understanding; one for the direct taking in or grasp of meaning, the
other for its circuitous apprehension, thus: [Greek: gnonai] and
[Greek: eidenai] in Greek; _noscere_ and _scire_ in Latin; _kennen_ and
_wissen_ in German; _connaitre_ and _savoir_ in French; while in English
to be _acquainted with_ and to _know of or about_ have been suggested as
equivalents.[22] Now our intellectual life consists of a peculiar
interaction between these two types of understanding. All judgment, all
reflective inference, presupposes some lack of understanding, a partial
absence of meaning. We reflect in order that we may get hold of the full
and adequate significance of what happens. Nevertheless, _something_
must be already understood, the mind must be in possession of some
meaning which it has mastered, or else thinking is impossible. We think
in order to grasp meaning, but none the less every extension of
knowledge makes us aware of blind and opaque spots, where with less
knowledge all had seemed obvious and natural. A scientist brought into a
new district will find many things that he does not understand, where
the native savage or rustic will be wholly oblivious to any meanings
beyond those directly apparent. Some Indians brought to a large city
remained stolid at the sight of mechanical wonders of bridge, trolley,
and telephone, but were held spellbound by the sight of workmen climbing
poles to repair wires. Increase of the store of meanings makes us
conscious of new problems, while only through translation of the new
perplexities into what is already familiar and plain do we understand or
solve these problems. This is the constant spiral movement of knowledge.
[22] James, _Principles of Psychology_, vol. I, p. 221. To _know_
and to _know that_ are perhaps more precise equivalents; compare "I
know him" and "I know that he has gone home." The former expresses a
fact simply; for the latter, evidence might be demanded and
supplied.
[Sidenote: Intellectual progress a rhythm]
Our progress in genuine knowledge always consists _in part in the
discovery of something not understood in what had previously been taken
for granted as plain, obvious, matter-of-course, and in part in the use
of meanings that are directly grasped without question, as instruments
for getting hold of obscure, doubtful, and perplexing meanings_. No
object is so familiar, so obvious, so commonplace that it may not
unexpectedly present, in a novel situation, some problem, and thus
arouse reflection in order to understand it. No object or principle is
so strange, peculiar, or remote that it may not be dwelt upon till its
meaning becomes familiar--taken in on sight without reflection. We may
come to _see_, _perceive_, _recognize_, _grasp_, _seize_, _lay hold of_
principles, laws, abstract truths--_i.e._ to understand their meaning in
very immediate fashion. Our intellectual progress consists, as has been
said, in a rhythm of direct understanding--technically called
_ap_prehension--with indirect, mediated understanding--technically
called _com_prehension.
Sec. 2. _The Process of Acquiring Meanings_
[Sidenote: Familiarity]
The first problem that comes up in connection with direct understanding
is how a store of directly apprehensible meanings is built up. How do
we learn to view things on sight as significant members of a situation,
or as having, as a matter of course, specific meanings? Our chief
difficulty in answering this question lies in the thoroughness with
which the lesson of familiar things has been learnt. Thought can more
easily traverse an unexplored region than it can undo what has been so
thoroughly done as to be ingrained in unconscious habit. We apprehend
chairs, tables, books, trees, horses, clouds, stars, rain, so promptly
and directly that it is hard to realize that as meanings they had once
to be acquired,--the meanings are now so much parts of the things
themselves.
[Sidenote: Confusion is prior to familiarity]
In an often quoted passage, Mr. James has said: "The baby, assailed by
eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great
blooming, buzzing confusion."[23] Mr. James is speaking of a baby's
world taken as a whole; the description, however, is equally applicable
to the way any new thing strikes an adult, so far as the thing is really
new and strange. To the traditional "cat in a strange garret,"
everything is blurred and confused; the wonted marks that label things
so as to separate them from one another are lacking. Foreign languages
that we do not understand always seem jabberings, babblings, in which it
is impossible to fix a definite, clear-cut, individualized group of
sounds. The countryman in the crowded city street, the landlubber at
sea, the ignoramus in sport at a contest between experts in a
complicated game, are further instances. Put an unexperienced man in a
factory, and at first the work seems to him a meaningless medley. All
strangers of another race proverbially look alike to the visiting
foreigner. Only gross differences of size or color are perceived by an
outsider in a flock of sheep, each of which is perfectly individualized
to the shepherd. A diffusive blur and an indiscriminately shifting
suction characterize what we do not understand. The problem of the
acquisition of meaning by things, or (stated in another way) of forming
habits of simple apprehension, is thus the problem of introducing (_i_)
_definiteness_ and _distinction_ and (_ii_) _consistency_ or _stability_
of meaning into what is otherwise vague and wavering.
[23] _Principles of Psychology_, vol. I, p. 488.
[Sidenote: Practical responses clarify confusion]
The acquisition of definiteness and of coherency (or constancy) of
meanings is derived primarily from practical activities. By rolling an
object, the child makes its roundness appreciable; by bouncing it, he
singles out its elasticity; by throwing it, he makes weight its
conspicuous distinctive factor. Not through the senses, but by means of
the reaction, the responsive adjustment, is the impression made
distinctive, and given a character marked off from other qualities that
call out unlike reactions. Children, for example, are usually quite slow
in apprehending differences of color. Differences from the standpoint of
the adult so glaring that it is impossible not to note them are
recognized and recalled with great difficulty. Doubtless they do not all
_feel_ alike, but there is no intellectual recognition of what makes the
difference. The redness or greenness or blueness of the object does not
tend to call out a reaction that is sufficiently peculiar to give
prominence or distinction to the color trait. Gradually, however,
certain characteristic habitual responses associate themselves with
certain things; the white becomes the sign, say, of milk and sugar, to
which the child reacts favorably; blue becomes the sign of a dress that
the child likes to wear, and so on: and the distinctive reactions tend
to single out color qualities from other things in which they had been
submerged.
[Sidenote: We identify by use or function]
Take another example. We have little difficulty in distinguishing from
one another rakes, hoes, plows and harrows, shovels and spades. Each has
its own associated characteristic use and function. We may have,
however, great difficulty in recalling the difference between serrate
and dentate, ovoid and obovoid, in the shapes and edges of leaves, or
between acids in _ic_ and in _ous_. There is some difference; but just
what? Or, we know what the difference is; but which is which? Variations
in form, size, color, and arrangement of parts have much less to do, and
the uses, purposes, and functions of things and of their parts much more
to do, with distinctness of character and meaning than we should be
likely to think. What misleads us is the fact that the qualities of
form, size, color, and so on, are _now_ so distinct that we fail to see
that the problem is precisely to account for the way in which they
originally obtained their definiteness and conspicuousness. So far as we
sit passive before objects, they are not distinguished out of a vague
blur which swallows them all. Differences in the pitch and intensity of
sounds leave behind a different feeling, but until we assume different
attitudes toward them, or _do_ something special in reference to them,
their vague difference cannot be _intellectually_ gripped and retained.
[Sidenote: Children's drawings illustrate domination by value]
Children's drawings afford a further exemplification of the same
principle. Perspective does not exist, for the child's interest is not
in _pictorial representation_, but in the _things_ represented; and
while perspective is essential to the former, it is no part of the
characteristic uses and values of the things themselves. The house is
drawn with transparent walls, because the rooms, chairs, beds, people
inside, are the important things in the house-meaning; smoke always
comes out of the chimney--otherwise, why have a chimney at all? At
Christmas time, the stockings may be drawn almost as large as the house
or even so large that they have to be put outside of it:--in any case,
it is the scale of values in use that furnishes the scale for their
qualities, the pictures being diagrammatic reminders of these values,
not impartial records of physical and sensory qualities. One of the
chief difficulties felt by most persons in learning the art of pictorial
representation is that habitual uses and results of use have become so
intimately read into the character of things that it is practically
impossible to shut them out at will.
[Sidenote: As do sounds used as language signs]
The acquiring of meaning by sounds, in virtue of which they become
words, is perhaps the most striking illustration that can be found of
the way in which mere sensory stimuli acquire definiteness and constancy
of meaning and are thereby themselves defined and interconnected for
purposes of recognition. Language is a specially good example because
there are hundreds or even thousands of words in which meaning is now so
thoroughly consolidated with physical qualities as to be directly
apprehended, while in the case of words it is easier to recognize that
this connection has been gradually and laboriously acquired than in the
case of physical objects such as chairs, tables, buttons, trees, stones,
hills, flowers, and so on, where it seems as if the union of
intellectual character and meaning with the physical fact were
aboriginal, and thrust upon us passively rather than acquired through
active explorations. And in the case of the meaning of words, we see
readily that it is by making sounds and noting the results which
follow, by listening to the sounds of others and watching the activities
which accompany them, that a given sound finally becomes the stable
bearer of a meaning.
[Sidenote: Summary]
Familiar acquaintance with meanings thus signifies that we have acquired
in the presence of objects definite attitudes of response which lead us,
without reflection, to anticipate certain possible consequences. The
definiteness of the expectation defines the meaning or takes it out of
the vague and pulpy; its habitual, recurrent character gives the meaning
constancy, stability, consistency, or takes it out of the fluctuating
and wavering.
Sec. 3. _Conceptions and Meaning_
[Sidenote: A conception is a definite meaning]
The word _meaning_ is a familiar everyday term; the words _conception_,
_notion_, are both popular and technical terms. Strictly speaking, they
involve, however, nothing new; any meaning sufficiently individualized
to be directly grasped and readily used, and thus fixed by a word, is a
conception or notion. Linguistically, every common noun is the carrier
of a meaning, while proper nouns and common nouns with the word _this_
or _that_ prefixed, refer to the things in which the meanings are
exemplified. That thinking both employs and expands notions,
conceptions, is then simply saying that in inference and judgment we use
meanings, and that this use also corrects and widens them.
[Sidenote: which is standardized]
Various persons talk about an object not physically present, and yet all
get the same material of belief. The same person in different moments
often refers to the same object or kind of objects. The sense
experience, the physical conditions, the psychological conditions, vary,
but the same meaning is conserved. If pounds arbitrarily changed their
weight, and foot rules their length, while we were using them, obviously
we could not weigh nor measure. This would be our intellectual position
if meanings could not be maintained with a certain stability and
constancy through a variety of physical and personal changes.
[Sidenote: By it we identify the unknown]
[Sidenote: and supplement the sensibly present]
[Sidenote: and also systematize things]
To insist upon the fundamental importance of conceptions would,
accordingly, only repeat what has been said. We shall merely summarize,
saying that conceptions, or standard meanings, are instruments (_i_) of
identification, (_ii_) of supplementation, and (_iii_) of placing in a
system. Suppose a little speck of light hitherto unseen is detected in
the heavens. Unless there is a store of meanings to fall back upon as
tools of inquiry and reasoning, that speck of light will remain just
what it is to the senses--a mere speck of light. For all that it leads
to, it might as well be a mere irritation of the optic nerve. Given the
stock of meanings acquired in prior experience, this speck of light is
mentally attacked by means of appropriate concepts. Does it indicate
asteroid, or comet, or a new-forming sun, or a nebula resulting from
some cosmic collision or disintegration? Each of these conceptions has
its own specific and differentiating characters, which are then sought
for by minute and persistent inquiry. As a result, then, the speck is
identified, we will say, as a comet. Through a standard meaning, it gets
identity and stability of character. Supplementation then takes place.
All the known qualities of comets are read into this particular thing,
even though they have not been as yet observed. All that the astronomers
of the past have learned about the paths and structure of comets becomes
available capital with which to interpret the speck of light. Finally,
this comet-meaning is itself not isolated; it is a related portion of
the whole system of astronomic knowledge. Suns, planets, satellites,
nebulae, comets, meteors, star dust--all these conceptions have a certain
mutuality of reference and interaction, and when the speck of light is
identified as meaning a comet, it is at once adopted as a full member in
this vast kingdom of beliefs.
[Sidenote: Importance of system to knowledge]
Darwin, in an autobiographical sketch, says that when a youth he told
the geologist, Sidgwick, of finding a tropical shell in a certain gravel
pit. Thereupon Sidgwick said it must have been thrown there by some
person, adding: "But if it were really embedded there, it would be the
greatest misfortune to geology, because it would overthrow all that we
know about the superficial deposits of the Midland Counties"--since they
were glacial. And then Darwin adds: "I was then utterly astonished at
Sidgwick not being delighted at so wonderful a fact as a tropical shell
being found near the surface in the middle of England. Nothing before
had made me thoroughly realize _that science consists in grouping facts
so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them_." This
instance (which might, of course, be duplicated from any branch of
science) indicates how scientific notions make explicit the
systematizing tendency involved in all use of concepts.
Sec. 4. _What Conceptions are Not_
The idea that a conception is a meaning that supplies a standard rule
for the identification and placing of particulars may be contrasted with
some current misapprehensions of its nature.
[Sidenote: A concept is not a bare residue]
1. Conceptions are not derived from a multitude of different definite
objects by leaving out the qualities in which they differ and retaining
those in which they agree. The origin of concepts is sometimes described
to be as if a child began with a lot of different particular things, say
particular dogs; his own Fido, his neighbor's Carlo, his cousin's Tray.
Having all these different objects before him, he analyzes them into a
lot of different qualities, say (_a_) color, (_b_) size, (_c_) shape,
(_d_) number of legs, (_e_) quantity and quality of hair, (_f_)
digestive organs, and so on; and then strikes out all the unlike
qualities (such as color, size, shape, hair), retaining traits such as
quadruped and domesticated, which they all have in general.
[Sidenote: but an active attitude]
As a matter of fact, the child begins with whatever significance he has
got out of the one dog he has seen, heard, and handled. He has found
that he can carry over from one experience of this object to subsequent
experience certain expectations of certain characteristic modes of
behavior--may expect these even before they show themselves. He tends to
assume this attitude of anticipation whenever any clue or stimulus
presents itself; whenever the object gives him any excuse for it. Thus
he might call cats little dogs, or horses big dogs. But finding that
other expected traits and modes of behavior are not fulfilled, he is
forced to throw out certain traits from the dog-meaning, while by
contrast (see p. 90) certain other traits are selected and emphasized.
As he further applies the meaning to other dogs, the dog-meaning gets
still further defined and refined. He does not begin with a lot of
ready-made objects from which he extracts a common meaning; he tries to
apply to every new experience whatever from his old experience will help
him understand it, and as this process of constant assumption and
experimentation is fulfilled and refuted by results, his conceptions get
body and clearness.
[Sidenote: It is general because of its application]
2. Similarly, conceptions are general because of their use and
application, not because of their ingredients. The view of the origin of
conception in an impossible sort of analysis has as its counterpart the
idea that the conception is made up out of all the like elements that
remain after dissection of a number of individuals. Not so; the moment a
meaning is gained, it is a working tool of further apprehensions, an
instrument of understanding other things. Thereby the meaning is
_extended_ to cover them. Generality resides in application to the
comprehension of new cases, not in constituent parts. A collection of
traits left as the common residuum, the _caput mortuum_, of a million
objects, would be merely a collection, an inventory or aggregate, not a
_general idea_; a striking trait emphasized in any one experience which
then served to help understand some one other experience, would become,
in virtue of that service of application, in so far general. Synthesis
is not a matter of mechanical addition, but of application of something
discovered in one case to bring other cases into line.
Sec. 5. _Definition and Organization of Meanings_
[Sidenote: Definiteness _versus_ vagueness]
[Sidenote: In the abstract meaning is intension]
[Sidenote: In its application it is extension]
A being that cannot understand at all is at least protected from
_mis_-understandings. But beings that get knowledge by means of
inferring and interpreting, by judging what things signify in relation
to one another, are constantly exposed to the danger of
_mis_-apprehension, _mis_-understanding, _mis_-taking--taking a thing
amiss. A constant source of misunderstanding and mistake is
indefiniteness of meaning. Through vagueness of meaning we
misunderstand other people, things, and ourselves; through its ambiguity
we distort and pervert. Conscious distortion of meaning may be enjoyed
as nonsense; erroneous meanings, if clear-cut, may be followed up and
got rid of. But vague meanings are too gelatinous to offer matter for
analysis, and too pulpy to afford support to other beliefs. They evade
testing and responsibility. Vagueness disguises the unconscious mixing
together of different meanings, and facilitates the substitution of one
meaning for another, and covers up the failure to have any precise
meaning at all. It is the aboriginal logical sin--the source from which
flow most bad intellectual consequences. Totally to eliminate
indefiniteness is impossible; to reduce it in extent and in force
requires sincerity and vigor. To be clear or perspicuous a meaning must
be detached, single, self-contained, homogeneous as it were, throughout.
The technical name for any meaning which is thus individualized is
_intension_. The process of arriving at such units of meaning (and of
stating them when reached) is _definition_. The intension of the terms
_man_, _river_, _seed_, _honesty_, _capital_, _supreme court_, is the
meaning that _exclusively_ and _characteristically_ attaches to those
terms. This meaning is set forth in the definitions of those words. The
test of the distinctness of a meaning is that it shall successfully mark
off a group of things that exemplify the meaning from other groups,
especially of those objects that convey nearly allied meanings. The
river-meaning (or character) must serve to _designate_ the Rhone, the
Rhine, the Mississippi, the Hudson, the Wabash, in spite of their
varieties of place, length, quality of water; and must be such as _not_
to suggest ocean currents, ponds, or brooks. This use of a meaning to
mark off and group together a variety of distinct existences constitutes
its _extension_.
[Sidenote: Definition and division]
As definition sets forth intension, so division (or the reverse process,
classification) expounds extension. Intension and extension, definition
and division, are clearly correlative; in language previously used,
_intension_ is meaning as a principle of identifying particulars;
extension is the group of particulars identified and distinguished.
Meaning, as extension, would be wholly in the air or unreal, did it not
point to some object or group of objects; while objects would be as
isolated and independent intellectually as they seem to be spatially,
were they not bound into groups or classes on the basis of
characteristic meanings which they constantly suggest and exemplify.
Taken together, definition and division put us in possession of
individualized or definite meanings and indicate to what group of
objects meanings refer. They typify the fixation and the organization of
meanings. In the degree in which the meanings of any set of experiences
are so cleared up as to serve as principles for grouping those
experiences in relation to one another, that set of particulars becomes
a science; _i.e._ definition and classification are the marks of a
science, as distinct from both unrelated heaps of miscellaneous
information and from the habits that introduce coherence into our
experience without our being aware of their operation.
Definitions are of three types, _denotative_, _expository_,
_scientific_. Of these, the first and third are logically important,
while the expository type is socially and pedagogically important as an
intervening step.
[Sidenote: We define by picking out]
I. Denotative. A blind man can never have an adequate understanding of
the meaning of _color_ and _red_; a seeing person can acquire the
knowledge only by having certain things designated in such a way as to
fix attention upon some of their qualities. This method of delimiting a
meaning by calling out a certain attitude toward objects may be called
_denotative_ or _indicative_. It is required for all sense
qualities--sounds, tastes, colors--and equally for all emotional and
moral qualities. The meanings of _honesty_, _sympathy_, _hatred_,
_fear_, must be grasped by having them presented in an individual's
first-hand experience. The reaction of educational reformers against
linguistic and bookish training has always taken the form of demanding
recourse to personal experience. However advanced the person is in
knowledge and in scientific training, understanding of a new subject, or
a new aspect of an old subject, must always be through these acts of
experiencing directly the existence or quality in question.
[Sidenote: and also by combining what is already more definite,]
2. Expository. Given a certain store of meanings which have been
directly or denotatively marked out, language becomes a resource by
which imaginative combinations and variations may be built up. A color
may be defined to one who has not experienced it as lying between green
and blue; a tiger may be defined (_i.e._ the idea of it made more
definite) by selecting some qualities from known members of the cat
tribe and combining them with qualities of size and weight derived from
other objects. Illustrations are of the nature of expository
definitions; so are the accounts of meanings given in a dictionary. By
taking better-known meanings and associating them,--the attained store
of meanings of the community in which one resides is put at one's
disposal. But in themselves these definitions are secondhand and
conventional; there is danger that instead of inciting one to effort
after personal experiences that will exemplify and verify them, they
will be accepted on authority as _substitutes_.
[Sidenote: and by discovering method of production]
3. Scientific. Even popular definitions serve as rules for identifying
and classifying individuals, but the purpose of such identifications and
classifications is mainly practical and social, not intellectual. To
conceive the whale as a fish does not interfere with the success of
whalers, nor does it prevent recognition of a whale when seen, while to
conceive it not as fish but as mammal serves the practical end equally
well, and also furnishes a much more valuable principle for scientific
identification and classification. Popular definitions select certain
fairly obvious traits as keys to classification. Scientific definitions
select _conditions of causation, production, and generation_ as their
characteristic material. The traits used by the popular definition do
not help us to understand why an object has its common meanings and
qualities; they simply state the fact that it does have them. Causal and
genetic definitions fix upon the way an object is constructed as the key
to its being a certain kind of object, and thereby explain why it has
its class or common traits.
[Sidenote: Contrast of causal and descriptive definitions]
[Sidenote: Science is the most perfect type of knowledge because it uses
causal definitions]
If, for example, a layman of considerable practical experience were
asked what he meant or understood by _metal_, he would probably reply in
terms of the qualities useful (_i_) in recognizing any given metal and
(_ii_) in the arts. Smoothness, hardness, glossiness, and brilliancy,
heavy weight for its size, would probably be included in his definition,
because such traits enable us to identify specific things when we see
and touch them; the serviceable properties of capacity for being
hammered and pulled without breaking, of being softened by heat and
hardened by cold, of retaining the shape and form given, of resistance
to pressure and decay, would probably be included--whether or not such
terms as _malleable_ or _fusible_ were used. Now a scientific
conception, instead of using, even with additions, traits of this kind,
determines _meaning on a different basis_. The present definition of
metal is about like this: Metal means any chemical element that enters
into combination with oxygen so as to form a base, _i.e._ a compound
that combines with an acid to form a salt. This scientific definition is
founded, not on directly perceived qualities nor on directly useful
properties, but on the _way in which certain things are causally related
to other things_; _i.e._ it denotes a relation. As chemical concepts
become more and more those of relationships of interaction in
constituting other substances, so physical concepts express more and
more relations of operation: mathematical, as expressing functions of
dependence and order of grouping; biological, relations of
differentiation of descent, effected through adjustment of various
environments; and so on through the sphere of the sciences. In short,
our conceptions attain a maximum of definite individuality and of
generality (or applicability) in the degree to which they show how
things depend upon one another or influence one another, instead of
expressing the qualities that objects possess statically. The ideal of a
system of scientific conceptions is to attain continuity, freedom, and
flexibility of transition in passing from any fact and meaning to any
other; this demand is met in the degree in which we lay hold of the
dynamic ties that hold things together in a continuously changing
process--a principle that states insight into mode of production or
growth.
CHAPTER TEN
CONCRETE AND ABSTRACT THINKING
[Sidenote: False notions of concrete and abstract]
The maxim enjoined upon teachers, "to proceed from the concrete to the
abstract," is perhaps familiar rather than comprehended. Few who read
and hear it gain a clear conception of the starting-point, the concrete;
of the nature of the goal, the abstract; and of the exact nature of the
path to be traversed in going from one to the other. At times the
injunction is positively misunderstood, being taken to mean that
education should advance from things to thought--as if any dealing with
things in which thinking is not involved could possibly be educative. So
understood, the maxim encourages mechanical routine or sensuous
excitation at one end of the educational scale--the lower--and academic
and unapplied learning at the upper end.
Actually, all dealing with things, even the child's, is immersed in
inferences; things are clothed by the suggestions they arouse, and are
significant as challenges to interpretation or as evidences to
substantiate a belief. Nothing could be more unnatural than instruction
in things without thought; in sense-perceptions without judgments based
upon them. And if the abstract to which we are to proceed denotes
thought apart from things, the goal recommended is formal and empty,
for effective thought always refers, more or less directly, to things.
[Sidenote: Direct and indirect understanding again]
Yet the maxim has a meaning which, understood and supplemented, states
the line of development of logical capacity. What is this signification?
Concrete denotes a meaning definitely marked off from other meanings so
that it is readily apprehended by itself. When we hear the words,
_table_, _chair_, _stove_, _coat_, we do not have to reflect in order to
grasp what is meant. The terms convey meaning so directly that no effort
at translating is needed. The meanings of some terms and things,
however, are grasped only by first calling to mind more familiar things
and then tracing out connections between them and what we do not
understand. Roughly speaking, the former kind of meanings is concrete;
the latter abstract.
[Sidenote: What is familiar is mentally concrete]
To one who is thoroughly at home in physics and chemistry, the notions
of _atom_ and _molecule_ are fairly concrete. They are constantly used
without involving any labor of thought in apprehending what they mean.
But the layman and the beginner in science have first to remind
themselves of things with which they already are well acquainted, and go
through a process of slow translation; the terms _atom_ and _molecule_
losing, moreover, their hard-won meaning only too easily if familiar
things, and the line of transition from them to the strange, drop out of
mind. The same difference is illustrated by any technical terms:
_coefficient_ and _exponent_ in algebra, _triangle_ and _square_ in
their geometric as distinct from their popular meanings; _capital_ and
_value_ as used in political economy, and so on.
[Sidenote: Practical things are familiar]
The difference as noted is purely relative to the intellectual progress
of an individual; what is abstract at one period of growth is concrete
at another; or even the contrary, as one finds that things supposed to
be thoroughly familiar involve strange factors and unsolved problems.
There is, nevertheless, a general line of cleavage which, deciding upon
the whole what things fall within the limits of familiar acquaintance
and what without, marks off the concrete and the abstract in a more
permanent way. _These limits are fixed mainly by the demands of
practical life._ Things such as sticks and stones, meat and potatoes,
houses and trees, are such constant features of the environment of which
we have to take account in order to live, that their important meanings
are soon learnt, and indissolubly associated with objects. We are
acquainted with a thing (or it is familiar to us) when we have so much
to do with it that its strange and unexpected corners are rubbed off.
The necessities of social intercourse convey to adults a like
concreteness upon such terms as _taxes_, _elections_, _wages_, _the
law_, and so on. Things the meaning of which I personally do not take in
directly, appliances of cook, carpenter, or weaver, for example, are
nevertheless unhesitatingly classed as concrete, since they are so
directly connected with our common social life.
[Sidenote: The theoretical, or strictly intellectual, is abstract]
By contrast, the abstract is the _theoretical_, or that not intimately
associated with practical concerns. The abstract thinker (the man of
pure science as he is sometimes called) deliberately abstracts from
application in life; that is, he leaves practical uses out of account.
This, however, is a merely negative statement. What remains when
connections with use and application are excluded? _Evidently only what
has to do with knowing considered as an end in itself._ Many notions of
science are abstract, not only because they cannot be understood
without a long apprenticeship in the science (which is equally true of
technical matters in the arts), but also because the whole content of
their meaning has been framed for the sole purpose of facilitating
further knowledge, inquiry, and speculation. _When thinking is used as a
means to some end, good, or value beyond itself, it is concrete; when it
is employed simply as a means to more thinking, it is abstract._ To a
theorist an idea is adequate and self-contained just because it engages
and rewards thought; to a medical practitioner, an engineer, an artist,
a merchant, a politician, it is complete only when employed in the
furthering of some interest in life--health, wealth, beauty, goodness,
success, or what you will.
[Sidenote: Contempt for theory]
For the great majority of men under ordinary circumstances, the
practical exigencies of life are almost, if not quite, coercive. Their
main business is the proper conduct of their affairs. Whatever is of
significance only as affording scope for thinking is pallid and
remote--almost artificial. Hence the contempt felt by the practical and
successful executive for the "mere theorist"; hence his conviction that
certain things may be all very well in theory, but that they will not do
in practice; in general, the depreciatory way in which he uses the terms
_abstract_, _theoretical_, and _intellectual_--as distinct from
_intelligent_.
[Sidenote: But theory is highly practical]
This attitude is justified, of course, under certain conditions. But
depreciation of theory does not contain the whole truth, as common or
practical sense recognizes. There is such a thing, even from the
common-sense standpoint, as being "too practical," as being so intent
upon the immediately practical as not to see beyond the end of one's
nose or as to cut off the limb upon which one is sitting. The question
is one of limits, of degrees and adjustments, rather than one of
absolute separation. Truly practical men give their minds free play
about a subject without asking too closely at every point for the
advantage to be gained; exclusive preoccupation with matters of use and
application so narrows the horizon as in the long run to defeat itself.
It does not pay to tether one's thoughts to the post of use with too
short a rope. Power in action requires some largeness and
imaginativeness of vision. Men must at least have enough interest in
thinking for the sake of thinking to escape the limits of routine and
custom. Interest in knowledge for the sake of knowledge, in thinking for
the sake of the free play of thought, is necessary then to the
_emancipation_ of practical life--to make it rich and progressive.
We may now recur to the pedagogic maxim of going from the concrete to
the abstract.
[Sidenote: Begin with the concrete means begin with practical
manipulations]
1. Since the _concrete_ denotes thinking applied to activities for the
sake of dealing effectively with the difficulties that present
themselves practically, "beginning with the concrete" signifies that we
should at the outset make much of _doing_; especially, make much in
occupations that are not of a routine and mechanical kind and hence
require intelligent selection and adaptation of means and materials. We
do not "follow the order of nature" when we multiply mere sensations or
accumulate physical objects. Instruction in number is not concrete
merely because splints or beans or dots are employed, while whenever the
use and bearing of number relations are clearly perceived, the number
idea is concrete even if figures alone are used. Just what sort of
symbol it is best to use at a given time--whether blocks, or lines, or
figures--is entirely a matter of adjustment to the given case. If
physical things used in teaching number or geography or anything else do
not leave the mind illuminated with recognition of a _meaning_ beyond
themselves, the instruction that uses them is as abstract as that which
doles out ready-made definitions and rules; for it distracts attention
from ideas to mere physical excitations.
[Sidenote: Confusion of the concrete with the sensibly isolated]
The conception that we have only to put before the senses particular
physical objects in order to impress certain ideas upon the mind amounts
almost to a superstition. The introduction of object lessons and
sense-training scored a distinct advance over the prior method of
linguistic symbols, and this advance tended to blind educators to the
fact that only a halfway step had been taken. Things and sensations
develop the child, indeed, but only because he _uses_ them in mastering
his body and in the scheme of his activities. Appropriate continuous
occupations or activities involve the use of natural materials, tools,
modes of energy, and do it in a way that compels thinking as to what
they mean, how they are related to one another and to the realization of
ends; while the mere isolated presentation of things remains barren and
dead. A few generations ago the great obstacle in the way of reform of
primary education was belief in the almost magical efficacy of the
symbols of language (including number) to produce mental training; at
present, belief in the efficacy of objects just as objects, blocks the
way. As frequently happens, the better is an enemy of the best.
[Sidenote: Transfer of interest to intellectual matters]
2. The interest in results, in the successful carrying on of an
activity, should be gradually transferred to study of objects--their
properties, consequences, structures, causes, and effects. The adult
when at work in his life calling is rarely free to devote time or
energy--beyond the necessities of his immediate action--to the study of
what he deals with. (_Ante_, p. 43.) The educative activities of
childhood should be so arranged that direct interest in the activity and
its outcome create a demand for attention to matters that have a more
and more _indirect and remote_ connection with the original activity.
The direct interest in carpentering or shop work should yield
organically and gradually an interest in geometric and mechanical
problems. The interest in cooking should grow into an interest in
chemical experimentation and in the physiology and hygiene of bodily
growth. The making of pictures should pass to an interest in the
technique of representation and the aesthetics of appreciation, and so
on. This development is what the term _go_ signifies in the maxim "_go_
from the concrete to the abstract"; it represents the dynamic and truly
educative factor of the process.
[Sidenote: Development of delight in the activity of thinking]
3. The outcome, the _abstract_ to which education is to proceed, is an
interest in intellectual matters for their own sake, a delight in
thinking for the sake of thinking. It is an old story that acts and
processes which at the outset are incidental to something else develop
and maintain an absorbing value of their own. So it is with thinking and
with knowledge; at first incidental to results and adjustments beyond
themselves, they attract more and more attention to themselves till they
become ends, not means. Children engage, unconstrainedly and
continually, in reflective inspection and testing for the sake of what
they are interested in doing successfully. Habits of thinking thus
generated may increase in volume and extent till they become of
importance on their own account.
[Sidenote: Examples of the transition]
The three instances cited in Chapter Six represented an ascending cycle
from the practical to the theoretical. Taking thought to keep a personal
engagement is obviously of the concrete kind. Endeavoring to work out
the meaning of a certain part of a boat is an instance of an
intermediate kind. The reason for the existence and position of the pole
is a practical reason, so that to the architect the problem was purely
concrete--the maintenance of a certain system of action. But for the
passenger on the boat, the problem was theoretical, more or less
speculative. It made no difference to his reaching his destination
whether he worked out the meaning of the pole. The third case, that of
the appearance and movement of the bubbles, illustrates a strictly
theoretical or abstract case. No overcoming of physical obstacles, no
adjustment of external means to ends, is at stake. Curiosity,
intellectual curiosity, is challenged by a seemingly anomalous
occurrence; and thinking tries simply to account for an apparent
exception in terms of recognized principles.
[Sidenote: Theoretical knowledge never the whole end]
(_i_) Abstract thinking, it should be noted, represents _an_ end, not
_the_ end. The power of sustained thinking on matters remote from direct
use is an outgrowth of practical and immediate modes of thought, but not
a substitute for them. The educational end is not the destruction of
power to think so as to surmount obstacles and adjust means and ends; it
is not its replacement by abstract reflection. Nor is theoretical
thinking a higher type of thinking than practical. A person who has at
command both types of thinking is of a higher order than he who
possesses only one. Methods that in developing abstract intellectual
abilities weaken habits of practical or concrete thinking, fall as much
short of the educational ideal as do the methods that in cultivating
ability to plan, to invent, to arrange, to forecast, fail to secure some
delight in thinking irrespective of practical consequences.
[Sidenote: Nor that most congenial to the majority of pupils]
(_ii_) Educators should also note the very great individual differences
that exist; they should not try to force one pattern and model upon all.
In many (probably the majority) the executive tendency, the habit of
mind that thinks for purposes of conduct and achievement, not for the
sake of knowing, remains dominant to the end. Engineers, lawyers,
doctors, merchants, are much more numerous in adult life than scholars,
scientists, and philosophers. While education should strive to make men
who, however prominent their professional interests and aims, partake of
the spirit of the scholar, philosopher, and scientist, no good reason
appears why education should esteem the one mental habit inherently
superior to the other, and deliberately try to transform the type from
practical to theoretical. Have not our schools (as already suggested, p.
49) been one-sidedly devoted to the more abstract type of thinking, thus
doing injustice to the majority of pupils? Has not the idea of a
"liberal" and "humane" education tended too often in practice to the
production of technical, because overspecialized, thinkers?
[Sidenote: Aim of education is a working balance]
The aim of education should be to secure a balanced interaction of the
two types of mental attitude, having sufficient regard to the
disposition of the individual not to hamper and cripple whatever powers
are naturally strong in him. The narrowness of individuals of strong
concrete bent needs to be liberalized. Every opportunity that occurs
within their practical activities for developing curiosity and
susceptibility to intellectual problems should be seized. Violence is
not done to natural disposition, but the latter is broadened. As regards
the smaller number of those who have a taste for abstract, purely
intellectual topics, pains should be taken to multiply opportunities and
demands for the application of ideas; for translating symbolic truths
into terms of social life and its ends. Every human being has both
capabilities, and every individual will be more effective and happier if
both powers are developed in easy and close interaction with each
other.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EMPIRICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THINKING
Sec. 1. _Empirical Thinking_
[Sidenote: Empirical thinking depends on past habits]
Apart from the development of scientific method, inferences depend upon
habits that have been built up under the influence of a number of
particular experiences not themselves arranged for logical purposes. A
says, "It will probably rain to-morrow." B asks, "Why do you think so?"
and A replies, "Because the sky was lowering at sunset." When B asks,
"What has that to do with it?" A responds, "I do not know, but it
generally does rain after such a sunset." He does not perceive any
_connection_ between the appearance of the sky and coming rain; he is
not aware of any continuity in the facts themselves--any law or
principle, as we usually say. He simply, from frequently recurring
conjunctions of the events, has associated them so that when he sees one
he thinks of the other. One _suggests_ the other, or is _associated_
with it. A man may believe it will rain to-morrow because he has
consulted the barometer; but if he has no conception how the height of
the mercury column (or the position of an index moved by its rise and
fall) is connected with variations of atmospheric pressure, and how
these in turn are connected with the amount of moisture in the air, his
belief in the likelihood of rain is purely empirical. When men lived in
the open and got their living by hunting, fishing, or pasturing flocks,
the detection of the signs and indications of weather changes was a
matter of great importance. A body of proverbs and maxims, forming an
extensive section of traditionary folklore, was developed. But as long
as there was no understanding _why_ or _how_ certain events were signs,
as long as foresight and weather shrewdness rested simply upon repeated
conjunction among facts, beliefs about the weather were thoroughly
empirical.
[Sidenote: It is fairly adequate in some matters,]
In similar fashion learned men in the Orient learned to predict, with
considerable accuracy, the recurrent positions of the planets, the sun
and the moon, and to foretell the time of eclipses, without
understanding in any degree the laws of the movements of heavenly
bodies--that is, without having a notion of the continuities existing
among the facts themselves. They had learned from repeated observations
that things happened in about such and such a fashion. Till a
comparatively recent time, the truths of medicine were mainly in the
same condition. Experience had shown that "upon the whole," "as a rule,"
"generally or usually speaking," certain results followed certain
remedies, when symptoms were given. Our beliefs about human nature in
individuals (psychology) and in masses (sociology) are still very
largely of a purely empirical sort. Even the science of geometry, now
frequently reckoned a typical rational science, began, among the
Egyptians, as an accumulation of recorded observations about methods of
approximate mensuration of land surfaces; and only gradually assumed,
among the Greeks, scientific form.
The _disadvantages_ of purely empirical thinking are obvious.
[Sidenote: but is very apt to lead to false beliefs,]
1. While many empirical conclusions are, roughly speaking, correct;
while they are exact enough to be of great help in practical life; while
the presages of a weatherwise sailor or hunter may be more accurate,
within a certain restricted range, than those of a scientist who relies
wholly upon scientific observations and tests; while, indeed, empirical
observations and records furnish the raw or crude material of scientific
knowledge, yet the empirical method affords no way of discriminating
between right and wrong conclusions. Hence it is responsible for a
multitude of _false_ beliefs. The technical designation for one of the
commonest fallacies is _post hoc, ergo propter hoc_; the belief that
because one thing comes _after_ another, it comes _because_ of the
other. Now this fallacy of method is the animating principle of
empirical conclusions, even when correct--the correctness being almost
as much a matter of good luck as of method. That potatoes should be
planted only during the crescent moon, that near the sea people are born
at high tide and die at low tide, that a comet is an omen of danger,
that bad luck follows the cracking of a mirror, that a patent medicine
cures a disease--these and a thousand like notions are asseverated on
the basis of empirical coincidence and conjunction. Moreover, habits of
expectation and belief are formed otherwise than by a number of repeated
similar cases.
[Sidenote: and does not enable us to cope with the novel,]
2. The more numerous the experienced instances and the closer the watch
kept upon them, the greater is the trustworthiness of constant
conjunction as evidence of connection among the things themselves. Many
of our most important beliefs still have only this sort of warrant. No
one can yet tell, with certainty, the necessary cause of old age or of
death--which are empirically the most certain of all expectations. But
even the most reliable beliefs of this type fail when they confront the
_novel_. Since they rest upon past uniformities, they are useless when
further experience departs in any considerable measure from ancient
incident and wonted precedent. Empirical inference follows the grooves
and ruts that custom wears, and has no track to follow when the groove
disappears. So important is this aspect of the matter that Clifford
found the difference between ordinary skill and scientific thought right
here. "Skill enables a man to deal with the same circumstances that he
has met before, scientific thought enables him to deal with different
circumstances that he has never met before." And he goes so far as to
define scientific thinking as "the application of old experience to new
circumstances."
[Sidenote: and leads to laziness and presumption,]
3. We have not yet made the acquaintance of the most harmful feature of
the empirical method. Mental inertia, laziness, unjustifiable
conservatism, are its probable accompaniments. Its general effect upon
mental attitude is more serious than even the specific wrong conclusions
in which it has landed. Wherever the chief dependence in forming
inferences is upon the conjunctions observed in past experience,
failures to agree with the usual order are slurred over, cases of
successful confirmation are exaggerated. Since the mind naturally
demands some principle of continuity, some connecting link between
separate facts and causes, forces are arbitrarily invented for that
purpose. Fantastic and mythological explanations are resorted to in
order to supply missing links. The pump brings water because nature
abhors a vacuum; opium makes men sleep because it has a dormitive
potency; we recollect a past event because we have a faculty of memory.
In the history of the progress of human knowledge, out and out myths
accompany the first stage of empiricism; while "hidden essences" and
"occult forces" mark its second stage. By their very nature, these
"causes" escape observation, so that their explanatory value can be
neither confirmed nor refuted by further observation or experience.
Hence belief in them becomes purely traditionary. They give rise to
doctrines which, inculcated and handed down, become dogmas; subsequent
inquiry and reflection are actually stifled. (_Ante_, p. 23.)
[Sidenote: and to dogmatism]
Certain men or classes of men come to be the accepted guardians and
transmitters--instructors--of established doctrines. To question the
beliefs is to question their authority; to accept the beliefs is
evidence of loyalty to the powers that be, a proof of good citizenship.
Passivity, docility, acquiescence, come to be primal intellectual
virtues. Facts and events presenting novelty and variety are slighted,
or are sheared down till they fit into the Procrustean bed of habitual
belief. Inquiry and doubt are silenced by citation of ancient laws or a
multitude of miscellaneous and unsifted cases. This attitude of mind
generates dislike of change, and the resulting aversion to novelty is
fatal to progress. What will not fit into the established canons is
outlawed; men who make new discoveries are objects of suspicion and even
of persecution. Beliefs that perhaps originally were the products of
fairly extensive and careful observation are stereotyped into fixed
traditions and semi-sacred dogmas accepted simply upon authority, and
are mixed with fantastic conceptions that happen to have won the
acceptance of authorities.
Sec. 2. _Scientific Method_
[Sidenote: Scientific thinking analyzes the present case]
In contrast with the empirical method stands the scientific. Scientific
method replaces the repeated conjunction or coincidence of separate
facts by discovery of a single comprehensive fact, effecting this
replacement by _breaking up the coarse or gross facts of observation
into a number of minuter processes not directly accessible to
perception_.
[Sidenote: Illustration from _suction_ of empirical method,]
If a layman were asked why water rises from the cistern when an ordinary
pump is worked, he would doubtless answer, "By suction." Suction is
regarded as a force like heat or pressure. If such a person is
confronted by the fact that water rises with a suction pump only about
thirty-three feet, he easily disposes of the difficulty on the ground
that all forces vary in their intensities and finally reach a limit at
which they cease to operate. The variation with elevation above the sea
level of the height to which water can be pumped is either unnoticed,
or, if noted, is dismissed as one of the curious anomalies in which
nature abounds.
[Sidenote: of scientific method]
[Sidenote: Relies on differences,]
Now the scientist advances by assuming that what seems to observation to
be a single total fact is in truth complex. He attempts, therefore, to
break up the single fact of water-rising-in-the-pipe into a number of
lesser facts. His method of proceeding is by _varying conditions one by
one_ so far as possible, and noting just what happens when a given
condition is eliminated. There are two methods for varying
conditions.[24] The first is an extension of the empirical method of
observation. It consists in comparing very carefully the results of a
great number of observations which have occurred under accidentally
_different_ conditions. The difference in the rise of the water at
different heights above the sea level, and its total cessation when the
distance to be lifted is, even at sea level, more than thirty-three
feet, are emphasized, instead of being slurred over. The purpose is to
find out what _special conditions_ are present when the effect occurs
and absent when it fails to occur. These special conditions are then
substituted for the gross fact, or regarded as its principle--the key to
understanding it.
[24] The next two paragraphs repeat, for purposes of the present
discussion, what we have already noted in a different context. See
p. 88 and p. 99.
[Sidenote: and creates differences]
The method of analysis by comparing cases is, however, badly
handicapped; it can do nothing until it is presented with a certain
number of diversified cases. And even when different cases are at hand,
it will be questionable whether they vary in just these respects in
which it is important that they should vary in order to throw light upon
the question at issue. The method is passive and dependent upon external
accidents. Hence the superiority of the active or experimental method.
Even a small number of observations may suggest an explanation--a
hypothesis or theory. Working upon this suggestion, the scientist may
then _intentionally_ vary conditions and note what happens. If the
empirical observations have suggested to him the possibility of a
connection between air pressure on the water and the rising of the water
in the tube where air pressure is absent, he deliberately empties the
air out of the vessel in which the water is contained and notes that
suction no longer works; or he intentionally increases atmospheric
pressure on the water and notes the result. He institutes experiments to
calculate the weight of air at the sea level and at various levels
above, and compares the results of reasoning based upon the pressure of
air of these various weights upon a certain volume of water with the
results actually obtained by observation. _Observations formed by
variation of conditions on the basis of some idea or theory constitute
experiment._ Experiment is the chief resource in scientific reasoning
because it facilitates the picking out of significant elements in a
gross, vague whole.
[Sidenote: Analysis and synthesis again]
Experimental thinking, or scientific reasoning, is thus a conjoint
process of _analysis and synthesis_, or, in less technical language, of
discrimination and assimilation or identification. The gross fact of
water rising when the suction valve is worked is resolved or
discriminated into a number of independent variables, some of which had
never before been observed or even thought of in connection with the
fact. One of these facts, the weight of the atmosphere, is then
selectively seized upon as the key to the entire phenomenon. This
disentangling constitutes _analysis_. But atmosphere and its pressure or
weight is a fact not confined to this single instance. It is a fact
familiar or at least discoverable as operative in a great number of
other events. In fixing upon this imperceptible and minute fact as the
essence or key to the elevation of water by the pump, the pump-fact has
thus been assimilated to a whole group of ordinary facts from which it
was previously isolated. This assimilation constitutes _synthesis_.
Moreover, the fact of atmospheric pressure is itself a case of one of
the commonest of all facts--weight or gravitational force. Conclusions
that apply to the common fact of weight are thus transferable to the
consideration and interpretation of the _relatively_ rare and
exceptional case of the suction of water. The suction pump is seen to be
a case of the same kind or sort as the siphon, the barometer, the
rising of the balloon, and a multitude of other things with which at
first sight it has no connection at all. This is another instance of the
synthetic or assimilative phase of scientific thinking.
If we revert to the advantages of scientific over empirical thinking, we
find that we now have the clue to them.
[Sidenote: Lessened liability to error]
(_a_) The increased security, the added factor of certainty or proof, is
due to the substitution of the _detailed and specific fact_ of
atmospheric pressure for the gross and total and relatively
miscellaneous fact of suction. The latter is complex, and its complexity
is due to many unknown and unspecified factors; hence, any statement
about it is more or less random, and likely to be defeated by any
unforeseen variation of circumstances. _Comparatively_, at least, the
minute and detailed fact of air pressure is a measurable and definite
fact--one that can be picked out and managed with assurance.
[Sidenote: Ability to manage the new]
(_b_) As analysis accounts for the added certainty, so synthesis
accounts for ability to cope with the novel and variable. Weight is a
much commoner fact than atmospheric weight, and this in turn is a much
commoner fact than the workings of the suction pump. To be able to
substitute the common and frequent fact for that which is relatively
rare and peculiar is to reduce the seemingly novel and exceptional to
cases of a general and familiar principle, and thus to bring them under
control for interpretation and prediction.
As Professor James says: "Think of heat as motion and whatever is true
of motion will be true of heat; but we have a hundred experiences of
motion for every one of heat. Think of rays passing through this lens as
cases of bending toward the perpendicular, and you substitute for the
comparatively unfamiliar lens the very familiar notion of a particular
change in direction of a line, of which notion every day brings us
countless examples."[25]
[25] _Psychology_, vol. II. p. 342.
[Sidenote: Interest in the future or in progress]
(_c_) The change of attitude from conservative reliance upon the past,
upon routine and custom, to faith in progress through the intelligent
regulation of existing conditions, is, of course, the reflex of the
scientific method of experimentation. The empirical method inevitably
magnifies the influences of the past; the experimental method throws
into relief the possibilities of the future. The empirical method says,
"_Wait_ till there is a sufficient number of cases;" the experimental
method says, "_Produce_ the cases." The former depends upon nature's
accidentally happening to present us with certain conjunctions of
circumstances; the latter deliberately and intentionally endeavors to
bring about the conjunction. By this method the notion of progress
secures scientific warrant.
[Sidenote: Physical _versus_ logical force]
Ordinary experience is controlled largely by the direct strength and
intensity of various occurrences. What is bright, sudden, loud, secures
notice and is given a conspicuous rating. What is dim, feeble, and
continuous gets ignored, or is regarded as of slight importance.
Customary experience tends to the control of thinking by considerations
of _direct and immediate strength_ rather than by those of importance in
the long run. Animals without the power of forecast and planning must,
upon the whole, respond to the stimuli that are most urgent at the
moment, or cease to exist. These stimuli lose nothing of their direct
urgency and clamorous insistency when the thinking power develops; and
yet thinking demands the subordination of the immediate stimulus to the
remote and distant. The feeble and the minute may be of much greater
importance than the glaring and the big. The latter may be signs of a
force that is already exhausting itself; the former may indicate the
beginnings of a process in which the whole fortune of the individual is
involved. The prime necessity for scientific thought is that the thinker
be freed from the tyranny of sense stimuli and habit, and this
emancipation is also the necessary condition of progress.
[Sidenote: Illustration from moving water]
Consider the following quotation: "When it first occurred to a
reflecting mind that moving water had a property identical with human or
brute force, namely, the property of setting other masses in motion,
overcoming inertia and resistance,--when the sight of the stream
suggested through this point of likeness the power of the animal,--a new
addition was made to the class of prime movers, and when circumstances
permitted, this power could become a substitute for the others. It may
seem to the modern understanding, familiar with water wheels and
drifting rafts, that the similarity here was an extremely obvious one.
But if we put ourselves back into an early state of mind, when running
water affected the mind _by its brilliancy, its roar and irregular
devastation_, we may easily suppose that to identify this with animal
muscular energy was by no means an obvious effort."[26]
[26] Bain, _The Senses and Intellect_, third American ed., 1879, p.
492 (italics not in original).
[Sidenote: Value of abstraction]
If we add to these obvious sensory features the various social customs
and expectations which fix the attitude of the individual, the evil of
the subjection of free and fertile suggestion to empirical
considerations becomes clear. A certain power of _abstraction_, of
deliberate turning away from the habitual responses to a situation, was
required before men could be emancipated to follow up suggestions that
in the end are fruitful.
[Sidenote: Experience as inclusive of thought]
In short, the term _experience_ may be interpreted either with reference
to the _empirical_ or the _experimental_ attitude of mind. Experience is
not a rigid and closed thing; it is vital, and hence growing. When
dominated by the past, by custom and routine, it is often opposed to the
reasonable, the thoughtful. But experience also includes the reflection
that sets us free from the limiting influence of sense, appetite, and
tradition. Experience may welcome and assimilate all that the most exact
and penetrating thought discovers. Indeed, the business of education
might be defined as just such an emancipation and enlargement of
experience. Education takes the individual while he is relatively
plastic, before he has become so indurated by isolated experiences as to
be rendered hopelessly empirical in his habit of mind. The attitude of
childhood is naive, wondering, experimental; the world of man and nature
is new. Right methods of education preserve and perfect this attitude,
and thereby short-circuit for the individual the slow progress of the
race, eliminating the waste that comes from inert routine.
PART THREE: THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
CHAPTER TWELVE
ACTIVITY AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
In this chapter we shall gather together and amplify considerations that
have already been advanced, in various passages of the preceding pages,
concerning the relation of _action to thought_. We shall follow, though
not with exactness, the order of development in the unfolding human
being.
Sec. 1. _The Early Stage of Activity_
[Sidenote: 1. The baby's problem determines his thinking]
The sight of a baby often calls out the question: "What do you suppose
he is thinking about?" By the nature of the case, the question is
unanswerable in detail; but, also by the nature of the case, we may be
sure about a baby's chief interest. His primary problem is mastery of
his body as a tool of securing comfortable and effective adjustments to
his surroundings, physical and social. The child has to learn to do
almost everything: to see, to hear, to reach, to handle, to balance the
body, to creep, to walk, and so on. Even if it be true that human beings
have even more instinctive reactions than lower animals, it is also true
that instinctive tendencies are much less perfect in men, and that most
of them are of little use till they are intelligently combined and
directed. A little chick just out of the shell will after a few trials
peck at and grasp grains of food with its beak as well as at any later
time. This involves a complicated cooerdination of the eye and the head.
An infant does not even begin to reach definitely for things that the
eye sees till he is several months old, and even then several weeks'
practice is required before he learns the adjustment so as neither to
overreach nor to underreach. It may not be literally true that the child
will grasp for the moon, but it is true that he needs much practice
before he can tell whether an object is within reach or not. The arm is
thrust out instinctively in response to a stimulus from the eye, and
this tendency is the origin of the ability to reach and grasp exactly
and quickly; but nevertheless final mastery requires observing and
selecting the successful movements, and arranging them in view of an
end. _These operations of conscious selection and arrangement constitute
thinking_, though of a rudimentary type.
[Sidenote: Mastery of the body is an intellectual problem]
Since mastery of the bodily organs is necessary for all later
developments, such problems are both interesting and important, and
solving them supplies a very genuine training of thinking power. The joy
the child shows in learning to use his limbs, to translate what he sees
into what he handles, to connect sounds with sights, sights with taste
and touch, and the rapidity with which intelligence grows in the first
year and a half of life (the time during which the more fundamental
problems of the use of the organism are mastered), are sufficient
evidence that the development of physical control is not a physical but
an intellectual achievement.
[Sidenote: 2. The problem of social adjustment and intercourse]
Although in the early months the child is mainly occupied in learning
to use his body to accommodate himself to physical conditions in a
comfortable way and to use things skillfully and effectively, yet social
adjustments are very important. In connection with parents, nurse,
brother, and sister, the child learns the signs of satisfaction of
hunger, of removal of discomfort, of the approach of agreeable light,
color, sound, and so on. His contact with physical things is regulated
by persons, and he soon distinguishes persons as the most important and
interesting of all the objects with which he has to do. Speech, the
accurate adaptation of sounds heard to the movements of tongue and lips,
is, however, the great instrument of social adaptation; and with the
development of speech (usually in the second year) adaptation of the
baby's activities to and with those of other persons gives the keynote
of mental life. His range of possible activities is indefinitely widened
as he watches what other persons do, and as he tries to understand and
to do what they encourage him to attempt. The outline pattern of mental
life is thus set in the first four or five years. Years, centuries,
generations of invention and planning, may have gone to the development
of the performances and occupations of the adults surrounding the child.
Yet for him their activities are direct stimuli; they are part of his
natural environment; they are carried on in physical terms that appeal
to his eye, ear, and touch. He cannot, of course, appropriate their
meaning directly through his senses; but they furnish stimuli to which
he responds, so that his attention is focussed upon a higher order of
materials and of problems. Were it not for this process by which the
achievements of one generation form the stimuli that direct the
activities of the next, the story of civilization would be writ in
water, and each generation would have laboriously to make for itself, if
it could, its way out of savagery.
[Sidenote: Social adjustment results in imitation but is not caused by
it]
Imitation is one (though only one, see p. 47) of the means by which the
activities of adults supply stimuli which are so interesting, so varied,
so complex, and so novel, as to occasion a rapid progress of thought.
Mere imitation, however, would not give rise to thinking; if we could
learn like parrots by simply copying the outward acts of others, we
should never have to think; nor should we know, after we had mastered
the copied act, what was the meaning of the thing we had done. Educators
(and psychologists) have often assumed that acts which reproduce the
behavior of others are acquired merely by imitation. But a child rarely
learns by conscious imitation; and to say that his imitation is
unconscious is to say that it is not from his standpoint imitation at
all. The word, the gesture, the act, the occupation of another, falls in
line with _some impulse already active_ and suggests some satisfactory
mode of expression, some end in which it may find fulfillment. Having
this end of his own, the child then notes other persons, as he notes
natural events, to get further suggestions as to means of its
realization. He selects some of the means he observes, tries them on,
finds them successful or unsuccessful, is confirmed or weakened in his
belief in their value, and so continues selecting, arranging, adapting,
testing, till he can accomplish what he wishes. The onlooker may then
observe the resemblance of this act to some act of an adult, and
conclude that it was acquired by imitation, while as a matter of fact it
was acquired by attention, observation, selection, experimentation, and
confirmation by results. Only because this method is employed is there
intellectual discipline and an educative result. The presence of adult
activities plays an enormous role in the intellectual growth of the
child because they add to the natural stimuli of the world new stimuli
which are more exactly adapted to the needs of a human being, which are
richer, better organized, more complex in range, permitting more
flexible adaptations, and calling out novel reactions. But in utilizing
these stimuli the child follows the same methods that he uses when he is
forced to think in order to master his body.
Sec. 2. _Play, Work, and Allied Forms of Activity_
[Sidenote: Play indicates the domination of activity by meanings or
ideas]
[Sidenote: Organization of ideas involved in play]
When things become signs, when they gain a representative capacity as
standing for other things, play is transformed from mere physical
exuberance into an activity involving a mental factor. A little girl who
had broken her doll was seen to perform with the leg of the doll all the
operations of washing, putting to bed, and fondling, that she had been
accustomed to perform with the entire doll. The part stood for the
whole; she reacted not to the stimulus sensibly present, but to the
meaning suggested by the sense object. So children use a stone for a
table, leaves for plates, acorns for cups. So they use their dolls,
their trains, their blocks, their other toys. In manipulating them, they
are living not with the physical things, but in the large world of
meanings, natural and social, evoked by these things. So when children
play horse, play store, play house or making calls, they are
subordinating the physically present to the ideally signified. In this
way, a world of meanings, a store of concepts (so fundamental to all
intellectual achievement), is defined and built up. Moreover, not only
do meanings thus become familiar acquaintances, but they are organized,
arranged in groups, made to cohere in connected ways. A play and a story
blend insensibly into each other. The most fanciful plays of children
rarely lose all touch with the mutual fitness and pertinency of various
meanings to one another; the "freest" plays observe some principles of
coherence and unification. They have a beginning, middle, and end. In
games, rules of order run through various minor acts and bind them into
a connected whole. The rhythm, the competition, and cooeperation involved
in most plays and games also introduce organization. There is, then,
nothing mysterious or mystical in the discovery made by Plato and remade
by Froebel that play is the chief, almost the only, mode of education
for the child in the years of later infancy.
[Sidenote: The playful attitude]
_Playfulness_ is a more important consideration than play. The former is
an attitude of mind; the latter is a passing outward manifestation of
this attitude. When things are treated simply as vehicles of suggestion,
what is suggested overrides the thing. Hence the playful attitude is one
of freedom. The person is not bound to the physical traits of things,
nor does he care whether a thing really means (as we say) what he takes
it to represent. When the child plays horse with a broom and cars with
chairs, the fact that the broom does not really represent a horse, or a
chair a locomotive, is of no account. In order, then, that playfulness
may not terminate in arbitrary fancifulness and in building up an
imaginary world alongside the world of actual things, it is necessary
that the play attitude should gradually pass into a work attitude.
[Sidenote: The work attitude is interested in means and ends]
What is work--work not as mere external performance, but as attitude of
mind? It signifies that the person is not content longer to accept and
to act upon the meanings that things suggest, but demands congruity of
meaning with the things themselves. In the natural course of growth,
children come to find irresponsible make-believe plays inadequate. A
fiction is too easy a way out to afford content. There is not enough
stimulus to call forth satisfactory mental response. When this point is
reached, the ideas that things suggest must be applied to the things
with some regard to fitness. A small cart, resembling a "real" cart,
with "real" wheels, tongue, and body, meets the mental demand better
than merely making believe that anything which comes to hand is a cart.
Occasionally to take part in setting a "real" table with "real" dishes
brings more reward than forever to make believe a flat stone is a table
and that leaves are dishes. The interest may still center in the
meanings, the things may be of importance only as amplifying a certain
meaning. So far the attitude is one of play. But the meaning is now of
such a character that it must find appropriate embodiment in actual
things.
The dictionary does not permit us to call such activities work.
Nevertheless, they represent a genuine passage of play into work. For
work (as a mental attitude, not as mere external performance) _means
interest in the adequate embodiment of a meaning_ (a suggestion,
purpose, aim) _in objective form through the use of appropriate
materials and appliances_. Such an attitude takes advantage of the
meanings aroused and built up in free play, but _controls their
development by seeing to it that they are applied to things in ways
consistent with the observable structure of the things themselves_.
[Sidenote: and in processes on account of their results]
The point of this distinction between play and work may be cleared up by
comparing it with a more usual way of stating the difference. In play
activity, it is said, the interest is in the activity for its own sake;
in work, it is in the product or result in which the activity
terminates. Hence the former is purely free, while the latter is tied
down by the end to be achieved. When the difference is stated in this
sharp fashion, there is almost always introduced a false, unnatural
separation between process and product, between activity and its
achieved outcome. The true distinction is not between an interest in
activity for its own sake and interest in the external result of that
activity, but between an interest in an activity just as it flows on
from moment to moment, and an interest in an activity as tending to a
culmination, to an outcome, and therefore possessing a thread of
continuity binding together its successive stages. Both may equally
exemplify interest in an activity "for its own sake"; but in one case
the activity in which the interest resides is more or less casual,
following the accident of circumstance and whim, or of dictation; in the
other, the activity is enriched by the sense that it leads somewhere,
that it amounts to something.
[Sidenote: Consequences of the sharp separation of play and work]
Were it not that the false theory of the relation of the play and the
work attitudes has been connected with unfortunate modes of school
practice, insistence upon a truer view might seem an unnecessary
refinement. But the sharp break that unfortunately prevails between the
kindergarten and the grades is evidence that the theoretical distinction
has practical implications. Under the title of play, the former is
rendered unduly symbolic, fanciful, sentimental, and arbitrary; while
under the antithetical caption of work the latter contains many _tasks
externally assigned_. The former has no end and the latter an end so
remote that only the educator, not the child, is aware that it is an
end.
There comes a time when children must extend and make more exact their
acquaintance with existing things; must conceive ends and consequences
with sufficient definiteness to guide their actions by them, and must
acquire some technical skill in selecting and arranging means to realize
these ends. Unless these factors are gradually introduced in the earlier
play period, they must be introduced later abruptly and arbitrarily, to
the manifest disadvantage of both the earlier and the later stages.
[Sidenote: False notions of imagination and utility]
The sharp opposition of play and work is usually associated with false
notions of utility and imagination. Activity that is directed upon
matters of home and neighborhood interest is depreciated as merely
utilitarian. To let the child wash dishes, set the table, engage in
cooking, cut and sew dolls' clothes, make boxes that will hold "real
things," and construct his own playthings by using hammer and nails,
excludes, so it is said, the aesthetic and appreciative factor,
eliminates imagination, and subjects the child's development to material
and practical concerns; while (so it is said) to reproduce symbolically
the domestic relationships of birds and other animals, of human father
and mother and child, of workman and tradesman, of knight, soldier, and
magistrate, secures a liberal exercise of mind, of great moral as well
as intellectual value. It has been even stated that it is over-physical
and utilitarian if a child plants seeds and takes care of growing plants
in the kindergarten; while reproducing dramatically operations of
planting, cultivating, reaping, and so on, either with no physical
materials or with symbolic representatives, is highly educative to the
imagination and to spiritual appreciation. Toy dolls, trains of cars,
boats, and engines are rigidly excluded, and the employ of cubes, balls,
and other symbols for representing these social activities is
recommended on the same ground. The more unfitted the physical object
for its imagined purpose, such as a cube for a boat, the greater is the
supposed appeal to the imagination.
[Sidenote: Imagination a medium of realizing the absent and significant]
There are several fallacies in this way of thinking. (_a_) The healthy
imagination deals not with the unreal, but with the mental realization
of what is suggested. Its exercise is not a flight into the purely
fanciful and ideal, but a method of expanding and filling in what is
real. To the child the homely activities going on about him are not
utilitarian devices for accomplishing physical ends; they exemplify a
wonderful world the depths of which he has not sounded, a world full of
the mystery and promise that attend all the doings of the grown-ups whom
he admires. However prosaic this world may be to the adults who find its
duties routine affairs, to the child it is fraught with social meaning.
To engage in it is to exercise the imagination in constructing an
experience of wider value than any the child has yet mastered.
[Sidenote: Only the already experienced can be symbolized]
(_b_) Educators sometimes think children are reacting to a great moral
or spiritual truth when the children's reactions are largely physical
and sensational. Children have great powers of dramatic simulation, and
their physical bearing may seem (to adults prepossessed with a
philosophic theory) to indicate they have been impressed with some
lesson of chivalry, devotion, or nobility, when the children themselves
are occupied only with transitory physical excitations. To symbolize
great truths far beyond the child's range of actual experience is an
impossibility, and to attempt it is to invite love of momentary
stimulation.
[Sidenote: Useful work is not necessarily labor]
(_c_) Just as the opponents of play in education always conceive of play
as mere amusement, so the opponents of direct and useful activities
confuse occupation with labor. The adult is acquainted with responsible
labor upon which serious financial results depend. Consequently he seeks
relief, relaxation, amusement. Unless children have prematurely worked
for hire, unless they have come under the blight of child labor, no such
division exists for them. Whatever appeals to them at all, appeals
directly on its own account. There is no contrast between doing things
for utility and for fun. Their life is more united and more wholesome.
To suppose that activities customarily performed by adults only under
the pressure of utility may not be done perfectly freely and joyously by
children indicates a lack of imagination. Not the thing done but the
quality of mind that goes into the doing settles what is utilitarian and
what is unconstrained and educative.
Sec. 3. _Constructive Occupations_
[Sidenote: The historic growth of sciences out of occupations]
The history of culture shows that mankind's scientific knowledge and
technical abilities have developed, especially in all their earlier
stages, out of the fundamental problems of life. Anatomy and physiology
grew out of the practical needs of keeping healthy and active; geometry
and mechanics out of demands for measuring land, for building, and for
making labor-saving machines; astronomy has been closely connected with
navigation, keeping record of the passage of time; botany grew out of
the requirements of medicine and of agronomy; chemistry has been
associated with dyeing, metallurgy, and other industrial pursuits. In
turn, modern industry is almost wholly a matter of applied science; year
by year the domain of routine and crude empiricism is narrowed by the
translation of scientific discovery into industrial invention. The
trolley, the telephone, the electric light, the steam engine, with all
their revolutionary consequences for social intercourse and control, are
the fruits of science.
[Sidenote: The intellectual possibilities of school occupations]
These facts are full of educational significance. Most children are
preeminently active in their tendencies. The schools have also taken
on--largely from utilitarian, rather than from strictly educative
reasons--a large number of active pursuits commonly grouped under the
head of manual training, including also school gardens, excursions, and
various graphic arts. Perhaps the most pressing problem of education at
the present moment is to organize and relate these subjects so that they
will become instruments for forming alert, persistent, and fruitful
intellectual habits. That they take hold of the more primary and native
equipment of children (appealing to their desire to do) is generally
recognized; that they afford great opportunity for training in
self-reliant and efficient social service is gaining acknowledgment. But
they may also be used for presenting _typical problems to be solved by
personal reflection and experimentation, and by acquiring definite
bodies of knowledge leading later to more specialized scientific
knowledge_. There is indeed no magic by which mere physical activity or
deft manipulation will secure intellectual results. (See p. 43.) Manual
subjects may be taught by routine, by dictation, or by convention as
readily as bookish subjects. But intelligent consecutive work in
gardening, cooking, or weaving, or in elementary wood and iron, may be
planned which will inevitably result in students not only amassing
information of practical and scientific importance in botany, zooelogy,
chemistry, physics, and other sciences, but (what is more significant)
in their becoming versed in methods of experimental inquiry and proof.
[Sidenote: Reorganization of the course of study]
That the elementary curriculum is overloaded is a common complaint. The
only alternative to a reactionary return to the educational traditions
of the past lies in working out the intellectual possibilities resident
in the various arts, crafts, and occupations, and reorganizing the
curriculum accordingly. Here, more than elsewhere, are found the means
by which the blind and routine experience of the race may be transformed
into illuminated and emancipated experiment.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LANGUAGE AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
Sec. 1. _Language as the Tool of Thinking_
[Sidenote: Ambiguous position of language]
Speech has such a peculiarly intimate connection with thought as to
require special discussion. Although the very word logic comes from
logos ([Greek: logos]), meaning indifferently both word or speech, and
thought or reason, yet "words, words, words" denote intellectual
barrenness, a sham of thought. Although schooling has language as its
chief instrument (and often as its chief matter) of study, educational
reformers have for centuries brought their severest indictments against
the current use of language in the schools. The conviction that language
is necessary to thinking (is even identical with it) is met by the
contention that language perverts and conceals thought.
[Sidenote: Language a necessary tool of thinking,]
[Sidenote: for it alone fixes meanings]
Three typical views have been maintained regarding the relation of
thought and language: first, that they are identical; second, that words
are the garb or clothing of thought, necessary not for thought but only
for conveying it; and third (the view we shall here maintain) that while
language is not thought it is necessary for thinking as well as for its
communication. When it is said, however, that thinking is impossible
without language, we must recall that language includes much more than
oral and written speech. Gestures, pictures, monuments, visual images,
finger movements--anything consciously employed as a _sign_ is,
logically, language. To say that language is necessary for thinking is
to say that signs are necessary. Thought deals not with bare things, but
with their _meanings_, their suggestions; and meanings, in order to be
apprehended, must be embodied in sensible and particular existences.
Without meaning, things are nothing but blind stimuli or chance sources
of pleasure and pain; and since meanings are not themselves tangible
things, they must be anchored by attachment to some physical existence.
Existences that are especially set aside to fixate and convey meanings
are _signs_ or _symbols_. If a man moves toward another to throw him out
of the room, his movement is not a sign. If, however, the man points to
the door with his hand, or utters the sound _go_, his movement is
reduced to a vehicle of meaning: it is a sign or symbol. In the case of
signs we care nothing for what they are in themselves, but everything
for what they signify and represent. _Canis_, _hund_, _chien_, dog--it
makes no difference what the outward thing is, so long as the meaning is
presented.
[Sidenote: Limitations of natural symbols]
Natural objects are signs of other things and events. Clouds stand for
rain; a footprint represents game or an enemy; a projecting rock serves
to indicate minerals below the surface. The limitations of natural signs
are, however, great. (_i_) The physical or direct sense excitation tends
to distract attention from what is meant or indicated.[27] Almost every
one will recall pointing out to a kitten or puppy some object of food,
only to have the animal devote himself to the hand pointing, not to the
thing pointed at. (_ii_) Where natural signs alone exist, we are mainly
at the mercy of external happenings; we have to wait until the natural
event presents itself in order to be warned or advised of the
possibility of some other event. (_iii_) Natural signs, not being
originally intended to be signs, are cumbrous, bulky, inconvenient,
unmanageable.
[27] Compare the quotation from Bain on p. 155.
[Sidenote: Artificial signs overcome these restrictions.]
It is therefore indispensable for any high development of thought that
there should be also intentional signs. Speech supplies the requirement.
Gestures, sounds, written or printed forms, are strictly physical
existences, but their native value is intentionally subordinated to the
value they acquire as representative of meanings. (_i_) The direct and
sensible value of faint sounds and minute written or printed marks is
very slight. Accordingly, attention is not distracted from their
_representative_ function. (_ii_) Their production is under our direct
control so that they may be produced when needed. When we can make the
word _rain_, we do not have to wait for some physical forerunner of rain
to call our thoughts in that direction. We cannot make the cloud; we can
make the sound, and as a token of meaning the sound serves the purpose
as well as the cloud. (_iii_) Arbitrary linguistic signs are convenient
and easy to manage. They are compact, portable, and delicate. As long as
we live we breathe; and modifications by the muscles of throat and mouth
of the volume and quality of the air are simple, easy, and indefinitely
controllable. Bodily postures and gestures of the hand and arm are also
employed as signs, but they are coarse and unmanageable compared with
modifications of breath to produce sounds. No wonder that oral speech
has been selected as the main stuff of intentional intellectual signs.
Sounds, while subtle, refined, and easily modifiable, are transitory.
This defect is met by the system of written and printed words,
appealing to the eye. _Litera scripta manet._
Bearing in mind the intimate connection of meanings and signs (or
language), we may note in more detail what language does (1) for
specific meanings, and (2) for the organization of meanings.
I. Individual Meanings. A verbal sign (_a_) selects, detaches, a meaning
from what is otherwise a vague flux and blur (see p. 121); (_b_) it
retains, registers, stores that meaning; and (_c_) applies it, when
needed, to the comprehension of other things. Combining these various
functions in a mixture of metaphors, we may say that a linguistic sign
is a fence, a label, and a vehicle--all in one.
[Sidenote: A sign makes a meaning distinct]
(_a_) Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for
what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter.
Some meaning seems almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to
condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how,
it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it
out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account.
When Emerson said that he would almost rather know the true name, the
poet's name, for a thing, than to know the thing itself, he presumably
had this irradiating and illuminating function of language in mind. The
delight that children take in demanding and learning the names of
everything about them indicates that meanings are becoming concrete
individuals to them, so that their commerce with things is passing from
the physical to the intellectual plane. It is hardly surprising that
savages attach a magic efficacy to words. To name anything is to give it
a title; to dignify and honor it by raising it from a mere physical
occurrence to a meaning that is distinct and permanent. To know the
names of people and things and to be able to manipulate these names is,
in savage lore, to be in possession of their dignity and worth, to
master them.
[Sidenote: A sign preserves a meaning]
(_b_) Things come and go; or we come and go, and either way things
escape our notice. Our direct sensible relation to things is very
limited. The suggestion of meanings by natural signs is limited to
occasions of direct contact or vision. But a meaning fixed by a
linguistic sign is conserved for future use. Even if the thing is not
there to represent the meaning, the word may be produced so as to evoke
the meaning. Since intellectual life depends on possession of a store of
meanings, the importance of language as a tool of preserving meanings
cannot be overstated. To be sure, the method of storage is not wholly
aseptic; words often corrupt and modify the meanings they are supposed
to keep intact, but liability to infection is a price paid by every
living thing for the privilege of living.
[Sidenote: A sign transfers a meaning]
(_c_) When a meaning is detached and fixed by a sign, it is possible to
use that meaning in a new context and situation. This transfer and
reapplication is the key to all judgment and inference. It would little
profit a man to recognize that a given particular cloud was the
premonitor of a given particular rainstorm if his recognition ended
there, for he would then have to learn over and over again, since the
next cloud and the next rain are different events. No cumulative growth
of intelligence would occur; experience might form habits of physical
adaptation but it would not teach anything, for we should not be able to
use a prior experience consciously to anticipate and regulate a further
experience. To be able to use the past to judge and infer the new and
unknown implies that, although the past thing has gone, its _meaning_
abides in such a way as to be applicable in determining the character of
the new. Speech forms are our great carriers: the easy-running vehicles
by which meanings are transported from experiences that no longer
concern us to those that are as yet dark and dubious.
[Sidenote: Logical organization depends upon signs]
II. Organization of Meanings. In emphasizing the importance of signs in
relation to specific meanings, we have overlooked another aspect,
equally valuable. Signs not only mark off specific or individual
meanings, but they are also instruments of grouping meanings in relation
to one another. Words are not only names or titles of single meanings;
they also form _sentences_ in which meanings are organized in relation
to one another. When we say "That book is a dictionary," or "That blur
of light in the heavens is Halley's comet," we express a _logical_
connection--an act of classifying and defining that goes beyond the
physical thing into the logical region of genera and species, things and
attributes. Propositions, sentences, bear the same relation to judgments
that distinct words, built up mainly by analyzing propositions in their
various types, bear to meanings or conceptions; and just as words imply
a sentence, so a sentence implies a larger whole of consecutive
discourse into which it fits. As is often said, grammar expresses the
unconscious logic of the popular mind. _The chief intellectual
classifications that constitute the working capital of thought have been
built up for us by our mother tongue._ Our very lack of explicit
consciousness in using language that we are employing the intellectual
systematizations of the race shows how thoroughly accustomed we have
become to its logical distinctions and groupings.
Sec. 2. _The Abuse of Linguistic Methods in Education_
[Sidenote: Teaching merely things, not educative]
Taken literally, the maxim, "Teach things, not words," or "Teach things
before words," would be the negation of education; it would reduce
mental life to mere physical and sensible adjustments. Learning, in the
proper sense, is not learning things, but the _meanings_ of things, and
this process involves the use of signs, or language in its generic
sense. In like fashion, the warfare of some educational reformers
against symbols, if pushed to extremes, involves the destruction of the
intellectual life, since this lives, moves, and has its being in those
processes of definition, abstraction, generalization, and classification
that are made possible by symbols alone. Nevertheless, these contentions
of educational reformers have been needed. The liability of a thing to
abuse is in proportion to the value of its right use.
[Sidenote: But words separated from things are not true signs]
Symbols are themselves, as pointed out above, particular, physical,
sensible existences, like any other things. They are symbols only by
virtue of what they suggest and represent, _i.e._ meanings. (_i_) They
stand for these meanings to any individual only when he has had
_experience_ of some situation to which these meanings are actually
relevant. Words can detach and preserve a meaning only when the meaning
has been first involved in our own direct intercourse with things. To
attempt to give a meaning through a word alone without any dealings with
a thing is to deprive the word of intelligible signification; against
this attempt, a tendency only too prevalent in education, reformers have
protested. Moreover, there is a tendency to assume that whenever there
is a definite word or form of speech there is also a definite idea;
while, as a matter of fact, adults and children alike are capable of
using even precise verbal formulae with only the vaguest and most
confused sense of what they mean. Genuine ignorance is more profitable
because likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and
open-mindedness; while ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms,
familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind
with a varnish waterproof to new ideas.
[Sidenote: Language tends to arrest personal inquiry and reflection]
(_ii_) Again, although new combinations of words without the
intervention of physical things may supply new ideas, there are limits
to this possibility. Lazy inertness causes individuals to accept ideas
that have currency about them without personal inquiry and testing. A
man uses thought, perhaps, to find out what others believe, and then
stops. The ideas of others as embodied in language become substitutes
for one's own ideas. The use of linguistic studies and methods to halt
the human mind on the level of the attainments of the past, to prevent
new inquiry and discovery, to put the authority of tradition in place of
the authority of natural facts and laws, to reduce the individual to a
parasite living on the secondhand experience of others--these things
have been the source of the reformers' protest against the preeminence
assigned to language in schools.
[Sidenote: Words as mere stimuli]
Finally, words that originally stood for ideas come, with repeated use,
to be mere counters; they become physical things to be manipulated
according to certain rules, or reacted to by certain operations without
consciousness of their meaning. Mr. Stout (who has called such terms
"substitute signs")remarks that "algebraical and arithmetical signs are
to a great extent used as mere substitute signs.... It is possible to
use signs of this kind whenever fixed and definite rules of operation
can be derived from the nature of the things symbolized, so as to be
applied in manipulating the signs, without further reference to their
signification. A word is an instrument for thinking about the meaning
which it expresses; a substitute sign is a means of _not_ thinking about
the meaning which it symbolizes." The principle applies, however, to
ordinary words, as well as to algebraic signs; they also enable us to
use meanings so as to get results without thinking. In many respects,
signs that are means of not thinking are of great advantage; standing
for the familiar, they release attention for meanings that, being novel,
require conscious interpretation. Nevertheless, the premium put in the
schoolroom upon attainment of technical facility, upon skill in
producing external results (_ante_, p. 51), often changes this advantage
into a positive detriment. In manipulating symbols so as to recite well,
to get and give correct answers, to follow prescribed formulae of
analysis, the pupil's attitude becomes mechanical, rather than
thoughtful; verbal memorizing is substituted for inquiry into the
meaning of things. This danger is perhaps the one uppermost in mind when
verbal methods of education are attacked.
Sec. 3. _The Use of Language in its Educational Bearings_
Language stands in a twofold relation to the work of education. On the
one hand, it is continually used in all studies as well as in all the
social discipline of the school; on the other, it is a distinct object
of study. We shall consider only the ordinary use of language, since its
effects upon habits of thought are much deeper than those of conscious
study.
[Sidenote: Language not primarily intellectual in purpose]
The common statement that "language is the expression of thought"
conveys only a half-truth, and a half-truth that is likely to result in
positive error. Language does express thought, but not primarily, nor,
at first, even consciously. The primary motive for language is to
influence (through the expression of desire, emotion, and thought) the
activity of others; its secondary use is to enter into more intimate
sociable relations with them; its employment as a conscious vehicle of
thought and knowledge is a tertiary, and relatively late, formation. The
contrast is well brought out by the statement of John Locke that words
have a double use,--"civil" and "philosophical." "By their civil use, I
mean such a communication of thoughts and ideas by words as may serve
for the upholding of common conversation and commerce about the ordinary
affairs and conveniences of civil life.... By the philosophical use of
words, I mean such a use of them as may serve to convey the precise
notions of things, and to express in general propositions certain and
undoubted truths."
[Sidenote: Hence education has to transform it into an intellectual
tool]