s extracting their inmost
essence and significance. If one lets an interval pass, and then
returns, it is surprising how clear and ripe that has become, which,
when we left it, seemed crude, obscure, full of perplexity.

All this takes trouble, no doubt, but then it will not do to deal with
ideas that we find in books or elsewhere as a certain bird does with
its eggs--leave them in the sand for the sun to hatch and chance to
rear. People who follow this plan possess nothing better than ideas
half-hatched, and convictions reared by accident. They are like a man
who should pace up and down the world in the delusion that he is clad
in sumptuous robes of purple and velvet, when in truth he is only
half-covered by the rags and tatters of other people's cast-off
clothes.

Apart from such mechanical devices as these I have mentioned, there
are habits and customary attitudes of mind which a conscientious
reader will practise, if he desires to get out of a book still greater
benefits than the writer of it may have designed or thought of. For
example, he should never be content with mere aggressive and negatory
criticism of the page before him. The page may be open to such
criticism, and in that case it is natural to indulge in it; but the
reader will often find an unexpected profit by asking himself--What
does this error teach me? How comes that fallacy to be here? How came
the writer to fall into this defect of taste? To ask such questions
gives a reader a far healthier tone of mind in the long run, more
seriousness, more depth, more moderation of judgment, more insight
into other men's ways of thinking as well as into his own, than any
amount of impatient condemnation and hasty denial, even when both
condemnation and denial may be in their place.

Again, let us not be too ready to detect an inconsistency in our
author, but rather let us teach ourselves to distinguish between
inconsistency and having two sides to an opinion. 'Before I admit that
two and two are four,' some one said, 'I must first know to what use
you are going to put the proposition.' That is to say, even the
plainest proposition needs to be stated with a view to the drift of
the discussion in hand, or with a view to some special part of the
discussion. When the turn of some other part of the matter comes, it
will be convenient and often necessary to bring out into full light
another side of your opinion, not contradictory, but complementary,
and the great