does not seem to know what it is to take his
rest like a gentleman. He lunges between all-science and all-vaudeville,
and plays in his way, it is true, but he never plays with his mind. He
never takes playing with a mind seriously, as one of the great standard
joys and powers and equipments of human life. He does not seem to love
his mind enough to play with it. Above all, he does not see that playing
with a mind (on great subjects, at least) is the only possible way to
make it work. He entirely overlooks the fact, in his little round of
reading for results, that the main thing a book is in a man's hands for
is the man--that it is there to lift him over into a state of being, a
power of action. A man who really reads a book and reads it well, reads
it for moral muscle, spiritual skill, for far-sightedness, for
catholicity--above all for a kind of limberness and suppleness, a swift
sure strength through his whole being. He faces the world with a new
face when he has truly read a true book, and as a bridegroom coming out
of his chamber, he rejoices as a strong man to run a race.

As between reading to heighten one's senses, one's suggestibility, power
of knowing and combining facts, the _multum-in-parvo_ method in reading,
and the _parvum-in-multo_ method, a dogged, accumulating, impotent,
callous reading for results, it is not hard to say which, in the
equipment of the modern scientist, is being overlooked.

It is doubtless true, the common saying of the man of genius in every
age, that "everything is grist to his mill," but it would not be if he
could not grind it fine enough. And he is only able to grind it fine
enough because he makes his reading bring him power as well as grist.
Having provided for energy, stored-up energy for grinding, he guards and
preserves that energy as the most important and culminating thing in his
intellectual life. He insists on making provision for it. He makes ready
solitude for it, blankness, reverie, sleep, silence. He cultivates the
general habit not only of rejecting things, but of keeping out of their
way when necessary, so as not to have to reject them, and he knows the
passion in all times and all places for grinding grist finer instead of
gathering more grist. These are going to be the traits of all the mighty
reading, the reading that achieves, in the twentieth century. The saying
of the man of genius that everything is grist to his mill merely means
that he reads a book athletica