The Most Subtle Reflections

By Author: rdfgdr
Total Articles: 105
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I have never had much patience with the writers who claim from the reader an effort to understand their meaning. You have only to go to the great philosophers to see that it is possible to express with lucidity the most subtle reflections. You may find it difficult to understand the thought of Hume, and if you have no philosophical training its implications will doubtless escape you; but no one with any education at all can fail to understand exactly what the meaning each sentence is. Few people have written English with more grace than Berkeley. There are two sorts of obscurity that you find in writers. One is due to negligence and the other to willful-less. People often write obscurely because they have never taken the trouble to learn to write dearly. This sort of obscurity you find too often in modern philosophers, in men of science, aid even in literary critics. Here it is indeed strange. You would have thought that men who massed their lives in the study of the great masters of literature would be sufficiently sensitive to the beauty of language to write if not beautifully at least with perspicuity. Yet you will find in ...
... their works sentences that you must read twice to discover the sense. Often you can only guess it it, for the writers have evidently not said what they intended.

Another cause of obscurity is that the writer is himself not quite sure of his meaning. He has vague impression of what he wants to say, but has not, either from lack of mental power) r from laziness, exactly formulated it in his mind and it is natural enough that he should not 5nd a precise expression for a confused idea. This is due largely to the fact that many writers hink, not before, but as they write. The pen originates the thought. The disadvantage of this, and indeed it is a danger ageist which the author must be always on his guard, is that there is sort of magic in the written word. The idea acquires substance by taking on a visible nature and then stands in the way of its own clarification. But this sort of obscurity merges very easily nto the willful. Some writers who do not think clearly are inclined to suppose that their haughty have significance greater than at first sight appears. It is flattering to believe that they are too profound to be expressed so clearly that all who run may read, and very naturally t does not occur to such writers that the fault is with their own minds which have not the facilely of precise reflection. Here again the magic of the written word obtains. It is very easy to persuade oneself that a phrase that one does not quite understand may mean a great deal more ham one realizes. From this there is only a little way to go to fall into the habit of setting down me's impressions in all their original vagueness. There is another form of willful obscurity that masquerades as aristocratic exclusiveness. The author wraps his meaning in mystery so that the raga shall not participate in it. His soul is a secret garden into which the elect may penetrate jolly after overcoming a number of perilous obstacles. But this kind of obscurity is not only pretentious; it is short-sighted. For time plays it an odd trick. If the sense is meager time reduces it to a meaningless verbiage that no one thinks of reading.