How to Learn: Lewis Carroll’s Four Rules for Digesting Information and Mastering the Art of Reading by Maria Popova “Mental recreation is a thing that we all of us need for our mental health.”
Long before he met the real-life little girl who inspired him to write Alice in Wonderland under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a prominent mathematician and logician. In addition to his scientific bend and his love of language, Carroll also had strong convictions about what it takes to cultivate a healthy mind. He married all three of these passions in the introductory essay to one of his textbooks on Symbolic Logic, included in the fantastic 1973 volume A Random Walk in Science (public library) — the same compendium of scientists’ irreverent ideas and comments that gave us this wonderful 1969 essay on how laughter saves us from the despotism of automation and that goes on to explore such curiosities as the physics of holding up a strapless dress and the math of why any horse actually has an infinite number of legs.
Under the unambiguous title “How to Learn,” Carroll offers four pointers on cultivating critical thinking and digesting even the most challenging of passages while reading.
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The Learner, who wishes to try the question fairly, whether this little book does, or does not, supply the materials for a most interesting mental recreation, is earnestly advised to adopt the following Rules:
If, dear Reader, you will faithfully observe these Rules, and so give my little book a really fair trail, I promise you, most confidently, that you will find Symbolic Logic to be one of the most, if not the most, fascinating of mental recreations!
[…]
Mental recreation is a thing that we all of us need for our mental health; and you may get much healthy enjoyment, no doubt, from Games… But, after all, when you have made yourself a first-rate player at any one of these Games, you have nothing real to show for it, as a result! You enjoyed the Game, and the victory, no doubt, at the time: but you have no result that you can treasure up and get real good out of. And, all the while, you have been leaving unexplored a perfect mine of wealth. Once master the machinery of Symbolic Logic, and you have a mental occupation always at hand, of absorbing interest, and one that will be of real use to you in any subject you may take up. It will give you clearness of thought—the ability to see your way through a puzzle—the habit of arranging your ideas in an orderly and get-at-able form—and, more valuable than all, the power to detect fallacies, and to tear to pieces the flimsy illogical arguments, which you will so continually encounter in books, in newspapers, in speeches, and even in sermons, and which so easily delude those who have never taken the trouble to master this fascinating Art. Try it. That is all I ask of you!
A Random Walk in Science is a gem in its entirety. Complement this particular bit with Carroll on feeding the mind and his , then revisit this 1936 guide to the 14 ways to acquire knowledge.
