoughts are ideas. He does not reject the popular usage of the word in phrases like the idea of Shakespeare’s Othello, of Bismarck’s policy. Take the following sentence from Justin McCarthy’s “History of Our Own Times:” “Unluckily, Lord Palmerston became possessed with the idea that the French minister in Greece was secretly setting the Greek government on to resist our claims.” In thinking the thought of this sentence the mind is not filled with any images of Greece or mental pictures of any other kind. Possibly the adjective Greek may bring to the minds of some persons the map symbol of Greece or even scenery and cities in Greece, especially if they have travelled or resided there; but such mental pictures really interfere with the current of thought in reading. In planning a route from New York to San Francisco one is apt to think it in the lines and dots of railway maps. That in the mind for which words stand may be styled their meaning, and Lewes claims that much of our reading does not translate the words into their full signification, but proceeds by a process of logical symbolism. He asserts that “the greater proportion of all men’s thinking goes forward with confident reliance on the correctness of the logical operations, and with only an occasional translation of symbols into images. The translation—verification—does, indeed, from time to time take place, and always in proportion to the novelty of the connections; but how easily and how fatally the mind glides along the path of logical operation without pausing to interpret more than the relation of the symbols is humorously illustrated in the common story of a physicist, whose claim to omniscience was the joke of his friends. Being asked earnestly whether he had ‘read Biot’s paper on the malleability of light?’ ‘No,’ he replied; ‘he sent it me, but I have not yet had time to read it.’”