Thinking and learning to think - Nathan C. Schaeffer (romantic story to read .txt) 📗
- Author: Nathan C. Schaeffer
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Who can fully appreciate these stanzas without picturing the landscape of clover, blue-eyed grass, meadow bars, river lane, cows moving homeward, and especially the boy with the shadow on his face, the two older brothers lying dead under the feet of the trampling foe? The subsequent parts of the poem lend themselves to the activity of the imagination, to a play of sympathy for the father seemingly bereft of all his sons, until on a summer day cool and late he sees fluttering in the wind an empty sleeve of army blue, beneath a face that he knew,—a scene which, if constructed by the imagination, cannot help stirring the emotional life of the reader and giving him proper tones and inflections in oral reading while more fully realizing the price paid in war for the saving of the nation. Very much of our thinking does not turn on images or mental pictures. We do not primarily think justice, law, kindness, mercy under the form of images, though by a secondary process we can throw these ideas into concrete examples and image them as occurring in life. Very many ideas cannot be made concrete in that way, as, for example, the ideas of infinity, eternity. Sometimes an indistinct or faded image does duty for the idea of horses in general, but in such cases the image is representative of the idea, and should not be confounded with the idea. Both are thoughts, but not all thoughts are ideas or images. Many thoughts are propositions and cannot be imaged at all.
The images which go with words grow in fulness as one’s experience enlarges. Take the word fire. The first idea was formed from fire in the stove and in the smithy. A fuller idea resulted from the sight of a distant mountain on fire. Then a distant conflagration resulting in the loss of a block of town property gave the word still fuller content. Finally, the destruction of the State Capitol, in which part of the manuscript of a book, other valuable papers and records were destroyed, and in which one or two friends almost lost their lives, gave a meaning to the word fire which it never had before. Without doubt it hampers the mind and impedes the logical processes of thought if the word invariably calls up the idea of these fires with the accompanying emotions.
We saw the value of the labor-saving devices introduced by the symbols and formulas of mathematics and other sciences. Analysts carry forward long trains of thought by means of symbols whose meaning can be, but is not always, called up with the successive links of the chain of reasoning. In adding a column of figures, in solving an algebraic equation, in reading a work on higher mathematics or logic, in thinking the formulas of chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc., and in dealing with objects, forces, and relations which have been accurately and definitely quantified, the thinking may be carried forward by the use of symbols which can be interpreted and applied whenever the occasion requires, but whose meaning is not always present to the mind. In reading of things which have not been quantified, the stream of thought often flows on without images, or mental pictures, or copies of sensations. Nevertheless, the examination of any school reader or book of selections from the best literature will show how our best writers and orators appeal to the imagination, and to what a large field the method of thinking in images or mental pictures is applicable for the purpose of securing due appreciation of good literature and proper expression in oral reading.
The simplest thinking is the comparison of objects when these are present to the senses. It prevails largely in the handicrafts and in the ordinary duties of life. More difficult is the comparison of images or mental pictures of things when these are not present to the senses, but must be recalled by the memory. This thinking is essential to the appreciation of poetry, to the vivid presentation of thought, and should not be neglected by those who wish to move the multitudes with tongue or pen. “Imaging,” says Dryden, “is in itself the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet paints.” Higher, from the scientist’s point of view, is the thinking in substitute symbols which stand for ideas definitely fixed or quantified. Higher still is the comparison of abstract and general ideas through expressive symbols, including their application to the problems of life; for this is the kind of thinking that characterizes the scientist and the philosopher, the engineer and the surgeon, the editor and the orator, and, in fact, all whose vocation has risen to the rank of a profession. But highest of all is the thinking which creates and invents, begetting progress in science and art, in literature and history, in government and civilization.
XVTHE STREAM OF THOUGHT IN WRITING, SPEAKING, AND ORAL READING
The highest joy is the freedom of the mind in the living play of all its powers.
Schiller.
The historian Niebuhr, speaking of the historian’s vocation, remarks that he who calls past ages into being enjoys a bliss analogous to that of creating. With still more truth may we say of that mind which is able, in the conscious awakening of all its powers, to give full and satisfactory utterance to its thick-coming thoughts, that it enjoys the joy of a creator. If there is one bright particular hour in the life of the educated man, in the career of the scholar, it is that hour for which all other hours of student-life were made,—that hour in which he gives original and full expression to what has been slowly gendering within him.
Shedd.
Unless a man can link his written thoughts with the everlasting wants of men so that they shall draw from them as from wells, there is no more immortality to the thoughts and feelings of the soul than to the muscles and bones.
Beecher.
XVTHE STREAM OF THOUGHT IN WRITING, SPEAKING, AND ORAL READING
Eventful in his career is the day on which a young person speaks in public for the first time. His hands and arms are in his way; his lower limbs quake; his lips and throat feel dry and parched; the vocal organs refuse to obey his bidding; he experiences other discomforts which he cannot explain and which are due to embarrassment and nervousness. What is worst of all, he cannot tell what has gone wrong in his mind. If his speech was committed, the memory fails to recall some word or sentence that seems absolutely essential to the sequence of thought. If he speaks extemporaneously, the stream of thought stops flowing, or turns back in eddies, or perhaps spreads out over all the land instead of moving towards the proper goal. In fact, all these annoyances have their fontal source in the mind, in a play of emotions in which stage-fright is the principal element. To this young man some trusted friend should whisper, “Take courage;” for if ever in his life a young man needs encouragement it is when he makes his first speech or preaches his first sermon.
Public speakers are made, not born. Native talent is helpful, but not all sufficient. Most of the obstacles to success disappear as soon as one has learned to think on his feet; that is, to control the stream of thought when facing an audience.
There are, of course, exceptions to all rules. Some young men possess an amount of self-confidence which is proof against embarrassment. Such youth are sometimes gifted with a flow of words that is fatal to ultimate success. It enables them to fill time without previous preparation. Bautain describes a “fatal facility a thousand times worse than hesitation or than silence, which drowns thought in floods of words, or in a torrent of copiousness, sweeping away good earth and leaving behind sand and stones alone. Heaven keep us from these interminable talkers, such as are often to be found in southern countries, who deluge you, relatively to anything and to nothing, with a shower of dissertation and a down-pouring of their eloquence. During nine-tenths of the time there is not one rational thought in the whole of this twaddle, carrying along in its course every kind of rubbish and platitude. The class of persons who produce a speech so easily and who are ready at the shortest moment to extemporize a speech, a dissertation, or a homily, know not how to compose a tolerable sentence; and I repeat that, with such exceptions as defy all rule, he who has not learned how to write will never know how to speak.”[40]
No one stands in greater need of the discipline derived from the use of the pen than those who overflow with words and sentences. Their dearth of ideas can be remedied in no other way. The sentence which escapes from the lips is fleeting and soon forgotten. The sentence in black and white, which stares you in the face from the written page, can be read and re-read until its lack of sense and its wealth of nonsense and absurdity grow too glaring to be endured. Paragraph after paragraph can thus be tested, condensed, and stuffed full of meaning. This discipline ultimately enables a fluent talker to speak with force and to the point, because it gradually transforms his habits of thinking, deepening the stream of thought and enabling it to carry craft too weighty to be borne by a
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