Chapter VII: Part 7

The imagination is very active in children. Watch their plays if you would see how they convert a stick into a horse, the play-house into a home, and mimic the drama of life in their games and contests. Their life is largely make-believe and thinking in images. This tendency to think in images can be utilized in the lessons in arithmetic, geometry, geography, and history. Without the combination of images into new forms and products, the pupil cannot think the thoughts peculiar to these branches. For instance, the lesson in geography starts with what the child has seen or can see at home, and proceeds to that which is away from home, using pictures, drawings, lantern-slides, and vivid descriptions to aid the imagination in picturing scenery, cities, countries, and forms of life in other parts of the globe. It may be a question what the mind should think in connection with the symbols and truths of that science. The form of a continent is without doubt best conceived as given on a map. For many practical purposes, cities may be thought as mere starting-points and halting-places in a journey. Many a river is for mature minds a winding black line on colored surfaces called maps. Nevertheless, if geography means for a pupil no more than this, it will be dry and uninteresting indeed. Out of the images of things observed the mind should be led to construct images of what it has not seen. These images are never an adequate picture of the foreign city or country, even after they have been supplemented or modified by visits to museums, conservatories, and zoological gardens, by excursions to the field, the forest, and the factory, or even by travel at home and abroad. The thoughts of a country that one has journeyed through, or lived in for a time, consist partly of images and partly of symbolic representations. Since thinking in images is easier for beginners than thinking in symbols, the instruction in geography should begin with child-life at home, with the things on the breakfast-table, with the garments worn and the means of transportation used, and proceed from these to the life, the home, the dress, and the sports of children living in other lands and other climes. The lessons in geography make constant appeals to the imagination, and call for thinking in images or mental-pictures in connection with map-symbols and the discussions of causes and laws.

[Sidenote: History.]

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.

[Sidenote: Geometry.]

[Sidenote: Arithmetic.]

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.

[Sidenote: Creative imagination.]

[Sidenote: Productive thinking.]

[Sidenote: Knowledge uncommunicated.]

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.’”

[Sidenote: Forms of creative effort.]

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.

XIII

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT

At Learning’s fountain it is sweet to drink,
But ’tis a nobler privilege to think;
And oft, from books apart, the thirsting mind
May make the nectar which it cannot find.
’Tis well to borrow from the good and great;
’Tis wise to learn; ’tis godlike to create!

J. G. SAXE.

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.

XIII

THE 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.

[Sidenote: The flow of thought.]

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.

[Sidenote: Teacher’s duty.]

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.”

[Sidenote: Thought like a stream.]

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.

[Sidenote: Early life.]

[Sidenote: Other metaphors.]

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 of rivers and the carving of land forms from their youth through maturity to old age have furnished many a figure of speech for our poetic literature. The change from the active upper waters to the sedate lower current may typify the change in the stream of thought as we pass from youth to age. While the volume of the stream is small and the channel lacks depth, it is easy to change the direction of the current, as sometimes happens when a straight channel is dug to take the place of its windings. In early life the stream of thought is apt to wander in meandering courses; the teacher may very frequently find it necessary to keep the mind from wandering, to direct the stream of thought towards the destined goal, and to make it groove for itself channels in harmony with logical habits. In teaching pupils to think it is quite as essential to give direction to thought as it is to furnish either thought-stimulus or thought-material. In one respect the metaphor, stream of thought, fails utterly to express the truth. The constituents of thought are not related to each other like the molecules of a liquid which move freely among themselves. Thoughts have a connection with those that precede and those that follow. An inner nexus binds the successive portions of a demonstration. Hence other figures of speech have been employed to denote the connection between the successive elements of a logical proof, such as the train of thought, the line of argument, the chain of reasoning.

[Sidenote: Cognitive function.]

It will be readily admitted that often our thinking is so loose and disjointed that its component parts resemble the liquid more than the chain, whereas our best thinking—namely, that which leads to a goal in the shape of a trustworthy conclusion—resembles a train of cars in which motive power is derived not from steam, but from a conscious expenditure of will-power. The teacher may perform the triple function of fireman, engineer, and switch-tender, supplying the fuel for the process, regulating the speed, and directing it along the lines of track which lead to the desired goal. It is as natural for a pupil to think as it is for a stream to flow towards the ocean. The stream may run shallow if no supply of water is received from the outside. It is the mission of the teacher to keep up the supply, to remove as far as possible the obstructions which are likely to throw the current of thought into unexpected channels. It is a peculiarity of this current of thinking that it is cognitive, or possesses the function of knowing. Human thought resembles the stream in seemingly taking up and carrying what was not a part of itself. Just as the stream of water carries minerals in solution as well as silt, sand, pebbles, and even heavier objects, so the stream of thought appears to lay hold of objects and to carry them as part of itself. Here, however, the strings of the analogy break. The stream of thought is in the mind; the objects with which it deals are outside of the mind. Mental pictures of these objects float in the stream of thought as objects on the bank of a river are mirrored in its waters; yet the parallel is not complete, because the mind may turn the eye upon itself and make what is thus seen the object of thought. This turning upon itself may be likened to eddies in the stream. But even when the mind thus turns back upon itself and views its own states and activities, these are regarded as objective, as related to the thinking process very much like the objects of knowledge in the external world.

Another important phase of thinking finds no likeness in any of the figures of speech above referred to. The mind meets certain objects of thought on which it seems to tarry or fasten itself. This has led some writers to deny that the stream of thought is a continuous current. This view causes undue stress to be laid upon the material of thought, and leads the teacher to undervalue his function as directing guide in teaching pupils to think. Even Professor Bain claims that,—

[Sidenote: Bain’s view.]

“The stream of thought is not a continuous current, but a series of distinct ideas, more or less rapid in their succession, the rapidity being measurable by the number that pass through the mind in a given time. Mental excitement is constantly judged of by this test; and if we choose to count and time the thoughts as they succeed one another, we could give so much more precision to the estimate.”[32]

[Sidenote: Transitions.]

[Sidenote: Two phases.]

These transitions should not be confounded with the relations between objects of thought or between objects in the external world. The relations may be part of the thought of that which is perceived or known, or they may be made distinct ideas or thoughts. The important phase under consideration is the passage of the mind from one idea or thought to another. Such transitions are quite as important and quite as much a part of the current of thought as the premises and conclusions on which the mind seems to rest. These two phases of the thought-process may be likened to the perching and the flight of a bird. This figure of speech is used by Professor James, among whose services to the profession of teaching it is not the least that he has called attention to the importance of these transitions in the stream of consciousness. His account is so lucid and satisfactory that one cannot forbear to quote his words at some length. Referring to the stream of thought, he says,—

[Sidenote: View of Professor James.]

“Like a bird’s life, it seems to be made up of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence and every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time and contemplated without changing; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest. _Let us call the halting-places_ the ‘substantive’ parts and the places of flight the ‘transitive’ parts of the stream of thought. It then appears that the main need of our thinking is at all times the attainment of some other substantive part than the one from which we have just been dislodged. And we may say that the main use of the transitive parts is to lead us from one substantive conclusion to another. Now it is very difficult, introspectively, to see the transitive parts for what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before a conclusion is reached is really annihilating them. Whilst if we wait until the conclusion be reached, it so exceeds them in vigor and stability that it quite eclipses and swallows them up in its glare. Let any one try to cut a thought in the middle and get a look at its section, and he will see how difficult the introspective observation of the transitive tract is. The rush of the thought is so headlong that it almost always brings us up at the conclusion before we can arrest it. Or if our purpose is nimble enough and we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to be itself. As a snow-flake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal, but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statistically taken, and with its function, tendency, and particular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated. The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is, in fact, like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see the darkness. And the challenge to _produce_ these psychoses, which is sure to be thrown by doubting psychologists at any one who contends for their existence, is as unfair as Zeno’s treatment of the advocates of motion, when, asking them to point out in what place an arrow _is_ when it moves, he argues the falsity of their thesis from their inability to make to so preposterous a question an immediate reply.”[33]

[Sidenote: Nouns, verbs, etc.]

[Sidenote: Connectives.]

The science of logic deals almost altogether with the halting-places, with the substantive parts, with the ideas, notions, concepts that are to be compared, and with the resulting judgments, inferences, and conclusions. Whether the teacher has studied the science of logic or not, it is to these he devotes his chief attention; they can be analyzed, defined, and clearly fixed as thought-products or knowledge. Defects in the thinking-process are apt to show themselves here; at least, they furnish tangible data for criticism, corrections, and reviews. These thought-products on which the mind loves to linger are denoted by nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs,—the parts of speech which constitute the bulk of the vocabulary of every language. The movements of the mind from one object of thought to another are indicated by conjunctions and other connectives. Thinkers are often known by their favorite connective words and phrases. Pupils catch these from the phraseology of their teachers, or pick them up unconsciously from the books they read. Some languages are richer in such connective words and phrases than others; the mind carries away some influence in the way of making these transitions in thought from every language which it studies; its thinking is moulded by the language which it masters. Logic has very little to say about these transitions for which one language sometimes supplies words and expressions altogether wanting in another. Frequently we grow conscious of them through the feeling of a gap to be filled, or of a chasm to be leaped over, or of an obstacle to be cleared away, or of something that obstructs our thinking and hinders it from reaching the goal. Here again one cannot refrain from quoting Professor James, although his words do not indicate that he fully realizes the value for elementary instruction of what he has written. Here are his words:

“The truth is that large tracts of human speech are nothing but _signs of direction_ in thought, of which direction we, nevertheless, have an acutely discriminative sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever. Sensorial images are stable psychic facts; we can hold them still, and look at them as long as we like. These bare images of logical movements, on the contrary, are psychic transitions, always on the wing, so to speak, and not to be glimpsed except in flight. Their function is to lead from one set of images to another. As they pass, we feel both the waxing and the waning images in a way quite different from the way of their full presence. If we try to hold fast the feeling of direction, the full presence comes, and the feeling of direction is lost. The blank verbal scheme of logical movement gives us the fleeting sense of the movement as we read it, quite as well as does a rational sentence awakening definite imaginations by its words.”[34]

[Sidenote: Directing the youthful mind.]

Right here the teacher who is an artist finds the opportunity for the display of his highest skill. It is his privilege to direct the flights and the perchings of the youthful mind. He can shape the thoughts and their sequence. He can cause the intellect to move from the reason to its consequence, or in the reverse direction if that be more natural or more appropriate. He can guide the thought from cause to effect, from the whole to the parts, from the general to the particular, from the end to the means, from the design to its execution; or a movement the other way is possible in each of these categories. While thus choosing the direction which thought shall take, he can select the objects upon which it shall tarry. This directing influence he will often exert when he is not aware of it. His own habits of mind will be reflected in the mental life of his pupils. There was profound philosophy in the reply of a gifted author who, when asked by his daughter what she should study, said, “I am more concerned about the teachers under whom you study than about the branches of study which you may select.” Habits of thought depend far more upon the teacher than upon the text-book, upon the quality of the instruction than upon its general content. There is, of course, a difference in the culture value of different branches of study; but a study as valuable as geometry may be pursued in a loose way, whilst branches of much inferior value for developing power to think may be taught and studied by the methods of rigid and exact thought.

[Sidenote: The artist-teacher.]

[Sidenote: Forms of speech.]

In shaping the activity of thought, the artist-teacher makes the mind tarry long enough for clear apprehension, sometimes for thorough comprehension, upon the ideas, judgments, and conclusions which are the framework of a system of thought, but he does not neglect the transitions from one to the other, as if these were of little account or necessarily took care of themselves. The transitions in thought are aided by set phrases and forms of solution. As soon as these are mastered, there develops the tendency to think them as algebraic symbols, which do substitute duty in the absence of that for which they stand. For fear of this, the teacher sometimes fails to drill on them long enough to fix them in the mind,—certainly a radical mistake. Drill is a condition of the highest discipline in the school as well as in the army. The drill-master seeks to habituate the soldier to the word of command, so that he will obey in the face of danger without thinking of the consequences. The drill-master at school seeks to make it second nature for a pupil to go through the logical motions, but not without conscious thought of the process or the consequences. Whenever the learner uses forms of parsing, analysis, or solution, his mind should go through the movements of thought expressed by the language. Ask any ordinary class to give you a noun of the first person; they are almost sure to give you either a noun of the third person or a pronoun of the first person. Dictate a sentence with a noun in the first person, and ask the pupils to parse it in the customary way; in nearly all cases they will parse it as a noun of the third person. Ask them to tell why a personal pronoun is so called; frequently they say because it indicates a person,—a statement quite applicable to other kinds of pronouns. If the logical or customary forms of speech are employed, the stream of thought moves on, the mind often failing to perceive the new truth, or error, or nonsense inherent in the language employed. School-boys have tricks of their own which turn upon this peculiarity in the movement of thought. “Who killed Cain?” is suddenly asked. “Abel,” is the reply generally elicited by the question. Should you say, Nine times seven _is_ or _are_ forty-two? The boy who decides in favor of _is_ or _are_ gets a shock of surprise on being told that the product of nine times seven is not forty-two.

[Sidenote: A strange reply.]

One day a teacher was lecturing upon education in the dark ages. To show how the energies of the common people were exhausted in the struggle for existence, the resolution of a synod in the south of France was cited. The resolution enjoined upon the bishops the duty of seeing to it that during a period of scarcity of food the peasants were at least provided with bread made of acorns. A few minutes later a reference was made to the autobiography of Thomas Platter, in which certain things are described as happening about the time of the Diet of Worms. On being asked in what period of history that was, a pupil promptly replied, “When the common people were fed on worms.”

[Sidenote: Biblical phraseology.]

[Sidenote: Huxley’s story.]

Very much of the sermonizing of our day gives rise to the same kind of thinking. The mind is borne along by the customary flow of words. The phrases used have an orthodox sound; perhaps they are biblical in the sense that they occur in the Bible. It is impossible to tell whether any clear idea or real religious experience is suggested to the hearer’s mind by the words used. The ideas excited in the hearer should be those for which the words stand in the mind of the speaker. If the ideas of the speaker are not clear, how can his words suggest anything definite to the audience? Huxley relates an amusing story of an after-dinner orator who was endowed with a voice of rare flexibility and power, and with a fine flow of words, and who was called upon to speak without much preparation. The applause was terrific. When Huxley asked a neighbor who was especially enthusiastic what the orator had said, the latter could not tell. Nothing was lacking in the post-prandial speech save sense and occasionally grammar.[35]

The fuller consideration of the stream of thought in listening and lecturing, in reading, speaking, and composing, is deserving of separate chapters. The mental attitude in listening resembles that in getting thought from the printed page. Silent reading is for the reader’s own benefit; it comprises by far the larger proportion of our reading. In oral reading, the stream of thought is somewhat different, the aim being similar to that of public speaking,—namely, to suggest or convey to the hearer thoughts from some other mind. In the act of composing, the aim is to evolve thought from the mind’s own resources and activities. The thought process is very much the same, no matter whether we dictate to a stenographer, or speak to an audience, or use the pen in giving to it form and abiding shape. It will be most convenient to treat together the stream of thought in listening and in silent reading, and to reserve for separate consideration the activity of the mind in writing, speaking, and oral reading.

XIV

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT IN LISTENING AND READING

Reading is thinking along a prescribed line that lies goldenly
beneath the flow of words.

BRUMBAUGH.

Whittier uses words as stepping-stones upon which with a light
and joyous bound he crosses and recrosses at will the rapid and
rushing stream of thought.

LONGFELLOW.

To listen well is to think well,—the hearing ear must be
attended by the alert mind, eager to seize upon incoming
sensations and weave them into a garland of thought.

M. G. B.

Words, however well constructed originally, are always tending,
like coins, to have their inscription worn off by passing
from hand to hand; and the only possible mode of reviving it
is to be ever stamping it afresh by living in the habitual
contemplation of the phenomena themselves, and not resting in
our familiarity with the words that express them.

J. S. MILL.

XIV

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT IN LISTENING AND READING

[Sidenote: A suggestive dialogue.]

Two men engaged in speculative pursuits met after one had published a book. Let us speak of them as A and B.

A: I have just read your new book. Many things in it please me very much, but in it you say so and so, with which I do not find myself in full accord.

B: I say nothing of the kind in that book.

A: I surely read your book.

B: You never read a book in your life. You read some sentences or paragraphs; your mind begins to react upon what you have read; and ere long you imagine that your inferences are the conclusions of the author.

A: I have a notion to write a psychology, and to set forth my views in full.

B: Don’t you do it. You know no psychology. You have been of great service in stimulating others to think; you are a most delightful lecturer; but you have never mastered psychology.

[Sidenote: Feeling.]

[Sidenote: Interest.]

If a third party could have listened to the conversation, what stream of consciousness would have started in his mind? Possibly surprise at the frankness of B and the composure of A, mingled with thoughts of what they were discussing. In other words, a strong tinge of feeling would be perceptible in the stream of thought. In the minds of the two engaged in the dialogue, feeling must have greatly modified the current of thought. The greatest kindness that can be shown to some men is to oppose or criticise their views. Opposition and criticism stimulate their thinking, and rouse their mental powers to the highest possible tension and activity. In men of the opposite temperament, feeling beclouds their thinking, and makes the stream of thought more sluggish. The common prejudice against appeals to feeling are due to the abuse of the right which every orator has of addressing the feelings through the intellect, and of thereby moving the will. To move the will is the essence and aim of all eloquence. In listening or lecturing, in reading or composing, some form of emotion always accompanies the stream of thought. The orator may move the hearer to tears or to laughter; he is not untrue to his mission if he can thereby win a vote, secure a verdict, or move the hearer to action. A lecture is addressed primarily to the understanding. It is greatly improved if the stream of thought which it starts and supplies is accompanied by feelings of interest and the pleasurable emotions attendant upon novelty, curiosity, or admiring approval. The consciousness that we understand a lecture is accompanied by pleasurable emotions which help to sustain the attention.

[Sidenote: Spurgeon.]

The writer once paid a shilling to hear Spurgeon. It was his purpose to get a good seat, so that he might study this famous preacher’s gestures and delivery, the quality of his voice, and the secret of his eloquence. The text was hardly announced before every one in the audience, including the writer, forgot all about Spurgeon, and thought only of his message to the thousands before him. The secret of his oratory lay in his ability to make the audience forget everything except the gospel he was preaching. If people, after hearing a speaker, talk of his fine delivery, his flowery language and beautiful figures of speech, or his peculiarities of pronunciation and other eccentricities, it is proof positive that he has failed. Instead of holding the attention to what he was saying, the audience was thinking of his manner and delivery. A well-printed book has the advantage of keeping the author’s personal characteristics from interfering with the stream of thought. It has the disadvantage of losing all the helps to listening and thinking which come from the tones of the voice and eloquent delivery.

The accusation of B against A, referred to at the beginning of this chapter, is applicable to many readers. For several sentences the mind is riveted upon the author’s meaning. Presently a train of thought starts; the eye runs along the sentences to the bottom of the page. On turning the page, the reader wakes up to the consciousness that his mind does not retain, perhaps never had the slightest notion of the contents of said page. Often the train of thought leads to no goal; the thinking resembles the process of wool-gathering, the tufts of wool on bushes and hedges necessitating much wandering to little purpose.

[Sidenote: The works of great thinkers.]

For the sake of cultivating ability to think, students are advised to read the works of great thinkers, like Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel. Such reading is often a sham and a delusion. No one has done more to shape the critical thinking of the world than Kant; and yet how many young men waste time upon his pages because they are not prepared to think his thoughts. Schleiermacher stimulated and modified the thinking of theologians in every department of their science except Old Testament exegesis; and yet the celebrated Dr. Kahnis, of the University of Leipsic, used to say of Schleiermacher, “Er ist rein nicht zum studiren.” Nevertheless, students for the ministry have been known to waste hours in trying to read his writings, which they were not prepared to understand. Of the obscurer passages in Hegel an eminent authority says, “It is a fair question whether the rationality included in them be anything more than the fact that the words all belong to a common vocabulary, and are strung together on a scheme of predication and relation,—immediacy, self-relation, and what not,—which has habitually recurred. Yet there seems no reason to doubt that the subjective feeling of the rationality of these sentences was strong in the writer as he penned them, or even that some readers by straining may have reproduced it in themselves.”[36]

It may be worth an honest effort for students and teachers to try to grasp the meaning of such writers; but if after a fair trial the mind is left empty of meaning, it is wise to follow the advice of Locke with regard to obscure ancient authors:

“In reading of them, if they do not use their words with a due clearness and perspicuity, we may lay them aside, and, without any injury done them, resolve thus with ourselves:

“Si non vis intelligi, debes negligi.”[37]

Several months or years of study may be required to prepare the mind for grasping the ideas or phraseology of new departments of investigation. No one can comprehend the treatises on physiological psychology without devoting several weeks to the anatomy of the brain.

[Sidenote: Reading.]

[Sidenote: Lewes’s view.]

The words, phrases, and sentences of the printed or written page should call up in the mind of the reader that for which they stand in the mind of the author. What the stream of thought should be in reading a book is well worthy of careful consideration. G. H. Lewes, in “Problems of Life and Mind,” claims that “our thought is a constant interchange of ideas and images, some trains of thought being carried on mainly by images more or less vivid, others mainly by ideas with only a faint escort of images.” It should be said, by way of explanation, that he does not use the word “ideas” in the Platonic sense of patterns fixed in nature, of which the individual objects in any given class are but imperfect copies, and by participation in which they have their being; nor in the sense of a mental image or picture, which (in opposition to Sir William Hamilton), the Century Dictionary claims, has been the more common meaning of the term in English literature since the sixteenth century. In Lewes’s pages ideas never stand for images, nor for copies of sensations. Sully says that the term idea is used to include both images and concepts, marking off the whole region of the representative from the presentative, but that, like the term notion, it now tends to be confined to concepts. With Lewes all ideas are thoughts, but not all thoughts are ideas. He does not reject the popular usage of the word in phrases like the idea of Shakespeare’s Othello, of Bismarck’s policy. Take the following sentence from Justin McCarthy’s “History of Our Own Times:” “Unluckily, Lord Palmerston became possessed with the idea that the French minister in Greece was secretly setting the Greek government on to resist our claims.” In thinking the thought of this sentence the mind is not filled with any images of Greece or mental pictures of any other kind. Possibly the adjective Greek may bring to the minds of some persons the map symbol of Greece or even scenery and cities in Greece, especially if they have travelled or resided there; but such mental pictures really interfere with the current of thought in reading. In planning a route from New York to San Francisco one is apt to think it in the lines and dots of railway maps. That in the mind for which words stand may be styled their meaning, and Lewes claims that much of our reading does not translate the words into their full signification, but proceeds by a process of logical symbolism. He asserts that “the greater proportion of all men’s thinking goes forward with confident reliance on the correctness of the logical operations, and with only an occasional translation of symbols into images. The translation—verification—does, indeed, from time to time take place, and always in proportion to the novelty of the connections; but how easily and how fatally the mind glides along the path of logical operation without pausing to interpret more than the relation of the symbols is humorously illustrated in the common story of a physicist, whose claim to omniscience was the joke of his friends. Being asked earnestly whether he had ‘read Biot’s paper on the malleability of light?’ ‘No,’ he replied; ‘he sent it me, but I have not yet had time to read it.’”

[Sidenote: An example.]

Lewes’s meaning is made somewhat clearer by two examples which he uses. “Suppose you inform me that the blood rushed violently from the man’s heart, quickening his pulse, at the sight of his enemy. Of the many latent images in this phrase, how many were salient in your mind and in mine? Probably two,—the man and his enemy,—and these images were faint. Images of blood, heart, violent rushing, pulse, quickening, and sight were either not revived at all or were passing shadows. Had any such images arisen, they would have hampered thought, retarding the logical process of judgment by irrelevant connections. The symbols had substituted _relations_ for these _values_,—the logical relations of inclusion and exclusion which constitute judgment. You were not anxious to inform me respecting the qualities of blood, heart, pulse, etc., but only of a certain effect produced on one man by sight of another; and this effect you expressed in the physiological terms which came first to hand; you might have expressed it equally well in very different psychological terms,—‘fierce anger seized the man’s soul, rousing all his energies at the sight of his enemy,’ when assuredly there would not have been present images of ‘anger,’ ‘seizing,’ ‘soul,’ ‘rousing,’ and ‘energies.’ These terms are symbols which stand for clusters of images, and can at will be translated into images, just as algebraic letters stand for values which can be assigned. But for purposes of thought and calculation such translation is unnecessary, is hampering; all that is necessary is that the terms should occupy their proper logical position.”[38]

[Sidenote: Another example.]

The other example is still more striking. “Suppose I read the phrase, ‘The ship which carried Nelson was appropriately named the Victory;’ unless the ship itself is the prominent interest, I have probably no image at all, or at least only a faint and fleeting shadow of some vague outline. I do not picture a man-of-war, I do not see the hull, masts, cordage, and cannon, though these, with the figure-head, fluttering flags, and pennons, may successfully emerge if I dwell on the ship. I perhaps do not see Nelson, or, at any rate, do not see his pale face, one eye, and one arm, but only some faint suggestion of a human form. The purpose of the phrase was not to raise images, but to communicate a fact respecting the name of the ship; and my intelligence has been occupied with this purpose. I must, it is true, have understood each word, or, at any rate, each clause of the sentence; but for this understanding it is not necessary that I should translate, nor even that I should be capable of translating, each word into an image or cluster of images; it is enough if I apprehend a series of logical relations. We all use occasional words with intelligent and intelligible propriety, the meaning of which as isolated terms we cannot translate. We read Shakespeare and Goethe without a suspicion of the many words which for us have no images. But if one of these words occurs in an unfamiliar connection we are at once arrested, as we are if any familiar word is placed in an unfamiliar position. Suppose we come upon the sentence, ‘The ship which carried Nelson was named _Victory_; the ship which carried Napoleon across the desert was named _Akbar_,’—we are at once arrested; the connection of ship and desert is unusual, and is seen, on reflection, to be contrary to experience; but when we learn that the camel is called the ‘ship of the desert,’ we recognize the new value assigned to the term, and the logical correctness of the phrase is thereby recognized.”[39]

These examples, and others like them which Lewes gives, bring us face to face with the proposition that “much of our thinking is carried on by means of symbols without any images, which is the same thing as thinking being carried on by words without any meanings and with only the accompanying intuition of their logical relations.” Thus, after a century of exhortation against the blind use of words we are brought face to face with the question of using words in thinking without realizing the full meaning, an abuse of words for which reformers have shot their arrows at rote teaching from every possible point of view. What truth is there in the statement of Mr. Lewes? What can be his meaning?

[Sidenote: Literature.]

[Sidenote: Imaging in poetry.]

[Sidenote: The correct plan.]

It must be admitted that men in mature life skim newspapers, magazines, and books, especially books of fiction and books of reference, without realizing in their minds the import of all the words upon which the eye falls. The aim may be to get the plot of the story or a fact for some specific use, or a hurried view of the news and current events of the last twenty-four hours. But this is not the kind of thinking which the teacher aims to beget in the minds of his pupils. Nor does it ever lead to a just appreciation of literature. All literature which appeals to the imagination cannot be read and enjoyed in that way. No one can rightly read a choice selection without thinking what was in the author’s mind, reconstructing the images and scenes which were before his mental eye and following the movements depicted by his language. Movement is more easily conceived than scenery, and abounds in the stories which are most popular among children. Judicious exercises will soon enable the pupil to call up all kinds of imagery. In the Standard Fifth Reader it is suggested that the pupils sit with closed eyes and close attention while the teacher or one of the pupils reads a paragraph or stanza. For illustration, Kate Putnam Osgood’s poem, entitled “Driving Home the Cows,” is selected.

Out of the clover and blue-eyed grass
He turned them into the river lane;
One after another he let them pass,
Then fastened the meadow bars again.

Under the willows and over the hill
He patiently followed their sober pace;
The merry whistle for once was still,
And something shadowed the sunny face.

Only a boy! and his father had said
He never could let his youngest go;
Two already were lying dead
Under the feet of the trampling foe.

But after the evening’s work was done,
And the frogs were loud in the meadow-swamp,
Over his shoulder he slung his gun,
And stealthily followed the foot-path damp;

Across the clover and through the wheat,
With resolute heart and purpose grim;
Though the dew was on his hurrying feet
And the blind bat’s flitting startled him.

Thrice since then had the lanes been white,
And the orchard sweet with apple-bloom;
And now, when the cows came back at night,
The feeble father drove them home.

For news had come to the lonely farm
That three were lying where two had lain;
And the old man’s tremulous, palsied arm
Could never lean on a son’s again.

The summer days grew cool and late:
He went for the cows when the work was done;
But down the lane as he opened the gate
He saw them coming, one by one:

Brindle, Ebony, Speckle, and Bess,
Shaking their horns in the evening wind;
Cropping the buttercups out of the grass;
But who was it following close behind?

Loosely swung in the idle air
An empty sleeve of army blue;
And worn and pale, from the crisping hair,
Looked out a face that the father knew.

The great tears sprang to their meeting eyes
For the heart must speak when the lips are dumb;
And under the silent evening skies
Together they followed the cattle home.

[Sidenote: Some thoughts are not images.]

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.

[Sidenote: Putting content into words.]

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.

[Sidenote: Books on mathematics and other sciences.]