Thought, and the Validity of Thought. Physiologists and metaphysicians
have vied with one another to tell us in twenty different ways how we
think and why we think and what good our thinking may be supposed to be
as affording us any real acquaintance with things in general outside our
thinking-machine. One school of philosophers tells us that Thought is a
secretion of the brain (_i.e._, that Thought is a form of Matter), and
another that it is purely immaterial, and the only reality in the
universe,—_i.e._, that Matter is a form of Thought. The meekest of men
“presume to think” this, that, and the other; and the proudest
distinction of the modern sage is to be a “Thinker,” especially a “free”
one. But with all this much ado about Thought, it has not occurred to
any one, so far as I am aware, to attempt a fair review of what any one
of us thinks in the course of the twenty-four hours; what are the number
of separable thoughts which, on an average, pass through a human brain
in a day; and what may be their nature and proportions in the shape of
Recollections, Reflections, Hopes, Contrivances, Fancies, and
Reasonings. We are all aware that when we are awake a perpetual stream
of thoughts goes on in “what we are pleased to call our minds,”
sometimes slow and sluggish, as the water in a ditch; sometimes bright,
rapid, and sparkling, like a mountain brook; and now and then making
some sudden, happy dash, cataract-wise, over an obstacle. We are also
accustomed to speak as if the sum and substance of all this thinking
were very respectable, as might become “beings endowed with the lofty
faculty of thought”; and we always tacitly assume that our thoughts have
logical beginnings, middles, and endings—commence with problems and
terminate in solutions—or that we evolve out of our consciousness
ingenious schemes of action or elaborate pictures of Hope or Memory. If
our books of mental philosophy ever obtain a place in the Circulating
Libraries of another planet, the “general reader” of that distant world
will inevitably suppose that on our little Tellus dwell a thousand
millions of men, women, and children, who spend their existence as the
interlocutors in Plato’s Dialogues passed their hours under the grip of
the dread Socratic elenchus, arguing, sifting, balancing, recollecting,
hard at work as if under the ferule of a schoolmaster.
The real truth about the matter seems to be that, instead of taking this
kind of mental exercise all day long, and every day, there are very few
of us who ever do anything of the kind for more than a few minutes at a
time; and that the great bulk of our thoughts proceed in quite a
different way, and are occupied by altogether less exalted matters than
our vanity has induced us to imagine. The normal mental locomotion of
even well-educated men and women, save under the spur of exceptional
stimulus, is neither the flight of an eagle in the sky nor the trot of a
horse upon the road, but may better be compared to the lounge of a
truant school-boy in a shady lane, now dawdling pensively, now taking a
hop-skip-and-jump, now stopping to pick blackberries, and now turning to
right or left to catch a butterfly, climb a tree, or make
dick-duck-and-drake on a pond; going nowhere in particular, and only
once in a mile or so proceeding six steps in succession in an orderly
and philosophical manner.
It is far beyond my ambition to attempt to supply this large lacune in
mental science, and to set forth the truth of the matter about the
actual Thoughts which practically, not theoretically, are wont to pass
through human brains. Some few observations on the subject, however, may
perhaps be found entertaining, and ought certainly to serve to mitigate
our self-exaltation on account of our grand mental endowments, by
showing how rarely and under what curious variety of pressure we employ
them.
The first and familiar remark is that every kind of thought is liable to
be colored and modified in all manner of ways by our physical conditions
and surroundings. We are not steam thinking-machines, working evenly at
all times at the same rate, and turning out the same sort and quantity
of work in the same given period, but rather more like windmills,
subject to every breeze, and whirling our sails at one time with great
impetus and velocity, and at another standing still, becalmed and
ineffective. Sometimes it is our outer conditions which affect us,
sometimes it is our own inner wheels which are clogged and refuse to
rotate; but, from whatever cause it arises, the modification of our
thoughts is often so great as to make us arrive at diametrically
opposite conclusions on the same subject and with the same _data_ of
thought, within an incredibly brief interval of time. Some years ago,
the President of the British Association frankly answered objections to
the consistency of his inaugural address by referring to the different
aspects of the ultimate problems of theology in different “moods” of
mind. When men of such eminence confess to “moods,” lesser mortals may
avow their own mental oscillations without painful humiliation, and even
put forward some claim to consistency if the vibrating needle of their
convictions do not swing quite round the whole compass, and point at two
o’clock to the existence of a Deity and a Life to come, and at six to a
nebula for the origin, and a “streak of morning cloud” for the
consummation of things. Possibly, also, the unscientific mind may claim
some praise on the score of modesty if it delay for the moment to
instruct mankind in either its two o’clock or its six o’clock creed, and
wait till it has settled down for some few hours, weeks, or months, to
any one definite opinion.
Not to dwell for the present on these serious topics, it is only
necessary to carry with us through our future investigations that every
man’s thoughts are continually fluctuating and vibrating, from inward as
well as outward causes. Let us glance for a moment at some of these.
First, there are the well-known conditions of health and high animal
spirits, in which every thought is rose-colored; and corresponding
conditions of disease and depression, in which everything we think of
seems to pass, like a great bruise, through yellow, green, blue, and
purple to black. A liver complaint causes the universe to be enshrouded
in gray; and the gout covers it with an inky pall, and makes us think
our best friends little better than fiends in disguise. Further, a whole
treatise would be needed to expound how our thoughts are further
distempered by food, beverages of various kinds, and narcotics of great
variety. When our meals have been too long postponed, it would appear as
if that Evil Personage who proverbially finds mischief for idle hands to
do were similarly engaged with an idle digestive apparatus, and the
result is that, if there be the smallest and most remote cloud to be
seen in the whole horizon of our thoughts, it sweeps up and over us just
in proportion as we grow hungrier and fainter, till at last it
overwhelms us in depression and despair. “Why?” we ask ourselves, “why
has not A. written to us for so long? What will B. think of such and
such a transaction? How is our pecuniary concern with C. to be settled?
What is the meaning of that odd little twitch we have felt so often here
or there about our persons?” The answer to our thoughts, prompted by the
evil genius of famine, is always lugubrious in the extreme. “A. has not
written because he is dead. B. will quarrel with us forever because of
that transaction. C. will never pay us our money, or we shall never be
able to pay C. That twitch which we have so thoughtlessly disregarded is
the premonitory symptom of the most horrible of all human maladies, of
which we shall die in agonies and leave a circle of sorrowing friends
before the close of the ensuing year.” Such are the _idées noires_ which
present themselves when we want our dinner; and the best-intentioned
people in the world, forsooth! recommend us to summon them round us by
fasting, as if they were a company of cherubim instead of imps of quite
another character! But the scene undergoes a transformation bordering on
the miraculous when we have eaten a slice of mutton and drunk half a
glass of sherry. If we revert now to our recent meditations, we are
quite innocently astonished to think what could possibly have made us so
anxious without any reasonable ground. Of course, A. has not written to
us because he always goes grouse-shooting at this season. B. will never
take the trouble to think about our little transaction. C. is certain to
pay us, or we can readily raise money to pay him; and our twitch means
nothing worse than a touch of rheumatics or an ill-fitting garment.
Beyond the alternations of fasting and feasting, still more amazing are
the results of narcotics, alcoholic beverages, and of tea and coffee.
Every species of wine exercises a perceptibly different influence of its
own, from the cheery and social “sparkling grape of Eastern France” to
the solemn black wine of Oporto, the fit accompaniment of the blandly
dogmatic post-prandial prose of elderly gentlemen of orthodox
sentiments. A cup of strong coffee clears the brain and makes the
thoughts transparent, while one of green tea drives them fluttering like
dead leaves before the wind. Time and learning would fail to describe
the yet more marvellous effects of opium, hemlock, henbane, hashish,
bromide, and chloral. Every one of these narcotics produces a different
hue of the mental window through which we look out on the world;
sometimes distorting all objects in the wildest manner (like opium),
sometimes (like chloral) acting only perceptibly by removing the sense
of disquiet and restoring our thoughts to the white light of commonsense
cheerfulness; and again acting quite differently on the thoughts of
different persons, and of the same persons at different times.
Only secondary to the effects of inwardly imbibed stimulants or
narcotics are those of the outward atmosphere, which in bracing weather
makes our thoughts crisp like the frosted grass, and in heavy November
causes them to drip chill and slow and dull, like the moisture from the
mossy eaves of the Moated Grange. Burning, glaring Southern sunshine
dazes our minds as much as our eyes, and a London fog obfuscates them,
so that a man might honestly plead that he could no more argue clearly
in the fog than the Irishman could spell correctly with a bad pen and
muddy ink.
Nor are mouths, eyes, and lungs by any means the only organs through
which influences arrive at our brain, modifying the thoughts which
proceed from them. The sense of Smelling, when gratified by the odors of
woods and gardens and hay-fields, or even of delicately perfumed rooms,
lifts all our thoughts into a region wherein the Beautiful, the Tender,
and the Sublime may impress us freely; while the same sense, offended by
disgusting and noxious odors, as of coarse cookery, open sewers, or
close chambers inhabited by vulgar people, thrusts us down into an
opposite stratum of feeling, wherein poetry entereth not, and our very
thoughts smell of garlic. Needless to add that in a still more
transcendent way Music seizes on the thoughts of the musically-minded,
and bears them off in its talons over sea and land, and up to Olympus
like Ganymede. Two easily distinguishable mental influences seem to
belong to music, according as it is heard by those who really appreciate
it or by others who are unable to do so. To the former it opens a book
of poetry, which they follow word for word after the performer, as if he
read it to them, thinking the thoughts of the composer in succession
with scarcely greater uncertainty or vagueness than if they were
expressed in verbal language of a slightly mystical description. To the
latter the book is closed; but though the listener’s own thoughts unroll
themselves uninterrupted by the composer’s ideas, they are very
considerably colored thereby. “I delight in music,” said once Sir
Charles Lyell to me: “I am always able to think out my work better while
it is going on!” As a matter of fact, he resumed at the moment a
disquisition concerning the date of the Glacial Period at the precise
point at which it had been interrupted by the performance of a symphony
of Beethoven, having evidently mastered in the interval an intricate
astronomical knot. To ordinary mortals with similar deficiency of
musical sense, harmonious sound seems to spread a halo like that of
light, causing every subject of contemplation to seem glorified, as a
landscape appears in a dewy sunrise. Memories rise to the mind and seem
infinitely more affecting than at other times, affections still living
grow doubly tender, new beauties appear in the picture or the landscape
before our eyes, and passages of remembered prose or poetry float
through our brains in majestic cadence. In a word, the sense of the
Beautiful, the Tender, the Sublime, is vividly aroused, and the
atmosphere of familiarity and commonplace, wherewith the real beauty and
sweetness of life are too often veiled, is lifted for the hour. As in a
camera-obscura or mirror, the very trees and grass which we had looked
on a thousand times are seen to possess unexpected loveliness. But all
this can only happen to the non-musical soul when the harmony to which
it listens is really harmonious, and when it comes at an appropriate
time, when the surrounding conditions permit and incline the man to
surrender himself to its influences; in a word, when there is nothing
else demanding his attention. The most barbarous of the practices of
royalty and civic magnificence is that of employing music as an
accompaniment to feasts. It involves a confusion of the realm of the
real and ideal, and of one sense with another, as childish as that of
the little girl who took out a peach to eat while bathing in the sea.
Next to music during the dinner-time comes music in the midst of a
cheerful evening party, where, when every intellect present is strung up
to the note of animated conversation and brilliant repartee, there is a
sudden _douche_ of solemn chords from the region of the pianoforte, and
presently some well-meaning gentleman endeavors to lift up all the lazy
people, who are lounging in easy-chairs after a good dinner, into the
empyrean of emotion “sublime upon the seraph wings of ecstasy” of
Beethoven or Mozart; or some meek damsel, with plaintive note, calls on
them, in Schubert’s _Addio_, to break their hearts at the memory or
anticipation of those mortal sorrows which are either behind or before
every one of us, and which it is either agony or profanation to think of
at such a moment. All this is assuredly intensely barbarous. The same
people who like to mix up the ideal pleasure of music with incongruous
enjoyments of another kind would be guilty of giving a kiss with their
mouths full of bread and cheese. As to what we may term extra-mural
music, the hideous noises made by the aid of vile machinery in the
street, it is hard to find words of condemnation strong enough for it.
Probably the organ-grinders of London have done more in the last twenty
years to detract from the quality and quantity of the highest kind of
mental work done by the nation than any two or three colleges of Oxford
or Cambridge have effected to increase it. One mathematician alone, as
he informed the writer, estimated the cost of the increased mental labor
they have imposed upon him and his clerks at several thousand pounds’
worth of first-class work, for which the State practically paid in the
added length of time needed for his calculations. Not much better are
those church bells which now sound a trumpet before the good people who
attend “matins” and other daily services at hours when their profane
neighbors are wearily sleeping or anxiously laboring at their appointed
tasks.
Next to our bodily Sensations come in order of influence on our thoughts
the Places in which we happen to do our thinking. Meditating like the
pious Harvey “Among the Tombs” is one thing; doing the same on a breezy
mountain side among the gorse and the heather, quite another. Jostling
our way in a crowded street or roaming in a solitary wood, rattling in
an English express train or floating by moonlight in a Venetian gondola
or an Egyptian dahabieh, though each and all favorable conditions for
thinking, create altogether distinct classes of lucubrations. If we
endeavor to define what are the surroundings among which Thought is best
sustained and most vigorous, we shall probably find good reason to
reverse not a few of our accepted and familiar judgments. The common
idea, for example, that we ponder very profoundly by the seashore, is, I
am persuaded, a baseless delusion. We _think_ indeed that we are
thinking, but for the most part our minds merely lie open, like so many
oysters, to the incoming waves, and with scarcely greater intellectual
activity. The very charm of the great Deep seems to lie in the fact that
it reduces us to a state of mental emptiness and vacuity, while our
vanity is soothed by the notion that we are thinking with unwonted
emphasis and perseverance. Amphitrite, the enchantress, mesmerizes us
with the monotonous passes of her billowy hands, and lulls us into a
slumberous hypnotism wherein we meekly do her bidding, and fix our eyes
and thoughts, like biologized men, on the rising and falling of every
wave. If it be tempestuous weather, we watch open-mouthed till the
beautiful white crests topple over and dash in storm and thunder up the
beach; and, if it be a summer evening’s calm, we note with placid,
never-ending contentment how the wavelets, like little children, run up
softly and swiftly on the golden strand to deposit their gifts of shells
and seaweed, and then retreat, shy and ashamed of their boldness, to
hide themselves once again under the flowing skirts of Mother Ocean.
Again, divines and poets have united to bolster up our convictions that
we do a great deal of important thinking at night when we lie awake in
bed. Every preacher points to the hours of the “silent midnight,” when
his warnings will surely come home, and sit like incubi on the breast of
sinners who, too often perhaps, have dozed in the day-time as they flew,
bat-wise, over their heads from the pulpit. Shelley, in “Queen Mab,”
affords us a terrible night scene of a king who, after his dinner of
“silence, grandeur, and excess,” finds sleep abdicate his pillow
(probably in favor of indigestion); and Tennyson, in “Locksley Hall,”
threatens torments of memory still keener to the “shallow-hearted cousin
Amy” whenever she may happen to lie meditating—
“In the dead, unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.”
Certainly, if there be any time in the twenty-four hours when we might
carry on consecutive chains of thought, it would be when we lie still
for hours undisturbed by sight or sound, having nothing to do, and with
our bodies so far comfortable and quiescent as to give the minimum of
interruption to our mental proceedings. Far be it from me to deny that
under such favorable auspices some people may think to good purpose.
But, if I do not greatly err, they form the exception rather than the
rule among bad sleepers. As the Psalmist of old remarked, it is
generally “mischief” which a man—wicked or otherwise—“devises upon his
bed”; and the truth of the observation in our day is proved from the
harsh Ukases for domestic government which are commonly promulgated by
Paterfamilias at the breakfast table, and by the sullenness _de parti
pris_ which testifies that the sleepless brother, sister, or maiden aunt
has made up his or her mind during the night to “have it out” with
So-and-so next morning. People are a little faint and feverish when they
lie awake, and nothing occurs to divert their minds and restore them to
equanimity, and so they go on chewing the bitter cud of any little
grudge. Thus it comes to pass that, while Anger causes Sleeplessness,
Sleeplessness is a frequent nurse of Anger.[25]
Finally, among popular delusions concerning propitious conditions of
Thoughts, must be reckoned the belief (which has driven hermits and
philosophers crazy) that thinking is better done in abnormal isolation
than in the natural social state of man. Of course there is benefit
quite incalculable in the reservation of some portion of our days for
solitude. How much excuse is to be made for the shortcomings, the
ill-tempers, the irreligion of those poor people who are scarcely alone
for half an hour between the cradle and the grave, God alone can tell.
But, with such reasonable reservation of our hours and the occasional
precious enjoyment of lonely country walks or rides, the benefits of
solitude, even on Zimmermann’s showing, come nearly to an end; and there
is little doubt that, instead of thinking more, the more hours of
loneliness we devote to doing it, the _less_ we shall really think at
all, or even retain capacity for thinking and not degenerate into
cabbages. Our minds need the stimulus of other minds, as our lungs need
oxygen to perform their functions. After all, if we analyze the
exquisite pleasure afforded us by brilliant and suggestive conversation,
one of its largest elements will be found to be that it has quickened
our thoughts from a heavy amble into a gallop. A really fine talk
between half a dozen well-matched and thoroughly cultivated people, who
discuss an interesting subject with their manifold wealth of allusions,
arguments, and illustrations, is a sort of mental Oaks or Derbyday,
wherein our brains are excited to their utmost speed, and we get over
more ground than in weeks of solitary mooning meditation. It is
superfluous to add that if our constitutional mental tendency be that of
the gentleman who naïvely expressed his feelings by saying impressively
to a friend, “I take _great_ interest in my own concerns, I _assure_ you
I do,” it seems doubly desirable that we should overstep our petty
ring-fence of personal hopes, fears, and emotions of all kinds, and roam
with our neighbors over their dominions, and into further outlying
regions of public and universal interest. Of all ingenious prescriptions
for making a miserable moral hypochondriac, it is difficult to imagine a
better than the orthodox plan of the “Selig-gemachende Kirche” for
making a Saint. Take your man or woman, with a morbidly tender
conscience and a pernicious habit of self-introspection. If he or she
have an agonizing memory of wrong, sin, or sorrow overshadowing the
whole of life, so much the better. Then shut the individual up in a cell
like a toad in a stone, to feed on his or her own thoughts, till death
or madness puts an end to the experiment.
But if the seaside and solitude and the midnight couch have been much
overrated as propitious conditions of thought, there are, _per contra_,
certain other conditions of it the value of which has been too much
ignored. The law of the matter seems to be that real hard Thought, like
Happiness, rarely comes when we have made elaborate preparation for it;
and that the higher part of the mind which is to be exercised works much
more freely when a certain lower part (concerned with “unconscious
cerebration”) is busy about some little affairs of its own department
and its restless activity is thus disposed of. Not one man in fifty does
his best thinking quite motionless, but instinctively employs his limbs
in some way when his brain is in full swing of argument and reflection.
Even a trifling fidget of the hands with a paper-knife, a flower, a
piece of twine, or the bread we crumble beside our plate at dinner,
supplies in a degree this _desideratum_, and the majority of people
never carry on an animated conversation involving rapid thought without
indulging in some such habit. But the more complete employment of our
unconscious cerebration in walking up or down a level terrace or
quarter-deck, where there are no passing objects to distract our
attention and no need to mark where we plant our feet, seems to provide
even better for smooth-flowing thought. The perfection of such
conditions is attained when the walk in question is taken of a still,
soft November evening, when the light has faded so far as to blur the
surrounding withered trees and flowers, but the gentle gray sky yet
affords enough vision to prevent embarrassment. There are a few such
hours in every year which appear absolutely invaluable for calm
reflection, and which are grievously wasted by those who hurry indoors
at dusk to light candles and sit round a yet unneeded fire.