tarry long enough for clear apprehension, sometimes for thorough
comprehension, upon the ideas, judgments, and conclusions which are the
framework of a system of thought, but he does not neglect the transitions
from one to the other, as if these were of little account or necessarily
took care of themselves. The transitions in thought are aided by set
phrases and forms of solution. As soon as these are mastered, there
develops the tendency to think them as algebraic symbols, which do
substitute duty in the absence of that for which they stand. For fear
of this, the teacher sometimes fails to drill on them long enough to
fix them in the mind,—certainly a radical mistake. Drill is a condition
of the highest discipline in the school as well as in the army. The
drill-master seeks to habituate the soldier to the word of command,
so that he will obey in the face of danger without thinking of the
consequences. The drill-master at school seeks to make it second nature
for a pupil to go through the logical motions, but not without conscious
thought of the process or the consequences. Whenever the learner uses
forms of parsing, analysis, or solution, his mind should go through the
movements of thought expressed by the language. Ask any ordinary class
to give you a noun of the first person; they are almost sure to give
you either a noun of the third person or a pronoun of the first person.
Dictate a sentence with a noun in the first person, and ask the pupils to
parse it in the customary way; in nearly all cases they will parse it as
a noun of the third person. Ask them to tell why a personal pronoun is so
called; frequently they say because it indicates a person,—a statement
quite applicable to other kinds of pronouns. If the logical or customary
forms of speech are employed, the stream of thought moves on, the mind
often failing to perceive the new truth, or error, or nonsense inherent
in the language employed. School-boys have tricks of their own which turn
upon this peculiarity in the movement of thought. “Who killed Cain?” is
suddenly asked. “Abel,” is the reply generally elicited by the question.
Should you say, Nine times seven _is_ or _are_ forty-two? The boy who
decides in favor of _is_ or _are_ gets a shock of surprise on being told
that the product of nine times seven is not forty-two.
[Sidenote: A strange reply.]
One day a teacher was lecturing upon education in the dark ages. To show
how the energies of the common people were exhausted in the struggle
for existence, the resolution of a synod in the south of France was
cited. The resolution enjoined upon the bishops the duty of seeing to
it that during a period of scarcity of food the peasants were at least
provided with bread made of acorns. A few minutes later a reference was
made to the autobiography of Thomas Platter, in which certain things are
described as happening about the time of the Diet of Worms. On being
asked in what period of history that was, a pupil promptly replied, “When
the common people were fed on worms.”
[Sidenote: Biblical phraseology.]
[Sidenote: Huxley’s story.]
Very much of the sermonizing of our day gives rise to the same kind of
thinking. The mind is borne along by the customary flow of words. The
phrases used have an orthodox sound; perhaps they are biblical in the
sense that they occur in the Bible. It is impossible to tell whether any
clear idea or real religious experience is suggested to the hearer’s
mind by the words used. The ideas excited in the hearer should be those
for which the words stand in the mind of the speaker. If the ideas of
the speaker are not clear, how can his words suggest anything definite
to the audience? Huxley relates an amusing story of an after-dinner
orator who was endowed with a voice of rare flexibility and power, and
with a fine flow of words, and who was called upon to speak without much
preparation. The applause was terrific. When Huxley asked a neighbor who
was especially enthusiastic what the orator had said, the latter could
not tell. Nothing was lacking in the post-prandial speech save sense and
occasionally grammar.[35]
The fuller consideration of the stream of thought in listening and
lecturing, in reading, speaking, and composing, is deserving of separate
chapters. The mental attitude in listening resembles that in getting
thought from the printed page. Silent reading is for the reader’s own
benefit; it comprises by far the larger proportion of our reading. In
oral reading, the stream of thought is somewhat different, the aim being
similar to that of public speaking,—namely, to suggest or convey to the
hearer thoughts from some other mind. In the act of composing, the aim
is to evolve thought from the mind’s own resources and activities. The
thought process is very much the same, no matter whether we dictate to
a stenographer, or speak to an audience, or use the pen in giving to it
form and abiding shape. It will be most convenient to treat together the
stream of thought in listening and in silent reading, and to reserve for
separate consideration the activity of the mind in writing, speaking, and
oral reading.
XIV
THE STREAM OF THOUGHT IN LISTENING AND READING
Reading is thinking along a prescribed line that lies goldenly
beneath the flow of words.
BRUMBAUGH.
Whittier uses words as stepping-stones upon which with a light
and joyous bound he crosses and recrosses at will the rapid and
rushing stream of thought.
LONGFELLOW.
To listen well is to think well,—the hearing ear must be
attended by the alert mind, eager to seize upon incoming
sensations and weave them into a garland of thought.
M. G. B.
Words, however well constructed originally, are always tending,
like coins, to have their inscription worn off by passing
from hand to hand; and the only possible mode of reviving it
is to be ever stamping it afresh by living in the habitual
contemplation of the phenomena themselves, and not resting in
our familiarity with the words that express them.
J. S. MILL.
XIV
THE STREAM OF THOUGHT IN LISTENING AND READING
[Sidenote: A suggestive dialogue.]
Two men engaged in speculative pursuits met after one had published a
book. Let us speak of them as A and B.
A: I have just read your new book. Many things in it please me very much,
but in it you say so and so, with which I do not find myself in full
accord.
B: I say nothing of the kind in that book.
A: I surely read your book.
B: You never read a book in your life. You read some sentences or
paragraphs; your mind begins to react upon what you have read; and ere
long you imagine that your inferences are the conclusions of the author.
A: I have a notion to write a psychology, and to set forth my views in
full.
B: Don’t you do it. You know no psychology. You have been of great
service in stimulating others to think; you are a most delightful
lecturer; but you have never mastered psychology.
[Sidenote: Feeling.]
[Sidenote: Interest.]
If a third party could have listened to the conversation, what stream
of consciousness would have started in his mind? Possibly surprise at
the frankness of B and the composure of A, mingled with thoughts of
what they were discussing. In other words, a strong tinge of feeling
would be perceptible in the stream of thought. In the minds of the two
engaged in the dialogue, feeling must have greatly modified the current
of thought. The greatest kindness that can be shown to some men is to
oppose or criticise their views. Opposition and criticism stimulate their
thinking, and rouse their mental powers to the highest possible tension
and activity. In men of the opposite temperament, feeling beclouds their
thinking, and makes the stream of thought more sluggish. The common
prejudice against appeals to feeling are due to the abuse of the right
which every orator has of addressing the feelings through the intellect,
and of thereby moving the will. To move the will is the essence and aim
of all eloquence. In listening or lecturing, in reading or composing,
some form of emotion always accompanies the stream of thought. The
orator may move the hearer to tears or to laughter; he is not untrue to
his mission if he can thereby win a vote, secure a verdict, or move the
hearer to action. A lecture is addressed primarily to the understanding.
It is greatly improved if the stream of thought which it starts and
supplies is accompanied by feelings of interest and the pleasurable
emotions attendant upon novelty, curiosity, or admiring approval. The
consciousness that we understand a lecture is accompanied by pleasurable
emotions which help to sustain the attention.
[Sidenote: Spurgeon.]
The writer once paid a shilling to hear Spurgeon. It was his purpose to
get a good seat, so that he might study this famous preacher’s gestures
and delivery, the quality of his voice, and the secret of his eloquence.
The text was hardly announced before every one in the audience, including
the writer, forgot all about Spurgeon, and thought only of his message to
the thousands before him. The secret of his oratory lay in his ability to
make the audience forget everything except the gospel he was preaching.
If people, after hearing a speaker, talk of his fine delivery, his
flowery language and beautiful figures of speech, or his peculiarities
of pronunciation and other eccentricities, it is proof positive that he
has failed. Instead of holding the attention to what he was saying, the
audience was thinking of his manner and delivery. A well-printed book
has the advantage of keeping the author’s personal characteristics from
interfering with the stream of thought. It has the disadvantage of losing
all the helps to listening and thinking which come from the tones of the
voice and eloquent delivery.
The accusation of B against A, referred to at the beginning of this
chapter, is applicable to many readers. For several sentences the mind is
riveted upon the author’s meaning. Presently a train of thought starts;
the eye runs along the sentences to the bottom of the page. On turning
the page, the reader wakes up to the consciousness that his mind does not
retain, perhaps never had the slightest notion of the contents of said
page. Often the train of thought leads to no goal; the thinking resembles
the process of wool-gathering, the tufts of wool on bushes and hedges
necessitating much wandering to little purpose.
[Sidenote: The works of great thinkers.]
For the sake of cultivating ability to think, students are advised to
read the works of great thinkers, like Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel.
Such reading is often a sham and a delusion. No one has done more to
shape the critical thinking of the world than Kant; and yet how many
young men waste time upon his pages because they are not prepared to
think his thoughts. Schleiermacher stimulated and modified the thinking
of theologians in every department of their science except Old Testament
exegesis; and yet the celebrated Dr. Kahnis, of the University of
Leipsic, used to say of Schleiermacher, “Er ist rein nicht zum studiren.”
Nevertheless, students for the ministry have been known to waste hours in
trying to read his writings, which they were not prepared to understand.
Of the obscurer passages in Hegel an eminent authority says, “It is a
fair question whether the rationality included in them be anything more
than the fact that the words all belong to a common vocabulary, and are
strung together on a scheme of predication and relation,—immediacy,
self-relation, and what not,—which has habitually recurred. Yet there
seems no reason to doubt that the subjective feeling of the rationality
of these sentences was strong in the writer as he penned them, or even
that some readers by straining may have reproduced it in themselves.”[36]
It may be worth an honest effort for students and teachers to try to
grasp the meaning of such writers; but if after a fair trial the mind
is left empty of meaning, it is wise to follow the advice of Locke with
regard to obscure ancient authors:
“In reading of them, if they do not use their words with a due clearness
and perspicuity, we may lay them aside, and, without any injury done
them, resolve thus with ourselves:
“Si non vis intelligi, debes negligi.”[37]
Several months or years of study may be required to prepare the mind for
grasping the ideas or phraseology of new departments of investigation.
No one can comprehend the treatises on physiological psychology without
devoting several weeks to the anatomy of the brain.
[Sidenote: Reading.]
[Sidenote: Lewes’s view.]
The words, phrases, and sentences of the printed or written page should
call up in the mind of the reader that for which they stand in the mind
of the author. What the stream of thought should be in reading a book is
well worthy of careful consideration. G. H. Lewes, in “Problems of Life
and Mind,” claims that “our thought is a constant interchange of ideas
and images, some trains of thought being carried on mainly by images
more or less vivid, others mainly by ideas with only a faint escort of
images.” It should be said, by way of explanation, that he does not use
the word “ideas” in the Platonic sense of patterns fixed in nature, of
which the individual objects in any given class are but imperfect copies,
and by participation in which they have their being; nor in the sense of
a mental image or picture, which (in opposition to Sir William Hamilton),
the Century Dictionary claims, has been the more common meaning of the
term in English literature since the sixteenth century. In Lewes’s pages
ideas never stand for images, nor for copies of sensations. Sully says
that the term idea is used to include both images and concepts, marking
off the whole region of the representative from the presentative, but
that, like the term notion, it now tends to be confined to concepts.
With Lewes all ideas are thoughts, but not all thoughts are ideas. He
does not reject the popular usage of the word in phrases like the idea
of Shakespeare’s Othello, of Bismarck’s policy. Take the following
sentence from Justin McCarthy’s “History of Our Own Times:” “Unluckily,
Lord Palmerston became possessed with the idea that the French minister
in Greece was secretly setting the Greek government on to resist our
claims.” In thinking the thought of this sentence the mind is not filled
with any images of Greece or mental pictures of any other kind. Possibly
the adjective Greek may bring to the minds of some persons the map symbol
of Greece or even scenery and cities in Greece, especially if they have
travelled or resided there; but such mental pictures really interfere
with the current of thought in reading. In planning a route from New
York to San Francisco one is apt to think it in the lines and dots of
railway maps. That in the mind for which words stand may be styled their
meaning, and Lewes claims that much of our reading does not translate
the words into their full signification, but proceeds by a process of
logical symbolism. He asserts that “the greater proportion of all men’s
thinking goes forward with confident reliance on the correctness of the
logical operations, and with only an occasional translation of symbols
into images. The translation—verification—does, indeed, from time to time
take place, and always in proportion to the novelty of the connections;
but how easily and how fatally the mind glides along the path of logical
operation without pausing to interpret more than the relation of the
symbols is humorously illustrated in the common story of a physicist,
whose claim to omniscience was the joke of his friends. Being asked
earnestly whether he had ‘read Biot’s paper on the malleability of
light?’ ‘No,’ he replied; ‘he sent it me, but I have not yet had time to
read it.’”
[Sidenote: An example.]
Lewes’s meaning is made somewhat clearer by two examples which he uses.
“Suppose you inform me that the blood rushed violently from the man’s
heart, quickening his pulse, at the sight of his enemy. Of the many
latent images in this phrase, how many were salient in your mind and
in mine? Probably two,—the man and his enemy,—and these images were
faint. Images of blood, heart, violent rushing, pulse, quickening, and
sight were either not revived at all or were passing shadows. Had any
such images arisen, they would have hampered thought, retarding the
logical process of judgment by irrelevant connections. The symbols had
substituted _relations_ for these _values_,—the logical relations of
inclusion and exclusion which constitute judgment. You were not anxious
to inform me respecting the qualities of blood, heart, pulse, etc., but
only of a certain effect produced on one man by sight of another; and
this effect you expressed in the physiological terms which came first
to hand; you might have expressed it equally well in very different
psychological terms,—‘fierce anger seized the man’s soul, rousing all
his energies at the sight of his enemy,’ when assuredly there would not
have been present images of ‘anger,’ ‘seizing,’ ‘soul,’ ‘rousing,’ and
‘energies.’ These terms are symbols which stand for clusters of images,
and can at will be translated into images, just as algebraic letters
stand for values which can be assigned. But for purposes of thought
and calculation such translation is unnecessary, is hampering; all
that is necessary is that the terms should occupy their proper logical
position.”[38]
[Sidenote: Another example.]
The other example is still more striking. “Suppose I read the phrase,
‘The ship which carried Nelson was appropriately named the Victory;’
unless the ship itself is the prominent interest, I have probably no
image at all, or at least only a faint and fleeting shadow of some vague
outline. I do not picture a man-of-war, I do not see the hull, masts,
cordage, and cannon, though these, with the figure-head, fluttering
flags, and pennons, may successfully emerge if I dwell on the ship. I
perhaps do not see Nelson, or, at any rate, do not see his pale face, one
eye, and one arm, but only some faint suggestion of a human form. The
purpose of the phrase was not to raise images, but to communicate a fact
respecting the name of the ship; and my intelligence has been occupied
with this purpose. I must, it is true, have understood each word, or,
at any rate, each clause of the sentence; but for this understanding
it is not necessary that I should translate, nor even that I should be
capable of translating, each word into an image or cluster of images;
it is enough if I apprehend a series of logical relations. We all use
occasional words with intelligent and intelligible propriety, the meaning
of which as isolated terms we cannot translate. We read Shakespeare and
Goethe without a suspicion of the many words which for us have no images.
But if one of these words occurs in an unfamiliar connection we are at
once arrested, as we are if any familiar word is placed in an unfamiliar
position. Suppose we come upon the sentence, ‘The ship which carried
Nelson was named _Victory_; the ship which carried Napoleon across the
desert was named _Akbar_,’—we are at once arrested; the connection of
ship and desert is unusual, and is seen, on reflection, to be contrary to
experience; but when we learn that the camel is called the ‘ship of the
desert,’ we recognize the new value assigned to the term, and the logical
correctness of the phrase is thereby recognized.”[39]
These examples, and others like them which Lewes gives, bring us face
to face with the proposition that “much of our thinking is carried on
by means of symbols without any images, which is the same thing as
thinking being carried on by words without any meanings and with only the
accompanying intuition of their logical relations.” Thus, after a century
of exhortation against the blind use of words we are brought face to face
with the question of using words in thinking without realizing the full
meaning, an abuse of words for which reformers have shot their arrows at
rote teaching from every possible point of view. What truth is there in
the statement of Mr. Lewes? What can be his meaning?
[Sidenote: Literature.]
[Sidenote: Imaging in poetry.]
[Sidenote: The correct plan.]
It must be admitted that men in mature life skim newspapers, magazines,
and books, especially books of fiction and books of reference, without
realizing in their minds the import of all the words upon which the eye
falls. The aim may be to get the plot of the story or a fact for some
specific use, or a hurried view of the news and current events of the
last twenty-four hours. But this is not the kind of thinking which the
teacher aims to beget in the minds of his pupils. Nor does it ever lead
to a just appreciation of literature. All literature which appeals to the
imagination cannot be read and enjoyed in that way. No one can rightly
read a choice selection without thinking what was in the author’s mind,
reconstructing the images and scenes which were before his mental eye and
following the movements depicted by his language. Movement is more easily
conceived than scenery, and abounds in the stories which are most popular
among children. Judicious exercises will soon enable the pupil to call up
all kinds of imagery. In the Standard Fifth Reader it is suggested that
the pupils sit with closed eyes and close attention while the teacher
or one of the pupils reads a paragraph or stanza. For illustration, Kate
Putnam Osgood’s poem, entitled “Driving Home the Cows,” is selected.
Out of the clover and blue-eyed grass
He turned them into the river lane;
One after another he let them pass,
Then fastened the meadow bars again.
Under the willows and over the hill
He patiently followed their sober pace;
The merry whistle for once was still,
And something shadowed the sunny face.
Only a boy! and his father had said
He never could let his youngest go;
Two already were lying dead
Under the feet of the trampling foe.
But after the evening’s work was done,
And the frogs were loud in the meadow-swamp,
Over his shoulder he slung his gun,
And stealthily followed the foot-path damp;
Across the clover and through the wheat,
With resolute heart and purpose grim;
Though the dew was on his hurrying feet
And the blind bat’s flitting startled him.
Thrice since then had the lanes been white,
And the orchard sweet with apple-bloom;
And now, when the cows came back at night,
The feeble father drove them home.
For news had come to the lonely farm
That three were lying where two had lain;
And the old man’s tremulous, palsied arm
Could never lean on a son’s again.
The summer days grew cool and late:
He went for the cows when the work was done;
But down the lane as he opened the gate
He saw them coming, one by one:
Brindle, Ebony, Speckle, and Bess,
Shaking their horns in the evening wind;
Cropping the buttercups out of the grass;
But who was it following close behind?
Loosely swung in the idle air
An empty sleeve of army blue;
And worn and pale, from the crisping hair,
Looked out a face that the father knew.
The great tears sprang to their meeting eyes
For the heart must speak when the lips are dumb;
And under the silent evening skies
Together they followed the cattle home.
[Sidenote: Some thoughts are not images.]