Thinking and learning to think - Nathan C. Schaeffer (romantic story to read .txt) 📗
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Dr. J. P. Gordy, to whom credit is due for the preceding quotation, further says, “Words are like paper money; their value depends on what they stand for. As you would be none the richer for possessing Confederate money to the amount of a million dollars, so your pupils would be none the wiser for being able to repeat book after book by heart, unless the words were the signs of ideas in their minds. Words without ideas are an irredeemable paper currency. It is the practical recognition of this truth that has revolutionized the best schools in the last quarter of a century.... In what did the reform inaugurated by Pestalozzi consist? In the substitution of the intelligent for the blind use of words. He reversed the educational engine. Before his time teachers expected their pupils to go from words to ideas; he taught them to go from ideas to words. He brought out the fact upon which I have been insisting,—that words are utterly powerless to create ideas; that all they can do is to help the pupil to recall and recombine ideas already formed. With Pestalozzi, therefore, and with those who have been imbued with his theories, the important matter is the forming of clear and definite ideas.”[4]
It was a remark of Goethe that genius begins in the senses. With equal truth we may say that thinking begins in the senses. Like unto the genius, the thoughtful man perceives and interprets what has escaped the notice of other people. To sight he adds insight. That which he sees is subsumed under the proper class or category, and is viewed from different sides until its significance is discovered, and a place is assigned to it in the intellectual horizon and in the external world. Every fact thus seen in its relation to other facts serves as a basis for further observation, reflection, and comparison. Not merely the genius, but every other person whose thinking is above the average in vigor and accuracy, has the power to perceive things which escape the eyes and ears of other people. Through habits of careful and correct observation he fills his mind with images, ideas, concepts of the objects of thought and of the relations which exist between these objects, and thereby acquires the materials for the comparisons which constitute the essence of good thinking. If the strength of a student is exhausted in gathering and storing the materials for thought, his mind becomes a wilderness of facts; if he reasons without the facts, his conclusions are more unreal than the figments of the imagination.
Truth is the best thought-material for the mind to act upon. The possession of truth is the aim and the goal of all correct thinking. Knowledge of the truth implies the conformity of thinking with being. The world within should be made to correspond with the world outside of us.
Fortunately, the self-activity of children is towards the objective world of things which they can see, hear, smell, taste, and handle. From inner impulse their thinking is directed towards the cognition of objects. One of the functions of nature study is to beget habits of careful and accurate observation. This is a characteristic feature of the laboratory method as distinguished from the library method. A training in both is essential to a complete education. The library stores the treasures of knowledge which the human race has gathered and makes them accessible to the learner. The laboratory shows him by what methods truth is discovered and tested and verified. The German professor who declined to visit a menagerie, asserting that he could evolve the idea of the elephant from his inner consciousness, may have spent much time in reading books and in speculation; but he certainly never worked in a laboratory; nor had he taken to heart the lessons which he might have learned from the sages of antiquity. Aristotle knew the importance of asking nature for facts, and he induced his royal pupil, Alexander the Great, to employ two thousand persons in Europe, Asia, and Africa for the purpose of gathering information concerning beasts, birds, and reptiles, whereby he was enabled to write fifty volumes upon animated nature. After teachers had forgotten his methods they still turned to his books for the treasures which he had gathered. In the ages in which men hardly dared to ask nature for her secrets, fearing that they might be accused of witchcraft, they turned to Aristotle as if he were an infallible guide—so much so that when Galileo announced the discovery of sun-spots a monk declared that he had read Aristotle through from beginning to end, and inasmuch as Aristotle said nothing about spots on the sun, therefore there are none. This book-method of studying science has not entirely disappeared from the seats of learning. Books like Tyndall’s “Water and the Forms of Water,” Faraday’s “Chemistry of a Candle,” and Newcomb’s “Popular Astronomy” may, indeed, be read or studied as literature, and thus prove a means of culture; but to accept the facts and statements of a text-book without verification is the lazy man’s method of studying science; and as a method it fails to lay the foundation upon which a solid superstructure can be built. The correct method starts with observation of the things to be known, develops the basal concepts which lie at the foundation of the science under consideration, ends by teaching the pupil how to make independent investigations, how to utilize the treasures which have been preserved in our libraries, thereby furnishing an adequate supply of proper materials for thought.
The habits of men who have surprised the world by their intellectual and professional achievements are very suggestive. Spurgeon kept his mind filled by constant reading. Goethe was fond of travel and utilized what he learned from others. Emerson visited the markets regularly, conversed with the men and women from whom he bought, and sought to learn their views on current events. Study the greatest thinkers the world has known, and you will find their memories to have been a storehouse of thought-materials which they analyzed, sifted, compared, and formulated into systems that win the admiration of all who love to think.
IVBASAL CONCEPTS AS THOUGHT-MATERIAL
Thought proper, as distinguished from other facts of consciousness, may be adequately described as the act of knowing or judging of things by means of concepts.
Mansel.
We cannot learn all words through other words. There is a large and rapidly increasing part of all modern vocabularies which can be comprehended only by the observation of nature, scientific experiment,—in short, by the study of things.
Marsh.
The question we ask of each thing (and of the whole experience) is, What are you? You have qualities which I find everywhere else; your color I find in other things; your texture and hardness and odor and form I find in other things; but they are combined in you in such a way as to make you a thing by yourself, and not anything else. And I want to know what you truly are,—in short, what is your essence, which is also your idea, and the purpose or τέλος of your existence.
Laurie.
IVBASAL CONCEPTS AS THOUGHT-MATERIAL
The head may be likened unto a walled city, with comparatively few building materials on the inside, and with a limited number of gate-ways through which all other materials for building purposes must pass. The walls are not made of brick or stone, but of bone; the gate-ways are the different senses through which knowledge enters the mind. The building materials on the inside are intuitive ideas which take shape in conjunction with the entrance of materials from without. The structures which are built up out of the ideas within and the sense-impressions from without are individual and general concepts. Take an orange. Its shape, color, parts, are known through the eye. Its flavor, as sweet or sour, is ascertained through taste; its odor through smell; its temperature, shape, and some other qualities through touch. These various sense-impressions, giving the mind a knowledge of essential and accidental qualities and attributes, are combined in the idea of a particular orange. If the object were a bell, its sound, parts, uses, and qualities would make impressions through different gate-ways of knowledge; the builder inside would combine them into the more or less complete idea of the object presented to the senses. From each sense-impression the mind may get a percept; the synthesis of these percepts produces the individual concept or notion.
It is helpful at this point clearly to distinguish between essential and accidental attributes. The orange may have been kept in the open air when the temperature is low. To the hand it feels cold, and this quality enters into the idea of the first orange which the child has. As other oranges which have been in a warmer atmosphere are brought to the child, the attribute cold is seen to be accidental,—that is, it is not a necessary quality of oranges in general. On the other hand, the qualities which are found in every orange—many of them hard to describe in words—become fixed in the mind as essential attributes of the orange. In course of time many objects of the same kind are presented to the senses, cognized by comparison so as to retain the essential attributes and to omit the accidentals. By this process the general notion or concept is formed.
It is self-evident that the mind’s comparisons and conclusions are unreliable in so far as the gate-ways of knowledge are defective. Few persons have perfect ears; many can never become expert tuners of pianos or reliable critics of musical performances. The man who is color-blind is not accepted in the railway service or as an officer in the navy. The man who is totally blind is never selected as a guide in daylight. On the other hand, the blind girl spoken of by Bulwer could find her way better in the darkness of the last days of Pompeii than other people, because she was accustomed to rely upon the data furnished by the
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