(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Francis Bacon was a philosopher, essayist, lawyer and statesman.
Reading, for Bacon, was inextricably tied-up with writing and conversing. He termed this combination study. Study is used by wise people for a particular purpose, such that they neither admired nor condemned it, but recognised “a wisdom without them and above them, won by observation” (Bacon 1985, 209). To be useful, study must be combined with experience.
Reading, for example, can serve for “ornament”—improving our discourse—by providing examples of rhetoric, useful arguments and expressions (ibid.). Yet without a great memory, we’d forget these, so need to write them down. And without experience in public discourse, book-learned ornamentation leads us to speak with affectation (ibid.). To this end he collected “formula” from his reading (Bacon 1879, 208):
decent and apt passages and conveyances of speech, which may serve indifferently for differing subjects…. For as in buildings there is great pleasure and use in the wellcasting of the stair-cases, entries, doors, windows, and the like: so in speech, the conveyances and passages are of special ornament and effect
Or, reading can serve to make us more able in practical matters, improving our ability in “the judgement and disposition of business” (Bacon 1985, 209). People who haven’t studied “can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs come best from those that are learned” (ibid.). Reading can teach the general principles that experience by itself yields only, if at all, in old age. However, to “make judgement wholly by [study’s] rules is the humour of a scholar”—knowledge, again, must be combined with experience (ibid.). Note further that Bacon’s “business” was primarily his judicial and political employments, which involved not just sound judgement but also a great deal of conversation.
Reading can also serve for “delight”, contemplating in seclusion (ibid.). This describes Bacon’s scholarly activities, where he wasn’t content to merely republish or explicate maxims, but moved from (p. 27):
reading which has finished and is displayed in a literary mortuary (where men have thought this aphorism, or that, or that; and they have left it dead or rootless) to readings which cannot be finished because the writing can’t cross the interstices so finally that these conflicting aphorisms, maxims and other verbal authorities are reconciled
That is, he compared and contrasted the fragments he collected to understand how what he read cohered and where disagreement arose (Bacon 1879, 207). Too much study, however, leads to sloth, so he tempered his reading with observation and “learned experience”—“a kind of sagacity”, a “gathering and experimenting with an instinct of what might be” (Bacon 1985, 20 (quoted in)).
So, studying must be moderated and combined with experience. It can help perfect our nature, because, “like natural plants”, our natural abilities need pruning or cultivating, yet must be bounded by practical experience and observation lest they “give forth directions too much at large” (p. 209).
Studies make a person’s character, so specific deficiencies can be remedied with specific fields of study. Bacon suggests that “if a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again. …. If he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call up one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study the lawyers’ cases” (p. 210). Likewise, a person becomes wise through studying history, ingenious through poetry, subtle through mathematics, “deep, moral grave” through natural philosophy, and “able to contend” through logic and rhetoric (ibid.).
In Bacon’s expression, “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man”, the elements of study are brought together (p. 209). Again, we see activities recommended that compensate for deficiencies in our character. The better memory a person has, the less they need to write; the more ready a person’s mind, the less they need to confer; and the more a person can “seem to know that he doth not”, the less they need to read (ibid.). Reading, therefore, falls out of this trio as always necessary. One of the ways it makes us full must be why Bacon conceptualises it in terms of sustenance, using the verbs “tasted”, “swallowed”, “chewed”, “digested” to describe the use of books: reading satiates us in the sense of providing sufficient nutrition and material with which to work; but reading too much can make us fat. Experience, writing, and conversation put this fuel to use, burring off the excess.
Bacon collected excerpts and quotations from his reading in commonplace books, the passages therein extracted “from books which were then in every scholar’s hands” (Bacon 1879, 194). It appears that he recorded these “not as he read, but from memory afterwards”, as many are slightly inaccurate, and “was in the habit of sitting down from time to time, reviewing in memory the book he had last read, and jotting down those passages which for some reason or other he wished to fix in his mind” (ibid.). Not only was this useful for his writing but “would in all cases be a good exercise for the memory”, so “may have been practised for that alone” (ibid.).
It’s suggested that Bacon “found the slow and imperfect process of expounding ideas in words to impede too much the free motions of the mind” so instead recorded “brief sentences, picturesque images, or memorable expressions” because they embodied a thought, “such as might serve to represent and recall the entire idea which remained in puris naturalibus in his mind” (p. 195). In recording his insights gleaned from reading maxims and aphoristic thought by coining his own, Bacon brought creativity into his reading. He wished (p. 207 (quoted in)):
the seeds of the several arguments to be cast up into some brief and acute sentences, not to be cited, but to be as skeins or bottoms of thread, to be unwinded at large when they come to be used; supplying authorities and examples by reference
The attitude with which we should read is “not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider” (Bacon 1985, 209). But not all books are equally useful. Some need only skimming or occasional reference, some can be substituted for summaries, extracts, and commentaries, some read in their entirety but with no great care, and others carefully studied and analysed (ibid.). Or, as Bacon so memorably expressed (ibid.):
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.