How to Make an Index

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Wheatley Henry Benjamin. How to Make an Index

PREFACE

CHAPTER I. Introduction

CHAPTER II. Amusing and Satirical Indexes

CHAPTER III. The Bad Indexer

CHAPTER IV. The Good Indexer

CHAPTER V. Different Classes of Indexes

CHAPTER VI. General Rules for Alphabetical Indexes

CHAPTER VII. How to Set About the Index

CHAPTER VIII. General or Universal Index

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IT is generally agreed that that only is true knowledge which consists of information assimilated by our own minds. Mere disjointed facts kept in our memories have no right to be described as knowledge. It is this understanding that has made many writers jeer at so-called index-learning. Thus, in the seventeenth century, Joseph Glanville, writing in his Vanity of Dogmatizing, says: "Methinks 'tis a pitiful piece of knowledge that can be learnt from an index, and a poor ambition to be rich in the inventory of another's treasure." Dr. Watts alluded to those whose "learning reaches no farther than the tables of contents"; but then he added a sentence which quite takes the sting from what he had said before, and shows how absolutely needful an index is. He says: "If a book has no index or table of contents, 'tis very useful to make one as you are reading it."

Swift had his say on index-learning, too. In the Tale of a Tub (Section VII.) he wrote: "The most accomplisht way of using books at present is twofold: Either serve them as some men do Lords, learn their titles exactly, and then brag of their acquaintance. Or secondly, which indeed is the choicer, the profounder and politer method, to get a thorough insight into the Index, by which the whole book is governed and turned, like fishes by the tail. For to enter the palace of Learning at the great gate, requires an expense of time and forms; therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back-door. For, the Arts are all in a flying march, and therefore more easily subdued by attacking them in the rear.... Thus men catch Knowledge by throwing their wit on the posteriors of a book, as boys do sparrows with flinging salt upon their tails. Thus human life is best understood by the wise man's Rule of regarding the end. Thus are the Sciences found like Hercules' oxen, by tracing them backwards. Thus are old Sciences unravelled like old stockings, by beginning at the foot."

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If Prynne had sent his child out into the world without an index, he might have escaped from persecution, as no one would have found out the enormities which were supposed to lurk within the pages of the book. But he was unwise enough to add a most elaborate index, in which all the attacks upon a calling that received the sanction of the Court were arranged in a convenient form for reference. Attorney-General Noy found that the author himself had forged the weapons which he (the prosecutor) could use in the attack. This is proved by a passage in Noy's speech at Prynne's trial, where he points out that the accused "says Christ was a Puritan, in his Index." Noy calls it an index, but Prynne himself describes it as "A Table (with some brief additions) of the chiefest passages in this treatise."2

The entries in the index are so curious and one-sided in their accusations that it is worth while to quote some of them rather fully:

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