appears in a letter of Descartes prefacing his Principles of  
Philosophy : “. . . it may first of all be run through in its entirety 
like a novel, without forcing the attention unduly upon it. . . . It 
is only necessary to mark with a pen the places where difficulty 
is found, and continue to read without interruption to the end.”

     The instruction of Descartes to his readers is one of the 
more explicit recognitions of the change in language and 
thought resulting from print. Namely, that there is no more 
need, as there had been in oral philosophy, to probe and check 
each term. The context will now do. The situation is not unlike 
the meeting of two scholars today. When one asks, “How do 
you use the term ‘tribal’ in that connection?”, the other can 
say, “Read my article on it in the current issue of . . .” 
Paradoxically, a close attention to precise nuance of word use 
is an oral and not a written trait. For large, general visual