ny other action, a paragraph, or even the blowing of a wind,
is to lift it over to its principle, see it and delight in it as a part
of the whole, of the eternal, and of the running gear of things. Reading
for principles may make a man seem very slow at first--several years
slower than other people--but as every principle he reads with makes it
possible to avoid at least one experience, and, at the smallest
calculation, a hundred books, he soon catches up. It would be hard to
find a better device for reading books through their backs, for
travelling with one's mind, than the habit of reading for principles. A
principle is a sort of universal car-coupling. One can be joined to any
train of thought in all Christendom with it, and rolled in luxury around
the world in the private car of one's own mind.

But it is not so much as a luxury as a convenience that reading for
principles appeals to a vigorous mind. It is the short-cut to knowledge.
The man who is once started in reading for principles is not long in
distancing the rest of us, because all the reading that he does goes
into growth,--is saved up in a few handy, prompt generalisations. His
whole being becomes alert and supple. He has the under-hold in dealing
with nature, grips hold the law of the thing and rules it. He is capable
of far reaches where others go step by step. In every age of the world
of thought he goes about giant-like, lifting worlds with a laugh, doing
with the very playing of his mind work which crowds of other minds
toiling on their crowds of facts could not accomplish. He is only able
to do this by being a master of principles. He has made himself a man
who can handle a principle, a sum-total of a thousand facts as easily as
other men, men with bare scientific minds, can handle one of the facts.
He thinks like a god--not a very difficult thing to do. Any man can do
it after thirty or forty years, if he gives himself the chance, if he
reads for principles, keeps his imagination--the way Emerson did, for
instance--sound and alive all through. He does not need to deny that the
bare scientific method, the hugging of the outside of a thing, the being
deliberately superficial and literal--the needing to know all of the
facts, is a useful and necessary method at times; but outside of his
specialty he takes the ground that the scientific method is not the
normal method through which a man acquires his knowledge, but a
secondary and useful method for verif