Bacon on studies
📚SOURCE
💎PERMANENT NOTES
🧵SYNTHESIS
One page, written four hundred years ago, and it contains most of what I believe about reading. 🏛️ Francis Bacon says studies serve three ends: delight, in private; ornament, in conversation; and ability, in judging and arranging business. Each has its excess. Too much time in study is sloth, too much display is affectation, and judging everything by the rules of books is the humour of a scholar. Learning has to be trimmed by experience, as a plant by pruning.
Then the instruction on how to read: not to contradict, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk, but to weigh and consider. And the sorting of books into those to be tasted, those to be swallowed, and the few to be chewed and digested, which gives permission to read most things in parts and without guilt.
The sentence I came for is the one about the three activities. Reading fills a person, conversation makes them quick, and writing makes them exact. He follows it with the cost of skipping each: write little and you need a great memory, confer little and you need a ready wit, read little and you need much cunning to seem to know what you do not.
✨KEY IDEAS
"Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man."
"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."
Read to weigh and consider, and neither to refute nor to swallow.
Clever people despise study, simple people admire it, wise people use it.
Each kind of study mends a particular weakness of mind, as an exercise mends a part of the body.
📝READING NOTES
Public domain. Two sentences quoted from the 1625 edition of the Essays, in modernised spelling. The rest is paraphrase. Read on the evening of 28 February in ten minutes and written up the next morning.
Why a page from 1625
Because the vault is built on its middle sentence and I had never read the essay it comes from. I knew the line as a slogan. In context it is one step in a tight argument about what each activity is for.
The three, as I use them
| Bacon | Here | What it gives |
|---|---|---|
| Reading | Source notes | Fullness: material |
| Conference | Noor's comments, a reply from a reader, a retro | Readiness: being able to answer |
| Writing | Literature and permanent notes, the newsletter | Exactness: knowing what I mean |
The third row is the one that I had only half understood. Exact is the right word. I can hold a view for years without noticing the hole in it, and a hundred written words will find the hole by the second sentence. That is 💎 Writing is how I find out whether I understand, the first permanent note I marked as mature. The belief sits in its own note.
A small disagreement
He ranks. Books are for digesting or for tasting, and he lets some be read by deputy, in extracts made by others, which he then calls flashy things like distilled waters. I rely on summaries more than he would approve of, and so does anyone with a job. I think the modern rule is: a summary is fine for deciding whether to read, and worthless as a substitute for having read.
A larger one: he says nothing about forgetting. A full man leaks. See 📖 Ebbinghaus on forgetting, which I read in April, for what happens to all that fullness in a fortnight.
Kept
- The quote note 💬 Reading maketh a full man.
- Permission, from an essayist with no doubts about his own seriousness, to taste.
Zinsser is this sentence expanded to a book: 📖 Zinsser on clutter. He supplies the method and Bacon the reason.
🗣️IN SHORT
- In : Of Studies, from the 1625 edition of the Essays
- Bacon argues that : study is for use, and that reading, conversation and writing each do a different job that the others cannot do
- by stating that : reading supplies matter, discussion makes it available at speed, and writing forces precision, and that books deserve different depths of attention according to their worth