partly conscious and partly unconscious. The latter are the more
effective. Minds gifted with quickening power create about themselves
an intellectual atmosphere that is like the invigorating atmosphere of
the mountains or the tonic breezes which blow from the sea. The woman
who touched the hem of the Saviour’s garment felt at once the vivifying
influences which were all the time going forth from the Great Teacher.
Here we stand face to face with the greatest mystery of the teacher’s art.
[Sidenote: The heart.]
Some light is shed upon the mystery by the intimate relation which exists
between the conscious and the subconscious life of the soul. The ideas
upon any subject which the individual cherishes during his conscious
moments, the train of logical thinking which he pursues when the will
gives direction to reflection, the creative effort which he seeks to
put forth in a given direction,—these shape the activities which go
forward in the depths of the soul when perhaps the attention is directed
to the discharge of routine duties. “Out of the heart are the issues of
life.” “Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh.” From the
treasure-house of the heart come welling up thoughts, ideas, sentiments,
and purposes which largely determine the influence exerted upon others
when the individual is not aware of it. The teacher must make himself
what he wishes his pupil to be. If foot-ball and base-ball and boating
form the staple of his thinking, the centre of his affections, these
athletic sports, in ways that are marvellous and often past finding out,
become the objects of thought in which his students will delight. If
the truths and principles of science absorb his interest and engage the
best thought of his conscious hours, these will determine the moulding
influence which he will unconsciously exert upon others. If he delights
in germ-ideas, in seed-thoughts, these will emanate from him whenever he
is thrown into contact with inquiring minds. Much, of course, is due to
native ability, to inherited qualities. The circle of minds which one
teacher can reach is further limited by the breadth or narrowness of his
views, by the points which he has in common with others, by the amount of
sympathetic interest which he manifests in their progress and welfare,
by the sum total of the characteristics of generic humanity which he has
taken up into himself. In other words, his stimulating power depends upon
the extent to which his inner life is representative of the best thought
and the best traits of the age in which he lives and of the people to
whom he belongs.
[Sidenote: Exhaustive treatment.]
[Sidenote: Hope.]
A teacher may destroy his power to awaken and stimulate thought by
developing every subject in all its bearings to its logical or final
conclusion. He should send his classes away from the daily lecture or
recitation to the library or the laboratory, to the study, the shop, or
the field, with the sense of something to be achieved, with the feeling
that there are fields of research for them to explore, fields that will
amply repay careful study, investigation, and reflection. There is
nothing that tires a boy so soon as the feeling that there is nothing for
him to do, nothing that he can master, achieve, or conquer on his own
account. The normal child is so constituted that it loves activity, looks
into the future, and regards itself as an important factor in the world’s
life. The advance from childhood to youth is marked by a transition into
the period that is brimful of hope and ambition. The pampered son of a
rich man may feel no longing of this sort; his opportunities for early
travel and premature indulgence in every whim may have brought him to
the point where the whole world seems like a sucked orange for which
one has no further use. Unless the rich father and mother possess an
extraordinary amount of good sense, their children do not have an even
chance with the children of the middle classes whose outlook upon life
supplies abundant motives for study and exertion.
[Sidenote: The field of vision.]
If a boy has not made a mistake in selecting his parents, if the
atmosphere of the home in which his first six years are spent is normal,
he comes to school with a sense of something to be achieved. Should
this feeling be lacking, the true teacher will aim to beget it by the
instruction he gives and by appeals to the innate desire for knowledge.
As the intelligence dawns, the interrogation points on the boy’s face
multiply; his appetite for knowledge grows by what it feeds on. If the
branches of study do not become more interesting than any occupation by
which the boy can earn coppers, there is something wrong either with the
boy or his teacher, or with both. In the ascent of the hill of science
every step upward widens the horizon, increases the field of vision, and
stimulates to new effort. Every field explored beckons to new fields of
investigation. It is the prerogative of the teacher to point out what is
in store for the aspiring youth. Take, for instance, the domain of pure
mathematics. A pupil had learned in his geometry that parallel lines
never meet. The teacher told him that his geometrical studies would after
a while acquaint him with lines that are not parallel and yet never
meet. No sooner had he met lines of this kind, situated in different
planes, than his teacher told him of lines that continually approach but
never meet. The appeal to his curiosity helped to stimulate the desire
for knowledge and kept him thinking earnestly and seriously until he
met the asymptote and its curve. The study of asymptotes soon grew more
interesting than chess or any sports upon the athletic field.
[Sidenote: Master minds.]
The aim of the teacher should be to make himself useless. In other words,
the school should aim to lift the pupil to the plane of an independent
thinker, capable of giving conscious direction to his intellectual
life and of concentrating all his powers upon anything that is to be
mastered. It is to be reckoned a piece of good fortune for a bright
and talented youth to fall under the dominating influence of a master
mind. In endeavoring to walk in the footsteps of an intellectual giant,
to comprehend his theories and speculations, and to carry the burden
of his thoughts, unexpected strength and power are developed, and when
the day of emancipation comes—as it always does come in the case of
gifted youth—the learner will find that he has entered a higher sphere
of intellectual activity, and will henceforth rank among the world’s
productive thinkers.
[Sidenote: False stimulants.]
[Sidenote: Mental lethargy.]
As was said at the beginning of the chapter, the competition of men
in mature life is usually sufficient to stimulate their thinking. The
men whose duties make a constant drain upon their productivity need
other forms of thought-stimulation. Reference is not here made to the
narcotics, alcoholic stimulants, and other drugs which brain-workers use
in periods of reaction and fatigue: these stimulate only for a short
time, and leave the nervous system and the brain weaker than before; they
shorten life by burning the candle at both ends; they cannot supply the
need of sleep, rest, and recreation. To take rational exercise, to eat
proper food, and to obey all the laws of health is the sacred duty of
every person who teaches by word of mouth or pen. Every effort should be
made to keep vitality at its maximum. Often the mind resembles the soil
which yields a richer harvest if permitted to lie fallow for a time. If
at the close of a period of rest or a summer vacation the mind refuses
to work, what shall then be done to stimulate mental activity? Different
men derive stimulus from different sources. One finds help from taking a
pen in hand, another by facing a sea of upturned faces. A clergyman of
considerable repute uses an Indian story to start his mental machinery.
Henry Ward Beecher declared that the greatest kindness which could be
shown him was to oppose his public utterances. Opposition roused all his
powers and helped him to think vigorously and to the best advantage.
Schiller is said to have kept rotten apples in his desk, because he
believed that the odor stimulated his mind. Some men find help in
solitude, from the singing of birds, from the sound of rustling leaves
and falling waters, from the noise of ocean waves, or from the glimpse of
distant waters or far-off mountains. An eminent theologian is stimulated
by the playing of a piano in the next room. The stimulus from books is
reserved for discussion in a separate chapter on the Right Use of Books.
[Sidenote: Hinderances.]
As there are helps, so there are hinderances to good thinking. Petty
cares, executive duties, noises in the same room, or in the next room,
or upon the street, are well-known examples. Their name is legion, and
their cost is enormous if they come from manufacturing establishments
near the school. A word about the extra-mural music which emanates from
vile machinery on the streets is not out of place in this connection. An
English writer asserts that the organ-grinders of London have done more
in the last twenty years to detract from the quality and quantity of the
higher mental work of the nation than any two or three colleges at Oxford
have effected to increase it. A mathematician estimates the cost of the
increased mental labor these street-musicians have imposed upon him and
his clerks at several thousand pounds’ worth of first-class work, for
which the government actually paid in added length of the time needed for
his calculations.
[Sidenote: Our fellow-men.]
In matters of this kind every man must be a law unto himself. Since no
two human beings are exactly alike, but each is a new creation fresh from
the hands of the Creator, it follows that each person must study his
own peculiarities, form his own habits of work, and acquire the power
to think in the midst of the circumstances in which he is placed. By
resolute effort the mind can ignore many a hinderance and distraction.
The best stimulus from without comes from our fellow-men. “Our minds need
the stimulus of other minds, as our lungs need oxygen to perform their
functions.” At school the stimulus comes from classmates, from those in
the higher and lower classes, but above all else, from the best books
and the best teachers. In the life beyond the school the stimulus comes
from the daily contact and competition with others, from conversation and
discussions with those who think, from communion with the best books,
with nature, and with nature’s God.
[Sidenote: Sources of stimulus.]
After the powers of the mind have been awakened and disciplined,
stimulus and inspiration may come from ten thousand sources. Silence
and solitude, city and country, business and pleasure, observation and
travel, observatories and laboratories, libraries and museums, nature and
art, poetry and prose, fiction and history, may each in turn serve as a
spur to creative, inventive, and productive thinking, as an incentive
to original research, fruitful investigation, and profitable reasoning.
Among all the sources of stimulation, the good teacher and the good book
take superlative rank.
IX
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS
Even the very greatest of authors are indebted to miscellaneous
reading, often in several different languages, for the
suggestion of their most original works, and for the light
which has kindled many a shining thought of their own.
HAMERTON.
He reads a book most wisely who thinks everything into a book
that it is capable of holding, and it is the stamp and token of
a great book so to incorporate itself with our own being, so
to quicken our insight and stimulate our thought, as to make
us feel as if we helped to create it while we read. Whatever
we can find in a book that aids us in the conduct of life, or
to a truer interpretation of it, or to a franker reconcilement
with it, we may with a good conscience believe is not there by
accident, but that the author meant we should find it there.
LOWELL.
Much as a man gains from actual conflict with living minds,
he may gain much even of the same kind of knowledge, though
different in detail, from the accumulated thinking of the
past. No living generation can outweigh all the past. If
books without experience in real life cannot develop a man
all round, neither can life without books do it. There is a
certain dignity of culture which lives only in the atmosphere
of libraries. There is a breadth and a genuineness of
self-knowledge which one gets from the silent friendship of
great authors without which the best work that is in a man
cannot come out of him in large professional successes.
PHELPS.
The great secret of reading consists in this,—that it does
not matter so much what we read or how we read it as what we
think and how we think it. Reading is only the fuel; and, the
mind once on fire, any and all material will feed the flame,
provided only it have any combustible matter in it. And we
cannot tell from what quarter the next material will come. The
thought we need, the facts we are in search of, may make their
appearance in the corner of the newspaper, or in some forgotten
volume long ago consigned to dust and oblivion. Hawthorne in
the parlor of a country inn on a rainy day could find mental
nutriment in an old directory. That accomplished philologist,
the late Lord Strangford, could find ample amusement for an
hour’s delay at a railway station in tracing out the etymology
of the names in Bradshaw. The mind that is not awake and alive
will find a library a barren wilderness.
CHARLES F. RICHARDSON.
IX
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS
[Sidenote: A novel.]
A clergyman who found the reaction from his pulpit efforts so great that
often he could not bring himself to think vigorously and consecutively
before the middle of the following week was advised by his physician to
try the effect of an Indian tale or an exciting story, and found that
a good novel works like a charm in bringing the mind back to normal
action. After the interest in the story or novel begins to grow there is
danger of reading too long, of reading until another spell of fatigue and
reaction comes. The book should be laid aside as soon as the first glow
of mental action is felt.
[Sidenote: Books.]
Most thinkers need the stimulating influence of other minds. These can
be found at their best upon the shelves of a well-selected library. They
are ready to help us whenever we feel ready to give them our attention.
Men put the best part of themselves into their books. The process of
writing for print intensifies mental activity, spurs the intellect to the
keenest, most vigorous effort, and arouses the highest energy of thought
and feeling. Authors that exert a quickening influence upon our thinking
should be kept for use whenever we need a stimulus to rouse the mind from
its lethargy.
Leibnitz got his best ideas while reading books. He had acquired the
habits of a librarian to whom favorite volumes are always accessible.
[Sidenote: As stimulus.]
A scientist of repute says he gets the necessary stimulus from Jevons’s
treatise on the inductive sciences. Professor Phelps has collected an
instructive list of authors whose writings have been helpful to other
authors of note. He says,—
[Sidenote: Examples.]
“Voltaire used to read Massillon as a stimulus to production. Bossuet
read Homer for the same purpose. Gray read Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ as
the preliminary to the use of his pen. The favorites of Milton were Homer
and Euripides. Fénelon resorted to the ancient classics promiscuously.
Pope read Dryden as his habitual aid to composing. Corneille read Tacitus
and Livy. Clarendon did the same. Sir William Jones, on his passage to
India, planned five different volumes, and assigned to each the author he
resolved to read as a guide and awakener to his own mind for its work.
Buffon made the same use of the works of Sir Isaac Newton. With great
variety of tastes successful authors have generally agreed in availing
themselves of this natural and facile method of educating their minds to
the work of original creation.”[15]
[Sidenote: Great thinkers.]
The most valuable function of standard authors lies in their quickening
influence upon the intellectual life. The effort to appropriate their
ideas and to master their thoughts is the best possible exercise for the
understanding. In thinking their thoughts, weighing their arguments, and
following their train of reasoning the mind gains vigor, strength, and
the capacity for sustained effort. The invigorating atmosphere which
a great thinker creates has a most remarkable tonic effect upon all
who dwell in it. By unconscious absorption they acquire his spirit of
inquiry, his methods of research, his habits of investigation, his way
of attacking and mastering difficulties. While trying to walk in his
footsteps they learn to take giant strides. His idioms, his choice of
words, his favorite phrases and expressions are at their service when
they enter new fields of truth. Both in power and aspiration they become
like him through the mysterious process of mind acting upon mind, of
heart evoking heart, and of will transfusing itself into will. A great
thinker gets his place in the galaxy of shining intellects through the
truths which he communicates; and as truth is the best food for the soul,
so the quest of truth is the best exercise for all its faculties.
[Sidenote: The literature of knowledge and the literature of power.]
De Quincey, in his essay on Alexander Pope, draws an important and
oft-quoted distinction between the literature of knowledge and the
literature of power. He says the function of the one is to teach, of
the other to move. The former he likens to a rudder, the latter to
an oar or a sail. To illustrate the difference he asks, “What do you
learn from ‘Paradise Lost’? Nothing at all. What do you learn from a
cookery-book? Something new, something that you did not know before, in
every paragraph. But would you, therefore, put the wretched cookery-book
on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What you owe to
Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still
but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe
is _power_,—that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity
of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx
is a step upward, a step ascending, as upon Jacob’s ladder, from earth to
mysterious altitudes above the earth. All the steps of knowledge, from
first to last, carry you farther on the same plane, but could never raise
you one foot above your ancient level of earth; whereas, the very first
step in power is a flight, is an ascending into another element where
earth is forgotten.”
[Sidenote: Lowell.]
The value of the literature of power as a means of imparting power to
every soul that lives under its influence is easily seen and generally
acknowledged. But the literature of knowledge serves the double purpose
of furnishing us material for thought and of acting as a stimulus to
thought. On this point we have the testimony of the wisest who have
ventured to give advice upon the use of books. Lowell says, “It is
certainly true that the material of thought reacts upon the thought
itself. Shakespeare himself would have been commonplace had he been
padlocked in a thinly shaven vocabulary, and Phidias, had he worked in
wax, only a more inspired Mrs. Jarley.”
The advice which Lowell gives concerning a course of reading and the ends
of scholarship to be kept in mind by those who read with a purpose is too
valuable to be omitted in this connection:
[Sidenote: His advice.]
“One is sometimes asked by young people to recommend a course of reading.
My advice would be that they should confine themselves to the supreme
books in whatever literature, or, still better, to choose some one great
author and make themselves thoroughly familiar with him. For, as all
roads lead to Rome, so do they likewise lead away from it, and you will
find that in order to understand perfectly and to weigh exactly any vital
piece of literature you will be gradually and pleasantly persuaded to
excursions and explorations of which you little dreamed when you began,
and will find yourselves scholars before you are aware. For, remember,
there is nothing less profitable than scholarship for the mere sake of
scholarship, nor anything more wearisome in the attainment. But the
moment you have a definite aim, attention is quickened, the mother of
memory, and all that you acquire groups and arranges itself in an order
that is lucid, because everywhere and always it is in intelligent
relation to a central object of constant and growing interest. This
method also forces upon us the necessity of thinking, which is, after
all, the highest result of all education. For what we want is not
learning, but knowledge; that is, the power to make learning answer its
true end as a quickener of intelligence and a widener of our intellectual
sympathies. I do not mean to say that every one is fitted by nature or
inclination for a definite course of study, or, indeed, for serious study
in any sense. I am quite willing that these should ‘browse in a library,’
as Dr. Johnson called it, to their heart’s content. It is perhaps the
only way in which time may be profitably wasted. But desultory reading
will not make a ‘full man,’ as Bacon understood it, of one who has
not Johnson’s memory, his power of assimilation, and, above all, his
comprehensive view of the relations of things. ‘Read not,’ says Lord
Bacon, in his ‘Essay of Studies,’ ‘to contradict and confute; not to
believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to
weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed,
and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be
read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously (carefully), and
some few to be read wholly and with diligence and attention. _Some books,
also, may be read by deputy._’
“This is weighty and well said, and I would call your attention
especially to the wise words with which the passage closes. The best
books are not always those which lend themselves to discussions and
comment, but those (like Montaigne’s ‘Essays’) which discuss and comment
ourselves.”[16]
Professor Phelps, in his lectures to divinity students, gives golden
advice to the class of professional men whose life-work compels them
to draw upon their productive intellect more than any other class of
professional men.
[Sidenote: Phelps.]
“There is an influence exerted by books upon the mind which resembles
that of diet upon the body. A studious mind becomes, by a law of its
being, like the object which it studies with enthusiasm. If your favorite
authors are superficial, gaudy, short-lived, you become yourself such
in your culture and your influence. If your favorite authors are of the
grand, profound, enduring order, you become yourself such to the extent
of your innate capacity for such growth. Their thoughts become yours not
by transfer, but by transfusion. Their methods of combining thoughts
become yours; so that on different subjects from theirs you will compose
as they would have done if they had handled those subjects. Their choice
of words, their idioms, their constructions, their illustrative materials
become yours; so that their style and yours will belong to the same class
in expression, and yet your style will never be merely imitative of
theirs.
“It is the prerogative of great authors thus to throw back a charm over
subsequent generations which is often more plastic than the influence of
a parent over a child. Do we not feel the fascination of it from certain
favorite characters in history? Are there not already certain solar minds
in the firmament of your scholarly life whose rays you feel shooting down
into the depths of your being, and quickening there a vitality which you
feel in every original product of your own mind? Such minds are teaching
you the true ends of an intellectual life. They are unsealing the
springs of intellectual activity. They are attracting your intellectual
aspirations. They are like voices calling to you from the sky.