lways
to consist in the way it has of giving the nature of things a chance at
a man, of keeping things open to the sun and air of thought. To those
who cannot help being interested, it is a sad sight to stand by with the
typical modern man--especially a student--and watch him go blundering
about in a great book, cooping it up with purposes."

The P. G. S. of M. remarked somewhere at about this point that it seemed
to him that it made a great difference who an author or reader was. He
suggested that my theory of reading with a not-purpose worked rather
better with Shakespeare than with the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ or the
Hon. Carroll D. Wright, Commissioner of Statistics, or Ella Wheeler
Wilcox.

I admitted that in reading dictionaries, statistics, or mere poets or
mere scientists it was necessary to have a purpose to fall back upon to
justify one's self. And there was no denying that reading for results
was a necessary and natural thing. The trouble seemed to be, that very
few people could be depended on to pick out the right results. Most
people cannot be depended upon to pick out even the right directions in
reading a great book. It has to be left to the author. It could be
categorically proved that the best results in this world, either in
books or in life, had never been attained by men who always insisted on
doing their own steering. The special purpose of a great book is that a
man can stop steering in it, that one can give one's self up to the
undertow, to the cross-current in it. One feels one's self swept out
into the great struggling human stream that flows under life. One comes
to truths and delights at last that no man, though he had a thousand
lives, could steer to. Most of us are not clear-headed or far-sighted
enough to pick out purposes or results in reading. We are always
forgetting how great we are. We do not pick out results--and could not
if we tried--that are big enough.

II

The Usefully Unfinished

The P. G. S. of M. remarked that he thought there was such a thing as
having purposes in reading that were too big. It seemed to him that a
man who spent nearly all his strength when he was reading a book, in
trying to use it to swallow a universe with, must find it monotonous. He
said he had tried reading a great book without any purpose whatever
except its tangents or suggestions, and he claimed that when he read a
great book in that way--the average great book--the monotone of
innumerable p