THE
New Psychology Series
_By_ WILLIAM WALKER ATKINSON
In the past few years a widespread mental and spiritual awakening has
taken place among the people of this country. And this new awakening has
been very aptly called THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY MOVEMENT, because it has to do
with the development and expression of the mind, or soul, of both the
individual and the nation.
The New Psychology
The Will
Memory
Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion
The Subconscious and Superconscious Planes of Mind
The Psychology of Success
The Art of Logical Thinking
Thought-Culture
The Psychology of Salesmanship
The Art of Expression
Mind and Body
Human Nature
Although each book stands alone as an authority on the subject treated,
yet one theme runs through the series, binding them together to make a
complete whole.
The uniform postpaid price of each volume is $1.00
We are making a special price of $10.00 for the entire set
THE PROGRESS COMPANY :: CHICAGO
THOUGHT-CULTURE
OR
PRACTICAL MENTAL TRAINING
By WILLIAM WALKER ATKINSON
L.N. FOWLER & COMPANY
7, Imperial Arcade, Ludgate Circus
London, E.C., England
1909
THE PROGRESS COMPANY
CHICAGO, ILL.
COPYRIGHT, 1910
BY
THE PROGRESS COMPANY
P.F. PETTIBONE & CO
Printers and Binders
Chicago
CONTENTS
I. The Power of Thought 9
II. The Nature of Thought 19
III. Phases of Thought 27
IV. Thought Culture 37
V. Attention 47
VI. Perception 57
VII. Representation 76
VIII. Abstraction 85
IX. Association of Ideas 95
X. Generalization 106
XI. Judgment 130
XII. Derived Judgments 138
XIII. Reasoning 152
XIV. Constructive Imagination 175
CHAPTER I.
THE POWER OF THOUGHT
In other volumes of this series we have considered the operations of the
human mind known as Will, Memory, etc. We now approach the consideration
of those mental activities which are concerned with the phenomena of
_thought_--those activities which we generally speak of as the operation
of the intellect or reason.
What is thought? The answer is not an easy one, although we use the term
familiarly almost every hour of our waking existence. The dictionaries
define the term "Thought" as follows: "The act of thinking; the exercise
of the mind in any way except sense and perception; serious
consideration; deliberation; reflection; the power or faculty of
thinking; the mental faculty of the mind; etc." This drives us back upon
the term, "to think" which is defined as follows: "To occupy the mind on
some subject; to have ideas; to revolve ideas in the mind; to cogitate;
to reason; to exercise the power of thought; to have a succession of
ideas or mental states; to perform any mental operation, whether of
apprehension, judgment, or illation; to judge; to form a conclusion, to
determine; etc."
Thought is an operation of the intellect. The intellect is: "that
faculty of the human soul or mind by which it receives or comprehends
the ideas communicated to it by the senses or by perception, or other
means, as distinguished from the power to feel and to will; the power or
faculty to perceive objects in their relations; the power to judge and
comprehend; also the capacity for higher forms of knowledge as
distinguished from the power to perceive and imagine."
When we say what we "think," we mean that we exercise the faculties
whereby we compare and contrast certain things with other things,
observing and noting their points of difference and agreement, then
classifying them in accordance with these observed agreements and
differences. In _thinking_ we tend to classify the multitude of
impressions received from the outside world, arranging thousands of
objects into one general class, and other thousands into other general
classes, and then sub-dividing these classes, until finally we have
found mental pigeon-holes for every conceivable idea or impression. We
then begin to make inferences and deductions regarding these ideas or
impressions, working from the known to the unknown, from particulars to
generalities, or from generalities to particulars, as the case may be.
It is this faculty or power of thought--this use of the intellect, that
has brought man to his present high position in the world of living
things. In his early days, man was a much weaker animal than those with
whom he was brought into contact. The tigers, lions, bears, mammoths,
and other ferocious beasts were much stronger, fiercer, and fleeter than
man, and he was placed in a position so lacking of apparent equal chance
of survival, that an observer would have unhesitatingly advanced the
opinion that this weak, feeble, slow animal must soon surely perish in
the struggle for existence, and that the "survival of the fittest" would
soon cause him to vanish from the scene of the world's activities. And,
so it would have been had he possessed no equipment other than those of
the other animals; viz., strength, natural weapons and speed. And yet
man not only survived in spite of these disadvantages, but he has
actually conquered, mastered and enslaved these other animals which
seemed likely to work his destruction. Why? How?
This feeble animal called _man_ had within him the elements of a new
power--a power manifested in but a slight degree in the other animals.
He possessed an intellect by which he was able to deduce, compare,
infer--reason.
His lack of natural weapons he overcame by borrowing the idea of the
tooth and claw of the other animals, imitating them in flint and shaping
them into spears; borrowing the trunk of the elephant and the paw of the
tiger, and reproducing their blow-striking qualities in his wooden club.
Not only this but he took lessons from the supple limbs and branches of
the trees, and copied the principle in his bow, in order to project its
minature spear, his arrow. He sheltered himself, his mate and his
young, from the fury of the storm, first by caves and afterwards by rude
houses, built in inaccessible places, reached only by means of crude
ladders, bridges, or climbing poles. He built doors for his habitations,
to protect himself from the attacks of these wild enemies--he heaped
stones at the mouth of his caves to keep them out. He placed great
boulders on cliffs that he might topple them down on the approaching
foe. He learned to hurl rocks with sure aim with his strong arm. He
copied the floating log, and built his first rude rafts, and then
evolved the hollowed canoe. He used the skins of animals to keep him
warm--their tendons for his bowstrings. He learned the advantages of
cooperation and combined effort, and thus formed the first rudiments of
society and social life. And finally--man's first great discovery--he
found the art of fire making.
As a writer has said: "For some hundreds of years, upon the general
plane of self-consciousness, an ascent, to the human eye gradual but
from the point of view of cosmic evolution rapid, has been made. In a
race large-brained, walking-erect, gregarious, brutal, but king of all
other brutes, man in appearance but not in fact, was from the highest
simple-consciousness born the basic human faculty, self-consciousness
and its twin, language. From these and what went with these, through
suffering, toil and war; through bestiality, savagery, barbarism;
through slavery, greed, effort, through conquests infinite, through
defeats overwhelming, through struggle unending; through ages of aimless
semi-brutal existence, through subsistence on berries and roots; through
the use of the casually found stone or stick; through life in deep
forests, with nuts and seeds, and on the shores of waters with mollusks,
crustaceans and fish for food; through that greatest, perhaps, of human
victories, the domestication and subjugation of fire; through the
invention and art of bow and arrow; through the training of animals and
the breaking of them to labor; through the long learning which led to
the cultivation of the soil; through the adobe brick and the building of
houses therefrom; through the smelting of metals and the slow birth of
the arts which rest upon these; through the slow making of alphabets
and the evolution of the written work; in short, through thousands of
centuries of human life, of human aspiration, of human growth, sprang
the world of men and women as it stands before us and within us today
with all its achievements and possessions."
The great difference between thought as we find it in man, and its forms
among the lower animals lies in what psychologists have called
"progressive thought." The animals advance but little in their thinking
processes but rest content with those of their ancestors--their thought
seems to have become set or crystallized during the process of their
evolution. The birds, mammals and the insects vary but little in their
mental processes from their ancestors of many thousand years ago. They
build their nests, or dens, in almost precisely the same manner as did
their progenitors in the stone-age. But man has slowly but steadily
progressed, in spite of temporary set-backs and failures. He has
endeavored to progress and improve. Those tribes which fell back in
regard to mental progress and advancement, have been left behind in the
race, and in many cases have become extinct. The great natural law of
the "survival of the fittest" has steadily operated in the life of the
race. The "fittest" were those best adapted to grapple with and overcome
the obstacles of their environment, and these obstacles were best
overcome by the use of the intellect. Those tribes and those individuals
whose intellect was active, tended to survive where others perished, and
consequently they were able to transmit their intellectual quality to
their descendants.
Halleck says: "Nature is constantly using her power to kill off the
thoughtless, or to cripple them in life's race. She is determined that
only the fittest and the descendants of the fittest shall survive. By
the 'fittest' she means those who have thought and whose ancestors have
thought and profited thereby. Geologists tell us that ages ago there
lived in England bears, tigers, elephants, lions and many other powerful
and fierce animals. There was living contemporaneous with them a much
weaker animal, that had neither the claws, the strength, nor the speed
of the tiger. In fact this human being was almost defenceless. Had a
being from another planet been asked to prophesy, he would undoubtedly
have said that this helpless animal would be the first to be
exterminated. And yet every one of those fierce creatures succumbed
either to the change of climate, or to man's inferior strength. The
reason was that man had one resource denied to the animals--the power of
progressive thought. The land sank, the sea cut off England from the
mainland, the climate changed, and even the strongest animals were
helpless. But man changed his clothing with the changing climate. He
made fires; he built a retreat to keep off death by cold. He thought out
means to kill or to subdue the strongest animals. Had the lions, tigers
or bears the power of progressive thought, they could have combined, and
it would have been possible for them to exterminate man before he
reached the civilized stage.... Man no longer sleeps in caves. The smoke
no longer fills his home or finds its way out through the chinks in the
walls or a hole in the roof. In traveling, he is no longer restricted to
his feet or even to horses. For all this improvement man is indebted to
_thought_. That has harnessed the very vibrations of the ether to do his
bidding."
And thus we see that man owes his present place on earth to his
Thought-Culture. And, it certainly behooves us to closely consider and
study the methods and processes whereby each and every man may cultivate
and develop the wondrous faculties of the mind which are employed in the
processes of Thought. The faculties of the Mind, like the muscles of the
body, may be developed, trained and cultivated. The process of such
mental development is called "THOUGHT-CULTURE," and forms the subject of
this book.