It is first necessary, then, to make an endeavor to become interested in whatever it has seemed worth while to read. The student should try earnestly to discover wherein others have found it good. Every reader is at liberty to like or to dislike even a masterpiece; but he is not in a position even to have an opinion of it until he appreciates why it has been admired. He must set himself to realize not what is bad in a book, but what is good. The common theory that the critical faculties are best developed by training the mind to detect shortcomings is as vicious as it is false. Any carper can find the faults in a great work; it is only the enlightened who can discover all its merits. It will seldom happen that a sincere effort to appreciate a good book will leave the reader uninterested. If it does, it is generally safe to conclude that the mind is not ready for this particular work. There must be degrees of development; and the same literature is not adapted to all stages. If you cannot honestly enjoy a thing you are from one cause or another in no condition to read it. Either the time is not ripe or it has no message for your especial temperament. To force yourself to read what does not please you is like forcing yourself to eat that for which you have no appetite. There may be some nourishment in one case as in the other, but there is far more likely to be indigestion. An essential condition of profitable reading is that it shall be intelligent. The extent to which some persons can go on reading without having any clear idea of what they read is stupefyingly amazing! You may any day talk in society with persons who have gone through exhaustive courses of reading, yet who from them have no more got real ideas than a painted bee would get honey from a painted flower. Fortunately ordinary mortals are not so bad as this; but is there one of us who is not conscious of having tobogganed down many and many a page without pausing thoroughly to seize and master a single thought by the way? It is well to make in the mind a sharp distinction between apprehending and comprehending. The difference is that between sighting and bagging your game. To run hastily along through a book, catching sight of the meaning of the author, getting a general notion of what he would convey,--casually apprehending his work,--is one thing; it is quite another to enter fully into the thoughts and emotions embodied, to make them yours by thorough appreciation,--in a word to comprehend. The trouble which Gibbon says he took to get the most out of what he read must strike ordinary readers with amazement:--