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 of 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 willfulness. People often write obscurely because they have never taken the trouble to learn to write clearly. This sort of obscurity you find too often in modern philosophers, in men of science, and even in literary critics. Here it is indeed strange. You would have thought that men who passed 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 sentence after sentence that you must read twice to discover the sense. Often you can only guess at it, for the writers have evidently not said what they intended. 有點文學啊！

熱心網友

我從來對那些要求讀者努力讀懂他們著作的意圖的那些作者們缺乏耐心。要清晰表述微妙的內心感悟，你只有去求助于那些哲學大家們。你會發現荷馬的思想晦澀難懂，如果你沒有經過任何哲學方面的歷練，他所表達的那些內涵就會從你身邊溜走；但是沒有接受過任何這種教育的人恐怕沒人會看不懂每個句子的確切含義。幾乎沒有人能夠像伯克里那樣能運用英語如此優雅。作家們晦澀深奧可以分為兩種。一種是源于疏忽而另一種則源于率性而為。他們經常寫得含混難懂是因為他們從不會不怕麻煩地寫清楚。你會經常從現代哲學家，科學家甚至文學批評家那里體會到這種晦澀。這的確是一種奇怪的現象。你可能會覺得，這些在研究文學大家們中窮其一生的人們更應該對書面語言的美感十分敏感；即便不是富于美感也至少應該清楚明白。然而，你會發現，為了弄懂其中的含義，你必須得逐句重讀一遍他們的著作。而且經常你只能猜度，因為作者經常是醉翁之意不在酒，及此而言它了。 。