Thinking and learning to think - Nathan C. Schaeffer (romantic story to read .txt) 📗
- Author: Nathan C. Schaeffer
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Not less valuable is the power of imaging in the study of history. Many details are worthless and meaningless until the imagination weaves them into a fabric in which their relations and significance become apparent. So far as the trend of history is concerned, it would have mattered very little if the name of the ship in which the Pilgrim fathers sailed had been Aprilshower instead of Mayflower, if the number of passengers had been one hundred and one instead of exactly one hundred, if they had landed at some place other than Plymouth Rock. Their coming, their compact, their religious life and purposes were of chief importance. Details help to fill out the mental picture of their voyage, landing, and settlement. They throw a halo of interest around the central event, or germinal idea. Or, to change the figure, they furnish the scaffolding by means of which the teacher gradually raises the edifice of historical knowledge. After the edifice has been completed the scaffolding may be removed. After the essential or central idea has been grasped and fixed, details like the name of the ship, the number of emigrants, and the exact day of their arrival may be forgotten. The mind can often unload the luggage that is not absolutely needed, and move with more ease and speed into new fields of thought and investigation.
Geometry has been aptly styled eine Augenwissenschaft, “a science of the eye” (the last word being used not as the object with which the science deals, but as the means by which its ideas are acquired). The line drawn upon the black-board has breadth, and is not at all a mathematical line. Through the eye it serves to suggest the line which has length without breadth or thickness. Progress in solid geometry is impossible if the mind does not image or conceive the volumes of three dimensions indicated by the drawings on a surface which has but two dimensions. In arithmetic many of the business transactions upon which the problems are based have not come into the experience of the child, but must be evolved by appeals to the imagination if the solutions are to be brought within easy reach of the understanding. The power of combining images into new forms aids greatly in the construction of apparatus and in the making of experiments. It helps the scientist to evolve his theories and hypotheses. It is the faculty by which man becomes a creator in science, art, literature, and philosophy.
Few suggestions for the exercise of the creative imagination can be given. Here rules are more of a hinderance than a help. The imagination is not creative in the sense of evolving something out of nothing,—this notion has misled many in their estimate of genius,—but in the sense of producing that which never existed, at least for the individual himself. Its activity has been denominated plastic from the fact that it moulds and fashions the materials or images into the forms which the new product is to assume. The influence of judgment is needed to keep the imagination from violating the laws and principles inherent in the things from which its materials are drawn. The understanding aids and is aided by this creative, plastic function of the imagination. The two should have free play in productive thinking. Let the student of science or art saturate himself with the theme on which he is working; let him keep health and energy of body and mind at their highest point; let him concentrate his best powers on what is to be accomplished, keeping clearly in mind the end to be reached and the materials to be used; the product for which he is working will spring into being in ways that he cannot explain. Like an unfathomable well which has been gathering its waters through hidden channels from mysterious sources, the stream of thought comes welling up from the depth of the soul into the conscious life of the thinker, giving him the living waters by which he can satisfy the thirst for knowledge felt by other souls. In expressing, formulating, and communicating the thoughts which thus come to him he cannot help feeling the “joy of creating.” “The history of literature,” says Shedd, “furnishes many examples of men whose knowledge only increased their sorrow, because it never found an efflux from their own minds into the world. Knowledge uncommunicated is something like remorse unconfessed. The mind, not being allowed to go out of itself, and to direct its energies towards an object and end greater and worthier than itself, turns back upon itself, and becomes morbidly self-reflecting and self-conscious. A studious and reflecting man of this class is characterized by excessive fastidiousness, which makes him dissatisfied with all that he does himself or sees done by others; which represses and finally suppresses all the buoyant and spirited activity of the intellect, leaving it sluggish as ‘the dull weed that rots by Lethe’s wharf.’”
No teacher and no system of training can furnish both brains and culture. It is not the mission of any person to create in every line of effort. Some find their joy in evolving and expressing thought with tongue or pen, others through the brush or the chisel, and still others through machinery and the handicrafts. In every occupation man may experience the joy of creating if his powers of imaging are allowed to play and interplay with other activities of thought. Each in normal conditions helps the others, and the activity of all combined is essential to complete living.
XIIITHE STREAM OF THOUGHT
Madame Swetchine says that to have ideas is to gather flowers: to think is to weave them into garlands. There could be no happier synonym for thinking than the word weaving,—a putting together of the best products of observation, reading, experience, and travel so as to represent a patterned whole, receiving its design from the weaver’s own mind. We have plenty of flowers; we want more garlands. We have libraries, books, and newspapers; we want more thinkers.
T. Sharper Knowlson.
XIIITHE STREAM OF THOUGHT
In speaking of our inner life we employ language that abounds in metaphors drawn from the external world. Some are faded metaphors; others are still fresh and new enough to suggest what was in the minds of those first using them. Many of these metaphorical expressions draw attention to one side or phase of the truth. If pressed with the design of making them embody the whole truth, they become untruths.
One fact of our waking consciousness is that thought goes on without stopping so long as we remain awake. Indeed, some philosophers have drawn the inference that the soul always thinks, that during the hours of deep sleep the brain-centres may be at rest, but that thought nevertheless flows on in the unconscious depths of our being. Locke combats this idea at length and with more than usual warmth. During sleep on a railway train we sometimes seem to be awake, the ends of our conscious thinking apparently fitting into each other without gaps; and yet the calling out of the stations convinces us that we must have been wrapped in unconscious slumber when we passed certain stations without noticing that the train stopped and the stations were announced. On the other hand, it is the experience of earnest students that the striking of a clock may escape notice because the mind has been deeply absorbed in a difficult problem.
The question need not concern us beyond the fact that the thinking of our most wakeful moments perpetually plays into our subconscious life. In order that the flow of thought welling up from the deepest depths of the soul may be clear, copious, and full, it is the duty of the teacher to keep himself and his pupils wide awake during the hours of study and recitation. He should not worry them by excessive tasks or unreasonable examinations so that the hours of sleep are disturbed by dreams, followed during the day by weariness and fatigue. The folly of burning the midnight oil and of spending too many hours each day in mental toil is fraught with evil consequences in the domain of thought. In the main Harbaugh was right when he undertook to change Franklin’s maxim about early rising into the following form: “Go to bed early, and get up late; but then keep awake all day.”
So far as we are aware, thought is going forward continuously while we are awake. This phase of consciousness has been likened to a stream, and has given rise to the expression, The stream of thought. The metaphor can be pressed very far without conveying untruths. A stream does not always flow with the same velocity. It is at times deep, at other times shallow, now moving forward like a swollen torrent, now flowing placidly with scarcely a wave or a ripple perceptible on its surface. Here its smooth course is disturbed by wind and storm and rain; there its even flow is influenced by rocks and irregularities in the bed of the stream. Again and again its current is modified by affluents which empty their waters into the main stream, perhaps changing the appearance from clear to cloudy or muddy, or, it may be, exerting the opposite effect. To all these peculiarities in the flow of the stream there are likenesses in the stream of thought. At times it is deep and at other times shallow, now violent and disturbed, now calm and placid, sometimes clear to the bottom, sometimes cloudy, yea, muddy, always modified more or less by influences from without, which are taken up into the main current of thought and alter the stream like the tributaries of a great river.
On reaching the level country a river may spread out into a lake, resulting in a clearing up of the water and resembling the periods of calm meditation during which the soul clarifies its thinking. The lifelike behavior
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