Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is
thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it
is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless
we chew them over again they will not give us strength and
nourishment.... The memory may be stored, but the judgement is little
better, and the stock of knowledge not increased, by being able to
repeat what others have said or produce the arguments we have found in
them. Such a knowledge as this is but knowledge by hearsay, and the
ostentation of it is at best but talking by rote, and very often upon
weak and wrong principles. For all that is to be found in books is not
built upon true foundations, nor always rightly deduced from the
principles it is pretended to be built on.... The mind is backward in
itself to be at the pains to trace every argument to its original, and
to see upon what basis it stands, and how firmly; but yet it is this
that gives so much the advantage to one man more than another in
reading. The mind should, by severe rules, be tied down to this at first
uneasy task; use and exercise will give it facility. So that those who
are accustomed to it, readily, as it were with one cast of the eye, take
a view of the argument, and presently, in most cases, see where it
bottoms. Those who have got this faculty, one may say, have got the true
key of books, and the clue to lead them through the mizmaze of variety
of opinions and authors to truth and certainty. This young beginners
should be entered in, and showed the use of, that they might profit by
their reading.... This way of thinking on and profiting by what we read
will be a clog and rub to any one only in the beginning; when custom and
exercise has made it familiar, it will be dispatched in most occasions,
without resting or interruption in the course of our reading.--J. LOCKE.
_Conduct of the Understanding._