Thinking and learning to think by Nathan C. Schaeffer (ebooks that read to you .txt) 📖
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What is meant by an independent thinker? Evidently one who is not indebted to others for the inferences which he draws or the conclusions at which he arrives. Many practices at school are subversive of habits of independent thinking. The assignment of lessons of such length and difficulty that the weaker pupils must rely upon their stronger classmates for help, or resort to “coaches, keys, and ponies” for assistance, makes them helpless instead of self-reliant, and cultivates the memory at the expense of the understanding. The lessons should be graded so as to beget the sense of mastery. Every difficulty that is overcome by a pupil’s own efforts tends to develop in him an ambition to conquer other difficulties. Few, if any, joys can be compared with the ecstatic joy of victory. Moreover, it should be the aim of the teacher to beget in the pupil a love of truth more potent and profound than reverence for a favorite authority. On the contrary, the feeling of independence and the desire of distinction by differing from other people may grow into a passion. This seldom does much harm in the case of an editor or a professor. If you give either of them leave to criticise and to print, he is well satisfied. If he is elected to a board of managers or the national assembly, his critical faculty and his fondness for finding fault and thinking differently from other people may make him a hinderance to the leaders, who must get things done, or cause him to stand apart, like Ewald, in the German Reichstag, as a one-man party, whose views must be ignored on all questions requiring prompt action or immediate decision. To counteract this tendency in a youth of strong personality, it is difficult to devise anything better than the moulding supremacy of class-spirit, the chastening influence of a contest in the literary society, and the relentless lessons which a boy gets on the play-ground when he will not play because the game does not go his way. Independence of thought in the quest of truth, on the one hand, and concert of action for the public good, on the other, are two of the most useful lessons to be learned at school. At this point there is room for a kind of child-study apart from a syllabus of set questions, and leading to results which cannot be tabulated in statistics or averages. The average in such cases is untrue as a guide, and may be utterly subversive of correct habits of thinking, or the correct method of dealing with the individual. To give enough optional or specific work for the brightest, and not too much general or required work for the slowest, is an ideal hard to realize in the assignment of work, and yet of supreme importance in the endeavor to develop habits of independent thinking.
There is great need for independent thinking under a system of popular government, especially on the part of those who exercise the elective franchise. In the modern caucus or convention one man often does the thinking for the rest. “If he is the man whom I follow, I call him my leader. If he is the man whom you follow, I call him your boss.” When the leader or boss is not sufficiently sure of his ability to bind the others by his orders, those who have a following are invited to a conference, at which a line of action is agreed upon to relieve the multitudes of the trouble of thinking. A delegate who was giving very vociferous vent to his feelings was rebuked by a colleague, saying, “Just think where you are.” He replied with more emphasis than elegance, “I was not brought here to think, but to shout.” Independent thinking is as hard work as the average man cares to do. He craves a guide, an authority to relieve him of the trouble of thinking for himself. Outside of their particular vocation or profession it is absolutely necessary at times for the strongest intellects to accept the conclusions of other thinkers. The man who has been successful at making money, and who finds that his thinking in financial matters is trustworthy, often makes himself obnoxious by assuming that his opinions and conclusions should be accorded equal weight in every other sphere of human activity. There is no better place to teach the individual his limitations without destroying his independence as a thinker than the atmosphere of a great university.
The dependent thinker is aptly described by a writer in Leisure Hours in the following language:
“It is sometimes amusing to hear a man of this order coming out strongly with opinions which he would have you believe are thoroughly independent and original, but which you can trace directly to the source from which he got them. You could indicate those sources if it were not uncivil to do so, very much as a shrewd but not very well-behaved old gentleman is said to have indicated at church, in a tone sufficiently loud to be heard by the clergyman and the congregation, too,—which was especially galling,—the authors to whom the said clergyman had been indebted for his sermon, ‘That’s Sherlock; that’s Tillotson; that’s Jeremy Taylor.’ ‘I tell you what, fellow, if you don’t hold your tongue, I’ll have you turned out of church.’ ‘That’s his own.’”
The men who must depend upon others to do their thinking for them deserve pity and commiseration. The bureaus which thrive by furnishing essays and orations for commencements, sermons for special occasions, and even for the regularly recurring Sunday services, show how often our schools make their pupils dependent instead of self-reliant. On being cast upon the sea of life, their minds resemble a craft which has lost its rudder; they drift with wind and tide, uncertain where they shall land. Their thinking is not grounded on first principles; hence their minds reflect transient views on every question. The strong personality in the sunlight of whose influence they happened last to bask moulds their opinions and directs their intellectual life until they move into the sphere of new influences, constantly resembling those whom Randolph of Roanoke stigmatized as dough-faces because their votes were under the control of party leaders and were cast regardless of their convictions of right.
The men whom the world reveres as great thinkers have been distinguished by their ability to give continuous thought to whatever engaged their serious attention. Newton claimed that he made his discoveries by always thinking about them. His biographers relate how he would for hours remain seated upon his bed, half dressed, absorbed in thought, forgetful of his surroundings. Stories of the absent-mindedness of Socrates, Sydney Smith, Neander, Edison, and many others who attained eminence as philosophers, authors, or inventors, are interesting indeed, but they throw no light upon the way in which these men acquired their marvellous powers; they merely show a capacity for focussing all the energies of the soul upon one point to the exclusion of sense impressions from without. It is very certain that men who excel in any line of work acquire habits of concentrated and continuous thought in one direction. Very different from these are the mental habits of the boy and the average man. A writer in Cornhill Magazine describes their intellectual activity as follows:
“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 passively, now taking a hop-skip-jump, now stopping to pick blackberries, and now turning to right or left to catch a butterfly, climb a tree, or make dick-duck-drake on a pond; going nowhere in particular, and only once in a mile or so proceeding six steps in an orderly and philosophical manner.”
The thoughts of some men resemble mosaic work. Each part is beautiful in itself, but has no inner connection with those next to it. Men of this class are called loose thinkers; it is always difficult to retain what they say. The thinking of a totally opposite class of men resembles the growth of an organism. They start from a germinal idea, which, like seed sown into good soil, begins to grow, throwing out parts which have inward connection and which together constitute an organic unity. In a machine any part can be replaced by another. In the organism no such substitution is possible. For each organ bears a life relation to the whole, and if it is wanting the unity of the organism is destroyed. Organic thinking gives the hearer the feeling that the several parts and inferences of a discourse are evolved from his inner consciousness. Having had the germ-idea in his mind, he feels as if he had held all it involves; the speaker supplied the conditions of development as the sun supplies warmth for vegetable growth. The effect of such thinking is irresistible. The branches of study which thus grow out of a fundamental idea, and show the inner relation between the subjects not as a mere sequence, but as a living organic relation, have an educative value which cannot be too highly prized. The organic thinker, if he makes himself understood, has the audience on his side; and his cogency can seldom be refuted except by showing either that his germinal idea is wrong or that his conclusions have no connection with his premises.
Dr. Harris has drawn attention to three stages of thinking. He claims that in the first stage things are regarded as the essential elements of all being, that in the second the mind discovers relations,—truly essential relations,—and that in the third stage the mind thinks the self-related. “Self-relation is the category of the reason, just as relativity is the category of the understanding, or non-relativity (atomism) the category of sense-perception.” Theoretically this distinction is important as giving us a rational basis for the knowledge of God as revealed to man. Practically, every child thinks the idea of God. Where the study of science or philosophy leads to atheism, the wish is always father to the thought.
Clifford has made a distinction between technical and scientific thinking. The former enables one to do with skill and accuracy what has been done heretofore. The latter partakes of the nature of prophecy or prediction. He claims that scientific as well as merely technical thought make use of experience to direct human action, but that while technical thought or skill enables a man to deal with the same circumstances he has met before, scientific thought enables him to deal with circumstances different from any he has met before. In his opinion, scientific thought is human progress itself. An example or two can best be given in his own language.
“If you make a dot on a piece of paper, and then hold a piece of Iceland spar over it, you will see not
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