THE POWERS OF THE MIND
(Sets forth the fact that knowledge is freedom and ignorance is
slavery, and what science means to the people.)
We have now completed a brief survey of the mind and its powers.
Whatever we may have proved or failed to prove, this much we may say
with assurance: the reader who has followed our brief sketch attentively
has been disabused of any idea he may have held that he knows it all;
and this is always the first step towards knowledge.
The mind is the instrument whereby our race has lifted itself out of
beasthood. It is the instrument whereby we hold ourselves above the
forces which seek to drag us down, and whereby we shall lift ourselves
higher, if higher we are to go. How shall we protect this precious
instrument? How shall we complete our mastery of it? What are the laws
of the conduct of the mind?
The process of the mind is one of groping outward after new facts, and
digesting and assimilating them, as the body gropes after and digests
and assimilates food. The senses bring us new impressions, and we take
these and analyze them, tear them into the parts which compose them,
compare them with previous sensations, recognize difference in things
which seem to be alike, and resemblances in things which seem to be
different; we classify them, and provide them with names, which are, as
it were, handles for the mind to grasp. Above all, we seek for causes;
those chains of events which make what we know as order in the world of
phenomena. And when the mind has what seems to be a cause, it proceeds
to test it according to methods it has worked out, the rules and
principles of experimental science.
It is a comparatively small number of sensations which the body brings
to the mind of itself; it is a narrow world in which we should live if
our minds adopted a passive attitude toward life. But some minds possess
what we call curiosity; they set out upon their own impulse to explore
life; they discover new laws and make new experiences and new
sensations for themselves. The mind forms an idea, and at first, after
the fashion of the ancient Greek philosophers, it glorifies that idea
and sets it in the seat of divinity. But presently comes the empirical
method, which refuses authority to any idea unless it can stand the test
of experiment, and prove that it corresponds with reality. Nowadays the
thinker amasses his facts, and forms a theory to explain them, and then
proceeds to try out this theory by the most rigid method that he or his
critics can devise. If the theory doesn't "work"--that is, if it doesn't
explain all the facts and stand all the tests--it is thrown away like a
worn-out shoe. So little by little a body of knowledge is built up which
is real knowledge; which will serve us in our daily lives, which we can
use as foundation-stones in the structure of our civilization.
By this method of research man is expanding his universe beyond anything
that could have been conceived in the pre-scientific days. Hour by hour,
while we work and play and sleep, the mind of our race is discovering
new worlds in which our posterity will dwell. For uncounted ages man
walked upon the earth, surrounded by infinite swarms of bacterial life
of whose existence he never dreamed. The invisible rays of the spectrum
beat upon him, and he knew nothing of what they did to him, whether good
or evil. He lifted his head and saw vast universes of suns, in
comparison with which his world was a mere speck of dust; yet to him
these universes were globes or lanterns which some divinity had hung in
the sky.
One of the most fascinating illustrations of how the mind runs ahead of
the senses is the story of the planet Uranus, which, less than two
hundred years ago, had never been beheld by the eye of man. A
mathematician seated in his study, working over the observations of
other planets, their motions in relation to their mass and distance,
discovered that their behavior was not as it should be. At certain times
none of them were in quite the right place, and he decided that this
variation must be due to the existence of an unknown body. He worked out
the problem of what must be the mass and the exact orbit of this body,
in order for it to be responsible for the variations observed; and when
he had completed these calculations, he announced to the astronomical
world, "Turn your telescopes to a certain spot in the heavens at a
certain minute of a certain night, and you will find a new planet of a
certain size." And so for the first time the human senses became aware
of a fact, which by themselves they might not have discovered in all
eternity.
Now, the importance of exact knowledge concerning a new planet may not
be apparent to the ordinary man; but if the thing which is discovered
is, for example, an unknown ray which will move an engine or destroy a
cancer, then we realize the worthwhileness of research, and the masters
of the world's commerce are willing to give here and there a pittance
for the increase of such knowledge. But men of science, who have by this
time come to a sense of their own dignity and importance, understand
that there is no knowledge about reality which is useless, no research
into nature which is wasted. You might say that to describe and classify
the fleas which inhabit the bodies of rats and ground-squirrels, and to
study under the microscope the bacteria which live in the blood of these
fleas--that this would be an occupation hardly worthy of the divinity
that is in man. But presently, as a result of this knowledge about fleas
and flea diseases being in existence and available, a bacteriologist
discovers the secret of the dread bubonic plague, which hundreds of
times in past history has wiped out a great part of the population of
Europe and Asia.
Mark Twain tells in his "Connecticut Yankee" how his hero was able to
overcome the wizard Merlin, because he knew in advance of an eclipse of
the sun. And this was fiction, of course; but if you prefer fact, you
may read in the memoirs of Houdin, the French conjurer, how he was able
to bring the Arab tribes into subjection to the French government by
depriving the great chieftains of their strength. He gathered them into
a theatre, and invited their mighty men upon the stage, and there was an
iron weight, and they were able to lift it when Houdin permitted, and
not to lift it when he forbade. These noble barbarians had never heard
of the electro-magnet, and could not conceive of a force that could
operate through a solid wooden floor beneath their feet.
Such things, trivial as they are, serve to illustrate the difference
between ignorance and knowledge, and the power which knowledge gives.
The man who knows is godlike to those who do not know; he may enslave
them, he may do what he pleases with their lives, and they are powerless
to help themselves. Anyone who would help them must begin by giving them
knowledge, real knowledge. There is no such thing as freedom without
knowledge, and it must be the best knowledge, it must be new knowledge;
he who goes against new knowledge armed with old knowledge is like the
Chinese who went out to meet machine-guns with bows and arrows, and with
umbrellas over their heads.
Once upon a time knowledge was the prerogative of kings and priests and
ruling castes; but this supreme power has been wrested from them, and
this is the greatest step in human progress so far taken. "Seek and ye
shall find," is the law concerning knowledge today. "Knock, and it shall
be opened unto you." In this, my Book of the Mind, I say to you that
knowledge is your priceless birthright, and that you should repudiate
all men and all institutions and all creeds and all formulas which seek
to keep this heritage from you. Beware of men who bid you believe
something because it is told you, or because your fathers believed it,
or because it is written in some ancient book, or embodied in some
ancient ceremonial. Break the chains of these venerable spells; and at
the same time beware of the modern spells which have been contrived to
replace them! Beware of party cries and shibboleths, the idols of the
forum, as Plato called them, the prejudices which are set as snares for
your feet. Beware of cant--that paraphernalia of noble sentiments,
artificially manufactured by politicians and newspapers for the purpose
of blinding you to their knaveries. Remember that you live in a world of
class conflicts; at every moment of your life your mind is besieged by
secret enemies, it is exposed to poison gas-clouds deliberately released
by people who seek to make use of you for purposes which are theirs and
not yours. In the fairy-tales we used to love, the hero was provided
with magic protection against the perils of those times; but what hero
and what magic will guard the modern man against the propaganda of
militarism, nationalism, and capitalist imperialism?
The mind is like the body in that it can be trained, it can be taught
sound habits, its powers can be enormously increased. There are many
books on mind and memory training, some of which are useful, and some of
which are trash. There is an English system widely advertised, called
"Pelmanism," of which I have personally made no test, but it has won
endorsements of a great many people who do not give their endorsements
lightly.
This is the subject of applied psychology, and just as in medicine, or
in law, or in any of the arts, there is a vast amount of charlatanry,
but there is also genuine knowledge being patiently accumulated and
standardized. When the United States government had to have an army in a
hurry it did not make its millions of young men into teamsters or
aviators at random. It used the new methods of determining reaction
times, and testing the coordination of mind and body. Recently I visited
the Whittier Reform School in California, where delinquent boys are
educated by the state. A boy had been set to work in the tailor shop,
and it had been found that he was unable to make the buttons and the
buttonholes of a coat come in the right place. For nine years the state
of California, and before it the state of Georgia, had been laboring to
teach this boy to make buttons and buttonholes meet; the effort had cost
some five thousand dollars, to say nothing of all the coats which were
spoiled, and all the mental suffering of the victim and his teachers.
Finally someone persuaded the state of California to spend a few
thousand dollars and install a psychological bureau for the purpose of
testing all the inmates of the institution; so by a half hour's
examination the fact was developed that this boy was mentally defective.
Although he was eighteen years old in body, his mind was only eight
years old, and so he would never be able to achieve the feat of making
buttons and buttonholes meet.
This is a new science which you may read about in Terman's "The
Measurement of Intelligence." By testing normal children, it is
established that certain tasks can be performed at certain ages. A child
of three can point to his eyes, his nose and his mouth; he can repeat a
sentence of six syllables, and repeat two digits, and give his family
name. Older children are asked to look at a picture and then tell what
they saw; to note omissions in a picture, to arrange blocks according to
their weight, to arrange words into sentences, to note absurdities in
statements, to count backwards, and to make change. Children of fifteen
are asked to interpret fables, to reverse the hands of a clock, and so
on. Of course there are always variations; every child will be better at
some kinds of tests than at others. But by having a wide variety, and
taking the average, you establish a "mental age" for the child--which
may be widely different from its physical age. You may find some whose
minds have stopped growing altogether, and can only be made to grow by
special methods of education. Enlightened communities are now conducting
separate schools for defective children--replacing the old-fashioned
schoolmaster who wore out birch-rods trying to force poor little
wretches to learn what was beyond their power.
In the same way psychology can be applied in industry, and in the
detection of crime. Here, too, there is a vast amount of "fake," but
also the beginning of a science. Our laws do not as yet permit the use
of automatic writing and the hypnotic trance in the investigation of
crime, but they have sometimes permitted some of the simpler tests, for
example, those of memory association. The examiner prepares a list of a
hundred names of objects, and reads those names one after another, and
asks the person he is investigating to name the first thing which is
suggested to him by each word in turn. "Engine" will suggest "steam," or
perhaps it will suggest "train"; "coat" will suggest "trousers," or
perhaps it will suggest "pocket," and so on. The examiner holds a
stop-watch, and notes what fraction of a second each one of these
reactions takes. The ordinary man, who is not trying to conceal
anything, will give all his associations promptly, and the reaction
times will be approximately alike. But suppose the man has just murdered
somebody with an axe, and buried the body in a cellar with a fire
shovel, and taken a pocketbook, and a watch, and a locket, and a number
of various objects, and climbed out of the cellar window by breaking the
glass; and now suppose that in his list of a hundred objects the
psychologist introduces unexpectedly a number of these things. In each
case the first memory association of the criminal will be one which he
does not wish to give. He will have to find another, and that inevitably
takes time. One or two such delays might be accidental; but if every
time there is any suggestion of the murder, or the method or scene of
the murder, there is noticed confusion and delay, you may be sure that
the conscious mind is interfering with the subconscious mind. The
difference between the conscious and the subconscious mind is always
possible to detect, and if you are permitted to be thorough in your
experiments, you can make certain what is in the subconscious mind that
the conscious mind is trying to conceal.
Here, as everywhere in life, knowledge is power, and expert knowledge
confers mastery over the shrewdest untrained mind. The only trouble is
that under our present social system the trained mind is very apt to be
working in the interest of class privilege. The psychologist who is
employed by a great corporation, or by a police department, may be as
little worthy of trust as a chemist who is engaged in making poison
gases to be used by capitalist imperialism for the extermination of its
rebellious slaves. But what this proves is not that scientific knowledge
is untrustworthy, but merely that the workers must acquire it, they must
have their own organizations and their own experiments in every field.
To give knowledge to the masses of mankind, slow and painful as the
process seems, is now the most important task confronting the
enlightened thinker.
The method of psychoanalysis gives us also much insight into the
phenomena of genius, and the hope that we may ultimately come to
understand it. At present we are embarrassed because genius is so often
closely allied to eccentricity; the supernormal appears in connection
with the subnormal--and it is often hard to tell them apart. Great poets
and painters in revolt against a world of smug commercialism, adopt
irresponsibility as their religion; they live in a world of their own,
they dress like freaks, they refuse to pay their debts, or to be true to
their wives. They are followed by a host of disciples, who adopt the
defects of the master as a substitute for his qualities. And so there
grows up a perverted notion of what genius is, and wholly false
standards of artistic quality. There is nothing mankind needs more than
sure and exact tests of mental superiority; not merely the ability to
acquire languages and to solve mathematical equations, but the ability
to carry in the mind intense emotions, while at the same time shaping
and organizing them by the logical faculty, selecting masses of facts
and weaving them into a pattern calculated to awaken the emotion in
others. This is the last and greatest work of the human spirit, and to
select the men who can do it, and foster their activity, is the ultimate
purpose of all true science.