HOW WE THINK

BY
JOHN DEWEY
PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1910,
BY D. C. HEATH & CO.
2F8
Printed in U. S. A.

PREFACE
Our schools are troubled with a multiplication of studies, each in turn
having its own multiplication of materials and principles. Our teachers find
their tasks made heavier in that they have come to deal with pupils
individually and not merely in mass. Unless these steps in advance are to
end in distraction, some clew of unity, some principle that makes for
simplification, must be found. This book represents the conviction that the
needed steadying and centralizing factor is found in adopting as the end of
endeavor that attitude of mind, that habit of thought, which we call
scientific. This scientific attitude of mind might, conceivably, be quite
irrelevant to teaching children and youth. But this book also represents the
conviction that such is not the case; that the native and unspoiled attitude
of childhood, marked by ardent curiosity, fertile imagination, and love of
experimental inquiry, is near, very near, to the attitude of the scientific
mind. If these pages assist any to appreciate this kinship and to consider
seriously how its recognition in educational practice would make for
individual happiness and the reduction of social waste, the book will amply
have served its purpose.
It is hardly necessary to enumerate the authors to whom I am indebted. My
fundamental indebtedness is to my wife, by whom the ideas of this book
were inspired, and through whose work in connection with the Laboratory
School, existing in Chicago between 1896 and 1903, the ideas attained such
concreteness as comes from embodiment and testing in practice. It is a
pleasure, also, to acknowledge indebtedness to the intelligence and
sympathy of those who coöperated as teachers and supervisors in the
conduct of that school, and especially to Mrs. Ella Flagg Young, then a
colleague in the University, and now Superintendent of the Schools of
Chicago.
NEW YORK CITY, December, 1909.

CONTENTS
  PART I  
  THE PROBLEM OF TRAINING THOUGHT  
CHAPTER   PAGE
I. WHAT IS THOUGHT? 1
II. THE NEED FOR TRAINING THOUGHT 14
III. NATURAL RESOURCES IN THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT 29
IV. SCHOOL CONDITIONS AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT 45
THE MEANS AND END OF MENTAL TRAINING: THE
V. 56
PSYCHOLOGICAL AND THE LOGICAL
 
  PART II  
  LOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS  
VI. THE ANALYSIS OF A COMPLETE ACT OF THOUGHT 68
VII. SYSTEMATIC INFERENCE: INDUCTION AND DEDUCTION 79
VIII. JUDGMENT: THE INTERPRETATION OF FACTS 101
IX. MEANING: OR CONCEPTIONS AND UNDERSTANDING 116
X. CONCRETE AND ABSTRACT THINKING 135
XI. EMPIRICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THINKING 145
 
  PART III  
  THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT  
XII. ACTIVITY AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT 157
XIII. LANGUAGE AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT 170
XIV. OBSERVATION AND INFORMATION IN THE TRAINING OF MIND 188
XV. THE RECITATION AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT 201
XVI. SOME GENERAL CONCLUSIONS 214
[Pg 1]

HOW WE THINK

PART ONE: THE PROBLEM OF

CHAPTER ONE
WHAT IS THOUGHT?
§ 1. Varied Senses of the Term
Four senses of thought, from the wider to the limited
No words are oftener on our lips than thinking and thought. So profuse and
varied, indeed, is our use of these words that it is not easy to define just
what we mean by them. The aim of this chapter is to find a single consistent
meaning. Assistance may be had by considering some typical ways in which
the terms are employed. In the first place thought is used broadly, not to say
loosely. Everything that comes to mind, that "goes through our heads," is
called a thought. To think of a thing is just to be conscious of it in any way
whatsoever. Second, the term is restricted by excluding whatever is directly
presented; we think (or think of) only such things as we do not directly see,
hear, smell, or taste. Then, third, the meaning is further limited to beliefs
that rest upon some kind of evidence or testimony. Of this third type, two
kinds—or, rather, two degrees—must be discriminated. In some cases, a
belief is accepted with slight or almost no attempt to state the grounds that
support it. In other cases, the ground or basis for a belief is deliberately
sought and its[Pg 2] adequacy to support the belief examined. This process
is called reflective thought; it alone is truly educative in value, and it forms,
accordingly, the principal subject of this volume. We shall now briefly
describe each of the four senses.
Chance and idle thinking
I. In its loosest sense, thinking signifies everything that, as we say, is "in our
heads" or that "goes through our minds." He who offers "a penny for your
thoughts" does not expect to drive any great bargain. In calling the objects of
his demand thoughts, he does not intend to ascribe to them dignity,
consecutiveness, or truth. Any idle fancy, trivial recollection, or flitting
impression will satisfy his demand. Daydreaming, building of castles in the
air, that loose flux of casual and disconnected material that floats through
our minds in relaxed moments are, in this random sense, thinking. More of
our waking life than we should care to admit, even to ourselves, is likely to
be whiled away in this inconsequential trifling with idle fancy and
unsubstantial hope.
Reflective thought is consecutive, not merely a sequence
In this sense, silly folk and dullards think. The story is told of a man in
slight repute for intelligence, who, desiring to be chosen selectman in his
New England town, addressed a knot of neighbors in this wise: "I hear you
don't believe I know enough to hold office. I wish you to understand that I
am thinking about something or other most of the time." Now reflective
thought is like this random coursing of things through the mind in that it
consists of a succession of things thought of; but it is unlike, in that the
mere chance occurrence of any chance "something or other" in an irregular
sequence does not suffice. Reflection involves not simply a sequence of
ideas, but a consequence—a consecutive ordering in such a way that[Pg
3] each determines the next as its proper outcome, while each in turn leans
back on its predecessors. The successive portions of the reflective thought
grow out of one another and support one another; they do not come and go
in a medley. Each phase is a step from something to something—technically
speaking, it is a term of thought. Each term leaves a deposit which is
utilized in the next term. The stream or flow becomes a train, chain, or
thread.
The restriction of thinking to what goes beyond direct observation
Reflective thought aims, however, at belief
II. Even when thinking is used in a broad sense, it is usually restricted to
matters not directly perceived: to what we do not see, smell, hear, or touch.
We ask the man telling a story if he saw a certain incident happen, and his
reply may be, "No, I only thought of it." A note of invention, as distinct from
faithful record of observation, is present. Most important in this class are
successions of imaginative incidents and episodes which, having a certain
coherence, hanging together on a continuous thread, lie between
kaleidoscopic flights of fancy and considerations deliberately employed to
establish a conclusion. The imaginative stories poured forth by children
possess all degrees of internal congruity; some are disjointed, some are
articulated. When connected, they simulate reflective thought; indeed, they
usually occur in minds of logical capacity. These imaginative enterprises
often precede thinking of the close-knit type and prepare the way for it.
But they do not aim at knowledge, at belief about facts or in truths; and
thereby they are marked off from reflective thought even when they most
resemble it. Those who express such thoughts do not expect credence, but
rather credit for a well-constructed plot or a well-arranged climax. They
produce good stories, not—unless by chance[Pg 4]—knowledge. Such
thoughts are an efflorescence of feeling; the enhancement of a mood or
sentiment is their aim; congruity of emotion, their binding tie.
Thought induces belief in two ways
III. In its next sense, thought denotes belief resting upon some basis, that is,
real or supposed knowledge going beyond what is directly present. It is
marked by acceptance or rejection of something as reasonably probable or
improbable. This phase of thought, however, includes two such distinct
types of belief that, even though their difference is strictly one of degree, not
of kind, it becomes practically important to consider them separately. Some
beliefs are accepted when their grounds have not themselves been
considered, others are accepted because their grounds have been examined.
When we say, "Men used to think the world was flat," or, "I thought you
went by the house," we express belief: something is accepted, held to,
acquiesced in, or affirmed. But such thoughts may mean a supposition
accepted without reference to its real grounds. These may be adequate, they
may not; but their value with reference to the support they afford the belief
has not been considered.
Such thoughts grow up unconsciously and without reference to the
attainment of correct belief. They are picked up—we know not how. From
obscure sources and by unnoticed channels they insinuate themselves into
acceptance and become unconsciously a part of our mental furniture.
Tradition, instruction, imitation—all of which depend upon authority in
some form, or appeal to our own advantage, or fall in with a strong passion
—are responsible for them. Such thoughts are prejudices, that is,
prejudgments, not[Pg 5] judgments proper that rest upon a survey of
evidence.[1]
Thinking in its best sense is that which considers the basis and
consequences of beliefs
IV. Thoughts that result in belief have an importance attached to them
which leads to reflective thought, to conscious inquiry into the nature,
conditions, and bearings of the belief. To think of whales and camels in the
clouds is to entertain ourselves with fancies, terminable at our pleasure,
which do not lead to any belief in particular. But to think of the world as flat
is to ascribe a quality to a real thing as its real property. This conclusion
denotes a connection among things and hence is not, like imaginative
thought, plastic to our mood. Belief in the world's flatness commits him who
holds it to thinking in certain specific ways of other objects, such as the
heavenly bodies, antipodes, the possibility of navigation. It prescribes to him
actions in accordance with his conception of these objects.
The consequences of a belief upon other beliefs and upon behavior may be
so important, then, that men are forced to consider the grounds or reasons
of their belief and its logical consequences. This means reflective thought—
thought in its eulogistic and emphatic sense.
Reflective thought defined
Men thought the world was flat until Columbus thought it to be round. The
earlier thought was a belief held because men had not the energy or the
courage to question what those about them accepted and taught, especially
as it was suggested and seemingly confirmed by obvious sensible facts. The
thought of Columbus was a reasoned conclusion. It marked the close of
study into facts, of scrutiny and revision of evidence, of working out the
implications of various hypotheses, and of[Pg 6] comparing these theoretical
results with one another and with known facts. Because Columbus did not
accept unhesitatingly the current traditional theory, because he doubted
and inquired, he arrived at his thought. Skeptical of what, from long habit,
seemed most certain, and credulous of what seemed impossible, he went on
thinking until he could produce evidence for both his confidence and his
disbelief. Even if his conclusion had finally turned out wrong, it would have
been a different sort of belief from those it antagonized, because it was
reached by a different method. Active, persistent, and careful consideration of
any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that
support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends, constitutes reflective
thought. Any one of the first three kinds of thought may elicit this type; but
once begun, it is a conscious and voluntary effort to establish belief upon a
firm basis of reasons.
§ 2. The Central Factor in Thinking
There is a common element in all types of thought:
There are, however, no sharp lines of demarcation between the various
operations just outlined. The problem of attaining correct habits of reflection
would be much easier than it is, did not the different modes of thinking
blend insensibly into one another. So far, we have considered rather extreme
instances of each kind in order to get the field clearly before us. Let us now
reverse this operation; let us consider a rudimentary case of thinking, lying
between careful examination of evidence and a mere irresponsible stream of
fancies. A man is walking on a warm day. The sky was clear the last time he
observed it; but presently he notes, while occupied primarily with other
things, that the air is cooler. It occurs to him that it is probably going to [Pg
7] rain; looking up, he sees a dark cloud between him and the sun, and he
then quickens his steps. What, if anything, in such a situation can be called
thought? Neither the act of walking nor the noting of the cold is a thought.
Walking is one direction of activity; looking and noting are other modes of
activity. The likelihood that it will rain is, however, something suggested.
The pedestrian feels the cold; he thinks of clouds and a coming shower.
viz. suggestion of something not observed
But reflection involves also the relation of signifying
So far there is the same sort of situation as when one looking at a cloud is
reminded of a human figure and face. Thinking in both of these cases (the
cases of belief and of fancy) involves a noted or perceived fact, followed by
something else which is not observed but which is brought to mind,
suggested by the thing seen. One reminds us, as we say, of the other. Side
by side, however, with this factor of agreement in the two cases of
suggestion is a factor of marked disagreement. We do not believe in the face
suggested by the cloud; we do not consider at all the probability of its being
a fact. There is no reflective thought. The danger of rain, on the contrary,
presents itself to us as a genuine possibility—as a possible fact of the same
nature as the observed coolness. Put differently, we do not regard the cloud
as meaning or indicating a face, but merely as suggesting it, while we do
consider that the coolness may mean rain. In the first case, seeing an object,
we just happen, as we say, to think of something else; in the second, we
consider the possibility and nature of the connection between the object seen
and the object suggested. The seen thing is regarded as in some way the
ground or basis of belief in the suggested thing; it possesses the quality
of evidence.[Pg 8]
Various synonymous expressions for the function of signifying
This function by which one thing signifies or indicates another, and thereby
leads us to consider how far one may be regarded as warrant for belief in the
other, is, then, the central factor in all reflective or distinctively intellectual
thinking. By calling up various situations to which such terms
as signifies and indicates apply, the student will best realize for himself the
actual facts denoted by the words reflective thought. Synonyms for these
terms are: points to, tells of, betokens, prognosticates, represents, stands
for, implies.[2] We also say one thing portends another; is ominous of
another, or a symptom of it, or a key to it, or (if the connection is quite
obscure) that it gives a hint, clue, or intimation.
Reflection and belief on evidence
Reflection thus implies that something is believed in (or disbelieved in), not
on its own direct account, but through something else which stands as
witness, evidence, proof, voucher, warrant; that is, as ground of belief. At
one time, rain is actually felt or directly experienced; at another time, we
infer that it has rained from the looks of the grass and trees, or that it is
going to rain because of the condition of the air or the state of the
barometer. At one time, we see a man (or suppose we do) without any
intermediary fact; at another time, we are not quite sure what we see, and
hunt for accompanying facts that will serve as signs, indications, tokens of
what is to be believed.
Thinking, for the purposes of this inquiry, is defined accordingly as that
operation in which present facts suggest other facts (or truths) in such a way
as to induce be[Pg 9]lief in the latter upon the ground or warrant of the former.
We do not put beliefs that rest simply on inference on the surest level of
assurance. To say "I think so" implies that I do not as yet know so. The
inferential belief may later be confirmed and come to stand as sure, but in
itself it always has a certain element of supposition.
§ 3. Elements in Reflective Thinking
So much for the description of the more external and obvious aspects of the
fact called thinking. Further consideration at once reveals certain
subprocesses which are involved in every reflective operation. These are: (a)
a state of perplexity, hesitation, doubt; and (b) an act of search or
investigation directed toward bringing to light further facts which serve to
corroborate or to nullify the suggested belief.
The importance of uncertainty
(a) In our illustration, the shock of coolness generated confusion and
suspended belief, at least momentarily. Because it was unexpected, it was a
shock or an interruption needing to be accounted for, identified, or placed.
To say that the abrupt occurrence of the change of temperature constitutes
a problem may sound forced and artificial; but if we are willing to extend the
meaning of the word problem to whatever—no matter how slight and
commonplace in character—perplexes and challenges the mind so that it
makes belief at all uncertain, there is a genuine problem or question
involved in this experience of sudden change.
and of inquiry in order to test
(b) The turning of the head, the lifting of the eyes, the scanning of the
heavens, are activities adapted to bring to recognition facts that will answer
the question presented by the sudden coolness. The facts as they[Pg 10] first
presented themselves were perplexing; they suggested, however, clouds. The
act of looking was an act to discover if this suggested explanation held good.
It may again seem forced to speak of this looking, almost automatic, as an
act of research or inquiry. But once more, if we are willing to generalize our
conceptions of our mental operations to include the trivial and ordinary as
well as the technical and recondite, there is no good reason for refusing to
give such a title to the act of looking. The purport of this act of inquiry is to
confirm or to refute the suggested belief. New facts are brought to
perception, which either corroborate the idea that a change of weather is
imminent, or negate it.
Finding one's way an illustration of reflection
Another instance, commonplace also, yet not quite so trivial, may enforce
this lesson. A man traveling in an unfamiliar region comes to a branching of
the roads. Having no sure knowledge to fall back upon, he is brought to a
standstill of hesitation and suspense. Which road is right? And how shall
perplexity be resolved? There are but two alternatives: he must either blindly
and arbitrarily take his course, trusting to luck for the outcome, or he must
discover grounds for the conclusion that a given road is right. Any attempt
to decide the matter by thinking will involve inquiry into other facts, whether
brought out by memory or by further observation, or by both. The perplexed
wayfarer must carefully scrutinize what is before him and he must cudgel
his memory. He looks for evidence that will support belief in favor of either
of the roads—for evidence that will weight down one suggestion. He may
climb a tree; he may go first in this direction, then in that, looking, in either
case, for signs, clues,[Pg 11] indications. He wants something in the nature
of a signboard or a map, and his reflection is aimed at the discovery of facts
that will serve this purpose.
Possible, yet incompatible, suggestions
The above illustration may be generalized. Thinking begins in what may
fairly enough be called a forked-road situation, a situation which is
ambiguous, which presents a dilemma, which proposes alternatives. As long
as our activity glides smoothly along from one thing to another, or as long as
we permit our imagination to entertain fancies at pleasure, there is no call
for reflection. Difficulty or obstruction in the way of reaching a belief brings
us, however, to a pause. In the suspense of uncertainty, we metaphorically
climb a tree; we try to find some standpoint from which we may survey
additional facts and, getting a more commanding view of the situation, may
decide how the facts stand related to one another.
Regulation of thinking by its purpose
Demand for the solution of a perplexity is the steadying and guiding factor in
the entire process of reflection. Where there is no question of a problem to be
solved or a difficulty to be surmounted, the course of suggestions flows on at
random; we have the first type of thought described. If the stream of
suggestions is controlled simply by their emotional congruity, their fitting
agreeably into a single picture or story, we have the second type. But a
question to be answered, an ambiguity to be resolved, sets up an end and
holds the current of ideas to a definite channel. Every suggested conclusion
is tested by its reference to this regulating end, by its pertinence to the
problem in hand. This need of straightening out a perplexity also controls
the kind of inquiry undertaken. A traveler whose end is the most beautiful
path will look for other considerations and[Pg 12] will test suggestions
occurring to him on another principle than if he wishes to discover the way
to a given city. The problem fixes the end of thought and the end controls the
process of thinking.
§ 4. Summary
Origin and stimulus
We may recapitulate by saying that the origin of thinking is some perplexity,
confusion, or doubt. Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it
does not occur just on "general principles." There is something specific
which occasions and evokes it. General appeals to a child (or to a grown-up)
to think, irrespective of the existence in his own experience of some difficulty
that troubles him and disturbs his equilibrium, are as futile as advice to lift
himself by his boot-straps.
Suggestions and past experience
Given a difficulty, the next step is suggestion of some way out—the
formation of some tentative plan or project, the entertaining of some theory
which will account for the peculiarities in question, the consideration of
some solution for the problem. The data at hand cannot supply the solution;
they can only suggest it. What, then, are the sources of the suggestion?
Clearly past experience and prior knowledge. If the person has had some
acquaintance with similar situations, if he has dealt with material of the
same sort before, suggestions more or less apt and helpful are likely to arise.
But unless there has been experience in some degree analogous, which may
now be represented in imagination, confusion remains mere confusion.
There is nothing upon which to draw in order to clarify it. Even when a child
(or a grown-up) has a problem, to urge him to think when he has no prior
experiences involving some of the same conditions, is wholly futile.[Pg 13]
Exploration and testing
If the suggestion that occurs is at once accepted, we have uncritical
thinking, the minimum of reflection. To turn the thing over in mind, to
reflect, means to hunt for additional evidence, for new data, that will develop
the suggestion, and will either, as we say, bear it out or else make obvious
its absurdity and irrelevance. Given a genuine difficulty and a reasonable
amount of analogous experience to draw upon, the difference, par
excellence, between good and bad thinking is found at this point. The easiest
way is to accept any suggestion that seems plausible and thereby bring to
an end the condition of mental uneasiness. Reflective thinking is always
more or less troublesome because it involves overcoming the inertia that
inclines one to accept suggestions at their face value; it involves willingness
to endure a condition of mental unrest and disturbance. Reflective thinking,
in short, means judgment suspended during further inquiry; and suspense
is likely to be somewhat painful. As we shall see later, the most important
factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude
of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of
searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions
that occur. To maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and
protracted inquiry—these are the essentials of thinking.[Pg 14]

CHAPTER TWO
THE NEED FOR TRAINING THOUGHT
Man the animal that thinks
To expatiate upon the importance of thought would be absurd. The
traditional definition of man as "the thinking animal" fixes thought as the
essential difference between man and the brutes,—surely an important
matter. More relevant to our purpose is the question how thought is
important, for an answer to this question will throw light upon the kind of
training thought requires if it is to subserve its end.
§ 1. The Values of Thought
The possibility of deliberate and intentional activity
I. Thought affords the sole method of escape from purely impulsive or purely
routine action. A being without capacity for thought is moved only by
instincts and appetites, as these are called forth by outward conditions and
by the inner state of the organism. A being thus moved is, as it were,
pushed from behind. This is what we mean by the blind nature of brute
actions. The agent does not see or foresee the end for which he is acting, nor
the results produced by his behaving in one way rather than in another. He
does not "know what he is about." Where there is thought, things present
act as signs or tokens of things not yet experienced. A thinking being can,
accordingly, act on the basis of the absent and the future. Instead of being
pushed into a mode of action by the sheer urgency of forces, whether[Pg
15] instincts or habits, of which he is not aware, a reflective agent is drawn
(to some extent at least) to action by some remoter object of which he is
indirectly aware.
Natural events come to be a language
An animal without thought may go into its hole when rain threatens,
because of some immediate stimulus to its organism. A thinking agent will
perceive that certain given facts are probable signs of a future rain, and will
take steps in the light of this anticipated future. To plant seeds, to cultivate
the soil, to harvest grain, are intentional acts, possible only to a being who
has learned to subordinate the immediately felt elements of an experience to
those values which these hint at and prophesy. Philosophers have made
much of the phrases "book of nature," "language of nature." Well, it is in
virtue of the capacity of thought that given things are significant of absent
things, and that nature speaks a language which may be interpreted. To a
being who thinks, things are records of their past, as fossils tell of the prior
history of the earth, and are prophetic of their future, as from the present
positions of heavenly bodies remote eclipses are foretold. Shakespeare's
"tongues in trees, books in the running brooks," expresses literally enough
the power superadded to existences when they appeal to a thinking being.
Upon the function of signification depend all foresight, all intelligent
planning, deliberation, and calculation.
The possibility of systematized foresight
II. By thought man also develops and arranges artificial signs to remind him
in advance of consequences, and of ways of securing and avoiding them. As
the trait just mentioned makes the difference between savage man and
brute, so this trait makes the difference between civilized man and savage. A
savage who has been shipwrecked in a river may note certain things
which[Pg 16] serve him as signs of danger in the future. But civilized man
deliberately makes such signs; he sets up in advance of wreckage warning
buoys, and builds lighthouses where he sees signs that such events may
occur. A savage reads weather signs with great expertness; civilized man
institutes a weather service by which signs are artificially secured and
information is distributed in advance of the appearance of any signs that
could be detected without special methods. A savage finds his way skillfully
through a wilderness by reading certain obscure indications; civilized man
builds a highway which shows the road to all. The savage learns to detect
the signs of fire and thereby to invent methods of producing flame; civilized
man invents permanent conditions for producing light and heat whenever
they are needed. The very essence of civilized culture is that we deliberately
erect monuments and memorials, lest we forget; and deliberately institute,
in advance of the happening of various contingencies and emergencies of
life, devices for detecting their approach and registering their nature, for
warding off what is unfavorable, or at least for protecting ourselves from its
full impact and for making more secure and extensive what is favorable. All
forms of artificial apparatus are intentionally designed modifications of
natural things in order that they may serve better than in their natural
estate to indicate the hidden, the absent, and the remote.
The possibility of objects rich in quality
III. Finally, thought confers upon physical events and objects a very different
status and value from that which they possess to a being that does not
reflect. These words are mere scratches, curious variations of light and
shade, to one to whom they are not linguistic signs. To him for whom they
are signs of other things,[Pg 17] each has a definite individuality of its own,
according to the meaning that it is used to convey. Exactly the same holds of
natural objects. A chair is a different object to a being to whom it consciously
suggests an opportunity for sitting down, repose, or sociable converse, from
what it is to one to whom it presents itself merely as a thing to be smelled,
or gnawed, or jumped over; a stone is different to one who knows something
of its past history and its future use from what it is to one who only feels it
directly through his senses. It is only by courtesy, indeed, that we can say
that an unthinking animal experiences an object at all—so largely is
anything that presents itself to us as an object made up by the qualities it
possesses as a sign of other things.
The nature of the objects an animal perceives
An English logician (Mr. Venn) has remarked that it may be questioned
whether a dog sees a rainbow any more than he apprehends the political
constitution of the country in which he lives. The same principle applies to
the kennel in which he sleeps and the meat that he eats. When he is sleepy,
he goes to the kennel; when he is hungry, he is excited by the smell and
color of meat; beyond this, in what sense does he see an object? Certainly he
does not see a house—i.e. a thing with all the properties and relations of a
permanent residence, unless he is capable of making what is present a
uniform sign of what is absent—unless he is capable of thought. Nor does he
see what he eats as meat unless it suggests the absent properties by virtue
of which it is a certain joint of some animal, and is known to afford
nourishment. Just what is left of an object stripped of all such qualities of
meaning, we cannot well say; but we can be sure that the object is then a
very different sort of thing from the objects that we perceive. There[Pg 18] is
moreover no particular limit to the possibilities of growth in the fusion of a
thing as it is to sense and as it is to thought, or as a sign of other things.
The child today soon regards as constituent parts of objects qualities that
once it required the intelligence of a Copernicus or a Newton to apprehend.
Mill on the business of life and the occupation of mind
These various values of the power of thought may be summed up in the
following quotation from John Stuart Mill. "To draw inferences," he says,
"has been said to be the great business of life. Every one has daily, hourly,
and momentary need of ascertaining facts which he has not directly
observed: not from any general purpose of adding to his stock of knowledge,
but because the facts themselves are of importance to his interests or to his
occupations. The business of the magistrate, of the military commander, of
the navigator, of the physician, of the agriculturist, is merely to judge of
evidence and to act accordingly.... As they do this well or ill, so they
discharge well or ill the duties of their several callings. It is the only
occupation in which the mind never ceases to be engaged."[3]
§ 2. Importance of Direction in order to Realize these Values
Thinking goes astray
What a person has not only daily and hourly, but momentary need of
performing, is not a technical and abstruse matter; nor, on the other hand,
is it trivial and negligible. Such a function must be congenial to the mind,
and must be performed, in an unspoiled mind, upon every fitting occasion.
Just because, however, it is an operation of drawing inferences, of basing
conclusions upon evidence, of reaching belief indirectly, it is[Pg 19] an
operation that may go wrong as well as right, and hence is one that needs
safeguarding and training. The greater its importance the greater are the
evils when it is ill-exercised.
Ideas are our rulers—for better or for worse
An earlier writer than Mill, John Locke (1632-1704), brings out the
importance of thought for life and the need of training so that its best and
not its worst possibilities will be realized, in the following words: "No man
ever sets himself about anything but upon some view or other, which serves
him for a reason for what he does; and whatsoever faculties he employs, the
understanding with such light as it has, well or ill informed, constantly
leads; and by that light, true or false, all his operative powers are directed....
Temples have their sacred images, and we see what influence they have
always had over a great part of mankind. But in truth the ideas and images
in men's minds are the invisible powers that constantly govern them, and to
these they all, universally, pay a ready submission. It is therefore of the
highest concernment that great care should be taken of the understanding,
to conduct it aright in the search of knowledge and in the judgments it
makes."[4] If upon thought hang all deliberate activities and the uses we
make of all our other powers, Locke's assertion that it is of the highest
concernment that care should be taken of its conduct is a moderate
statement. While the power of thought frees us from servile subjection to
instinct, appetite, and routine, it also brings with it the occasion and
possibility of error and mistake. In elevating us above the brute, it opens to
us the possibility of failures to which the animal, limited to instinct, cannot
sink.
§ 3. Tendencies Needing Constant Regulation
Physical and social sanctions of correct thinking
Up to a certain point, the ordinary conditions of life, natural and social,
provide the conditions requisite for regulating the operations of inference.
The necessities of life enforce a fundamental and persistent discipline for
which the most cunningly devised artifices would be ineffective substitutes.
The burnt child dreads the fire; the painful consequence emphasizes the
need of correct inference much more than would learned discourse on the
properties of heat. Social conditions also put a premium on correct inferring
in matters where action based on valid thought is socially important. These
sanctions of proper thinking may affect life itself, or at least a life reasonably
free from perpetual discomfort. The signs of enemies, of shelter, of food, of
the main social conditions, have to be correctly apprehended.
The serious limitations of such sanctions
But this disciplinary training, efficacious as it is within certain limits, does
not carry us beyond a restricted boundary. Logical attainment in one
direction is no bar to extravagant conclusions in another. A savage expert in
judging signs of the movements and location of animals that he hunts, will
accept and gravely narrate the most preposterous yarns concerning the
origin of their habits and structures. When there is no directly appreciable
reaction of the inference upon the security and prosperity of life, there are
no natural checks to the acceptance of wrong beliefs. Conclusions may be
generated by a modicum of fact merely because the suggestions are vivid
and interesting; a large accumulation of data may fail to suggest a proper
conclusion because existing customs are averse to entertaining it.
Independent of training, there is a "primitive credulity"[Pg 21] which tends to
make no distinction between what a trained mind calls fancy and that which
it calls a reasonable conclusion. The face in the clouds is believed in as
some sort of fact, merely because it is forcibly suggested. Natural
intelligence is no barrier to the propagation of error, nor large but untrained
experience to the accumulation of fixed false beliefs. Errors may support one
another mutually and weave an ever larger and firmer fabric of
misconception. Dreams, the positions of stars, the lines of the hand, may be
regarded as valuable signs, and the fall of cards as an inevitable omen, while
natural events of the most crucial significance go disregarded. Beliefs in
portents of various kinds, now mere nook and cranny superstitions, were
once universal. A long discipline in exact science was required for their
conquest.
Superstition as natural a result as science
In the mere function of suggestion, there is no difference between the power
of a column of mercury to portend rain, and that of the entrails of an animal
or the flight of birds to foretell the fortunes of war. For all anybody can tell
in advance, the spilling of salt is as likely to import bad luck as the bite of a
mosquito to import malaria. Only systematic regulation of the conditions
under which observations are made and severe discipline of the habits of
entertaining suggestions can secure a decision that one type of belief is
vicious and the other sound. The substitution of scientific for superstitious
habits of inference has not been brought about by any improvement in the
acuteness of the senses or in the natural workings of the function of
suggestion. It is the result of regulation of the conditions under which
observation and inference take place.[Pg 22]
General causes of bad thinking: Bacon's "idols"
It is instructive to note some of the attempts that have been made to classify
the main sources of error in reaching beliefs. Francis Bacon, for example, at
the beginnings of modern scientific inquiry, enumerated four such classes,
under the somewhat fantastic title of "idols" (Gr. ειδωλα, images), spectral
forms that allure the mind into false paths. These he called the idols, or
phantoms, of the (a) tribe, (b) the marketplace, (c) the cave or den, and (d)
the theater; or, less metaphorically, (a) standing erroneous methods (or at
least temptations to error) that have their roots in human nature generally;
(b) those that come from intercourse and language; (c) those that are due to
causes peculiar to a specific individual; and finally, (d) those that have their
sources in the fashion or general current of a period. Classifying these
causes of fallacious belief somewhat differently, we may say that two are
intrinsic and two are extrinsic. Of the intrinsic, one is common to all men
alike (such as the universal tendency to notice instances that corroborate a
favorite belief more readily than those that contradict it), while the other
resides in the specific temperament and habits of the given individual. Of
the extrinsic, one proceeds from generic social conditions—like the tendency
to suppose that there is a fact wherever there is a word, and no fact where
there is no linguistic term—while the other proceeds from local and
temporary social currents.
Locke on the influence of
Locke's method of dealing with typical forms of wrong belief is less formal
and may be more enlightening. We can hardly do better than quote his
forcible and quaint language, when, enumerating different classes of men,
he shows different ways in which thought goes wrong:[Pg 23]
(a) dependence on others,
1. "The first is of those who seldom reason at all, but do and think according
to the example of others, whether parents, neighbors, ministers, or who else
they are pleased to make choice of to have an implicit faith in, for the saving
of themselves the pains and troubles of thinking and examining for
themselves."
(b) self-interest,
2. "This kind is of those who put passion in the place of reason, and being
resolved that shall govern their actions and arguments, neither use their
own, nor hearken to other people's reason, any farther than it suits their
humor, interest, or party."[5]
(c) circumscribed experience
3. "The third sort is of those who readily and sincerely follow reason, but for
want of having that which one may call large, sound, roundabout sense,
have not a full view of all that relates to the question.... They converse but
with one sort of men, they read but one sort of books, they will not come in
the hearing but of one sort of notions.... They have a pretty traffic with
known correspondents in some little creek ... but will not venture out into
the great ocean of knowledge." Men of originally equal natural parts may
finally arrive at very different stores of knowledge and truth, "when all the
odds between them has been the different scope that has been given to their
understandings to range in, for the gathering up of information and
furnishing their heads with ideas and notions and observations, whereon to
employ their mind."[6]
[Pg 24]
In another portion of his writings, [7] Locke states the same ideas in slightly
different form.
Effect of dogmatic principles,
1. "That which is inconsistent with our principles is so far from passing for
probable with us that it will not be allowed possible. The reverence borne to
these principles is so great, and their authority so paramount to all other,
that the testimony, not only of other men, but the evidence of our own
senses are often rejected, when they offer to vouch anything contrary to
these established rules.... There is nothing more ordinary than children's
receiving into their minds propositions ... from their parents, nurses, or
those about them; which being insinuated in their unwary as well as
unbiased understandings, and fastened by degrees, are at last (and this
whether true or false) riveted there by long custom and education, beyond
all possibility of being pulled out again. For men, when they are grown up,
reflecting upon their opinions and finding those of this sort to be as ancient
in their minds as their very memories, not having observed their early
insinuation, nor by what means they got them, they are apt to reverence
them as sacred things, and not to suffer them to be profaned, touched, or
questioned." They take them as standards "to be the great and unerring
deciders of truth and falsehood, and the judges to which they are to appeal
in all manner of controversies."
of closed minds,
2. "Secondly, next to these are men whose understandings are cast into a
mold, and fashioned just to the size of a received hypothesis." Such men,
Locke goes on to say, while not denying the existence of facts and evidence,
cannot be convinced by the evidence that[Pg 25] would decide them if their
minds were not so closed by adherence to fixed belief.
of strong passion,
3. "Predominant Passions. Thirdly, probabilities which cross men's appetites
and prevailing passions run the same fate. Let ever so much probability
hang on one side of a covetous man's reasoning, and money on the other, it
is easy to foresee which will outweigh. Earthly minds, like mud walls, resist
the strongest batteries.
of dependence upon authority of others
4. "Authority. The fourth and last wrong measure of probability I shall take
notice of, and which keeps in ignorance or error more people than all the
others together, is the giving up our assent to the common received
opinions, either of our friends or party, neighborhood or country."
Causes of bad mental habits are social as well as inborn
Both Bacon and Locke make it evident that over and above the sources of
misbelief that reside in the natural tendencies of the individual (like those
toward hasty and too far-reaching conclusions), social conditions tend to
instigate and confirm wrong habits of thinking by authority, by conscious
instruction, and by the even more insidious half-conscious influences of
language, imitation, sympathy, and suggestion. Education has accordingly
not only to safeguard an individual against the besetting erroneous
tendencies of his own mind—its rashness, presumption, and preference of
what chimes with self-interest to objective evidence—but also to undermine
and destroy the accumulated and self-perpetuating prejudices of long ages.
When social life in general has become more reasonable, more imbued with
rational conviction, and less moved by stiff authority and blind passion,
educational agencies may be more positive and constructive than at present,
for they will[Pg 26] work in harmony with the educative influence exercised
willy-nilly by other social surroundings upon an individual's habits of
thought and belief. At present, the work of teaching must not only transform
natural tendencies into trained habits of thought, but must also fortify the
mind against irrational tendencies current in the social environment, and
help displace erroneous habits already produced.
§ 4. Regulation Transforms Inference into Proof
A leap is involved in all thinking
Thinking is important because, as we have seen, it is that function in which
given or ascertained facts stand for or indicate others which are not directly
ascertained. But the process of reaching the absent from the present is
peculiarly exposed to error; it is liable to be influenced by almost any
number of unseen and unconsidered causes,—past experience, received
dogmas, the stirring of self-interest, the arousing of passion, sheer mental
laziness, a social environment steeped in biased traditions or animated by
false expectations, and so on. The exercise of thought is, in the literal sense
of that word, inference; by it one thing carries us over to the idea of, and
belief in, another thing. It involves a jump, a leap, a going beyond what is
surely known to something else accepted on its warrant. Unless one is an
idiot, one simply cannot help having all things and events suggest other
things not actually present, nor can one help a tendency to believe in the
latter on the basis of the former. The very inevitableness of the jump, the
leap, to something unknown, only emphasizes the necessity of attention to
the conditions under which it occurs so that the danger of a false step may
be lessened and the probability of a right landing increased.[Pg 27]
Hence, the need of regulation which, when adequate, makes proof
Such attention consists in regulation (1) of the conditions under which the
function of suggestion takes place, and (2) of the conditions under which
credence is yielded to the suggestions that occur. Inference controlled in
these two ways (the study of which in detail constitutes one of the chief
objects of this book) forms proof. To prove a thing means primarily to try, to
test it. The guest bidden to the wedding feast excused himself because he
had to prove his oxen. Exceptions are said to prove a rule; i.e. they furnish
instances so extreme that they try in the severest fashion its applicability; if
the rule will stand such a test, there is no good reason for further doubting
it. Not until a thing has been tried—"tried out," in colloquial language—do
we know its true worth. Till then it may be pretense, a bluff. But the thing
that has come out victorious in a test or trial of strength carries its
credentials with it; it is approved, because it has been proved. Its value is
clearly evinced, shown, i.e. demonstrated. So it is with inferences. The mere
fact that inference in general is an invaluable function does not guarantee,
nor does it even help out the correctness of any particular inference. Any
inference may go astray; and as we have seen, there are standing influences
ever ready to assist its going wrong. What is important, is that every
inference shall be a tested inference; or (since often this is not possible) that
we shall discriminate between beliefs that rest upon tested evidence and
those that do not, and shall be accordingly on our guard as to the kind and
degree of assent yielded.
The office of education in forming skilled
powers of thinking
While it is not the business of education to prove every statement made, any
more than to teach every possible item of information, it is its business to
culti[Pg 28]vate deep-seated and effective habits of discriminating tested
beliefs from mere assertions, guesses, and opinions; to develop a lively,
sincere, and open-minded preference for conclusions that are properly
grounded, and to ingrain into the individual's working habits methods of
inquiry and reasoning appropriate to the various problems that present
themselves. No matter how much an individual knows as a matter of
hearsay and information, if he has not attitudes and habits of this sort, he is
not intellectually educated. He lacks the rudiments of mental discipline. And
since these habits are not a gift of nature (no matter how strong the aptitude
for acquiring them); since, moreover, the casual circumstances of the
natural and social environment are not enough to compel their acquisition,
the main office of education is to supply conditions that make for their
cultivation. The formation of these habits is the Training of Mind.[Pg 29]

CHAPTER THREE
NATURAL RESOURCES IN THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
Only native powers can be trained.
In the last chapter we considered the need of transforming, through
training, the natural capacities of inference into habits of critical
examination and inquiry. The very importance of thought for life makes
necessary its control by education because of its natural tendency to go
astray, and because social influences exist that tend to form habits of
thought leading to inadequate and erroneous beliefs. Training must,
however, be itself based upon the natural tendencies,—that is, it must find
its point of departure in them. A being who could not think without training
could never be trained to think; one may have to learn to think well, but not
to think. Training, in short, must fall back upon the prior and independent
existence of natural powers; it is concerned with their proper direction, not
with creating them.
Hence, the one taught must take the initiative
Teaching and learning are correlative or corresponding processes, as much
so as selling and buying. One might as well say he has sold when no one
has bought, as to say that he has taught when no one has learned. And in
the educational transaction, the initiative lies with the learner even more
than in commerce it lies with the buyer. If an individual can learn to think
only in the sense of learning to employ more economically and[Pg
30] effectively powers he already possesses, even more truly one can teach
others to think only in the sense of appealing to and fostering powers
already active in them. Effective appeal of this kind is impossible unless the
teacher has an insight into existing habits and tendencies, the natural
resources with which he has to ally himself.
Three important natural resources
Any inventory of the items of this natural capital is somewhat arbitrary
because it must pass over many of the complex details. But a statement of
the factors essential to thought will put before us in outline the main
elements. Thinking involves (as we have seen) the suggestion of a conclusion
for acceptance, and also search or inquiry to test the value of the suggestion
before finally accepting it. This implies (a) a certain fund or store of
experiences and facts from which suggestions proceed; (b) promptness,
flexibility, and fertility of suggestions; and (c) orderliness, consecutiveness,
appropriateness in what is suggested. Clearly, a person may be hampered in
any of these three regards: His thinking may be irrelevant, narrow, or crude
because he has not enough actual material upon which to base conclusions;
or because concrete facts and raw material, even if extensive and bulky, fail
to evoke suggestions easily and richly; or finally, because, even when these
two conditions are fulfilled, the ideas suggested are incoherent and
fantastic, rather than pertinent and consistent.
§ 1. Curiosity
Desire for fullness of experience:
The most vital and significant factor in supplying the primary material
whence suggestion may issue is, without doubt, curiosity. The wisest of the
Greeks used to[Pg 31] say that wonder is the mother of all science. An inert
mind waits, as it were, for experiences to be imperiously forced upon it. The
pregnant saying of Wordsworth:
"The eye—it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against or with our will"—
holds good in the degree in which one is naturally possessed by curiosity.
The curious mind is constantly alert and exploring, seeking material for
thought, as a vigorous and healthy body is on the qui vive for nutriment.
Eagerness for experience, for new and varied contacts, is found where
wonder is found. Such curiosity is the only sure guarantee of the acquisition
of the primary facts upon which inference must base itself.
(a) physical
(a) In its first manifestations, curiosity is a vital overflow, an expression of
an abundant organic energy. A physiological uneasiness leads a child to be
"into everything,"—to be reaching, poking, pounding, prying. Observers of
animals have noted what one author calls "their inveterate tendency to fool."
"Rats run about, smell, dig, or gnaw, without real reference to the business
in hand. In the same way Jack [a dog] scrabbles and jumps, the kitten
wanders and picks, the otter slips about everywhere like ground lightning,
the elephant fumbles ceaselessly, the monkey pulls things about." [8] The
most casual notice of the activities of a young child reveals a ceaseless
display of exploring and testing activity. Objects are sucked, fingered, and
thumped; drawn and pushed, handled and thrown; in short, experi[Pg
32]mented with, till they cease to yield new qualities. Such activities are
hardly intellectual, and yet without them intellectual activity would be feeble
and intermittent through lack of stuff for its operations.
(b) social
(b) A higher stage of curiosity develops under the influence of social stimuli.
When the child learns that he can appeal to others to eke out his store of
experiences, so that, if objects fail to respond interestingly to his
experiments, he may call upon persons to provide interesting material, a
new epoch sets in. "What is that?" "Why?" become the unfailing signs of a
child's presence. At first this questioning is hardly more than a projection
into social relations of the physical overflow which earlier kept the child
pushing and pulling, opening and shutting. He asks in succession what
holds up the house, what holds up the soil that holds the house, what holds
up the earth that holds the soil; but his questions are not evidence of any
genuine consciousness of rational connections. His why is not a demand for
scientific explanation; the motive behind it is simply eagerness for a larger
acquaintance with the mysterious world in which he is placed. The search is
not for a law or principle, but only for a bigger fact. Yet there is more than a
desire to accumulate just information or heap up disconnected items,
although sometimes the interrogating habit threatens to degenerate into a
mere disease of language. In the feeling, however dim, that the facts which
directly meet the senses are not the whole story, that there is more behind
them and more to come from them, lies the germ of intellectual curiosity.
(c) intellectual
(c) Curiosity rises above the organic and the social planes and becomes
intellectual in the degree in which[Pg 33] it is transformed into interest
in problems provoked by the observation of things and the accumulation of
material. When the question is not discharged by being asked of another,
when the child continues to entertain it in his own mind and to be alert for
whatever will help answer it, curiosity has become a positive intellectual
force. To the open mind, nature and social experience are full of varied and
subtle challenges to look further. If germinating powers are not used and
cultivated at the right moment, they tend to be transitory, to die out, or to
wane in intensity. This general law is peculiarly true of sensitiveness to what
is uncertain and questionable; in a few people, intellectual curiosity is so
insatiable that nothing will discourage it, but in most its edge is easily
dulled and blunted. Bacon's saying that we must become as little children in
order to enter the kingdom of science is at once a reminder of the open-
minded and flexible wonder of childhood and of the ease with which this
endowment is lost. Some lose it in indifference or carelessness; others in a
frivolous flippancy; many escape these evils only to become incased in a
hard dogmatism which is equally fatal to the spirit of wonder. Some are so
taken up with routine as to be inaccessible to new facts and problems.
Others retain curiosity only with reference to what concerns their personal
advantage in their chosen career. With many, curiosity is arrested on the
plane of interest in local gossip and in the fortunes of their neighbors;
indeed, so usual is this result that very often the first association with the
word curiosity is a prying inquisitiveness into other people's business. With
respect then to curiosity, the teacher has usually more to learn than to
teach. Rarely can he aspire to the office of kindling or[Pg 34] even increasing
it. His task is rather to keep alive the sacred spark of wonder and to fan the
flame that already glows. His problem is to protect the spirit of inquiry, to
keep it from becoming blasé from overexcitement, wooden from routine,
fossilized through dogmatic instruction, or dissipated by random exercise
upon trivial things.
§ 2. Suggestion
Out of the subject-matter, whether rich or scanty, important or trivial, of
present experience issue suggestions, ideas, beliefs as to what is not yet
given. The function of suggestion is not one that can be produced by
teaching; while it may be modified for better or worse by conditions, it
cannot be destroyed. Many a child has tried his best to see if he could not
"stop thinking," but the flow of suggestions goes on in spite of our will, quite
as surely as "our bodies feel, where'er they be, against or with our will."
Primarily, naturally, it is not we who think, in any actively responsible
sense; thinking is rather something that happens in us. Only so far as one
has acquired control of the method in which the function of suggestion
occurs and has accepted responsibility for its consequences, can one
truthfully say, "I think so and so."
The dimensions of suggestion:
(a) ease
The function of suggestion has a variety of aspects (or dimensions as we
may term them), varying in different persons, both in themselves and in
their mode of combination. These dimensions are ease or promptness,
extent or variety, and depth or persistence. (a) The common classification of
persons into the dull and the bright is made primarily on the basis of the
readiness or facility with which suggestions follow upon the presenta[Pg
35]tion of objects and upon the happening of events. As the metaphor of dull
and bright implies, some minds are impervious, or else they absorb
passively. Everything presented is lost in a drab monotony that gives
nothing back. But others reflect, or give back in varied lights, all that strikes
upon them. The dull make no response; the bright flash back the fact with a
changed quality. An inert or stupid mind requires a heavy jolt or an intense
shock to move it to suggestion; the bright mind is quick, is alert to react
with interpretation and suggestion of consequences to follow.
Yet the teacher is not entitled to assume stupidity or even dullness merely
because of irresponsiveness to school subjects or to a lesson as presented by
text-book or teacher. The pupil labeled hopeless may react in quick and
lively fashion when the thing-in-hand seems to him worth while, as some
out-of-school sport or social affair. Indeed, the school subject might move
him, were it set in a different context and treated by a different method. A
boy dull in geometry may prove quick enough when he takes up the subject
in connection with manual training; the girl who seems inaccessible to
historical facts may respond promptly when it is a question of judging the
character and deeds of people of her acquaintance or of fiction. Barring
physical defect or disease, slowness and dullness in all directions are
comparatively rare.
(b) range
(b) Irrespective of the difference in persons as to the ease and promptness
with which ideas respond to facts, there is a difference in the number or
range of the suggestions that occur. We speak truly, in some cases, of the
flood of suggestions; in others, there is but a slender trickle. Occasionally,
slowness of outward[Pg 36] response is due to a great variety of suggestions
which check one another and lead to hesitation and suspense; while a lively
and prompt suggestion may take such possession of the mind as to preclude
the development of others. Too few suggestions indicate a dry and meager
mental habit; when this is joined to great learning, there results a pedant or
a Gradgrind. Such a person's mind rings hard; he is likely to bore others
with mere bulk of information. He contrasts with the person whom we call
ripe, juicy, and mellow.
A conclusion reached after consideration of a few alternatives may be
formally correct, but it will not possess the fullness and richness of meaning
of one arrived at after comparison of a greater variety of alternative
suggestions. On the other hand, suggestions may be too numerous and too
varied for the best interests of mental habit. So many suggestions may rise
that the person is at a loss to select among them. He finds it difficult to
reach any definite conclusion and wanders more or less helplessly among
them. So much suggests itself pro and con, one thing leads on to another so
naturally, that he finds it difficult to decide in practical affairs or to conclude
in matters of theory. There is such a thing as too much thinking, as when
action is paralyzed by the multiplicity of views suggested by a situation. Or
again, the very number of suggestions may be hostile to tracing logical
sequences among them, for it may tempt the mind away from the necessary
but trying task of search for real connections, into the more congenial
occupation of embroidering upon the given facts a tissue of agreeable
fancies. The best mental habit involves a balance between paucity and
redundancy of suggestions.[Pg 37]
(c) profundity
(c) Depth. We distinguish between people not only upon the basis of their
quickness and fertility of intellectual response, but also with respect to the
plane upon which it occurs—the intrinsic quality of the response.
One man's thought is profound while another's is superficial; one goes to the
roots of the matter, and another touches lightly its most external aspects.
This phase of thinking is perhaps the most untaught of all, and the least
amenable to external influence whether for improvement or harm.
Nevertheless, the conditions of the pupil's contact with subject-matter may
be such that he is compelled to come to quarters with its more significant
features, or such that he is encouraged to deal with it upon the basis of
what is trivial. The common assumptions that, if the pupil only thinks, one
thought is just as good for his mental discipline as another, and that the
end of study is the amassing of information, both tend to foster superficial,
at the expense of significant, thought. Pupils who in matters of ordinary
practical experience have a ready and acute perception of the difference
between the significant and the meaningless, often reach in school subjects
a point where all things seem equally important or equally unimportant;
where one thing is just as likely to be true as another, and where intellectual
effort is expended not in discriminating between things, but in trying to
make verbal connections among words.
Balance of mind
Sometimes slowness and depth of response are intimately connected. Time
is required in order to digest impressions, and translate them into
substantial ideas. "Brightness" may be but a flash in the pan. The "slow but
sure" person, whether man or child, is one in whom impressions sink and
accumulate, so that thinking is done[Pg 38] at a deeper level of value than
with a slighter load. Many a child is rebuked for "slowness," for not
"answering promptly," when his forces are taking time to gather themselves
together to deal effectively with the problem at hand. In such cases, failure
to afford time and leisure conduce to habits of speedy, but snapshot and
superficial, judgment. The depth to which a sense of the problem, of the
difficulty, sinks, determines the quality of the thinking that follows; and any
habit of teaching which encourages the pupil for the sake of a successful
recitation or of a display of memorized information to glide over the thin ice
of genuine problems reverses the true method of mind training.
Individual differences
It is profitable to study the lives of men and women who achieve in adult life
fine things in their respective callings, but who were called dull in their
school days. Sometimes the early wrong judgment was due mainly to the
fact that the direction in which the child showed his ability was not one
recognized by the good old standards in use, as in the case of Darwin's
interest in beetles, snakes, and frogs. Sometimes it was due to the fact that
the child dwelling habitually on a deeper plane of reflection than other
pupils—or than his teachers—did not show to advantage when prompt
answers of the usual sort were expected. Sometimes it was due to the fact
that the pupil's natural mode of approach clashed habitually with that of the
text or teacher, and the method of the latter was assumed as an absolute
basis of estimate.
Any subject may be intellectual
In any event, it is desirable that the teacher should rid himself of the notion
that "thinking" is a single, unalterable faculty; that he should recognize that
it is a term denoting the various ways in which things acquire[Pg
39] significance. It is desirable to expel also the kindred notion that some
subjects are inherently "intellectual," and hence possessed of an almost
magical power to train the faculty of thought. Thinking is specific, not a
machine-like, ready-made apparatus to be turned indifferently and at will
upon all subjects, as a lantern may throw its light as it happens upon
horses, streets, gardens, trees, or river. Thinking is specific, in that different
things suggest their own appropriate meanings, tell their own unique
stories, and in that they do this in very different ways with different persons.
As the growth of the body is through the assimilation of food, so the growth
of mind is through the logical organization of subject-matter. Thinking is not
like a sausage machine which reduces all materials indifferently to one
marketable commodity, but is a power of following up and linking together
the specific suggestions that specific things arouse. Accordingly, any
subject, from Greek to cooking, and from drawing to mathematics, is
intellectual, if intellectual at all, not in its fixed inner structure, but in its
function—in its power to start and direct significant inquiry and reflection.
What geometry does for one, the manipulation of laboratory apparatus, the
mastery of a musical composition, or the conduct of a business affair, may
do for another.
§ 3. Orderliness: Its Nature
Continuity
Facts, whether narrow or extensive, and conclusions suggested by them,
whether many or few, do not constitute, even when combined, reflective
thought. The suggestions must be organized; they must be arranged with
reference to one another and with reference to the facts on which they
depend for proof. When the[Pg 40] factors of facility, of fertility, and of depth
are properly balanced or proportioned, we get as the outcome continuity of
thought. We desire neither the slow mind nor yet the hasty. We wish neither
random diffuseness nor fixed rigidity. Consecutiveness means flexibility and
variety of materials, conjoined with singleness and definiteness of direction.
It is opposed both to a mechanical routine uniformity and to a grasshopper-
like movement. Of bright children, it is not infrequently said that "they
might do anything, if only they settled down," so quick and apt are they in
any particular response. But, alas, they rarely settle.
On the other hand, it is not enough not to be diverted. A deadly and fanatic
consistency is not our goal. Concentration does not mean fixity, nor a
cramped arrest or paralysis of the flow of suggestion. It means variety and
change of ideas combined into a single steady trend moving toward a unified
conclusion. Thoughts are concentrated not by being kept still and quiescent,
but by being kept moving toward an object, as a general concentrates his
troops for attack or defense. Holding the mind to a subject is like holding a
ship to its course; it implies constant change of place combined with unity of
direction. Consistent and orderly thinking is precisely such a change of
subject-matter. Consistency is no more the mere absence of contradiction
than concentration is the mere absence of diversion—which exists in dull
routine or in a person "fast asleep." All kinds of varied and incompatible
suggestions may sprout and be followed in their growth, and yet thinking be
consistent and orderly, provided each one of the suggestions is viewed in
relation to the main topic.
Practical demands enforce some degree of continuity
In the main, for most persons, the primary resource[Pg 41] in the
development of orderly habits of thought is indirect, not direct. Intellectual
organization originates and for a time grows as an accompaniment of the
organization of the acts required to realize an end, not as the result of a
direct appeal to thinking power. The need of thinking to accomplish
something beyond thinking is more potent than thinking for its own sake.
All people at the outset, and the majority of people probably all their lives,
attain ordering of thought through ordering of action. Adults normally carry
on some occupation, profession, pursuit; and this furnishes the continuous
axis about which their knowledge, their beliefs, and their habits of reaching
and testing conclusions are organized. Observations that have to do with the
efficient performance of their calling are extended and rendered precise.
Information related to it is not merely amassed and then left in a heap; it is
classified and subdivided so as to be available as it is needed. Inferences are
made by most men not from purely speculative motives, but because they
are involved in the efficient performance of "the duties involved in their
several callings." Thus their inferences are constantly tested by results
achieved; futile and scattering methods tend to be discounted; orderly
arrangements have a premium put upon them. The event, the issue, stands
as a constant check on the thinking that has led up to it; and this discipline
by efficiency in action is the chief sanction, in practically all who are not
scientific specialists, of orderliness of thought.
Such a resource—the main prop of disciplined thinking in adult life—is not
to be despised in training the young in right intellectual habits. There are,
however, profound differences between the immature and the[Pg 42] adult in
the matter of organized activity—differences which must be taken seriously
into account in any educational use of activities: (i) The external
achievement resulting from activity is a more urgent necessity with the
adult, and hence is with him a more effective means of discipline of mind
than with the child; (ii) The ends of adult activity are more specialized than
those of child activity.
Peculiar difficulty with children
(i) The selection and arrangement of appropriate lines of action is a much
more difficult problem as respects youth than it is in the case of adults.
With the latter, the main lines are more or less settled by circumstances.
The social status of the adult, the fact that he is a citizen, a householder, a
parent, one occupied in some regular industrial or professional calling,
prescribes the chief features of the acts to be performed, and secures,
somewhat automatically, as it were, appropriate and related modes of
thinking. But with the child there is no such fixity of status and pursuit;
there is almost nothing to dictate that such and such a consecutive line of
action, rather than another, should be followed, while the will of others, his
own caprice, and circumstances about him tend to produce an isolated
momentary act. The absence of continued motivation coöperates with the
inner plasticity of the immature to increase the importance of educational
training and the difficulties in the way of finding consecutive modes of
activities which may do for child and youth what serious vocations and
functions do for the adult. In the case of children, the choice is so peculiarly
exposed to arbitrary factors, to mere school traditions, to waves of
pedagogical fad and fancy, to fluctuating social cross currents, that
sometimes, in sheer disgust at the inadequacy of results, a reaction
occurs[Pg 43] to the total neglect of overt activity as an educational factor,
and a recourse to purely theoretical subjects and methods.
Peculiar opportunity with children
(ii) This very difficulty, however, points to the fact that the opportunity for
selecting truly educative activities is indefinitely greater in child life than in
adult. The factor of external pressure is so strong with most adults that the
educative value of the pursuit—its reflex influence upon intelligence and
character—however genuine, is incidental, and frequently almost accidental.
The problem and the opportunity with the young is selection of orderly and
continuous modes of occupation, which, while they lead up to and prepare
for the indispensable activities of adult life, have their own sufficient
justification in their present reflex influence upon the formation of habits of
thought.
Action and reaction between extremes
Educational practice shows a continual tendency to oscillate between two
extremes with respect to overt and exertive activities. One extreme is to
neglect them almost entirely, on the ground that they are chaotic and
fluctuating, mere diversions appealing to the transitory unformed taste and
caprice of immature minds; or if they avoid this evil, are objectionable copies
of the highly specialized, and more or less commercial, activities of adult life.
If activities are admitted at all into the school, the admission is a grudging
concession to the necessity of having occasional relief from the strain of
constant intellectual work, or to the clamor of outside utilitarian demands
upon the school. The other extreme is an enthusiastic belief in the almost
magical educative efficacy of any kind of activity, granted it is an activity
and not a passive absorption of academic and theoretic material. The
conceptions of play, of[Pg 44] self-expression, of natural growth, are
appealed to almost as if they meant that opportunity for any kind of
spontaneous activity inevitably secures the due training of mental power; or
a mythological brain physiology is appealed to as proof that any exercise of
the muscles trains power of thought.
Locating the problem of education
While we vibrate from one of these extremes to the other, the most serious of
all problems is ignored: the problem, namely, of discovering and arranging
the forms of activity (a) which are most congenial, best adapted, to the
immature stage of development; (b) which have the most ulterior promise as
preparation for the social responsibilities of adult life; and (c) which, at the
same time, have the maximum of influence in forming habits of acute
observation and of consecutive inference. As curiosity is related to the
acquisition of material of thought, as suggestion is related to flexibility and
force of thought, so the ordering of activities, not themselves primarily
intellectual, is related to the forming of intellectual powers of
consecutiveness.[Pg 45]

CHAPTER FOUR
SCHOOL CONDITIONS AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
§ 1. Introductory: Methods and Conditions
Formal discipline
The so-called faculty-psychology went hand in hand with the vogue of the
formal-discipline idea in education. If thought is a distinct piece of mental
machinery, separate from observation, memory, imagination, and common-
sense judgments of persons and things, then thought should be trained by
special exercises designed for the purpose, as one might devise special
exercises for developing the biceps muscles. Certain subjects are then to be
regarded as intellectual or logical subjects par excellence, possessed of a
predestined fitness to exercise the thought-faculty, just as certain machines
are better than others for developing arm power. With these three notions
goes the fourth, that method consists of a set of operations by which the
machinery of thought is set going and kept at work upon any subject-
matter.
versus real thinking
We have tried to make it clear in the previous chapters that there is no
single and uniform power of thought, but a multitude of different ways in
which specific things—things observed, remembered, heard of, read about—
evoke suggestions or ideas that are pertinent to the occasion and fruitful in
the sequel. Training is such development of curiosity, suggestion, and habits
of exploring and testing, as increases their scope[Pg 46] and efficiency. A
subject—any subject—is intellectual in the degree in which with any given
person it succeeds in effecting this growth. On this view the fourth factor,
method, is concerned with providing conditions so adapted to individual
needs and powers as to make for the permanent improvement of
observation, suggestion, and investigation.
True and false meaning of method
The teacher's problem is thus twofold. On the one side, he needs (as we saw
in the last chapter) to be a student of individual traits and habits; on the
other side, he needs to be a student of the conditions that modify for better
or worse the directions in which individual powers habitually express
themselves. He needs to recognize that method covers not only what he
intentionally devises and employs for the purpose of mental training, but
also what he does without any conscious reference to it,—anything in the
atmosphere and conduct of the school which reacts in any way upon the
curiosity, the responsiveness, and the orderly activity of children. The
teacher who is an intelligent student both of individual mental operations
and of the effects of school conditions upon those operations, can largely be
trusted to develop for himself methods of instruction in their narrower and
more technical sense—those best adapted to achieve results in particular
subjects, such as reading, geography, or algebra. In the hands of one who is
not intelligently aware of individual capacities and of the influence
unconsciously exerted upon them by the entire environment, even the best
of technical methods are likely to get an immediate result only at the
expense of deep-seated and persistent habits. We may group the
conditioning influences of the school environment under three heads: (1) the
mental attitudes and habits of the[Pg 47] persons with whom the child is in
contact; (2) the subjects studied; (3) current educational aims and ideals.
§ 2. Influence of the Habits of Others
Bare reference to the imitativeness of human nature is enough to suggest
how profoundly the mental habits of others affect the attitude of the one
being trained. Example is more potent than precept; and a teacher's best
conscious efforts may be more than counteracted by the influence of
personal traits which he is unaware of or regards as unimportant. Methods
of instruction and discipline that are technically faulty may be rendered
practically innocuous by the inspiration of the personal method that lies
back of them.
Response to environment fundamental in method
To confine, however, the conditioning influence of the educator, whether
parent or teacher, to imitation is to get a very superficial view of the
intellectual influence of others. Imitation is but one case of a deeper
principle—that of stimulus and response. Everything the teacher does, as
well as the manner in which he does it, incites the child to respond in some
way or other, and each response tends to set the child's attitude in some way
or other. Even the inattention of the child to the adult is often a mode of
response which is the result of unconscious training. [9] The teacher is rarely
(and even then never entirely) a transparent medium of access by another
mind to a subject. With the young, the influence of the teacher's personality
is intimately fused with that of the subject; the child does not separate[Pg
48] nor even distinguish the two. And as the child's response
is toward or away from anything presented, he keeps up a running
commentary, of which he himself is hardly distinctly aware, of like and
dislike, of sympathy and aversion, not merely to the acts of the teacher, but
also to the subject with which the teacher is occupied.
Influence of teacher's own habits
Judging others by ourselves
The extent and power of this influence upon morals and manners, upon
character, upon habits of speech and social bearing, are almost universally
recognized. But the tendency to conceive of thought as an isolated faculty
has often blinded teachers to the fact that this influence is just as real and
pervasive in intellectual concerns. Teachers, as well as children, stick more
or less to the main points, have more or less wooden and rigid methods of
response, and display more or less intellectual curiosity about matters that
come up. And every trait of this kind is an inevitable part of the teacher's
method of teaching. Merely to accept without notice slipshod habits of
speech, slovenly inferences, unimaginative and literal response, is to indorse
these tendencies, and to ratify them into habits—and so it goes throughout
the whole range of contact between teacher and student. In this complex
and intricate field, two or three points may well be singled out for special
notice. (a) Most persons are quite unaware of the distinguishing peculiarities
of their own mental habit. They take their own mental operations for
granted, and unconsciously make them the standard for judging the mental
processes of others.[10] Hence there[Pg 49] is a tendency to encourage
everything in the pupil which agrees with this attitude, and to neglect or fail
to understand whatever is incongruous with it. The prevalent overestimation
of the value, for mind-training, of theoretic subjects as compared with
practical pursuits, is doubtless due partly to the fact that the teacher's
calling tends to select those in whom the theoretic interest is specially
strong and to repel those in whom executive abilities are marked. Teachers
sifted out on this basis judge pupils and subjects by a like standard,
encouraging an intellectual one-sidedness in those to whom it is naturally
congenial, and repelling from study those in whom practical instincts are
more urgent.
Exaggeration of direct personal influence
(b) Teachers—and this holds especially of the stronger and better teachers—
tend to rely upon their personal strong points to hold a child to his work,
and thereby to substitute their personal influence for that of subject-matter
as a motive for study. The teacher finds by experience that his own
personality is often effective where the power of the subject to command
attention is almost nil; then he utilizes the former more and more, until the
pupil's relation to the teacher almost takes the place of his relation to the
subject. In this way the teacher's personality may become a source of
personal dependence and weakness, an influence that renders the pupil
indifferent to the value of the subject for its own sake.
Independent thinking versus "getting the answer"
(c) The operation of the teacher's own mental habit tends, unless carefully
watched and guided, to make the child a student of the teacher's
peculiarities rather than of the subjects that he is supposed to study. His
chief concern is to accommodate himself to what the[Pg 50] teacher expects
of him, rather than to devote himself energetically to the problems of
subject-matter. "Is this right?" comes to mean "Will this answer or this
process satisfy the teacher?"—instead of meaning, "Does it satisfy the
inherent conditions of the problem?" It would be folly to deny the legitimacy
or the value of the study of human nature that children carry on in school;
but it is obviously undesirable that their chief intellectual problem should be
that of producing an answer approved by the teacher, and their standard of
success be successful adaptation to the requirements of another.
§ 3. Influence of the Nature of Studies
Types of studies
Studies are conventionally and conveniently grouped under these heads: (1)
Those especially involving the acquisition of skill in performance—the school
arts, such as reading, writing, figuring, and music. (2) Those mainly
concerned with acquiring knowledge—"informational" studies, such as
geography and history. (3) Those in which skill in doing and bulk of
information are relatively less important, and appeal to abstract thinking, to
"reasoning," is most marked—"disciplinary" studies, such as arithmetic and
formal grammar.[11] Each of these groups of subjects has its own special
pitfalls.
The abstract as the isolated
(a) In the case of the so-called disciplinary or pre-eminently logical studies,
there is danger of the isolation of intellectual activity from the ordinary
affairs[Pg 51] of life. Teacher and student alike tend to set up a chasm
between logical thought as something abstract and remote, and the specific
and concrete demands of everyday events. The abstract tends to become so
aloof, so far away from application, as to be cut loose from practical and
moral bearing. The gullibility of specialized scholars when out of their own
lines, their extravagant habits of inference and speech, their ineptness in
reaching conclusions in practical matters, their egotistical engrossment in
their own subjects, are extreme examples of the bad effects of severing
studies completely from their ordinary connections in life.
Overdoing the mechanical and automatic
"Drill"
(b) The danger in those studies where the main emphasis is upon
acquisition of skill is just the reverse. The tendency is to take the shortest
cuts possible to gain the required end. This makes the subjects mechanical,
and thus restrictive of intellectual power. In the mastery of reading, writing,
drawing, laboratory technique, etc., the need of economy of time and
material, of neatness and accuracy, of promptness and uniformity, is so
great that these things tend to become ends in themselves, irrespective of
their influence upon general mental attitude. Sheer imitation, dictation of
steps to be taken, mechanical drill, may give results most quickly and yet
strengthen traits likely to be fatal to reflective power. The pupil is enjoined to
do this and that specific thing, with no knowledge of any reason except that
by so doing he gets his result most speedily; his mistakes are pointed out
and corrected for him; he is kept at pure repetition of certain acts till they
become automatic. Later, teachers wonder why the pupil reads with so little
expression, and figures with so little intelligent consideration of the terms[Pg
52] of his problem. In some educational dogmas and practices, the very idea
of training mind seems to be hopelessly confused with that of a drill which
hardly touches mind at all—or touches it for the worse—since it is wholly
taken up with training skill in external execution. This method reduces the
"training" of human beings to the level of animal training. Practical skill,
modes of effective technique, can be intelligently, non-mechanically used,
only when intelligence has played a part in their acquisition.
Wisdom versus information
(c) Much the same sort of thing is to be said regarding studies where
emphasis traditionally falls upon bulk and accuracy of information. The
distinction between information and wisdom is old, and yet requires
constantly to be redrawn. Information is knowledge which is merely
acquired and stored up; wisdom is knowledge operating in the direction of
powers to the better living of life. Information, merely as information, implies
no special training of intellectual capacity; wisdom is the finest fruit of that
training. In school, amassing information always tends to escape from the
ideal of wisdom or good judgment. The aim often seems to be—especially in
such a subject as geography—to make the pupil what has been called a
"cyclopedia of useless information." "Covering the ground" is the primary
necessity; the nurture of mind a bad second. Thinking cannot, of course, go
on in a vacuum; suggestions and inferences can occur only upon a basis of
information as to matters of fact.
But there is all the difference in the world whether the acquisition of
information is treated as an end in itself, or is made an integral portion of
the training of thought. The assumption that information which has[Pg
53] been accumulated apart from use in the recognition and solution of a
problem may later on be freely employed at will by thought is quite false.
The skill at the ready command of intelligence is the skill acquired with the
aid of intelligence; the only information which, otherwise than by accident,
can be put to logical use is that acquired in the course of thinking. Because
their knowledge has been achieved in connection with the needs of specific
situations, men of little book-learning are often able to put to effective use
every ounce of knowledge they possess; while men of vast erudition are often
swamped by the mere bulk of their learning, because memory, rather than
thinking, has been operative in obtaining it.
§4. The Influence of Current Aims and Ideals
It is, of course, impossible to separate this somewhat intangible condition
from the points just dealt with; for automatic skill and quantity of
information are educational ideals which pervade the whole school. We may
distinguish, however, certain tendencies, such as that to judge education
from the standpoint of external results, instead of from that of the
development of personal attitudes and habits. The ideal of the product, as
against that of the mental process by which the product is attained, shows
itself in both instruction and moral discipline.
External results versus processes
(a) In instruction, the external standard manifests itself in the importance
attached to the "correct answer." No one other thing, probably, works so
fatally against focussing the attention of teachers upon the training of mind
as the domination of their minds by the idea that the chief thing is to get
pupils to recite their lessons correctly.[Pg 54] As long as this end is
uppermost (whether consciously or unconsciously), training of mind
remains an incidental and secondary consideration. There is no great
difficulty in understanding why this ideal has such vogue. The large number
of pupils to be dealt with, and the tendency of parents and school
authorities to demand speedy and tangible evidence of progress, conspire to
give it currency. Knowledge of subject-matter—not of children—is alone
exacted of teachers by this aim; and, moreover, knowledge of subject-matter
only in portions definitely prescribed and laid out, and hence mastered with
comparative ease. Education that takes as its standard the improvement of
the intellectual attitude and method of students demands more serious
preparatory training, for it exacts sympathetic and intelligent insight into
the workings of individual minds, and a very wide and flexible command of
subject-matter—so as to be able to select and apply just what is needed
when it is needed. Finally, the securing of external results is an aim that
lends itself naturally to the mechanics of school administration—to
examinations, marks, gradings, promotions, and so on.
Reliance upon others
(b) With reference to behavior also, the external ideal has a great influence.
Conformity of acts to precepts and rules is the easiest, because most
mechanical, standard to employ. It is no part of our present task to tell just
how far dogmatic instruction, or strict adherence to custom, convention,
and the commands of a social superior, should extend in moral training; but
since problems of conduct are the deepest and most common of all the
problems of life, the ways in which they are met have an influence that
radiates into every other mental attitude, even those far remote from any[Pg
55] direct or conscious moral consideration. Indeed, the deepest plane of the
mental attitude of every one is fixed by the way in which problems of
behavior are treated. If the function of thought, of serious inquiry and
reflection, is reduced to a minimum in dealing with them, it is not
reasonable to expect habits of thought to exercise great influence in less
important matters. On the other hand, habits of active inquiry and careful
deliberation in the significant and vital problems of conduct afford the best
guarantee that the general structure of mind will be reasonable.[Pg 56]

CHAPTER FIVE
THE MEANS AND END OF MENTAL TRAINING: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL
AND THE LOGICAL
§ 1. Introductory: The Meaning of Logical
Special topic of this chapter
In the preceding chapters we have considered (i) what thinking is; (ii) the
importance of its special training; (iii) the natural tendencies that lend
themselves to its training; and (iv) some of the special obstacles in the way
of its training under school conditions. We come now to the relation
of logic to the purpose of mental training.
Three senses of term logical
The practical is the important meaning of logical
In its broadest sense, any thinking that ends in a conclusion is logical—
whether the conclusion reached be justified or fallacious; that is, the
term logical covers both the logically good and the illogical or the logically
bad. In its narrowest sense, the term logical refers only to what is
demonstrated to follow necessarily from premises that are definite in
meaning and that are either self-evidently true, or that have been previously
proved to be true. Stringency of proof is here the equivalent of the logical. In
this sense mathematics and formal logic (perhaps as a branch of
mathematics) alone are strictly logical. Logical, however, is used in a third
sense, which is at once more vital and more practical; to denote, namely, the
systematic care, negative and positive, taken to safeguard reflection so that
it may yield the best results under the given conditions. If only the
word artificial were associated with the idea[Pg 57] of art, or expert skill
gained through voluntary apprenticeship (instead of suggesting the
factitious and unreal), we might say that logical refers to artificial thought.
Care, thoroughness, and exactness the marks of the logical
In this sense, the word logical is synonymous with wide-awake, thorough,
and careful reflection—thought in its best sense (ante, p. 5). Reflection is
turning a topic over in various aspects and in various lights so that nothing
significant about it shall be overlooked—almost as one might turn a stone
over to see what its hidden side is like or what is covered by
it. Thoughtfulness means, practically, the same thing as careful attention; to
give our mind to a subject is to give heed to it, to take pains with it. In
speaking of reflection, we naturally use the words weigh, ponder, deliberate
—terms implying a certain delicate and scrupulous balancing of things
against one another. Closely related names
are scrutiny, examination, consideration, inspection—terms which imply
close and careful vision. Again, to think is to relate things to one another
definitely, to "put two and two together" as we say. Analogy with the
accuracy and definiteness of mathematical combinations gives us such
expressions as calculate, reckon, account for; and even reason itself—ratio.
Caution, carefulness, thoroughness, definiteness, exactness, orderliness,
methodic arrangement, are, then, the traits by which we mark off the logical
from what is random and casual on one side, and from what is academic
and formal on the other.
Whole object of intellectual education is formation of logical
disposition
False opposition of the logical and psychological
No argument is needed to point out that the educator is concerned with the
logical in its practical and vital sense. Argument is perhaps needed to show
that the intellectual (as distinct from the moral) end of education is entirely
and only the logical in this sense; namely,[Pg 58] the formation of careful,
alert, and thorough habits of thinking. The chief difficulty in the way of
recognition of this principle is a false conception of the relation between the
psychological tendencies of an individual and his logical achievements. If it
be assumed—as it is so frequently—that these have, intrinsically, nothing to
do with each other, then logical training is inevitably regarded as something
foreign and extraneous, something to be ingrafted upon the individual from
without, so that it is absurd to identify the object of education with the
development of logical power.
Opposing the natural to the logical
The conception that the psychology of individuals has no intrinsic
connections with logical methods and results is held, curiously enough, by
two opposing schools of educational theory. To one school, the natural[12] is
primary and fundamental; and its tendency is to make little of distinctly
intellectual nurture. Its mottoes are freedom, self-expression, individuality,
spontaneity, play, interest, natural unfolding, and so on. In its emphasis
upon individual attitude and activity, it sets slight store upon organized
subject-matter, or the material of study, and conceives method to consist of
various devices for stimulating and evoking, in their natural order of growth,
the native potentialities of individuals.
Neglect of the innate logical resources
Identification of logical with subject-matter, exclusively
The other school estimates highly the value of the logical, but conceives the
natural tendency of individuals to be averse, or at least indifferent, to logical
achievement. It relies upon subject-matter—upon matter already defined and
classified. Method, then, has to do with the devices by which these
characteristics may be imported into a mind naturally reluctant and re[Pg
59]bellious. Hence its mottoes are discipline, instruction, restraint,
voluntary or conscious effort, the necessity of tasks, and so on. From this
point of view studies, rather than attitudes and habits, embody the logical
factor in education. The mind becomes logical only by learning to conform to
an external subject-matter. To produce this conformity, the study should
first be analyzed (by text-book or teacher) into its logical elements; then each
of these elements should be defined; finally, all of the elements should be
arranged in series or classes according to logical formulæ or general
principles. Then the pupil learns the definitions one by one; and
progressively adding one to another builds up the logical system, and
thereby is himself gradually imbued, from without, with logical quality.
Illustration from geography,
This description will gain meaning through an illustration. Suppose the
subject is geography. The first thing is to give its definition, marking it off
from every other subject. Then the various abstract terms upon which
depends the scientific development of the science are stated and defined one
by one—pole, equator, ecliptic, zone,—from the simpler units to the more
complex which are formed out of them; then the more concrete elements are
taken in similar series: continent, island, coast, promontory, cape, isthmus,
peninsula, ocean, lake, coast, gulf, bay, and so on. In acquiring this
material, the mind is supposed not only to gain important information, but,
by accommodating itself to ready-made logical definitions, generalizations,
and classifications, gradually to acquire logical habits.
from drawing
This type of method has been applied to every subject taught in the schools
—reading, writing, music, physics, grammar, arithmetic. Drawing for
example,[Pg 60] has been taught on the theory that since all pictorial
representation is a matter of combining straight and curved lines, the
simplest procedure is to have the pupil acquire the ability first to draw
straight lines in various positions (horizontal, perpendicular, diagonals at
various angles), then typical curves; and finally, to combine straight and
curved lines in various permutations to construct actual pictures. This
seemed to give the ideal "logical" method, beginning with analysis into
elements, and then proceeding in regular order to more and more complex
syntheses, each element being defined when used, and thereby clearly
understood.
Formal method
Even when this method in its extreme form is not followed, few schools
(especially of the middle or upper elementary grades) are free from an
exaggerated attention to forms supposedly employed by the pupil if he gets
his result logically. It is thought that there are certain steps arranged in a
certain order, which express preëminently an understanding of the subject,
and the pupil is made to "analyze" his procedure into these steps, i.e. to
learn a certain routine formula of statement. While this method is usually at
its height in grammar and arithmetic, it invades also history and even
literature, which are then reduced, under plea of intellectual training, to
"outlines," diagrams, and schemes of division and subdivision. In
memorizing this simulated cut and dried copy of the logic of an adult, the
child generally is induced to stultify his own subtle and vital logical
movement. The adoption by teachers of this misconception of logical method
has probably done more than anything else to bring pedagogy into
disrepute; for to many persons "pedagogy" means precisely a set of
mechanical, self-conscious devices for replacing by some[Pg 61] cast-iron
external scheme the personal mental movement of the individual.
Reaction toward lack of form and method
A reaction inevitably occurs from the poor results that accrue from these
professedly "logical" methods. Lack of interest in study, habits of inattention
and procrastination, positive aversion to intellectual application,
dependence upon sheer memorizing and mechanical routine with only a
modicum of understanding by the pupil of what he is about, show that the
theory of logical definition, division, gradation, and system does not work
out practically as it is theoretically supposed to work. The consequent
disposition—as in every reaction—is to go to the opposite extreme. The
"logical" is thought to be wholly artificial and extraneous; teacher and pupil
alike are to turn their backs upon it, and to work toward the expression of
existing aptitudes and tastes. Emphasis upon natural tendencies and
powers as the only possible starting-point of development is indeed
wholesome. But the reaction is false, and hence misleading, in what it
ignores and denies: the presence of genuinely intellectual factors in existing
powers and interests.
Logic of subject-matter is logic of adult or trained mind
What is conventionally termed logical (namely, the logical from the
standpoint of subject-matter) represents in truth the logic of the trained
adult mind. Ability to divide a subject, to define its elements, and to group
them into classes according to general principles represents logical capacity
at its best point reached after thorough training. The mind that habitually
exhibits skill in divisions, definitions, generalizations, and systematic
recapitulations no longer needs training in logical methods. But it is absurd
to suppose that a mind which needs training because it cannot perform
these opera[Pg 62]tions can begin where the expert mind stops. The logical
from the standpoint of subject-matter represents the goal, the last term of
training, not the point of departure.
The immature mind has its own logic
Hence, the psychological and the logical represent the two ends of the
same movement
In truth, the mind at every stage of development has its own logic. The error
of the notion that by appeal to spontaneous tendencies and by
multiplication of materials we may completely dismiss logical
considerations, lies in overlooking how large a part curiosity, inference,
experimenting, and testing already play in the pupil's life. Therefore it
underestimates the intellectual factor in the more spontaneous play and
work of individuals—the factor that alone is truly educative. Any teacher
who is alive to the modes of thought naturally operative in the experience of
the normal child will have no difficulty in avoiding the identification of the
logical with a ready-made organization of subject-matter, as well as the
notion that the only way to escape this error is to pay no attention to logical
considerations. Such a teacher will have no difficulty in seeing that the real
problem of intellectual education is the transformation of natural powers
into expert, tested powers: the transformation of more or less casual
curiosity and sporadic suggestion into attitudes of alert, cautious, and
thorough inquiry. He will see that the psychological and the logical, instead
of being opposed to each other (or even independent of each other), are
connected as the earlier and the later stages in one continuous process of
normal growth. The natural or psychological activities, even when not
consciously controlled by logical considerations, have their own intellectual
function and integrity; conscious and deliberate skill in thinking, when it is
achieved, makes habitual or second nature. The first is already logical in
spirit; the last, in presenting an ingrained disposi[Pg 63]tion and attitude, is
then as psychological (as personal) as any caprice or chance impulse could
be.
§ 2. Discipline and Freedom
True and false notions of discipline
Discipline of mind is thus, in truth, a result rather than a cause. Any mind
is disciplined in a subject in which independent intellectual initiative and
control have been achieved. Discipline represents original native endowment
turned, through gradual exercise, into effective power. So far as a mind is
disciplined, control of method in a given subject has been attained so that
the mind is able to manage itself independently without external tutelage.
The aim of education is precisely to develop intelligence of this independent
and effective type—a disciplined mind. Discipline is positive and
constructive.
Discipline as drill
Discipline, however, is frequently regarded as something negative—as a
painfully disagreeable forcing of mind away from channels congenial to it
into channels of constraint, a process grievous at the time but necessary as
preparation for a more or less remote future. Discipline is then generally
identified with drill; and drill is conceived after the mechanical analogy of
driving, by unremitting blows, a foreign substance into a resistant material;
or is imaged after the analogy of the mechanical routine by which raw
recruits are trained to a soldierly bearing and habits that are naturally
wholly foreign to their possessors. Training of this latter sort, whether it be
called discipline or not, is not mental discipline. Its aim and result are
not habits of thinking, but uniform external modes of action. By failing to ask
what he means by discipline, many a teacher is misled into supposing that
he is developing[Pg 64] mental force and efficiency by methods which in fact
restrict and deaden intellectual activity, and which tend to create
mechanical routine, or mental passivity and servility.
As independent power or freedom
Freedom and external spontaneity
When discipline is conceived in intellectual terms (as the habitual power of
effective mental attack), it is identified with freedom in its true sense. For
freedom of mind means mental power capable of independent exercise,
emancipated from the leading strings of others, not mere unhindered
external operation. When spontaneity or naturalness is identified with more
or less casual discharge of transitory impulses, the tendency of the educator
is to supply a multitude of stimuli in order that spontaneous activity may be
kept up. All sorts of interesting materials, equipments, tools, modes of
activity, are provided in order that there may be no flagging of free self-
expression. This method overlooks some of the essential conditions of the
attainment of genuine freedom.
Some obstacle necessary for thought
(a) Direct immediate discharge or expression of an impulsive tendency is
fatal to thinking. Only when the impulse is to some extent checked and
thrown back upon itself does reflection ensue. It is, indeed, a stupid error to
suppose that arbitrary tasks must be imposed from without in order to
furnish the factor of perplexity and difficulty which is the necessary cue to
thought. Every vital activity of any depth and range inevitably meets
obstacles in the course of its effort to realize itself—a fact that renders the
search for artificial or external problems quite superfluous. The difficulties
that present themselves within the development of an experience are,
however, to be cherished by the educator, not minimized, for they are the
natural stimuli[Pg 65] to reflective inquiry. Freedom does not consist in
keeping up uninterrupted and unimpeded external activity, but is something
achieved through conquering, by personal reflection, a way out of the
difficulties that prevent an immediate overflow and a spontaneous success.
Intellectual factors are natural
(b) The method that emphasizes the psychological and natural, but yet fails
to see what an important part of the natural tendencies is constituted at
every period of growth by curiosity, inference, and the desire to test, cannot
secure a natural development. In natural growth each successive stage of
activity prepares unconsciously, but thoroughly, the conditions for the
manifestation of the next stage—as in the cycle of a plant's growth. There is
no ground for assuming that "thinking" is a special, isolated natural
tendency that will bloom inevitably in due season simply because various
sense and motor activities have been freely manifested before; or because
observation, memory, imagination, and manual skill have been previously
exercised without thought. Only when thinking is constantly employed in
using the senses and muscles for the guidance and application of
observations and movements, is the way prepared for subsequent higher
types of thinking.
Genesis of thought contemporaneous with genesis of any human
mental activity
At present, the notion is current that childhood is almost entirely
unreflective—a period of mere sensory, motor, and memory development,
while adolescence suddenly brings the manifestation of thought and reason.
Adolescence is not, however, a synonym for magic. Doubtless youth should
bring with it an enlargement of the horizon of childhood, a susceptibility to
larger concerns and issues, a more generous and a more general standpoint
toward nature and social life. This development affords an opportunity for
thinking of a more com[Pg 66]prehensive and abstract type than has
previously obtained. But thinking itself remains just what it has been all the
time: a matter of following up and testing the conclusions suggested by the
facts and events of life. Thinking begins as soon as the baby who has lost
the ball that he is playing with begins to foresee the possibility of something
not yet existing—its recovery; and begins to forecast steps toward the
realization of this possibility, and, by experimentation, to guide his acts by
his ideas and thereby also test the ideas. Only by making the most of the
thought-factor, already active in the experiences of childhood, is there any
promise or warrant for the emergence of superior reflective power at
adolescence, or at any later period.
Fixation of bad mental habits
(c) In any case positive habits are being formed: if not habits of careful
looking into things, then habits of hasty, heedless, impatient glancing over
the surface; if not habits of consecutively following up the suggestions that
occur, then habits of haphazard, grasshopper-like guessing; if not habits of
suspending judgment till inferences have been tested by the examination of
evidence, then habits of credulity alternating with flippant incredulity, belief
or unbelief being based, in either case, upon whim, emotion, or accidental
circumstances. The only way to achieve traits of carefulness, thoroughness,
and continuity (traits that are, as we have seen, the elements of the "logical")
is by exercising these traits from the beginning, and by seeing to it that
conditions call for their exercise.
Genuine freedom is intellectual, not external
Genuine freedom, in short, is intellectual; it rests in the trained power of
thought, in ability to "turn things over," to look at matters deliberately, to
judge whether the amount and kind of evidence requisite for decision[Pg
67] is at hand, and if not, to tell where and how to seek such evidence. If a
man's actions are not guided by thoughtful conclusions, then they are
guided by inconsiderate impulse, unbalanced appetite, caprice, or the
circumstances of the moment. To cultivate unhindered, unreflective external
activity is to foster enslavement, for it leaves the person at the mercy of
appetite, sense, and circumstance.[Pg 68]

PART TWO: LOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

CHAPTER SIX
THE ANALYSIS OF A COMPLETE ACT OF THOUGHT
Object of Part Two
After a brief consideration in the first chapter of the nature of reflective
thinking, we turned, in the second, to the need for its training. Then we took
up the resources, the difficulties, and the aim of its training. The purpose of
this discussion was to set before the student the general problem of the
training of mind. The purport of the second part, upon which we are now
entering, is giving a fuller statement of the nature and normal growth of
thinking, preparatory to considering in the concluding part the special
problems that arise in connection with its education.
In this chapter we shall make an analysis of the process of thinking into its
steps or elementary constituents, basing the analysis upon descriptions of a
number of extremely simple, but genuine, cases of reflective experience. [13]
A simple case of practical deliberation
1. "The other day when I was down town on 16th Street a clock caught my
eye. I saw that the hands pointed to 12.20. This suggested that I had an
engagement at 124th Street, at one o'clock. I reasoned that[Pg 69] as it had
taken me an hour to come down on a surface car, I should probably be
twenty minutes late if I returned the same way. I might save twenty minutes
by a subway express. But was there a station near? If not, I might lose more
than twenty minutes in looking for one. Then I thought of the elevated, and I
saw there was such a line within two blocks. But where was the station? If it
were several blocks above or below the street I was on, I should lose time
instead of gaining it. My mind went back to the subway express as quicker
than the elevated; furthermore, I remembered that it went nearer than the
elevated to the part of 124th Street I wished to reach, so that time would be
saved at the end of the journey. I concluded in favor of the subway, and
reached my destination by one o'clock."
A simple case of reflection upon an observation
2. "Projecting nearly horizontally from the upper deck of the ferryboat on
which I daily cross the river, is a long white pole, bearing a gilded ball at its
tip. It suggested a flagpole when I first saw it; its color, shape, and gilded
ball agreed with this idea, and these reasons seemed to justify me in this
belief. But soon difficulties presented themselves. The pole was nearly
horizontal, an unusual position for a flagpole; in the next place, there was
no pulley, ring, or cord by which to attach a flag; finally, there were
elsewhere two vertical staffs from which flags were occasionally flown. It
seemed probable that the pole was not there for flag-flying.
"I then tried to imagine all possible purposes of such a pole, and to consider
for which of these it was best suited: (a) Possibly it was an ornament. But as
all the ferryboats and even the tugboats carried like poles,[Pg 70] this
hypothesis was rejected. (b) Possibly it was the terminal of a wireless
telegraph. But the same considerations made this improbable. Besides, the
more natural place for such a terminal would be the highest part of the
boat, on top of the pilot house. (c) Its purpose might be to point out the
direction in which the boat is moving.
"In support of this conclusion, I discovered that the pole was lower than the
pilot house, so that the steersman could easily see it. Moreover, the tip was
enough higher than the base, so that, from the pilot's position, it must
appear to project far out in front of the boat. Moreover, the pilot being near
the front of the boat, he would need some such guide as to its direction.
Tugboats would also need poles for such a purpose. This hypothesis was so
much more probable than the others that I accepted it. I formed the
conclusion that the pole was set up for the purpose of showing the pilot the
direction in which the boat pointed, to enable him to steer correctly."
A simple case of reflection involving experiment
3. "In washing tumblers in hot soapsuds and placing them mouth downward
on a plate, bubbles appeared on the outside of the mouth of the tumblers
and then went inside. Why? The presence of bubbles suggests air, which I
note must come from inside the tumbler. I see that the soapy water on the
plate prevents escape of the air save as it may be caught in bubbles. But
why should air leave the tumbler? There was no substance entering to force
it out. It must have expanded. It expands by increase of heat or by decrease
of pressure, or by both. Could the air have become heated after the tumbler
was taken from the hot suds? Clearly not the air that was already
entangled[Pg 71] in the water. If heated air was the cause, cold air must
have entered in transferring the tumblers from the suds to the plate. I test to
see if this supposition is true by taking several more tumblers out. Some I
shake so as to make sure of entrapping cold air in them. Some I take out
holding mouth downward in order to prevent cold air from entering. Bubbles
appear on the outside of every one of the former and on none of the latter. I
must be right in my inference. Air from the outside must have been
expanded by the heat of the tumbler, which explains the appearance of the
bubbles on the outside.
"But why do they then go inside? Cold contracts. The tumbler cooled and
also the air inside it. Tension was removed, and hence bubbles appeared
inside. To be sure of this, I test by placing a cup of ice on the tumbler while
the bubbles are still forming outside. They soon reverse."
The three cases form a series
These three cases have been purposely selected so as to form a series from
the more rudimentary to more complicated cases of reflection. The first
illustrates the kind of thinking done by every one during the day's business,
in which neither the data, nor the ways of dealing with them, take one
outside the limits of everyday experience. The last furnishes a case in which
neither problem nor mode of solution would have been likely to occur except
to one with some prior scientific training. The second case forms a natural
transition; its materials lie well within the bounds of everyday, unspecialized
experience; but the problem, instead of being directly involved in the
person's business, arises indirectly out of his activity, and accordingly
appeals to a somewhat theoretic and impartial interest. We[Pg 72] shall deal,
in a later chapter, with the evolution of abstract thinking out of that which
is relatively practical and direct; here we are concerned only with the
common elements found in all the types.
Five distinct steps in reflection
Upon examination, each instance reveals, more or less clearly, five logically
distinct steps: (i) a felt difficulty; (ii) its location and definition; (iii)
suggestion of possible solution; (iv) development by reasoning of the
bearings of the suggestion; (v) further observation and experiment leading to
its acceptance or rejection; that is, the conclusion of belief or disbelief.
1. The occurrence of a difficulty
(a) in the lack of adaptation of means to end
1. The first and second steps frequently fuse into one. The difficulty may be
felt with sufficient definiteness as to set the mind at once speculating upon
its probable solution, or an undefined uneasiness and shock may come first,
leading only later to definite attempt to find out what is the matter. Whether
the two steps are distinct or blended, there is the factor emphasized in our
original account of reflection—viz. the perplexity or problem. In the first of
the three cases cited, the difficulty resides in the conflict between conditions
at hand and a desired and intended result, between an end and the means
for reaching it. The purpose of keeping an engagement at a certain time, and
the existing hour taken in connection with the location, are not congruous.
The object of thinking is to introduce congruity between the two. The given
conditions cannot themselves be altered; time will not go backward nor will
the distance between 16th Street and 124th Street shorten itself. The
problem is the discovery of intervening terms which when inserted between
the remoter end and the given means will harmonize them with each other.[Pg
73]
(b) in identifying the character of an object
In the second case, the difficulty experienced is the incompatibility of a
suggested and (temporarily) accepted belief that the pole is a flagpole, with
certain other facts. Suppose we symbolize the qualities that
suggest flagpole by the letters a, b, c; those that oppose this suggestion by
the letters p, q, r. There is, of course, nothing inconsistent in the qualities
themselves; but in pulling the mind to different and incongruous
conclusions they conflict—hence the problem. Here the object is the
discovery of some object (O), of which a, b, c, and p, q, r, may all be
appropriate traits—just as, in our first case, it is to discover a course of
action which will combine existing conditions and a remoter result in a
single whole. The method of solution is also the same: discovery of
intermediate qualities (the position of the pilot house, of the pole, the need
of an index to the boat's direction) symbolized by d, g, l, o, which bind
together otherwise incompatible traits.
(c) in explaining an unexpected event
In the third case, an observer trained to the idea of natural laws or
uniformities finds something odd or exceptional in the behavior of the
bubbles. The problem is to reduce the apparent anomalies to instances of
well-established laws. Here the method of solution is also to seek for
intermediary terms which will connect, by regular linkage, the seemingly
extraordinary movements of the bubbles with the conditions known to follow
from processes supposed to be operative.
2. Definition of the difficulty
2. As already noted, the first two steps, the feeling of a discrepancy, or
difficulty, and the acts of observation that serve to define the character of
the difficulty may, in a given instance, telescope together. In cases of
striking novelty or unusual perplexity, the difficulty, however, is likely to
present itself at first as a shock, as[Pg 74] emotional disturbance, as a more
or less vague feeling of the unexpected, of something queer, strange, funny,
or disconcerting. In such instances, there are necessary observations
deliberately calculated to bring to light just what is the trouble, or to make
clear the specific character of the problem. In large measure, the existence
or non-existence of this step makes the difference between reflection proper,
or safeguarded critical inference and uncontrolled thinking. Where sufficient
pains to locate the difficulty are not taken, suggestions for its resolution
must be more or less random. Imagine a doctor called in to prescribe for a
patient. The patient tells him some things that are wrong; his experienced
eye, at a glance, takes in other signs of a certain disease. But if he permits
the suggestion of this special disease to take possession prematurely of his
mind, to become an accepted conclusion, his scientific thinking is by that
much cut short. A large part of his technique, as a skilled practitioner, is to
prevent the acceptance of the first suggestions that arise; even, indeed, to
postpone the occurrence of any very definite suggestion till the trouble—the
nature of the problem—has been thoroughly explored. In the case of a
physician this proceeding is known as diagnosis, but a similar inspection is
required in every novel and complicated situation to prevent rushing to a
conclusion. The essence of critical thinking is suspended judgment; and the
essence of this suspense is inquiry to determine the nature of the problem
before proceeding to attempts at its solution. This, more than any other
thing, transforms mere inference into tested inference, suggested
conclusions into proof.
3. Occurrence of a suggested explanation or possible solution
3. The third factor is suggestion. The situation in[Pg 75] which the perplexity
occurs calls up something not present to the senses: the present location,
the thought of subway or elevated train; the stick before the eyes, the idea of
a flagpole, an ornament, an apparatus for wireless telegraphy; the soap
bubbles, the law of expansion of bodies through heat and of their
contraction through cold. (a) Suggestion is the very heart of inference; it
involves going from what is present to something absent. Hence, it is more
or less speculative, adventurous. Since inference goes beyond what is
actually present, it involves a leap, a jump, the propriety of which cannot be
absolutely warranted in advance, no matter what precautions be taken. Its
control is indirect, on the one hand, involving the formation of habits of
mind which are at once enterprising and cautious; and on the other hand,
involving the selection and arrangement of the particular facts upon
perception of which suggestion issues. (b) The suggested conclusion so far
as it is not accepted but only tentatively entertained constitutes an idea.
Synonyms for this are supposition, conjecture, guess, hypothesis, and (in
elaborate cases) theory. Since suspended belief, or the postponement of a
final conclusion pending further evidence, depends partly upon the presence
of rival conjectures as to the best course to pursue or the probable
explanation to favor, cultivation of a variety of alternative suggestions is an
important factor in good thinking.
4. The rational elaboration of an idea
4. The process of developing the bearings—or, as they are more technically
termed, the implications—of any idea with respect to any problem, is
termed reasoning.[14] As an idea is inferred from given facts, so reasoning[Pg
76] sets out from an idea. The idea of elevated road is developed into the
idea of difficulty of locating station, length of time occupied on the journey,
distance of station at the other end from place to be reached. In the second
case, the implication of a flagpole is seen to be a vertical position; of a
wireless apparatus, location on a high part of the ship and, moreover,
absence from every casual tugboat; while the idea of index to direction in
which the boat moves, when developed, is found to cover all the details of
the case.
Reasoning has the same effect upon a suggested solution as more intimate
and extensive observation has upon the original problem. Acceptance of the
suggestion in its first form is prevented by looking into it more thoroughly.
Conjectures that seem plausible at first sight are often found unfit or even
absurd when their full consequences are traced out. Even when reasoning
out the bearings of a supposition does not lead to rejection, it develops the
idea into a form in which it is more apposite to the problem. Only when, for
example, the conjecture that a pole was an index-pole had been thought out
into its bearings could its particular applicability to the case in hand be
judged. Suggestions at first seemingly remote and wild are frequently so
transformed by being elaborated into what follows from them as to become
apt and fruitful. The development of an idea through reasoning helps at
least to supply the intervening or intermediate terms that link together into
a consistent whole apparently discrepant extremes (ante, p. 72).[Pg 77]
5. Corroboration of an idea and formation of a concluding belief
5. The concluding and conclusive step is some kind of experimental
corroboration, or verification, of the conjectural idea. Reasoning shows
that if the idea be adopted, certain consequences follow. So far the
conclusion is hypothetical or conditional. If we look and find present all the
conditions demanded by the theory, and if we find the characteristic traits
called for by rival alternatives to be lacking, the tendency to believe, to
accept, is almost irresistible. Sometimes direct observation furnishes
corroboration, as in the case of the pole on the boat. In other cases, as in
that of the bubbles, experiment is required; that is, conditions are
deliberately arranged in accord with the requirements of an idea or
hypothesis to see if the results theoretically indicated by the idea actually
occur. If it is found that the experimental results agree with the theoretical,
or rationally deduced, results, and if there is reason to believe that only the
conditions in question would yield such results, the confirmation is so
strong as to induce a conclusion—at least until contrary facts shall indicate
the advisability of its revision.
Thinking comes between observations at the beginning and at the end
Observation exists at the beginning and again at the end of the process: at
the beginning, to determine more definitely and precisely the nature of the
difficulty to be dealt with; at the end, to test the value of some hypothetically
entertained conclusion. Between those two termini of observation, we find
the more distinctively mental aspects of the entire thought-cycle: (i)
inference, the suggestion of an explanation or solution; and (ii) reasoning,
the development of the bearings and implications of the suggestion.
Reasoning requires some experimental observation to confirm it, while
experiment can be economically and fruitfully conducted only[Pg 78] on the
basis of an idea that has been tentatively developed by reasoning.
The trained mind one that judges the extent of each step advisable in a
given situation
The disciplined, or logically trained, mind—the aim of the educative process
—is the mind able to judge how far each of these steps needs to be carried in
any particular situation. No cast-iron rules can be laid down. Each case has
to be dealt with as it arises, on the basis of its importance and of the context
in which it occurs. To take too much pains in one case is as foolish—as
illogical—as to take too little in another. At one extreme, almost any
conclusion that insures prompt and unified action may be better than any
long delayed conclusion; while at the other, decision may have to be
postponed for a long period—perhaps for a lifetime. The trained mind is the
one that best grasps the degree of observation, forming of ideas, reasoning,
and experimental testing required in any special case, and that profits the
most, in future thinking, by mistakes made in the past. What is important is
that the mind should be sensitive to problems and skilled in methods of
attack and solution.[Pg 79]

CHAPTER SEVEN
SYSTEMATIC INFERENCE: INDUCTION AND DEDUCTION
§ 1. The Double Movement of Reflection
Back and forth between facts and meanings
The characteristic outcome of thinking we saw to be the organization of facts
and conditions which, just as they stand, are isolated, fragmentary, and
discrepant, the organization being effected through the introduction of
connecting links, or middle terms. The facts as they stand are the data, the
raw material of reflection; their lack of coherence perplexes and stimulates
to reflection. There follows the suggestion of some meaning which, if it can
be substantiated, will give a whole in which various fragmentary and
seemingly incompatible data find their proper place. The meaning suggested
supplies a mental platform, an intellectual point of view, from which to note
and define the data more carefully, to seek for additional observations, and
to institute, experimentally, changed conditions.
Inductive and deductive
There is thus a double movement in all reflection: a movement from the
given partial and confused data to a suggested comprehensive (or inclusive)
entire situation; and back from this suggested whole—which as suggested is
a meaning, an idea—to the particular facts, so as to connect these with one
another and with additional facts to which the suggestion has directed
attention. Roughly speaking, the first of these movements[Pg 80] is
inductive; the second deductive. A complete act of thought involves both—it
involves, that is, a fruitful interaction of observed (or recollected) particular
considerations and of inclusive and far-reaching (general) meanings.
Hurry versus caution
This double movement to and from a meaning may occur, however, in a
casual, uncritical way, or in a cautious and regulated manner. To think
means, in any case, to bridge a gap in experience, to bind together facts or
deeds otherwise isolated. But we may make only a hurried jump from one
consideration to another, allowing our aversion to mental disquietude to
override the gaps; or, we may insist upon noting the road traveled in making
connections. We may, in short, accept readily any suggestion that seems
plausible; or we may hunt out additional factors, new difficulties, to see
whether the suggested conclusion really ends the matter. The latter method
involves definite formulation of the connecting links; the statement of a
principle, or, in logical phrase, the use of a universal. If we thus formulate
the whole situation, the original data are transformed into premises of
reasoning; the final belief is a logical or rational conclusion, not a mere de
facto termination.
Continuity of relationship the mark of the latter
The importance of connections binding isolated items into a coherent single
whole is embodied in all the phrases that denote the relation of premises
and conclusions to each other. (1) The premises are called grounds,
foundations, bases, and are said to underlie, uphold, support the
conclusion. (2) We "descend" from the premises to the conclusion, and
"ascend" or "mount" in the opposite direction—as a river may be
continuously traced from source to sea or vice versa. So the conclusion
springs, flows, or is drawn from its premises.[Pg 81] (3) The conclusion—as
the word itself implies—closes, shuts in, locks up together the various
factors stated in the premises. We say that the premises "contain" the
conclusion, and that the conclusion "contains" the premises, thereby
marking our sense of the inclusive and comprehensive unity in which the
elements of reasoning are bound tightly together. [15] Systematic inference, in
short, means the recognition of definite relations of interdependence between
considerations previously unorganized and disconnected, this recognition
being brought about by the discovery and insertion of new facts and
properties.
Scientific induction and deduction
This more systematic thinking is, however, like the cruder forms in its
double movement, the movement toward the suggestion or hypothesis and
the movement back to facts. The difference is in the greater conscious care
with which each phase of the process is performed. The conditions under
which suggestions are allowed to spring up and develop are regulated. Hasty
acceptance of any idea that is plausible, that seems to solve the difficulty, is
changed into a conditional acceptance pending further inquiry. The idea is
accepted as a working hypothesis, as something to guide investigation and
bring to light new facts, not as a final conclusion. When pains are taken to
make each aspect of the movement as accurate as possible, the movement
toward building up the idea is known as inductive discovery (induction, for
short); the movement toward developing, applying, and testing, as deductive
proof (deduction, for short).
Particular and universal
While induction moves from fragmentary details (or[Pg 82] particulars) to a
connected view of a situation (universal), deduction begins with the latter
and works back again to particulars, connecting them and binding them
together. The inductive movement is toward discovery of a binding principle;
the deductive toward its testing—confirming, refuting, modifying it on the
basis of its capacity to interpret isolated details into a unified experience. So
far as we conduct each of these processes in the light of the other, we get
valid discovery or verified critical thinking.
Illustration from everyday experience
A commonplace illustration may enforce the points of this formula. A man
who has left his rooms in order finds them upon his return in a state of
confusion, articles being scattered at random. Automatically, the notion
comes to his mind that burglary would account for the disorder. He has not
seen the burglars; their presence is not a fact of observation, but is a
thought, an idea. Moreover, the man has no special burglars in mind; it is
the relation, the meaning of burglary—something general—that comes to
mind. The state of his room is perceived and is particular, definite,—exactly
as it is; burglars are inferred, and have a general status. The state of the
room is a fact, certain and speaking for itself; the presence of burglars is a
possible meaning which may explain the facts.
of induction,
So far there is an inductive tendency, suggested by particular and present
facts. In the same inductive way, it occurs to him that his children are
mischievous, and that they may have thrown the things about. This rival
hypothesis (or conditional principle of explanation) prevents him from
dogmatically accepting the first suggestion. Judgment is held in suspense
and a positive conclusion postponed.[Pg 83]
of deduction
Then deductive movement begins. Further observations, recollections,
reasonings are conducted on the basis of a development of the ideas
suggested: if burglars were responsible, such and such things would have
happened; articles of value would be missing. Here the man is going from a
general principle or relation to special features that accompany it, to
particulars,—not back, however, merely to the original particulars (which
would be fruitless or take him in a circle), but to new details, the actual
discovery or nondiscovery of which will test the principle. The man turns to
a box of valuables; some things are gone; some, however, are still there.
Perhaps he has himself removed the missing articles, but has forgotten it.
His experiment is not a decisive test. He thinks of the silver in the sideboard
—the children would not have taken that nor would he absent-mindedly
have changed its place. He looks; all the solid ware is gone. The conception
of burglars is confirmed; examination of windows and doors shows that they
have been tampered with. Belief culminates; the original isolated facts have
been woven into a coherent fabric. The idea first suggested (inductively) has
been employed to reason out hypothetically certain additional particulars
not yet experienced, that ought to be there, if the suggestion is correct. Then
new acts of observation have shown that the particulars theoretically called
for are present, and by this process the hypothesis is strengthened,
corroborated. This moving back and forth between the observed facts and
the conditional idea is kept up till a coherent experience of an object is
substituted for the experience of conflicting details—or else the whole matter
is given up as a bad job.
Science is the same operations carefully performed
Sciences exemplify similar attitudes and operations,[Pg 84] but with a
higher degree of elaboration of the instruments of caution, exactness and
thoroughness. This greater elaboration brings about specialization, an
accurate marking off of various types of problems from one another, and a
corresponding segregation and classification of the materials of experience
associated with each type of problem. We shall devote the remainder of this
chapter to a consideration of the devices by which the discovery, the
development, and the testing of meanings are scientifically carried on.
§ 2. Guidance of the Inductive Movement
Guidance is indirect
Control of the formation of suggestion is necessarily indirect, not direct;
imperfect, not perfect. Just because all discovery, all apprehension involving
thought of the new, goes from the known, the present, to the unknown and
absent, no rules can be stated that will guarantee correct inference. Just
what is suggested to a person in a given situation depends upon his native
constitution (his originality, his genius), temperament, the prevalent
direction of his interests, his early environment, the general tenor of his past
experiences, his special training, the things that have recently occupied him
continuously or vividly, and so on; to some extent even upon an accidental
conjunction of present circumstances. These matters, so far as they lie in
the past or in external conditions, clearly escape regulation. A suggestion
simply does or does not occur; this or that suggestion just happens, occurs,
springs up. If, however, prior experience and training have developed an
attitude of patience in a condition of doubt, a capacity for suspended
judgment, and a liking for inquiry, indirect control of the course of
suggestions is possible.[Pg 85] The individual may return upon, revise,
restate, enlarge, and analyze the facts out of which suggestion springs.
Inductive methods, in the technical sense, all have to do with regulating the
conditions under which observation, memory, and the acceptance of the
testimony of others (the operations supplying the raw data) proceed.
Method of indirect regulation
Given the facts A B C D on one side and certain individual habits on the
other, suggestion occurs automatically. But if the facts A B C D are carefully
looked into and thereby resolved into the facts A´ B´´ R S, a suggestion will
automatically present itself different from that called up by the facts in their
first form. To inventory the facts, to describe exactly and minutely their
respective traits, to magnify artificially those that are obscure and feeble, to
reduce artificially those that are so conspicuous and glaring as to be
distracting,—these are ways of modifying the facts that exercise suggestive
force, and thereby indirectly guiding the formation of suggested inferences.
Illustration from diagnosis
Consider, for example, how a physician makes his diagnosis—his inductive
interpretation. If he is scientifically trained, he suspends—postpones—
reaching a conclusion in order that he may not be led by superficial
occurrences into a snap judgment. Certain conspicuous phenomena may
forcibly suggest typhoid, but he avoids a conclusion, or even any strong
preference for this or that conclusion until he has greatly (i) enlarged the
scope of his data, and (ii) rendered them more minute. He not only questions
the patient as to his feelings and as to his acts prior to the disease, but by
various manipulations with his hands (and with instruments made for the
purpose) brings to light a large number of facts of which the patient is quite
unaware. The state of tem[Pg 86]perature, respiration, and heart-action is
accurately noted, and their fluctuations from time to time are exactly
recorded. Until this examination has worked out toward a wider collection
and in toward a minuter scrutiny of details, inference is deferred.
Summary: definition of scientific induction
Scientific induction means, in short, all the processes by which the
observing and amassing of data are regulated with a view to facilitating the
formation of explanatory conceptions and theories. These devices are all
directed toward selecting the precise facts to which weight and significance
shall attach in forming suggestions or ideas. Specifically, this selective
determination involves devices of (1) elimination by analysis of what is likely
to be misleading and irrelevant, (2) emphasis of the important by collection
and comparison of cases, (3) deliberate construction of data by experimental
variation.
Elimination of irrelevant meanings
(1) It is a common saying that one must learn to discriminate between
observed facts and judgments based upon them. Taken literally, such advice
cannot be carried out; in every observed thing there is—if the thing have any
meaning at all—some consolidation of meaning with what is sensibly and
physically present, such that, if this were entirely excluded, what is left
would have no sense. A says: "I saw my brother." The term brother, however,
involves a relation that cannot be sensibly or physically observed; it is
inferential in status. If A contents himself with saying, "I saw a man," the
factor of classification, of intellectual reference, is less complex, but still
exists. If, as a last resort, A were to say, "Anyway, I saw a colored object,"
some relationship, though more rudimentary and undefined, still subsists.
Theoretically, it is possible that no[Pg 87] object was there, only an unusual
mode of nerve stimulation. None the less, the advice to discriminate what is
observed from what is inferred is sound practical advice. Its working import
is that one should eliminate or exclude those inferences as to which
experience has shown that there is greatest liability to error. This, of course,
is a relative matter. Under ordinary circumstances no reasonable doubt
would attach to the observation, "I see my brother"; it would be pedantic and
silly to resolve this recognition back into a more elementary form. Under
other circumstances it might be a perfectly genuine question as to whether
A saw even a colored thing, or whether the color was due to a stimulation of
the sensory optical apparatus (like "seeing stars" upon a blow) or to a
disordered circulation. In general, the scientific man is one who knows that
he is likely to be hurried to a conclusion, and that part of this precipitancy
is due to certain habits which tend to make him "read" certain meanings
into the situation that confronts him, so that he must be on the lookout
against errors arising from his interests, habits, and current
preconceptions.
The technique of conclusion
The technique of scientific inquiry thus consists in various processes that
tend to exclude over-hasty "reading in" of meanings; devices that aim to give
a purely "objective" unbiased rendering of the data to be interpreted.
Flushed cheeks usually mean heightened temperature; paleness means
lowered temperature. The clinical thermometer records automatically the
actual temperature and hence checks up the habitual associations that
might lead to error in a given case. All the instrumentalities of observation—
the various -meters and -graphs and -scopes—fill a part[Pg 88] of their
scientific rôle in helping to eliminate meanings supplied because of habit,
prejudice, the strong momentary preoccupation of excitement and
anticipation, and by the vogue of existing theories. Photographs,
phonographs, kymographs, actinographs, seismographs, plethysmographs,
and the like, moreover, give records that are permanent, so that they can be
employed by different persons, and by the same person in different states of
mind, i.e. under the influence of varying expectations and dominant beliefs.
Thus purely personal prepossessions (due to habit, to desire, to after-effects
of recent experience) may be largely eliminated. In ordinary language, the
facts are objectively, rather than subjectively, determined. In this way
tendencies to premature interpretation are held in check.
Collection of instances
(2) Another important method of control consists in the multiplication of
cases or instances. If I doubt whether a certain handful gives a fair sample,
or representative, for purposes of judging value, of a whole carload of grain, I
take a number of handfuls from various parts of the car and compare them.
If they agree in quality, well and good; if they disagree, we try to get enough
samples so that when they are thoroughly mixed the result will be a fair
basis for an evaluation. This illustration represents roughly the value of that
aspect of scientific control in induction which insists upon multiplying
observations instead of basing the conclusion upon one or a few cases.
This method not the whole of induction
So prominent, indeed, is this aspect of inductive method that it is frequently
treated as the whole of induction. It is supposed that all inductive inference
is based upon collecting and comparing a number of like cases. But in fact
such comparison and collection is a[Pg 89] secondary development within
the process of securing a correct conclusion in some single case. If a man
infers from a single sample of grain as to the grade of wheat of the car as a
whole, it is induction and, under certain circumstances, a sound induction;
other cases are resorted to simply for the sake of rendering that induction
more guarded, and more probably correct. In like fashion, the reasoning that
led up to the burglary idea in the instance already cited (p. 83) was
inductive, though there was but one single case examined. The particulars
upon which the general meaning (or relation) of burglary was grounded were
simply the sum total of the unlike items and qualities that made up the one
case examined. Had this case presented very great obscurities and
difficulties, recourse might then have been had to examination of a number
of similar cases. But this comparison would not make inductive a process
which was not previously of that character; it would only render induction
more wary and adequate. The object of bringing into consideration a
multitude of cases is to facilitate the selection of the evidential or significant
features upon which to base inference in some single case.
Contrast as important as likeness
Accordingly, points of unlikeness are as important as points
of likeness among the cases examined. Comparison, without contrast, does
not amount to anything logically. In the degree in which other cases
observed or remembered merely duplicate the case in question, we are no
better off for purposes of inference than if we had permitted our single
original fact to dictate a conclusion. In the case of the various samples of
grain, it is the fact that the samples are unlike, at least in the part of the
carload from which they are taken, that is important. Were it not for this
unlikeness, their like[Pg 90]ness in quality would be of no avail in assisting
inference.[16] If we are endeavoring to get a child to regulate his conclusions
about the germination of a seed by taking into account a number of
instances, very little is gained if the conditions in all these instances closely
approximate one another. But if one seed is placed in pure sand, another in
loam, and another on blotting-paper, and if in each case there are two
conditions, one with and another without moisture, the unlike factors tend
to throw into relief the factors that are significant (or "essential") for reaching
a conclusion. Unless, in short, the observer takes care to have the
differences in the observed cases as extreme as conditions allow, and unless
he notes unlikenesses as carefully as likenesses, he has no way of
determining the evidential force of the data that confront him.
Importance of exceptions and contrary cases
Another way of bringing out this importance of unlikeness is the emphasis
put by the scientist upon negative cases—upon instances which it would
seem ought to fall into line but which as matter of fact do not. Anomalies,
exceptions, things which agree in most respects but disagree in some crucial
point, are so important that many of the devices of scientific technique are
designed purely to detect, record, and impress upon memory contrasting
cases. Darwin remarked that so easy is it to pass over cases that oppose a
favorite generalization, that he had made it a habit not merely to hunt for
contrary instances, but also to write down any exception he noted or
thought of—as otherwise it was almost sure to be forgotten.[Pg 91]
§ 3. Experimental Variation of Conditions
Experiment the typical method of introducing contrast factors
We have already trenched upon this factor of inductive method, the one that
is the most important of all wherever it is feasible. Theoretically, one sample
case of the right kind will be as good a basis for an inference as a thousand
cases; but cases of the "right kind" rarely turn up spontaneously. We have to
search for them, and we may have to make them. If we take cases just as we
find them—whether one case or many cases—they contain much that is
irrelevant to the problem in hand, while much that is relevant is obscure,
hidden. The object of experimentation is the construction, by regular steps
taken on the basis of a plan thought out in advance, of a typical, crucial case,
a case formed with express reference to throwing light on the difficulty in
question. All inductive methods rest (as already stated, p. 85) upon
regulation of the conditions of observation and memory; experiment is
simply the most adequate regulation possible of these conditions. We try to
make the observation such that every factor entering into it, together with
the mode and the amount of its operation, may be open to recognition. Such
making of observations constitutes experiment.
Three advantages of experiment
Such observations have many and obvious advantages over observations—
no matter how extensive—with respect to which we simply wait for an event
to happen or an object to present itself. Experiment overcomes the defects
due to (a) the rarity, (b) the subtlety and minuteness (or the violence), and (c)
the rigid fixity of facts as we ordinarily experience them. The following
quotations from Jevons's Elementary Lessons in Logic bring out all these
points:
(i) "We might have to wait years or centuries to meet[Pg 92] accidentally with
facts which we can readily produce at any moment in a laboratory; and it is
probable that most of the chemical substances now known, and many
excessively useful products would never have been discovered at all by
waiting till nature presented them spontaneously to our observation."
This quotation refers to the infrequency or rarity of certain facts of nature,
even very important ones. The passage then goes on to speak of the
minuteness of many phenomena which makes them escape ordinary
experience:
(ii) "Electricity doubtless operates in every particle of matter, perhaps at
every moment of time; and even the ancients could not but notice its action
in the loadstone, in lightning, in the Aurora Borealis, or in a piece of rubbed
amber. But in lightning electricity was too intense and dangerous; in the
other cases it was too feeble to be properly understood. The science of
electricity and magnetism could only advance by getting regular supplies of
electricity from the common electric machine or the galvanic battery and by
making powerful electromagnets. Most, if not all, the effects which electricity
produces must go on in nature, but altogether too obscurely for
observation."
Jevons then deals with the fact that, under ordinary conditions of
experience, phenomena which can be understood only by seeing them under
varying conditions are presented in a fixed and uniform way.
(iii) "Thus carbonic acid is only met in the form of a gas, proceeding from the
combustion of carbon; but when exposed to extreme pressure and cold, it is
condensed into a liquid, and may even be converted into a snowlike solid
substance. Many other gases have in[Pg 93] like manner been liquefied or
solidified, and there is reason to believe that every substance is capable of
taking all three forms of solid, liquid, and gas, if only the conditions of
temperature and pressure can be sufficiently varied. Mere observation of
nature would have led us, on the contrary, to suppose that nearly all
substances were fixed in one condition only, and could not be converted
from solid into liquid and from liquid into gas."
Many volumes would be required to describe in detail all the methods that
investigators have developed in various subjects for analyzing and restating
the facts of ordinary experience so that we may escape from capricious and
routine suggestions, and may get the facts in such a form and in such a
light (or context) that exact and far-reaching explanations may be suggested
in place of vague and limited ones. But these various devices of inductive
inquiry all have one goal in view: the indirect regulation of the function of
suggestion, or formation of ideas; and, in the main, they will be found to
reduce to some combination of the three types of selecting and arranging
subject-matter just described.
§ 4. Guidance of the Deductive Movement
Value of deduction for guiding induction
Before dealing directly with this topic, we must note that systematic
regulation of induction depends upon the possession of a body of general
principles that may be applied deductively to the examination or
construction of particular cases as they come up. If the physician does not
know the general laws of the physiology of the human body, he has little
way of telling what is either peculiarly significant or peculiarly[Pg
94] exceptional in any particular case that he is called upon to treat. If he
knows the laws of circulation, digestion, and respiration, he can deduce the
conditions that should normally be found in a given case. These
considerations give a base line from which the deviations and abnormalities
of a particular case may be measured. In this way, the nature of the problem
at hand is located and defined. Attention is not wasted upon features which
though conspicuous have nothing to do with the case; it is concentrated
upon just those traits which are out of the way and hence require
explanation. A question well put is half answered; i.e. a difficulty clearly
apprehended is likely to suggest its own solution,—while a vague and
miscellaneous perception of the problem leads to groping and fumbling.
Deductive systems are necessary in order to put the question in a fruitful
form.
"Reasoning a thing out"
The control of the origin and development of hypotheses by deduction does
not cease, however, with locating the problem. Ideas as they first present
themselves are inchoate and incomplete. Deduction is their elaboration into
fullness and completeness of meaning (see p. 76). The phenomena which the
physician isolates from the total mass of facts that exist in front of him
suggest, we will say, typhoid fever. Now this conception of typhoid fever is
one that is capable of development. If there is typhoid, wherever there is
typhoid, there are certain results, certain characteristic symptoms. By going
over mentally the full bearing of the concept of typhoid, the scientist is
instructed as to further phenomena to be found. Its development gives him
an instrument of inquiry, of observation and experimentation. He can go to
work deliberately to see whether[Pg 95] the case presents those features that
it should have if the supposition is valid. The deduced results form a basis
for comparison with observed results. Except where there is a system of
principles capable of being elaborated by theoretical reasoning, the process
of testing (or proof) of a hypothesis is incomplete and haphazard.
Such reasoning implies systematized knowledge,
These considerations indicate the method by which the deductive movement
is guided. Deduction requires a system of allied ideas which may be
translated into one another by regular or graded steps. The question is
whether the facts that confront us can be identified as typhoid fever. To all
appearances, there is a great gap between them and typhoid. But if we can,
by some method of substitutions, go through a series of intermediary terms
(see p. 72), the gap may, after all, be easily bridged. Typhoid may
mean p which in turn means o, which means n which means m, which is
very similar to the data selected as the key to the problem.
or definition and classification
One of the chief objects of science is to provide for every typical branch of
subject-matter a set of meanings and principles so closely interknit that any
one implies some other according to definite conditions, which under certain
other conditions implies another, and so on. In this way, various
substitutions of equivalents are possible, and reasoning can trace out,
without having recourse to specific observations, very remote consequences
of any suggested principle. Definition, general formulæ, and classification
are the devices by which the fixation and elaboration of a meaning into its
detailed ramifications are carried on. They are not ends in themselves—as
they are frequently regarded even in elementary education—but
instrumentalities for facilitating[Pg 96] the development of a conception into
the form where its applicability to given facts may best be tested. [17]
The final control of deduction
The final test of deduction lies in experimental observation. Elaboration by
reasoning may make a suggested idea very rich and very plausible, but it
will not settle the validity of that idea. Only if facts can be observed (by
methods either of collection or of experimentation), that agree in detail and
without exception with the deduced results, are we justified in accepting the
deduction as giving a valid conclusion. Thinking, in short, must end as well
as begin in the domain of concrete observations, if it is to be complete
thinking. And the ultimate educative value of all deductive processes is
measured by the degree to which they become working tools in the creation
and development of new experiences.
§ 5. Some Educational Bearings of the Discussion
Educational counterparts of false logical theories
Isolation of "facts"
Some of the points of the foregoing logical analysis may be clinched by a
consideration of their educational implications, especially with reference to
certain practices that grow out of a false separation by which each is
thought to be independent of the other and complete in itself. (i) In some
school subjects, or at all events in some topics or in some lessons, the
pupils are immersed in details; their minds are loaded with disconnected
items (whether gleaned by observation and memory, or accepted on hearsay
and authority). Induction is treated as beginning and ending with the
amassing of facts, of particular isolated pieces of information. That these
items are educative only as suggesting a view of some larger situation in
which the[Pg 97] particulars are included and thereby accounted for, is
ignored. In object lessons in elementary education and in laboratory
instruction in higher education, the subject is often so treated that the
student fails to "see the forest on account of the trees." Things and their
qualities are retailed and detailed, without reference to a more general
character which they stand for and mean. Or, in the laboratory, the student
becomes engrossed in the processes of manipulation,—irrespective of the
reason for their performance, without recognizing a typical problem for the
solution of which they afford the appropriate method. Only deduction brings
out and emphasizes consecutive relationships, and only
when relationships are held in view does learning become more than a
miscellaneous scrap-bag.
Failure to follow up by reasoning
(ii) Again, the mind is allowed to hurry on to a vague notion of the whole of
which the fragmentary facts are portions, without any attempt to become
conscious of how they are bound together as parts of this whole. The
student feels that "in a general way," as we say, the facts of the history or
geography lesson are related thus and so; but "in a general way" here stands
only for "in a vague way," somehow or other, with no clear recognition of just
how.
The pupil is encouraged to form, on the basis of the particular facts, a
general notion, a conception of how they stand related; but no pains are
taken to make the student follow up the notion, to elaborate it and see just
what its bearings are upon the case in hand and upon similar cases. The
inductive inference, the guess, is formed by the student; if it happens to be
correct, it is at once accepted by the teacher; or if it is false, it is rejected. If
any amplification of the idea occurs, it is[Pg 98] quite likely carried through
by the teacher, who thereby assumes the responsibility for its intellectual
development. But a complete, an integral, act of thought requires that the
person making the suggestion (the guess) be responsible also for reasoning
out its bearings upon the problem in hand; that he develop the suggestion
at least enough to indicate the ways in which it applies to and accounts for
the specific data of the case. Too often when a recitation does not consist in
simply testing the ability of the student to display some form of technical
skill, or to repeat facts and principles accepted on the authority of text-book
or lecturer, the teacher goes to the opposite extreme; and after calling out
the spontaneous reflections of the pupils, their guesses or ideas about the
matter, merely accepts or rejects them, assuming himself the responsibility
for their elaboration. In this way, the function of suggestion and of
interpretation is excited, but it is not directed and trained. Induction is
stimulated but is not carried over into the reasoning phase necessary to
complete it.
In other subjects and topics, the deductive phase is isolated, and is treated
as if it were complete in itself. This false isolation may show itself in either
(and both) of two points; namely, at the beginning or at the end of the resort
to general intellectual procedure.
Isolation of deduction by commencing with it
(iii) Beginning with definitions, rules, general principles, classifications, and
the like, is a common form of the first error. This method has been such a
uniform object of attack on the part of all educational reformers that it is not
necessary to dwell upon it further than to note that the mistake is, logically,
due to the attempt to introduce deductive considerations without first
making acquaintance with the particular facts that[Pg 99] create a need for
the generalizing rational devices. Unfortunately, the reformer sometimes
carries his objection too far, or rather locates it in the wrong place. He is led
into a tirade against all definition, all systematization, all use of general
principles, instead of confining himself to pointing out their futility and their
deadness when not properly motivated by familiarity with concrete
experiences.
Isolation of deduction from direction of new observations
(iv) The isolation of deduction is seen, at the other end, wherever there is
failure to clinch and test the results of the general reasoning processes by
application to new concrete cases. The final point of the deductive devices
lies in their use in assimilating and comprehending individual cases. No one
understands a general principle fully—no matter how adequately he can
demonstrate it, to say nothing of repeating it—till he can employ it in the
mastery of new situations, which, if they are new, differ in manifestation
from the cases used in reaching the generalization. Too often the text-book
or teacher is contented with a series of somewhat perfunctory examples and
illustrations, and the student is not forced to carry the principle that he has
formulated over into further cases of his own experience. In so far, the
principle is inert and dead.
Lack of provision for experimentation
(v) It is only a variation upon this same theme to say that every complete act
of reflective inquiry makes provision for experimentation—for testing
suggested and accepted principles by employing them for the active
construction of new cases, in which new qualities emerge. Only slowly do
our schools accommodate themselves to the general advance of scientific
method. From the scientific side, it is demonstrated that effective and
integral thinking is possible only where the experi[Pg 100]mental method in
some form is used. Some recognition of this principle is evinced in higher
institutions of learning, colleges and high schools. But in elementary
education, it is still assumed, for the most part, that the pupil's natural
range of observations, supplemented by what he accepts on hearsay, is
adequate for intellectual growth. Of course it is not necessary that
laboratories shall be introduced under that name, much less that elaborate
apparatus be secured; but the entire scientific history of humanity
demonstrates that the conditions for complete mental activity will not be
obtained till adequate provision is made for the carrying on of activities that
actually modify physical conditions, and that books, pictures, and even
objects that are passively observed but not manipulated do not furnish the
provision required.[Pg 101]

CHAPTER EIGHT
JUDGMENT: THE INTERPRETATION OF FACTS
§ 1. The Three Factors of Judging
Good judgment
A man of good judgment in a given set of affairs is a man in so far educated,
trained, whatever may be his literacy. And if our schools turn out their
pupils in that attitude of mind which is conducive to good judgment in any
department of affairs in which the pupils are placed, they have done more
than if they sent out their pupils merely possessed of vast stores of
information, or high degrees of skill in specialized branches. To know what
is good judgment we need first to know what judgment is.
Judgment and inference
That there is an intimate connection between judgment and inference is
obvious enough. The aim of inference is to terminate itself in an adequate
judgment of a situation, and the course of inference goes on through a
series of partial and tentative judgments. What are these units, these terms
of inference when we examine them on their own account? Their significant
traits may be readily gathered from a consideration of the operations to
which the word judgment was originally applied: namely, the authoritative
decision of matters in legal controversy—the procedure of the judge on the
bench. There are three such features: (1) a controversy, consisting of
opposite claims regarding the same objective situation; (2) a process of
defining and elaborating these claims and of sifting the facts adduced to[Pg
102] support them; (3) a final decision, or sentence, closing the particular
matter in dispute and also serving as a rule or principle for deciding future
cases.
Uncertainty the antecedent of judgment
1. Unless there is something doubtful, the situation is read off at a glance; it
is taken in on sight, i.e. there is merely apprehension, perception,
recognition, not judgment. If the matter is wholly doubtful, if it is dark and
obscure throughout, there is a blind mystery and again no judgment occurs.
But if it suggests, however vaguely, different meanings, rival possible
interpretations, there is some point at issue, some matter at stake. Doubt
takes the form of dispute, controversy; different sides compete for a
conclusion in their favor. Cases brought to trial before a judge illustrate
neatly and unambiguously this strife of alternative interpretations; but any
case of trying to clear up intellectually a doubtful situation exemplifies the
same traits. A moving blur catches our eye in the distance; we ask
ourselves: "What is it? Is it a cloud of whirling dust? a tree waving its
branches? a man signaling to us?" Something in the total situation suggests
each of these possible meanings. Only one of them can possibly be sound;
perhaps none of them is appropriate; yet some meaning the thing in
question surely has. Which of the alternative suggested meanings has the
rightful claim? What does the perception really mean? How is it to be
interpreted, estimated, appraised, placed? Every judgment proceeds from
some such situation.
Judgment defines the issue,
2. The hearing of the controversy, the trial, i.e. the weighing of alternative
claims, divides into two branches, either of which, in a given case, may be
more conspicuous than the other. In the consideration of a legal dispute,
these two branches are sifting the evidence and[Pg 103] selecting the rules
that are applicable; they are "the facts" and "the law" of the case. In
judgment they are (a) the determination of the data that are important in the
given case (compare the inductive movement); and (b) the elaboration of the
conceptions or meanings suggested by the crude data (compare the
deductive movement). (a) What portions or aspects of the situation are
significant in controlling the formation of the interpretation? (b) Just what is
the full meaning and bearing of the conception that is used as a method of
interpretation? These questions are strictly correlative; the answer to each
depends upon the answer to the other. We may, however, for convenience,
consider them separately.
(a) by selecting what facts are evidence
(a) In every actual occurrence, there are many details which are part of the
total occurrence, but which nevertheless are not significant in relation to the
point at issue. All parts of an experience are equally present, but they are
very far from being of equal value as signs or as evidences. Nor is there any
tag or label on any trait saying: "This is important," or "This is trivial." Nor is
intensity, or vividness or conspicuousness, a safe measure of indicative and
proving value. The glaring thing may be totally insignificant in this
particular situation, and the key to the understanding of the whole matter
may be modest or hidden (compare p. 74). Features that are not significant
are distracting; they proffer their claims to be regarded as clues and cues to
interpretation, while traits that are significant do not appear on the surface
at all. Hence, judgment is required even in reference to the situation or event
that is present to the senses; elimination or rejection, selection, discovery, or
bringing to light must take place.[Pg 104] Till we have reached a final
conclusion, rejection and selection must be tentative or conditional. We
select the things that we hope or trust are cues to meaning. But if they do
not suggest a situation that accepts and includes them (see p. 81), we
reconstitute our data, the facts of the case; for we mean, intellectually, by
the facts of the case those traits that are used as evidence in reaching a
conclusion or forming a decision.
Expertness in selecting evidence
No hard and fast rules for this operation of selecting and rejecting, or fixing
upon the facts, can be given. It all comes back, as we say, to the good
judgment, the good sense, of the one judging. To be a good judge is to have a
sense of the relative indicative or signifying values of the various features of
the perplexing situation; to know what to let go as of no account; what to
eliminate as irrelevant; what to retain as conducive to outcome; what to
emphasize as a clue to the difficulty. [18] This power in ordinary matters we
call knack, tact, cleverness; in more important affairs, insight, discernment.
In part it is instinctive or inborn; but it also represents the funded outcome
of long familiarity with like operations in the past. Possession of this ability
to seize what is evidential or significant and to let the rest go is the mark of
the expert, the connoisseur, the judge, in any matter.
Intuitive judgments
Mill cites the following case, which is worth noting as an instance of the
extreme delicacy and accuracy to which may be developed this power of
sizing up the significant factors of a situation. "A Scotch manufacturer
procured from England, at a high rate of wages, a working dyer, famous for
producing very fine colors, with the view of teaching to his other workmen
the same[Pg 105] skill. The workman came; but his method of proportioning
the ingredients, in which lay the secret of the effects he produced, was by
taking them up in handfuls, while the common method was to weigh them.
The manufacturer sought to make him turn his handling system into an
equivalent weighing system, that the general principles of his peculiar mode
of proceeding might be ascertained. This, however, the man found himself
quite unable to do, and could therefore impart his own skill to nobody. He
had, from individual cases of his own experience, established a connection
in his mind between fine effects of color and tactual perceptions in handling
his dyeing materials; and from these perceptions he could, in any particular
case, infer the means to be employed and the effects which would be
produced." Long brooding over conditions, intimate contact associated with
keen interest, thorough absorption in a multiplicity of allied experiences,
tend to bring about those judgments which we then call intuitive; but they
are true judgments because they are based on intelligent selection and
estimation, with the solution of a problem as the controlling standard.
Possession of this capacity makes the difference between the artist and the
intellectual bungler.
Such is judging ability, in its completest form, as to the data of the decision
to be reached. But in any case there is a certain feeling along for the way to
be followed; a constant tentative picking out of certain qualities to see what
emphasis upon them would lead to; a willingness to hold final selection in
suspense; and to reject the factors entirely or relegate them to a different
position in the evidential scheme if other features yield more solvent
suggestions. Alertness, flexibility, curios[Pg 106]ity are the essentials;
dogmatism, rigidity, prejudice, caprice, arising from routine, passion, and
flippancy are fatal.
(b) To decide an issue, the appropriate principles must also be selected
(b) This selection of data is, of course, for the sake of controlling
the development and elaboration of the suggested meaning in the light of
which they are to be interpreted (compare p. 76). An evolution of conceptions
thus goes on simultaneously with the determination of the facts; one
possible meaning after another is held before the mind, considered in
relation to the data to which it is applied, is developed into its more detailed
bearings upon the data, is dropped or tentatively accepted and used. We do
not approach any problem with a wholly naïve or virgin mind; we approach
it with certain acquired habitual modes of understanding, with a certain
store of previously evolved meanings, or at least of experiences from which
meanings may be educed. If the circumstances are such that a habitual
response is called directly into play, there is an immediate grasp of meaning.
If the habit is checked, and inhibited from easy application, a possible
meaning for the facts in question presents itself. No hard and fast rules
decide whether a meaning suggested is the right and proper meaning to
follow up. The individual's own good (or bad) judgment is the guide. There is
no label on any given idea or principle which says automatically, "Use me in
this situation"—as the magic cakes of Alice in Wonderland were inscribed
"Eat me." The thinker has to decide, to choose; and there is always a risk, so
that the prudent thinker selects warily, subject, that is, to confirmation or
frustration by later events. If one is not able to estimate wisely what is
relevant to the interpretation of a given perplexing or doubtful issue, it
avails[Pg 107] little that arduous learning has built up a large stock of
concepts. For learning is not wisdom; information does not guarantee good
judgment. Memory may provide an antiseptic refrigerator in which to store a
stock of meanings for future use, but judgment selects and adopts the one
used in a given emergency—and without an emergency (some crisis, slight
or great) there is no call for judgment. No conception, even if it is carefully
and firmly established in the abstract, can at first safely be more than
a candidate for the office of interpreter. Only greater success than that of its
rivals in clarifying dark spots, untying hard knots, reconciling discrepancies,
can elect it or prove it a valid idea for the given situation.
Judging terminates in a decision or statement
3. The judgment when formed is a decision; it closes (or concludes) the
question at issue. This determination not only settles that particular case,
but it helps fix a rule or method for deciding similar matters in the future;
as the sentence of the judge on the bench both terminates that dispute and
also forms a precedent for future decisions. If the interpretation settled upon
is not controverted by subsequent events, a presumption is built up in favor
of similar interpretation in other cases where the features are not so
obviously unlike as to make it inappropriate. In this way, principles of
judging are gradually built up; a certain manner of interpretation gets
weight, authority. In short, meanings get standardized, they become logical
concepts (see below, p. 118).
§ 2. The Origin and Nature of Ideas
Ideas are conjectures employed in judging
This brings us to the question of ideas in relation to judgments.[19] Something
in an obscure situation sug[Pg 108]gests something else as its meaning. If
this meaning is at once accepted, there is no reflective thinking, no genuine
judging. Thought is cut short uncritically; dogmatic belief, with all its
attending risks, takes place. But if the meaning suggested is held in
suspense, pending examination and inquiry, there is true judgment. We stop
and think, we de-fer conclusion in order to in-fer more thoroughly. In this
process of being only conditionally accepted, accepted only for
examination, meanings become ideas. That is to say, an idea is a meaning
that is tentatively entertained, formed, and used with reference to its fitness
to decide a perplexing situation,—a meaning used as a tool of judgment.
Or tools of interpretation
Let us recur to our instance of a blur in motion appearing at a distance. We
wonder what the thing is, i.e. what the blur means. A man waving his arms,
a friend beckoning to us, are suggested as possibilities. To accept at once
either alternative is to arrest judgment. But if we treat what is suggested as
only a suggestion, a supposition, a possibility, it becomes an idea, having
the following traits: (a) As merely a suggestion, it is a conjecture, a guess,
which in cases of greater dignity we call a hypothesis or a theory. That is to
say, it is a possible but as yet doubtful mode of interpretation. (b) Even
though doubtful, it has an office to perform; namely, that of directing
inquiry and examination. If this blur means a friend beckoning, then careful
observation should show certain other traits. If it is a man driving unruly
cattle, certain other traits should be found. Let us look and see if these
traits are found. Taken merely as a doubt, an idea would paralyze inquiry.
Taken merely as a certainty, it would arrest[Pg 109] inquiry. Taken as a
doubtful possibility, it affords a standpoint, a platform, a method of inquiry.
Pseudo-ideas
Ideas are not then genuine ideas unless they are tools in a reflective
examination which tends to solve a problem. Suppose it is a question of
having the pupil grasp the idea of the sphericity of the earth. This is
different from teaching him its sphericity as a fact. He may be shown (or
reminded of) a ball or a globe, and be told that the earth is round like those
things; he may then be made to repeat that statement day after day till the
shape of the earth and the shape of the ball are welded together in his mind.
But he has not thereby acquired any idea of the earth's sphericity; at most,
he has had a certain image of a sphere and has finally managed to image
the earth after the analogy of his ball image. To grasp sphericity as an idea,
the pupil must first have realized certain perplexities or confusing features
in observed facts and have had the idea of spherical shape suggested to him
as a possible way of accounting for the phenomena in question. Only by use
as a method of interpreting data so as to give them fuller meaning does
sphericity become a genuine idea. There may be a vivid image and no idea;
or there may be a fleeting, obscure image and yet an idea, if that image
performs the function of instigating and directing the observation and
relation of facts.
Ideas furnish the only alternative to "hit or miss" methods
Logical ideas are like keys which are shaping with reference to opening a
lock. Pike, separated by a glass partition from the fish upon which they
ordinarily prey, will—so it is said—butt their heads against the glass until it
is literally beaten into them that they cannot get at their food. Animals learn
(when they learn at all) by a "cut and try" method; by doing at random [Pg
110] first one thing and another thing and then preserving the things that
happen to succeed. Action directed consciously by ideas—by suggested
meanings accepted for the sake of experimenting with them—is the sole
alternative both to bull-headed stupidity and to learning bought from that
dear teacher—chance experience.
They are methods of indirect attack
It is significant that many words for intelligence suggest the idea of
circuitous, evasive activity—often with a sort of intimation of even moral
obliquity. The bluff, hearty man goes straight (and stupidly, it is implied) at
some work. The intelligent man is cunning, shrewd (crooked), wily, subtle,
crafty, artful, designing—the idea of indirection is involved. [20] An idea is a
method of evading, circumventing, or surmounting through reflection
obstacles that otherwise would have to be attacked by brute force. But ideas
may lose their intellectual quality as they are habitually used. When a child
was first learning to recognize, in some hesitating suspense, cats, dogs,
houses, marbles, trees, shoes, and other objects, ideas—conscious and
tentative meanings—intervened as methods of identification. Now, as a rule,
the thing and the meaning are so completely fused that there is no judgment
and no idea proper, but only automatic recognition. On the other hand,
things that are, as a rule, directly apprehended and familiar become
subjects of judgment when they present themselves in unusual contexts: as
forms, distances, sizes, positions when we attempt to draw them; triangles,
squares, and circles when they turn up, not in connection with familiar toys,
implements, and utensils, but as problems in geometry.
[Pg 111]
§ 3. Analysis and Synthesis
Judging clears up things: analysis
Through judging confused data are cleared up, and seemingly incoherent
and disconnected facts brought together. Things may have a peculiar feeling
for us, they may make a certain indescribable impression upon us; the thing
may feel round (that is, present a quality which we afterwards define as
round), an act may seem rude (or what we afterwards classify as rude), and
yet this quality may be lost, absorbed, blended in the total value of the
situation. Only as we need to use just that aspect of the original situation as
a tool of grasping something perplexing or obscure in another situation, do
we abstract or detach the quality so that it becomes individualized. Only
because we need to characterize the shape of some new object or the moral
quality of some new act, does the element of roundness or rudeness in the
old experience detach itself, and stand out as a distinctive feature. If the
element thus selected clears up what is otherwise obscure in the new
experience, if it settles what is uncertain, it thereby itself gains in
positiveness and definiteness of meaning. This point will meet us again in
the following chapter; here we shall speak of the matter only as it bears
upon the questions of analysis and synthesis.
Mental analysis is not like physical division
Misapprehension of analysis in education
Even when it is definitely stated that intellectual and physical analyses are
different sorts of operations, intellectual analysis is often treated after the
analogy of physical; as if it were the breaking up of a whole into all its
constituent parts in the mind instead of in space. As nobody can possibly
tell what breaking a whole into its parts in the mind means, this conception
leads to the further notion that logical analysis is a mere enumeration and
listing of all conceivable qualities and relations.[Pg 112] The influence upon
education of this conception has been very great.[21] Every subject in the
curriculum has passed through—or still remains in—what may be called the
phase of anatomical or morphological method: the stage in which
understanding the subject is thought to consist of multiplying distinctions of
quality, form, relation, and so on, and attaching some name to each
distinguished element. In normal growth, specific properties are emphasized
and so individualized only when they serve to clear up a present difficulty.
Only as they are involved in judging some specific situation is there any
motive or use for analyses, i.e. for emphasis upon some element or relation
as peculiarly significant.
Effects of premature formulation
The same putting the cart before the horse, the product before the process,
is found in that overconscious formulation of methods of procedure so
current in elementary instruction. (See p. 60.) The method that is employed
in discovery, in reflective inquiry, cannot possibly be identified with the
method that emerges after the discovery is made. In the genuine operation
of inference, the mind is in the attitude of search, of hunting, of projection,
of trying this and that; when the conclusion is reached, the search is at an
end. The Greeks used to discuss: "How is learning (or inquiry) possible? For
either we know already what we are after, and then we do not learn or
inquire; or we do not know, and then we cannot inquire, for we do not know
what to look for." The dilemma is at least suggestive, for it points to the true
alternative: the use in inquiry of doubt, of tentative suggestion, of
experimen[Pg 113]tation. After we have reached the conclusion, a
reconsideration of the steps of the process to see what is helpful, what is
harmful, what is merely useless, will assist in dealing more promptly and
efficaciously with analogous problems in the future. In this way, more or
less explicit method is gradually built up. (Compare the earlier discussion
on p. 62 of the psychological and the logical.)
Method comes before its formulation
It is, however, a common assumption that unless the pupil from the
outset consciously recognizes and explicitly states the method logically
implied in the result he is to reach, he will have no method, and his mind
will work confusedly or anarchically; while if he accompanies his
performance with conscious statement of some form of procedure (outline,
topical analysis, list of headings and subheadings, uniform formula) his
mind is safeguarded and strengthened. As a matter of fact, the development
of an unconscious logical attitude and habit must come first. A conscious
setting forth of the method logically adapted for reaching an end is possible
only after the result has first been reached by more unconscious and
tentative methods, while it is valuable only when a review of the method that
achieved success in a given case will throw light upon a new, similar case.
The ability to fasten upon and single out (abstract, analyze) those features of
one experience which are logically best is hindered by premature insistence
upon their explicit formulation. It is repeated use that gives
a method definiteness; and given this definiteness, precipitation into
formulated statement should follow naturally. But because teachers find
that the things which they themselves best understand are marked off and
defined in clear-cut ways, our schoolrooms are pervaded[Pg 114] with the
superstition that children are to begin with already crystallized formulæ of
method.
Judgment reveals the bearing or significance of facts: synthesis
As analysis is conceived to be a sort of picking to pieces, so synthesis is
thought to be a sort of physical piecing together; and so imagined, it also
becomes a mystery. In fact, synthesis takes place wherever we grasp the
bearing of facts on a conclusion, or of a principle on facts. As analysis
is emphasis, so synthesis is placing; the one causes the emphasized fact or
property to stand out as significant; the other gives what is selected
its context, or its connection with what is signified. Every judgment is
analytic in so far as it involves discernment, discrimination, marking off the
trivial from the important, the irrelevant from what points to a conclusion;
and it is synthetic in so far as it leaves the mind with an inclusive situation
within which the selected facts are placed.
Analysis and synthesis are correlative
Educational methods that pride themselves on being exclusively analytic or
exclusively synthetic are therefore (so far as they carry out their boasts)
incompatible with normal operations of judgment. Discussions have taken
place, for example, as to whether the teaching of geography should be
analytic or synthetic. The synthetic method is supposed to begin with the
partial, limited portion of the earth's surface already familiar to the pupil,
and then gradually piece on adjacent regions (the county, the country, the
continent, and so on) till an idea of the entire globe is reached, or of the
solar system that includes the globe. The analytic method is supposed to
begin with the physical whole, the solar system or globe, and to work down
through its constituent portions till the immediate environment is reached.
The underlying conceptions are of physical wholes and physical[Pg
115] parts. As matter of fact, we cannot assume that the portion of the earth
already familiar to the child is such a definite object, mentally, that he can
at once begin with it; his knowledge of it is misty and vague as well as
incomplete. Accordingly, mental progress will involve analysis of it—
emphasis of the features that are significant, so that they will stand out
clearly. Moreover, his own locality is not sharply marked off, neatly
bounded, and measured. His experience of it is already an experience that
involves sun, moon, and stars as parts of the scene he surveys; it involves a
changing horizon line as he moves about; that is, even his more limited and
local experience involves far-reaching factors that take his imagination clear
beyond his own street and village. Connection, relationship with a larger
whole, is already involved. But his recognition of these relations is
inadequate, vague, incorrect. He needs to utilize the features of the local
environment which are understood to help clarify and enlarge his
conceptions of the larger geographical scene to which they belong. At the
same time, not till he has grasped the larger scene will many of even the
commonest features of his environment become intelligible. Analysis leads to
synthesis; while synthesis perfects analysis. As the pupil grows in
comprehension of the vast complicated earth in its setting in space, he also
sees more definitely the meaning of the familiar local details. This intimate
interaction between selective emphasis and interpretation of what is selected
is found wherever reflection proceeds normally. Hence the folly of trying to
set analysis and synthesis over against each other.[Pg 116]
CHAPTER NINE
MEANING: OR CONCEPTIONS AND UNDERSTANDING
§ 1. The Place of Meanings in Mental Life
Meaning is central
As in our discussion of judgment we were making more explicit what is
involved in inference, so in the discussion of meaning we are only recurring
to the central function of all reflection. For one thing
to mean, signify, betoken, indicate, or point to, another we saw at the outset
to be the essential mark of thinking (see p. 8). To find out what facts, just as
they stand, mean, is the object of all discovery; to find out what facts will
carry out, substantiate, support a given meaning, is the object of all testing.
When an inference reaches a satisfactory conclusion, we attain a goal of
meaning. The act of judging involves both the growth and the application of
meanings. In short, in this chapter we are not introducing a new topic; we
are only coming to closer quarters with what hitherto has been constantly
assumed. In the first section, we shall consider the equivalence of meaning
and understanding, and the two types of understanding, direct and indirect.
I. MEANING AND UNDERSTANDING
To understand is to grasp meaning
If a person comes suddenly into your room and calls out "Paper," various
alternatives are possible. If you do not understand the English language,
there is simply a noise which may or may not act as a physical stimulus[Pg
117] and irritant. But the noise is not an intellectual object; it does not have
intellectual value. (Compare above, p. 15.) To say that you do not
understand it and that it has no meaning are equivalents. If the cry is the
usual accompaniment of the delivery of the morning paper, the sound will
have meaning, intellectual content; you will understand it. Or if you are
eagerly awaiting the receipt of some important document, you may assume
that the cry means an announcement of its arrival. If (in the third place) you
understand the English language, but no context suggests itself from your
habits and expectations, the word has meaning, but not the whole event.
You are then perplexed and incited to think out, to hunt for, some
explanation of the apparently meaningless occurrence. If you find something
that accounts for the performance, it gets meaning; you come to understand
it. As intelligent beings, we presume the existence of meaning, and its
absence is an anomaly. Hence, if it should turn out that the person merely
meant to inform you that there was a scrap of paper on the sidewalk, or that
paper existed somewhere in the universe, you would think him crazy or
yourself the victim of a poor joke. To grasp a meaning, to understand, to
identify a thing in a situation in which it is important, are thus equivalent
terms; they express the nerves of our intellectual life. Without them there is
(a) lack of intellectual content, or (b) intellectual confusion and perplexity, or
else (c) intellectual perversion—nonsense, insanity.
Knowledge and meaning
All knowledge, all science, thus aims to grasp the meaning of objects and
events, and this process always consists in taking them out of their
apparent brute isolation as events, and finding them to be parts of some[Pg
118] larger whole suggested by them, which, in turn, accounts
for, explains, interprets them; i.e. renders them significant. (Compare above,
p. 75.) Suppose that a stone with peculiar markings has been found. What
do these scratches mean? So far as the object forces the raising of this
question, it is not understood; while so far as the color and form that we see
mean to us a stone, the object is understood. It is such peculiar
combinations of the understood and the nonunderstood that provoke
thought. If at the end of the inquiry, the markings are decided to mean
glacial scratches, obscure and perplexing traits have been translated into
meanings already understood: namely, the moving and grinding power of
large bodies of ice and the friction thus induced of one rock upon another.
Something already understood in one situation has been transferred and
applied to what is strange and perplexing in another, and thereby the latter
has become plain and familiar, i.e. understood. This summary illustration
discloses that our power to think effectively depends upon possession of a
capital fund of meanings which may be applied when desired. (Compare
what was said about deduction, p. 94.)
II. DIRECT AND INDIRECT UNDERSTANDING
Direct and circuitous understanding
In the above illustrations two types of grasping of meaning are exemplified.
When the English language is understood, the person grasps at once the
meaning of "paper." He may not, however, see any meaning or sense in the
performance as a whole. Similarly, the person identifies the object on sight
as a stone; there is no secret, no mystery, no perplexity about that. But he
does not understand the markings on it. They have[Pg 119] some meaning,
but what is it? In one case, owing to familiar acquaintance, the thing and its
meaning, up to a certain point, are one. In the other, the thing and its
meaning are, temporarily at least, sundered, and meaning has to be sought
in order to understand the thing. In one case understanding is direct,
prompt, immediate; in the other, it is roundabout and delayed.
Interaction of the two types
Most languages have two sets of words to express these two modes of
understanding; one for the direct taking in or grasp of meaning, the other
for its circuitous apprehension, thus: γνωναι and ειδεναι in
Greek; noscere and scire in Latin; kennen and wissen in
German; connaître and savoir in French; while in English to be acquainted
with and to know of or about have been suggested as equivalents.[22] Now our
intellectual life consists of a peculiar interaction between these two types of
understanding. All judgment, all reflective inference, presupposes some lack
of understanding, a partial absence of meaning. We reflect in order that we
may get hold of the full and adequate significance of what happens.
Nevertheless, something must be already understood, the mind must be in
possession of some meaning which it has mastered, or else thinking is
impossible. We think in order to grasp meaning, but none the less every
extension of knowledge makes us aware of blind and opaque spots, where
with less knowledge all had seemed obvious and natural. A scientist brought
into a new district will find many things that he does not understand, where
the native savage or[Pg 120] rustic will be wholly oblivious to any meanings
beyond those directly apparent. Some Indians brought to a large city
remained stolid at the sight of mechanical wonders of bridge, trolley, and
telephone, but were held spellbound by the sight of workmen climbing poles
to repair wires. Increase of the store of meanings makes us conscious of new
problems, while only through translation of the new perplexities into what is
already familiar and plain do we understand or solve these problems. This is
the constant spiral movement of knowledge.
Intellectual progress a rhythm
Our progress in genuine knowledge always consists in part in the discovery
of something not understood in what had previously been taken for granted
as plain, obvious, matter-of-course, and in part in the use of meanings that
are directly grasped without question, as instruments for getting hold of
obscure, doubtful, and perplexing meanings. No object is so familiar, so
obvious, so commonplace that it may not unexpectedly present, in a novel
situation, some problem, and thus arouse reflection in order to understand
it. No object or principle is so strange, peculiar, or remote that it may not be
dwelt upon till its meaning becomes familiar—taken in on sight without
reflection. We may come to see, perceive, recognize, grasp, seize, lay hold
of principles, laws, abstract truths—i.e. to understand their meaning in very
immediate fashion. Our intellectual progress consists, as has been said, in a
rhythm of direct understanding—technically called apprehension—with
indirect, mediated understanding—technically called comprehension.
§ 2. The Process of Acquiring Meanings
Familiarity
The first problem that comes up in connection with direct understanding is
how a store of directly apprehen[Pg 121]sible meanings is built up. How do
we learn to view things on sight as significant members of a situation, or as
having, as a matter of course, specific meanings? Our chief difficulty in
answering this question lies in the thoroughness with which the lesson of
familiar things has been learnt. Thought can more easily traverse an
unexplored region than it can undo what has been so thoroughly done as to
be ingrained in unconscious habit. We apprehend chairs, tables, books,
trees, horses, clouds, stars, rain, so promptly and directly that it is hard to
realize that as meanings they had once to be acquired,—the meanings are
now so much parts of the things themselves.
Confusion is prior to familiarity
In an often quoted passage, Mr. James has said: "The baby, assailed by
eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming,
buzzing confusion."[23] Mr. James is speaking of a baby's world taken as a
whole; the description, however, is equally applicable to the way any new
thing strikes an adult, so far as the thing is really new and strange. To the
traditional "cat in a strange garret," everything is blurred and confused; the
wonted marks that label things so as to separate them from one another are
lacking. Foreign languages that we do not understand always seem
jabberings, babblings, in which it is impossible to fix a definite, clear-cut,
individualized group of sounds. The countryman in the crowded city street,
the landlubber at sea, the ignoramus in sport at a contest between experts
in a complicated game, are further instances. Put an unexperienced man in
a factory, and at first the work seems to him a meaningless medley. All
strangers of another race proverbially look alike to the visiting[Pg
122] foreigner. Only gross differences of size or color are perceived by an
outsider in a flock of sheep, each of which is perfectly individualized to the
shepherd. A diffusive blur and an indiscriminately shifting suction
characterize what we do not understand. The problem of the acquisition of
meaning by things, or (stated in another way) of forming habits of simple
apprehension, is thus the problem of introducing
(i) definiteness and distinction and (ii) consistency or stability of meaning
into what is otherwise vague and wavering.
Practical responses clarify confusion
The acquisition of definiteness and of coherency (or constancy) of meanings
is derived primarily from practical activities. By rolling an object, the child
makes its roundness appreciable; by bouncing it, he singles out its
elasticity; by throwing it, he makes weight its conspicuous distinctive factor.
Not through the senses, but by means of the reaction, the responsive
adjustment, is the impression made distinctive, and given a character
marked off from other qualities that call out unlike reactions. Children, for
example, are usually quite slow in apprehending differences of color.
Differences from the standpoint of the adult so glaring that it is impossible
not to note them are recognized and recalled with great difficulty. Doubtless
they do not all feel alike, but there is no intellectual recognition of what
makes the difference. The redness or greenness or blueness of the object
does not tend to call out a reaction that is sufficiently peculiar to give
prominence or distinction to the color trait. Gradually, however, certain
characteristic habitual responses associate themselves with certain things;
the white becomes the sign, say, of milk and sugar, to which the child reacts
favorably; blue becomes the sign of a dress that the child likes to wear, and
so on: and the[Pg 123] distinctive reactions tend to single out color qualities
from other things in which they had been submerged.
We identify by use or function
Take another example. We have little difficulty in distinguishing from one
another rakes, hoes, plows and harrows, shovels and spades. Each has its
own associated characteristic use and function. We may have, however,
great difficulty in recalling the difference between serrate and dentate, ovoid
and obovoid, in the shapes and edges of leaves, or between acids in ic and
in ous. There is some difference; but just what? Or, we know what the
difference is; but which is which? Variations in form, size, color, and
arrangement of parts have much less to do, and the uses, purposes, and
functions of things and of their parts much more to do, with distinctness of
character and meaning than we should be likely to think. What misleads us
is the fact that the qualities of form, size, color, and so on, are now so
distinct that we fail to see that the problem is precisely to account for the
way in which they originally obtained their definiteness and
conspicuousness. So far as we sit passive before objects, they are not
distinguished out of a vague blur which swallows them all. Differences in
the pitch and intensity of sounds leave behind a different feeling, but until
we assume different attitudes toward them, or do something special in
reference to them, their vague difference cannot be intellectually gripped and
retained.
Children's drawings illustrate domination by value
Children's drawings afford a further exemplification of the same principle.
Perspective does not exist, for the child's interest is not in pictorial
representation, but in the things represented; and while perspective is
essential to the former, it is no part of the characteristic uses and values of
the things themselves. The house[Pg 124] is drawn with transparent walls,
because the rooms, chairs, beds, people inside, are the important things in
the house-meaning; smoke always comes out of the chimney—otherwise,
why have a chimney at all? At Christmas time, the stockings may be drawn
almost as large as the house or even so large that they have to be put
outside of it:—in any case, it is the scale of values in use that furnishes the
scale for their qualities, the pictures being diagrammatic reminders of these
values, not impartial records of physical and sensory qualities. One of the
chief difficulties felt by most persons in learning the art of pictorial
representation is that habitual uses and results of use have become so
intimately read into the character of things that it is practically impossible
to shut them out at will.
As do sounds used as language signs
The acquiring of meaning by sounds, in virtue of which they become words,
is perhaps the most striking illustration that can be found of the way in
which mere sensory stimuli acquire definiteness and constancy of meaning
and are thereby themselves defined and interconnected for purposes of
recognition. Language is a specially good example because there are
hundreds or even thousands of words in which meaning is now so
thoroughly consolidated with physical qualities as to be directly
apprehended, while in the case of words it is easier to recognize that this
connection has been gradually and laboriously acquired than in the case of
physical objects such as chairs, tables, buttons, trees, stones, hills, flowers,
and so on, where it seems as if the union of intellectual character and
meaning with the physical fact were aboriginal, and thrust upon us
passively rather than acquired through active explorations. And in the case
of the meaning of words, we see readily that it is by making[Pg 125] sounds
and noting the results which follow, by listening to the sounds of others and
watching the activities which accompany them, that a given sound finally
becomes the stable bearer of a meaning.
Summary
Familiar acquaintance with meanings thus signifies that we have acquired
in the presence of objects definite attitudes of response which lead us,
without reflection, to anticipate certain possible consequences. The
definiteness of the expectation defines the meaning or takes it out of the
vague and pulpy; its habitual, recurrent character gives the meaning
constancy, stability, consistency, or takes it out of the fluctuating and
wavering.
§ 3. Conceptions and Meaning
A conception is a definite meaning
The word meaning is a familiar everyday term; the words conception, notion,
are both popular and technical terms. Strictly speaking, they involve,
however, nothing new; any meaning sufficiently individualized to be directly
grasped and readily used, and thus fixed by a word, is a conception or
notion. Linguistically, every common noun is the carrier of a meaning, while
proper nouns and common nouns with the word this or that prefixed, refer
to the things in which the meanings are exemplified. That thinking both
employs and expands notions, conceptions, is then simply saying that in
inference and judgment we use meanings, and that this use also corrects
and widens them.
which is standardized
Various persons talk about an object not physically present, and yet all get
the same material of belief. The same person in different moments often
refers to the same object or kind of objects. The sense experience, the
physical conditions, the psychological conditions, vary, but the same
meaning is conserved. If pounds[Pg 126] arbitrarily changed their weight,
and foot rules their length, while we were using them, obviously we could
not weigh nor measure. This would be our intellectual position if meanings
could not be maintained with a certain stability and constancy through a
variety of physical and personal changes.
By it we identify the unknown
and supplement the sensibly present
and also systematize things
To insist upon the fundamental importance of conceptions would,
accordingly, only repeat what has been said. We shall merely summarize,
saying that conceptions, or standard meanings, are instruments (i) of
identification, (ii) of supplementation, and (iii) of placing in a system.
Suppose a little speck of light hitherto unseen is detected in the heavens.
Unless there is a store of meanings to fall back upon as tools of inquiry and
reasoning, that speck of light will remain just what it is to the senses—a
mere speck of light. For all that it leads to, it might as well be a mere
irritation of the optic nerve. Given the stock of meanings acquired in prior
experience, this speck of light is mentally attacked by means of appropriate
concepts. Does it indicate asteroid, or comet, or a new-forming sun, or a
nebula resulting from some cosmic collision or disintegration? Each of these
conceptions has its own specific and differentiating characters, which are
then sought for by minute and persistent inquiry. As a result, then, the
speck is identified, we will say, as a comet. Through a standard meaning, it
gets identity and stability of character. Supplementation then takes place.
All the known qualities of comets are read into this particular thing, even
though they have not been as yet observed. All that the astronomers of the
past have learned about the paths and structure of comets becomes
available capital with which to interpret the speck[Pg 127] of light. Finally,
this comet-meaning is itself not isolated; it is a related portion of the whole
system of astronomic knowledge. Suns, planets, satellites, nebulæ, comets,
meteors, star dust—all these conceptions have a certain mutuality of
reference and interaction, and when the speck of light is identified as
meaning a comet, it is at once adopted as a full member in this vast
kingdom of beliefs.
Importance of system to knowledge
Darwin, in an autobiographical sketch, says that when a youth he told the
geologist, Sidgwick, of finding a tropical shell in a certain gravel pit.
Thereupon Sidgwick said it must have been thrown there by some person,
adding: "But if it were really embedded there, it would be the greatest
misfortune to geology, because it would overthrow all that we know about
the superficial deposits of the Midland Counties"—since they were glacial.
And then Darwin adds: "I was then utterly astonished at Sidgwick not being
delighted at so wonderful a fact as a tropical shell being found near the
surface in the middle of England. Nothing before had made me thoroughly
realize that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or
conclusions may be drawn from them." This instance (which might, of
course, be duplicated from any branch of science) indicates how scientific
notions make explicit the systematizing tendency involved in all use of
concepts.
§ 4. What Conceptions are Not
The idea that a conception is a meaning that supplies a standard rule for
the identification and placing of particulars may be contrasted with some
current misapprehensions of its nature.
A concept is not a bare residue
1. Conceptions are not derived from a multitude of[Pg 128] different definite
objects by leaving out the qualities in which they differ and retaining those
in which they agree. The origin of concepts is sometimes described to be as
if a child began with a lot of different particular things, say particular dogs;
his own Fido, his neighbor's Carlo, his cousin's Tray. Having all these
different objects before him, he analyzes them into a lot of different qualities,
say (a) color, (b) size, (c) shape, (d) number of legs, (e) quantity and quality of
hair, (f) digestive organs, and so on; and then strikes out all the unlike
qualities (such as color, size, shape, hair), retaining traits such as
quadruped and domesticated, which they all have in general.
but an active attitude
As a matter of fact, the child begins with whatever significance he has got
out of the one dog he has seen, heard, and handled. He has found that he
can carry over from one experience of this object to subsequent experience
certain expectations of certain characteristic modes of behavior—may expect
these even before they show themselves. He tends to assume this attitude of
anticipation whenever any clue or stimulus presents itself; whenever the
object gives him any excuse for it. Thus he might call cats little dogs, or
horses big dogs. But finding that other expected traits and modes of
behavior are not fulfilled, he is forced to throw out certain traits from the
dog-meaning, while by contrast (see p. 90) certain other traits are selected
and emphasized. As he further applies the meaning to other dogs, the dog-
meaning gets still further defined and refined. He does not begin with a lot of
ready-made objects from which he extracts a common meaning; he tries to
apply to every new experience whatever from his old experience will help him
understand it,[Pg 129] and as this process of constant assumption and
experimentation is fulfilled and refuted by results, his conceptions get body
and clearness.
It is general because of its application
2. Similarly, conceptions are general because of their use and application,
not because of their ingredients. The view of the origin of conception in an
impossible sort of analysis has as its counterpart the idea that the
conception is made up out of all the like elements that remain after
dissection of a number of individuals. Not so; the moment a meaning is
gained, it is a working tool of further apprehensions, an instrument of
understanding other things. Thereby the meaning is extended to cover them.
Generality resides in application to the comprehension of new cases, not in
constituent parts. A collection of traits left as the common residuum,
the caput mortuum, of a million objects, would be merely a collection, an
inventory or aggregate, not a general idea; a striking trait emphasized in any
one experience which then served to help understand some one other
experience, would become, in virtue of that service of application, in so far
general. Synthesis is not a matter of mechanical addition, but of application
of something discovered in one case to bring other cases into line.
§ 5. Definition and Organization of Meanings
Definiteness versus vagueness
In the abstract meaning is intension
In its application it is extension
A being that cannot understand at all is at least protected from mis-
understandings. But beings that get knowledge by means of inferring and
interpreting, by judging what things signify in relation to one another, are
constantly exposed to the danger of mis-apprehension, mis-
understanding, mis-taking—taking a thing amiss. A constant source of
misunderstanding and mistake is indefiniteness of meaning. Through
vagueness of[Pg 130] meaning we misunderstand other people, things, and
ourselves; through its ambiguity we distort and pervert. Conscious
distortion of meaning may be enjoyed as nonsense; erroneous meanings, if
clear-cut, may be followed up and got rid of. But vague meanings are too
gelatinous to offer matter for analysis, and too pulpy to afford support to
other beliefs. They evade testing and responsibility. Vagueness disguises the
unconscious mixing together of different meanings, and facilitates the
substitution of one meaning for another, and covers up the failure to have
any precise meaning at all. It is the aboriginal logical sin—the source from
which flow most bad intellectual consequences. Totally to eliminate
indefiniteness is impossible; to reduce it in extent and in force requires
sincerity and vigor. To be clear or perspicuous a meaning must be detached,
single, self-contained, homogeneous as it were, throughout. The technical
name for any meaning which is thus individualized is intension. The process
of arriving at such units of meaning (and of stating them when reached)
is definition. The intension of the
terms man, river, seed, honesty, capital, supreme court, is the meaning
that exclusively and characteristically attaches to those terms. This meaning
is set forth in the definitions of those words. The test of the distinctness of a
meaning is that it shall successfully mark off a group of things that
exemplify the meaning from other groups, especially of those objects that
convey nearly allied meanings. The river-meaning (or character) must serve
to designate the Rhone, the Rhine, the Mississippi, the Hudson, the
Wabash, in spite of their varieties of place, length, quality of water; and
must be such as not to suggest ocean currents, ponds, or brooks. This use
of a mean[Pg 131]ing to mark off and group together a variety of distinct
existences constitutes its extension.
Definition and division
As definition sets forth intension, so division (or the reverse process,
classification) expounds extension. Intension and extension, definition and
division, are clearly correlative; in language previously used, intension is
meaning as a principle of identifying particulars; extension is the group of
particulars identified and distinguished. Meaning, as extension, would be
wholly in the air or unreal, did it not point to some object or group of
objects; while objects would be as isolated and independent intellectually as
they seem to be spatially, were they not bound into groups or classes on the
basis of characteristic meanings which they constantly suggest and
exemplify. Taken together, definition and division put us in possession of
individualized or definite meanings and indicate to what group of objects
meanings refer. They typify the fixation and the organization of meanings. In
the degree in which the meanings of any set of experiences are so cleared up
as to serve as principles for grouping those experiences in relation to one
another, that set of particulars becomes a science; i.e. definition and
classification are the marks of a science, as distinct from both unrelated
heaps of miscellaneous information and from the habits that introduce
coherence into our experience without our being aware of their operation.
Definitions are of three types, denotative, expository, scientific. Of these, the
first and third are logically important, while the expository type is socially
and pedagogically important as an intervening step.
We define by picking out
I. Denotative. A blind man can never have an adequate understanding of the
meaning of color and red; a seeing person can acquire the knowledge only by
hav[Pg 132]ing certain things designated in such a way as to fix attention
upon some of their qualities. This method of delimiting a meaning by calling
out a certain attitude toward objects may be called denotative or indicative.
It is required for all sense qualities—sounds, tastes, colors—and equally for
all emotional and moral qualities. The meanings
of honesty, sympathy, hatred, fear, must be grasped by having them
presented in an individual's first-hand experience. The reaction of
educational reformers against linguistic and bookish training has always
taken the form of demanding recourse to personal experience. However
advanced the person is in knowledge and in scientific training,
understanding of a new subject, or a new aspect of an old subject, must
always be through these acts of experiencing directly the existence or quality
in question.
and also by combining what is already more definite,
2. Expository. Given a certain store of meanings which have been directly or
denotatively marked out, language becomes a resource by which imaginative
combinations and variations may be built up. A color may be defined to one
who has not experienced it as lying between green and blue; a tiger may be
defined (i.e. the idea of it made more definite) by selecting some qualities
from known members of the cat tribe and combining them with qualities of
size and weight derived from other objects. Illustrations are of the nature of
expository definitions; so are the accounts of meanings given in a dictionary.
By taking better-known meanings and associating them,—the attained store
of meanings of the community in which one resides is put at one's disposal.
But in themselves these definitions are secondhand and conventional; there
is danger that instead of inciting one to effort after personal experiences
that[Pg 133] will exemplify and verify them, they will be accepted on
authority as substitutes.
and by discovering method of production
3. Scientific. Even popular definitions serve as rules for identifying and
classifying individuals, but the purpose of such identifications and
classifications is mainly practical and social, not intellectual. To conceive
the whale as a fish does not interfere with the success of whalers, nor does
it prevent recognition of a whale when seen, while to conceive it not as fish
but as mammal serves the practical end equally well, and also furnishes a
much more valuable principle for scientific identification and classification.
Popular definitions select certain fairly obvious traits as keys to
classification. Scientific definitions select conditions of causation, production,
and generation as their characteristic material. The traits used by the
popular definition do not help us to understand why an object has its
common meanings and qualities; they simply state the fact that it does have
them. Causal and genetic definitions fix upon the way an object is
constructed as the key to its being a certain kind of object, and thereby
explain why it has its class or common traits.
Contrast of causal and descriptive definitions
Science is the most perfect type of knowledge because it uses causal
definitions
If, for example, a layman of considerable practical experience were asked
what he meant or understood by metal, he would probably reply in terms of
the qualities useful (i) in recognizing any given metal and (ii) in the arts.
Smoothness, hardness, glossiness, and brilliancy, heavy weight for its size,
would probably be included in his definition, because such traits enable us
to identify specific things when we see and touch them; the serviceable
properties of capacity for being hammered and pulled without breaking, of
being softened by heat and hardened by cold, of retaining the shape and
form[Pg 134] given, of resistance to pressure and decay, would probably be
included—whether or not such terms as malleable or fusible were used. Now
a scientific conception, instead of using, even with additions, traits of this
kind, determines meaning on a different basis. The present definition of
metal is about like this: Metal means any chemical element that enters into
combination with oxygen so as to form a base, i.e. a compound that
combines with an acid to form a salt. This scientific definition is founded,
not on directly perceived qualities nor on directly useful properties, but on
the way in which certain things are causally related to other things; i.e. it
denotes a relation. As chemical concepts become more and more those of
relationships of interaction in constituting other substances, so physical
concepts express more and more relations of operation: mathematical, as
expressing functions of dependence and order of grouping; biological,
relations of differentiation of descent, effected through adjustment of various
environments; and so on through the sphere of the sciences. In short, our
conceptions attain a maximum of definite individuality and of generality (or
applicability) in the degree to which they show how things depend upon one
another or influence one another, instead of expressing the qualities that
objects possess statically. The ideal of a system of scientific conceptions is to
attain continuity, freedom, and flexibility of transition in passing from any
fact and meaning to any other; this demand is met in the degree in which we
lay hold of the dynamic ties that hold things together in a continuously
changing process—a principle that states insight into mode of production or
growth.[Pg 135]

CHAPTER TEN
CONCRETE AND ABSTRACT THINKING
False notions of concrete and abstract
The maxim enjoined upon teachers, "to proceed from the concrete to the
abstract," is perhaps familiar rather than comprehended. Few who read and
hear it gain a clear conception of the starting-point, the concrete; of the
nature of the goal, the abstract; and of the exact nature of the path to be
traversed in going from one to the other. At times the injunction is positively
misunderstood, being taken to mean that education should advance from
things to thought—as if any dealing with things in which thinking is not
involved could possibly be educative. So understood, the maxim encourages
mechanical routine or sensuous excitation at one end of the educational
scale—the lower—and academic and unapplied learning at the upper end.
Actually, all dealing with things, even the child's, is immersed in inferences;
things are clothed by the suggestions they arouse, and are significant as
challenges to interpretation or as evidences to substantiate a belief. Nothing
could be more unnatural than instruction in things without thought; in
sense-perceptions without judgments based upon them. And if the abstract
to which we are to proceed denotes thought apart from things, the goal
recommended is formal and[Pg 136] empty, for effective thought always
refers, more or less directly, to things.
Direct and indirect understanding again
Yet the maxim has a meaning which, understood and supplemented, states
the line of development of logical capacity. What is this signification?
Concrete denotes a meaning definitely marked off from other meanings so
that it is readily apprehended by itself. When we hear the
words, table, chair, stove, coat, we do not have to reflect in order to grasp
what is meant. The terms convey meaning so directly that no effort at
translating is needed. The meanings of some terms and things, however, are
grasped only by first calling to mind more familiar things and then tracing
out connections between them and what we do not understand. Roughly
speaking, the former kind of meanings is concrete; the latter abstract.
What is familiar is mentally concrete
To one who is thoroughly at home in physics and chemistry, the notions
of atom and molecule are fairly concrete. They are constantly used without
involving any labor of thought in apprehending what they mean. But the
layman and the beginner in science have first to remind themselves of
things with which they already are well acquainted, and go through a
process of slow translation; the terms atom and molecule losing, moreover,
their hard-won meaning only too easily if familiar things, and the line of
transition from them to the strange, drop out of mind. The same difference
is illustrated by any technical terms: coefficient and exponent in
algebra, triangle and square in their geometric as distinct from their popular
meanings; capital and value as used in political economy, and so on.
Practical things are familiar
The difference as noted is purely relative to the intellectual progress of an
individual; what is abstract[Pg 137] at one period of growth is concrete at
another; or even the contrary, as one finds that things supposed to be
thoroughly familiar involve strange factors and unsolved problems. There is,
nevertheless, a general line of cleavage which, deciding upon the whole what
things fall within the limits of familiar acquaintance and what without,
marks off the concrete and the abstract in a more permanent way. These
limits are fixed mainly by the demands of practical life. Things such as sticks
and stones, meat and potatoes, houses and trees, are such constant
features of the environment of which we have to take account in order to
live, that their important meanings are soon learnt, and indissolubly
associated with objects. We are acquainted with a thing (or it is familiar to
us) when we have so much to do with it that its strange and unexpected
corners are rubbed off. The necessities of social intercourse convey to adults
a like concreteness upon such terms as taxes, elections, wages, the law,
and so on. Things the meaning of which I personally do not take in directly,
appliances of cook, carpenter, or weaver, for example, are nevertheless
unhesitatingly classed as concrete, since they are so directly connected with
our common social life.
The theoretical, or strictly intellectual, is abstract
By contrast, the abstract is the theoretical, or that not intimately associated
with practical concerns. The abstract thinker (the man of pure science as he
is sometimes called) deliberately abstracts from application in life; that is, he
leaves practical uses out of account. This, however, is a merely negative
statement. What remains when connections with use and application are
excluded? Evidently only what has to do with knowing considered as an end
in itself. Many notions of science[Pg 138] are abstract, not only because they
cannot be understood without a long apprenticeship in the science (which is
equally true of technical matters in the arts), but also because the whole
content of their meaning has been framed for the sole purpose of facilitating
further knowledge, inquiry, and speculation. When thinking is used as a
means to some end, good, or value beyond itself, it is concrete; when it is
employed simply as a means to more thinking, it is abstract. To a theorist an
idea is adequate and self-contained just because it engages and rewards
thought; to a medical practitioner, an engineer, an artist, a merchant, a
politician, it is complete only when employed in the furthering of some
interest in life—health, wealth, beauty, goodness, success, or what you will.
Contempt for theory
For the great majority of men under ordinary circumstances, the practical
exigencies of life are almost, if not quite, coercive. Their main business is the
proper conduct of their affairs. Whatever is of significance only as affording
scope for thinking is pallid and remote—almost artificial. Hence the
contempt felt by the practical and successful executive for the "mere
theorist"; hence his conviction that certain things may be all very well in
theory, but that they will not do in practice; in general, the depreciatory way
in which he uses the terms abstract, theoretical, and intellectual—as distinct
from intelligent.
But theory is highly practical
This attitude is justified, of course, under certain conditions. But
depreciation of theory does not contain the whole truth, as common or
practical sense recognizes. There is such a thing, even from the common-
sense standpoint, as being "too practical," as being so intent upon the
immediately practical as not to see[Pg 139] beyond the end of one's nose or
as to cut off the limb upon which one is sitting. The question is one of limits,
of degrees and adjustments, rather than one of absolute separation. Truly
practical men give their minds free play about a subject without asking too
closely at every point for the advantage to be gained; exclusive
preoccupation with matters of use and application so narrows the horizon
as in the long run to defeat itself. It does not pay to tether one's thoughts to
the post of use with too short a rope. Power in action requires some
largeness and imaginativeness of vision. Men must at least have enough
interest in thinking for the sake of thinking to escape the limits of routine
and custom. Interest in knowledge for the sake of knowledge, in thinking for
the sake of the free play of thought, is necessary then to the emancipation of
practical life—to make it rich and progressive.
We may now recur to the pedagogic maxim of going from the concrete to the
abstract.
Begin with the concrete means begin with practical manipulations
1. Since the concrete denotes thinking applied to activities for the sake of
dealing effectively with the difficulties that present themselves practically,
"beginning with the concrete" signifies that we should at the outset make
much of doing; especially, make much in occupations that are not of a
routine and mechanical kind and hence require intelligent selection and
adaptation of means and materials. We do not "follow the order of nature"
when we multiply mere sensations or accumulate physical objects.
Instruction in number is not concrete merely because splints or beans or
dots are employed, while whenever the use and bearing of number relations
are clearly perceived, the number idea is concrete even if figures alone are
used. Just what sort of[Pg 140] symbol it is best to use at a given time—
whether blocks, or lines, or figures—is entirely a matter of adjustment to the
given case. If physical things used in teaching number or geography or
anything else do not leave the mind illuminated with recognition of
a meaning beyond themselves, the instruction that uses them is as abstract
as that which doles out ready-made definitions and rules; for it distracts
attention from ideas to mere physical excitations.
Confusion of the concrete with the sensibly isolated
The conception that we have only to put before the senses particular
physical objects in order to impress certain ideas upon the mind amounts
almost to a superstition. The introduction of object lessons and sense-
training scored a distinct advance over the prior method of linguistic
symbols, and this advance tended to blind educators to the fact that only a
halfway step had been taken. Things and sensations develop the child,
indeed, but only because he uses them in mastering his body and in the
scheme of his activities. Appropriate continuous occupations or activities
involve the use of natural materials, tools, modes of energy, and do it in a
way that compels thinking as to what they mean, how they are related to
one another and to the realization of ends; while the mere isolated
presentation of things remains barren and dead. A few generations ago the
great obstacle in the way of reform of primary education was belief in the
almost magical efficacy of the symbols of language (including number) to
produce mental training; at present, belief in the efficacy of objects just as
objects, blocks the way. As frequently happens, the better is an enemy of the
best.
Transfer of interest to intellectual matters
2. The interest in results, in the successful carrying on of an activity, should
be gradually transferred to study[Pg 141] of objects—their properties,
consequences, structures, causes, and effects. The adult when at work in
his life calling is rarely free to devote time or energy—beyond the necessities
of his immediate action—to the study of what he deals with. (Ante, p. 43.)
The educative activities of childhood should be so arranged that direct
interest in the activity and its outcome create a demand for attention to
matters that have a more and more indirect and remote connection with the
original activity. The direct interest in carpentering or shop work should
yield organically and gradually an interest in geometric and mechanical
problems. The interest in cooking should grow into an interest in chemical
experimentation and in the physiology and hygiene of bodily growth. The
making of pictures should pass to an interest in the technique of
representation and the æsthetics of appreciation, and so on. This
development is what the term go signifies in the maxim "go from the
concrete to the abstract"; it represents the dynamic and truly educative
factor of the process.
Development of delight in the activity of thinking
3. The outcome, the abstract to which education is to proceed, is an interest
in intellectual matters for their own sake, a delight in thinking for the sake
of thinking. It is an old story that acts and processes which at the outset are
incidental to something else develop and maintain an absorbing value of
their own. So it is with thinking and with knowledge; at first incidental to
results and adjustments beyond themselves, they attract more and more
attention to themselves till they become ends, not means. Children engage,
unconstrainedly and continually, in reflective inspection and testing for the
sake of what they are interested in doing successfully. Habits of thinking
thus generated may increase in volume[Pg 142] and extent till they become
of importance on their own account.
Examples of the transition
The three instances cited in Chapter Six represented an ascending cycle
from the practical to the theoretical. Taking thought to keep a personal
engagement is obviously of the concrete kind. Endeavoring to work out the
meaning of a certain part of a boat is an instance of an intermediate kind.
The reason for the existence and position of the pole is a practical reason, so
that to the architect the problem was purely concrete—the maintenance of a
certain system of action. But for the passenger on the boat, the problem was
theoretical, more or less speculative. It made no difference to his reaching
his destination whether he worked out the meaning of the pole. The third
case, that of the appearance and movement of the bubbles, illustrates a
strictly theoretical or abstract case. No overcoming of physical obstacles, no
adjustment of external means to ends, is at stake. Curiosity, intellectual
curiosity, is challenged by a seemingly anomalous occurrence; and thinking
tries simply to account for an apparent exception in terms of recognized
principles.
Theoretical knowledge never the whole end
(i) Abstract thinking, it should be noted, represents an end, not the end. The
power of sustained thinking on matters remote from direct use is an
outgrowth of practical and immediate modes of thought, but not a
substitute for them. The educational end is not the destruction of power to
think so as to surmount obstacles and adjust means and ends; it is not its
replacement by abstract reflection. Nor is theoretical thinking a higher type
of thinking than practical. A person who has at command both types of
thinking is of a higher order than he who possesses only one. Methods that
in de[Pg 143]veloping abstract intellectual abilities weaken habits of
practical or concrete thinking, fall as much short of the educational ideal as
do the methods that in cultivating ability to plan, to invent, to arrange, to
forecast, fail to secure some delight in thinking irrespective of practical
consequences.
Nor that most congenial to the majority of pupils
(ii) Educators should also note the very great individual differences that
exist; they should not try to force one pattern and model upon all. In many
(probably the majority) the executive tendency, the habit of mind that thinks
for purposes of conduct and achievement, not for the sake of knowing,
remains dominant to the end. Engineers, lawyers, doctors, merchants, are
much more numerous in adult life than scholars, scientists, and
philosophers. While education should strive to make men who, however
prominent their professional interests and aims, partake of the spirit of the
scholar, philosopher, and scientist, no good reason appears why education
should esteem the one mental habit inherently superior to the other, and
deliberately try to transform the type from practical to theoretical. Have not
our schools (as already suggested, p. 49) been one-sidedly devoted to the
more abstract type of thinking, thus doing injustice to the majority of
pupils? Has not the idea of a "liberal" and "humane" education tended too
often in practice to the production of technical, because overspecialized,
thinkers?
Aim of education is a working balance
The aim of education should be to secure a balanced interaction of the two
types of mental attitude, having sufficient regard to the disposition of the
individual not to hamper and cripple whatever powers are naturally strong
in him. The narrowness of individuals of strong concrete bent needs to be
liberalized. Every oppor[Pg 144]tunity that occurs within their practical
activities for developing curiosity and susceptibility to intellectual problems
should be seized. Violence is not done to natural disposition, but the latter
is broadened. As regards the smaller number of those who have a taste for
abstract, purely intellectual topics, pains should be taken to multiply
opportunities and demands for the application of ideas; for translating
symbolic truths into terms of social life and its ends. Every human being
has both capabilities, and every individual will be more effective and happier
if both powers are developed in easy and close interaction with each other.
[Pg 145]
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EMPIRICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THINKING
§ 1. Empirical Thinking
Empirical thinking depends on past habits
Apart from the development of scientific method, inferences depend upon
habits that have been built up under the influence of a number of particular
experiences not themselves arranged for logical purposes. A says, "It will
probably rain to-morrow." B asks, "Why do you think so?" and A replies,
"Because the sky was lowering at sunset." When B asks, "What has that to
do with it?" A responds, "I do not know, but it generally does rain after such
a sunset." He does not perceive any connection between the appearance of
the sky and coming rain; he is not aware of any continuity in the facts
themselves—any law or principle, as we usually say. He simply, from
frequently recurring conjunctions of the events, has associated them so that
when he sees one he thinks of the other. One suggests the other, or
is associated with it. A man may believe it will rain to-morrow because he
has consulted the barometer; but if he has no conception how the height of
the mercury column (or the position of an index moved by its rise and fall) is
connected with variations of atmospheric pressure, and how these in turn
are connected with the amount of moisture in the air, his belief in the
likelihood of rain is purely empirical. When men lived in the open and got
their living by hunting, fishing, or[Pg 146] pasturing flocks, the detection of
the signs and indications of weather changes was a matter of great
importance. A body of proverbs and maxims, forming an extensive section of
traditionary folklore, was developed. But as long as there was no
understanding why or how certain events were signs, as long as foresight
and weather shrewdness rested simply upon repeated conjunction among
facts, beliefs about the weather were thoroughly empirical.
It is fairly adequate in some matters,
In similar fashion learned men in the Orient learned to predict, with
considerable accuracy, the recurrent positions of the planets, the sun and
the moon, and to foretell the time of eclipses, without understanding in any
degree the laws of the movements of heavenly bodies—that is, without
having a notion of the continuities existing among the facts themselves.
They had learned from repeated observations that things happened in about
such and such a fashion. Till a comparatively recent time, the truths of
medicine were mainly in the same condition. Experience had shown that
"upon the whole," "as a rule," "generally or usually speaking," certain results
followed certain remedies, when symptoms were given. Our beliefs about
human nature in individuals (psychology) and in masses (sociology) are still
very largely of a purely empirical sort. Even the science of geometry, now
frequently reckoned a typical rational science, began, among the Egyptians,
as an accumulation of recorded observations about methods of approximate
mensuration of land surfaces; and only gradually assumed, among the
Greeks, scientific form.
The disadvantages of purely empirical thinking are obvious.[Pg 147]
but is very apt to lead to false beliefs,
1. While many empirical conclusions are, roughly speaking, correct; while
they are exact enough to be of great help in practical life; while the presages
of a weatherwise sailor or hunter may be more accurate, within a certain
restricted range, than those of a scientist who relies wholly upon scientific
observations and tests; while, indeed, empirical observations and records
furnish the raw or crude material of scientific knowledge, yet the empirical
method affords no way of discriminating between right and wrong
conclusions. Hence it is responsible for a multitude of false beliefs. The
technical designation for one of the commonest fallacies is post hoc, ergo
propter hoc; the belief that because one thing comes after another, it
comes because of the other. Now this fallacy of method is the animating
principle of empirical conclusions, even when correct—the correctness being
almost as much a matter of good luck as of method. That potatoes should be
planted only during the crescent moon, that near the sea people are born at
high tide and die at low tide, that a comet is an omen of danger, that bad
luck follows the cracking of a mirror, that a patent medicine cures a disease
—these and a thousand like notions are asseverated on the basis of
empirical coincidence and conjunction. Moreover, habits of expectation and
belief are formed otherwise than by a number of repeated similar cases.
and does not enable us to cope with the novel,
2. The more numerous the experienced instances and the closer the watch
kept upon them, the greater is the trustworthiness of constant conjunction
as evidence of connection among the things themselves. Many of our most
important beliefs still have only this sort of warrant. No one can yet tell, with
certainty, the neces[Pg 148]sary cause of old age or of death—which are
empirically the most certain of all expectations. But even the most reliable
beliefs of this type fail when they confront the novel. Since they rest upon
past uniformities, they are useless when further experience departs in any
considerable measure from ancient incident and wonted precedent.
Empirical inference follows the grooves and ruts that custom wears, and has
no track to follow when the groove disappears. So important is this aspect of
the matter that Clifford found the difference between ordinary skill and
scientific thought right here. "Skill enables a man to deal with the same
circumstances that he has met before, scientific thought enables him to deal
with different circumstances that he has never met before." And he goes so
far as to define scientific thinking as "the application of old experience to
new circumstances."
and leads to laziness and presumption,
3. We have not yet made the acquaintance of the most harmful feature of
the empirical method. Mental inertia, laziness, unjustifiable conservatism,
are its probable accompaniments. Its general effect upon mental attitude is
more serious than even the specific wrong conclusions in which it has
landed. Wherever the chief dependence in forming inferences is upon the
conjunctions observed in past experience, failures to agree with the usual
order are slurred over, cases of successful confirmation are exaggerated.
Since the mind naturally demands some principle of continuity, some
connecting link between separate facts and causes, forces are arbitrarily
invented for that purpose. Fantastic and mythological explanations are
resorted to in order to supply missing links. The pump brings water because
nature abhors a vacuum; opium makes men sleep because it has a dormi[Pg
149]tive potency; we recollect a past event because we have a faculty of
memory. In the history of the progress of human knowledge, out and out
myths accompany the first stage of empiricism; while "hidden essences" and
"occult forces" mark its second stage. By their very nature, these "causes"
escape observation, so that their explanatory value can be neither confirmed
nor refuted by further observation or experience. Hence belief in them
becomes purely traditionary. They give rise to doctrines which, inculcated
and handed down, become dogmas; subsequent inquiry and reflection are
actually stifled. (Ante, p. 23.)
and to dogmatism
Certain men or classes of men come to be the accepted guardians and
transmitters—instructors—of established doctrines. To question the beliefs
is to question their authority; to accept the beliefs is evidence of loyalty to
the powers that be, a proof of good citizenship. Passivity, docility,
acquiescence, come to be primal intellectual virtues. Facts and events
presenting novelty and variety are slighted, or are sheared down till they fit
into the Procrustean bed of habitual belief. Inquiry and doubt are silenced
by citation of ancient laws or a multitude of miscellaneous and unsifted
cases. This attitude of mind generates dislike of change, and the resulting
aversion to novelty is fatal to progress. What will not fit into the established
canons is outlawed; men who make new discoveries are objects of suspicion
and even of persecution. Beliefs that perhaps originally were the products of
fairly extensive and careful observation are stereotyped into fixed traditions
and semi-sacred dogmas accepted simply upon authority, and are mixed
with fantastic conceptions that happen to have won the acceptance of
authorities.[Pg 150]
§ 2. Scientific Method
Scientific thinking analyzes the present case
In contrast with the empirical method stands the scientific. Scientific
method replaces the repeated conjunction or coincidence of separate facts
by discovery of a single comprehensive fact, effecting this replacement
by breaking up the coarse or gross facts of observation into a number of
minuter processes not directly accessible to perception.
Illustration from suction of empirical method,
If a layman were asked why water rises from the cistern when an ordinary
pump is worked, he would doubtless answer, "By suction." Suction is
regarded as a force like heat or pressure. If such a person is confronted by
the fact that water rises with a suction pump only about thirty-three feet, he
easily disposes of the difficulty on the ground that all forces vary in their
intensities and finally reach a limit at which they cease to operate. The
variation with elevation above the sea level of the height to which water can
be pumped is either unnoticed, or, if noted, is dismissed as one of the
curious anomalies in which nature abounds.
of scientific method
Relies on differences,
Now the scientist advances by assuming that what seems to observation to
be a single total fact is in truth complex. He attempts, therefore, to break up
the single fact of water-rising-in-the-pipe into a number of lesser facts. His
method of proceeding is by varying conditions one by one so far as possible,
and noting just what happens when a given condition is eliminated. There
are two methods for varying conditions. [24] The first is an extension of the
empirical method of observation. It consists in comparing very carefully the
results of a great number of observations which have occurred[Pg
151] under accidentally different conditions. The difference in the rise of the
water at different heights above the sea level, and its total cessation when
the distance to be lifted is, even at sea level, more than thirty-three feet, are
emphasized, instead of being slurred over. The purpose is to find out
what special conditions are present when the effect occurs and absent when
it fails to occur. These special conditions are then substituted for the gross
fact, or regarded as its principle—the key to understanding it.
and creates differences
The method of analysis by comparing cases is, however, badly handicapped;
it can do nothing until it is presented with a certain number of diversified
cases. And even when different cases are at hand, it will be questionable
whether they vary in just these respects in which it is important that they
should vary in order to throw light upon the question at issue. The method
is passive and dependent upon external accidents. Hence the superiority of
the active or experimental method. Even a small number of observations
may suggest an explanation—a hypothesis or theory. Working upon this
suggestion, the scientist may then intentionally vary conditions and note
what happens. If the empirical observations have suggested to him the
possibility of a connection between air pressure on the water and the rising
of the water in the tube where air pressure is absent, he deliberately empties
the air out of the vessel in which the water is contained and notes that
suction no longer works; or he intentionally increases atmospheric pressure
on the water and notes the result. He institutes experiments to calculate the
weight of air at the sea level and at various levels above, and compares the
results of reasoning based upon the pressure of air[Pg 152] of these various
weights upon a certain volume of water with the results actually obtained by
observation. Observations formed by variation of conditions on the basis of
some idea or theory constitute experiment. Experiment is the chief resource
in scientific reasoning because it facilitates the picking out of significant
elements in a gross, vague whole.
Analysis and synthesis again
Experimental thinking, or scientific reasoning, is thus a conjoint process
of analysis and synthesis, or, in less technical language, of discrimination
and assimilation or identification. The gross fact of water rising when the
suction valve is worked is resolved or discriminated into a number of
independent variables, some of which had never before been observed or
even thought of in connection with the fact. One of these facts, the weight of
the atmosphere, is then selectively seized upon as the key to the entire
phenomenon. This disentangling constitutes analysis. But atmosphere and
its pressure or weight is a fact not confined to this single instance. It is a
fact familiar or at least discoverable as operative in a great number of other
events. In fixing upon this imperceptible and minute fact as the essence or
key to the elevation of water by the pump, the pump-fact has thus been
assimilated to a whole group of ordinary facts from which it was previously
isolated. This assimilation constitutes synthesis. Moreover, the fact of
atmospheric pressure is itself a case of one of the commonest of all facts—
weight or gravitational force. Conclusions that apply to the common fact of
weight are thus transferable to the consideration and interpretation of
the relatively rare and exceptional case of the suction of water. The suction
pump is seen to be a case of the same kind or sort as the siphon, the[Pg
153] barometer, the rising of the balloon, and a multitude of other things
with which at first sight it has no connection at all. This is another instance
of the synthetic or assimilative phase of scientific thinking.
If we revert to the advantages of scientific over empirical thinking, we find
that we now have the clue to them.
Lessened liability to error
(a) The increased security, the added factor of certainty or proof, is due to
the substitution of the detailed and specific fact of atmospheric pressure for
the gross and total and relatively miscellaneous fact of suction. The latter is
complex, and its complexity is due to many unknown and unspecified
factors; hence, any statement about it is more or less random, and likely to
be defeated by any unforeseen variation of circumstances. Comparatively, at
least, the minute and detailed fact of air pressure is a measurable and
definite fact—one that can be picked out and managed with assurance.
Ability to manage the new
(b) As analysis accounts for the added certainty, so synthesis accounts for
ability to cope with the novel and variable. Weight is a much commoner fact
than atmospheric weight, and this in turn is a much commoner fact than
the workings of the suction pump. To be able to substitute the common and
frequent fact for that which is relatively rare and peculiar is to reduce the
seemingly novel and exceptional to cases of a general and familiar principle,
and thus to bring them under control for interpretation and prediction.
As Professor James says: "Think of heat as motion and whatever is true of
motion will be true of heat; but we have a hundred experiences of motion for
every one of heat. Think of rays passing through this lens as cases of
bending toward the perpendicular, and you[Pg 154] substitute for the
comparatively unfamiliar lens the very familiar notion of a particular change
in direction of a line, of which notion every day brings us countless
examples."[25]
Interest in the future or in progress
(c) The change of attitude from conservative reliance upon the past, upon
routine and custom, to faith in progress through the intelligent regulation of
existing conditions, is, of course, the reflex of the scientific method of
experimentation. The empirical method inevitably magnifies the influences
of the past; the experimental method throws into relief the possibilities of
the future. The empirical method says, "Wait till there is a sufficient number
of cases;" the experimental method says, "Produce the cases." The former
depends upon nature's accidentally happening to present us with certain
conjunctions of circumstances; the latter deliberately and intentionally
endeavors to bring about the conjunction. By this method the notion of
progress secures scientific warrant.
Physical versus logical force
Ordinary experience is controlled largely by the direct strength and intensity
of various occurrences. What is bright, sudden, loud, secures notice and is
given a conspicuous rating. What is dim, feeble, and continuous gets
ignored, or is regarded as of slight importance. Customary experience tends
to the control of thinking by considerations of direct and immediate
strength rather than by those of importance in the long run. Animals
without the power of forecast and planning must, upon the whole, respond
to the stimuli that are most urgent at the moment, or cease to exist. These
stimuli lose nothing of their direct urgency and clamorous insistency when
the thinking power develops; and yet thinking[Pg 155] demands the
subordination of the immediate stimulus to the remote and distant. The
feeble and the minute may be of much greater importance than the glaring
and the big. The latter may be signs of a force that is already exhausting
itself; the former may indicate the beginnings of a process in which the
whole fortune of the individual is involved. The prime necessity for scientific
thought is that the thinker be freed from the tyranny of sense stimuli and
habit, and this emancipation is also the necessary condition of progress.
Illustration from moving water
Consider the following quotation: "When it first occurred to a reflecting mind
that moving water had a property identical with human or brute force,
namely, the property of setting other masses in motion, overcoming inertia
and resistance,—when the sight of the stream suggested through this point
of likeness the power of the animal,—a new addition was made to the class
of prime movers, and when circumstances permitted, this power could
become a substitute for the others. It may seem to the modern
understanding, familiar with water wheels and drifting rafts, that the
similarity here was an extremely obvious one. But if we put ourselves back
into an early state of mind, when running water affected the mind by its
brilliancy, its roar and irregular devastation, we may easily suppose that to
identify this with animal muscular energy was by no means an obvious
effort."[26]
Value of abstraction
If we add to these obvious sensory features the various social customs and
expectations which fix the attitude of the individual, the evil of the
subjection of free and fertile suggestion to empirical considerations be[Pg
156]comes clear. A certain power of abstraction, of deliberate turning away
from the habitual responses to a situation, was required before men could
be emancipated to follow up suggestions that in the end are fruitful.
Experience as inclusive of thought
In short, the term experience may be interpreted either with reference to
the empirical or the experimental attitude of mind. Experience is not a rigid
and closed thing; it is vital, and hence growing. When dominated by the
past, by custom and routine, it is often opposed to the reasonable, the
thoughtful. But experience also includes the reflection that sets us free from
the limiting influence of sense, appetite, and tradition. Experience may
welcome and assimilate all that the most exact and penetrating thought
discovers. Indeed, the business of education might be defined as just such
an emancipation and enlargement of experience. Education takes the
individual while he is relatively plastic, before he has become so indurated
by isolated experiences as to be rendered hopelessly empirical in his habit of
mind. The attitude of childhood is naïve, wondering, experimental; the world
of man and nature is new. Right methods of education preserve and perfect
this attitude, and thereby short-circuit for the individual the slow progress
of the race, eliminating the waste that comes from inert routine.[Pg 157]

PART THREE: THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT

CHAPTER TWELVE
ACTIVITY AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
In this chapter we shall gather together and amplify considerations that
have already been advanced, in various passages of the preceding pages,
concerning the relation of action to thought. We shall follow, though not with
exactness, the order of development in the unfolding human being.
§ 1. The Early Stage of Activity
1. The baby's problem determines his thinking
The sight of a baby often calls out the question: "What do you suppose he is
thinking about?" By the nature of the case, the question is unanswerable in
detail; but, also by the nature of the case, we may be sure about a baby's
chief interest. His primary problem is mastery of his body as a tool of
securing comfortable and effective adjustments to his surroundings,
physical and social. The child has to learn to do almost everything: to see, to
hear, to reach, to handle, to balance the body, to creep, to walk, and so on.
Even if it be true that human beings have even more instinctive reactions
than lower animals, it is also true that instinctive tendencies are much less
perfect in men, and that most of them are[Pg 158] of little use till they are
intelligently combined and directed. A little chick just out of the shell will
after a few trials peck at and grasp grains of food with its beak as well as at
any later time. This involves a complicated coördination of the eye and the
head. An infant does not even begin to reach definitely for things that the
eye sees till he is several months old, and even then several weeks' practice
is required before he learns the adjustment so as neither to overreach nor to
underreach. It may not be literally true that the child will grasp for the
moon, but it is true that he needs much practice before he can tell whether
an object is within reach or not. The arm is thrust out instinctively in
response to a stimulus from the eye, and this tendency is the origin of the
ability to reach and grasp exactly and quickly; but nevertheless final
mastery requires observing and selecting the successful movements, and
arranging them in view of an end. These operations of conscious selection
and arrangement constitute thinking, though of a rudimentary type.
Mastery of the body is an intellectual problem
Since mastery of the bodily organs is necessary for all later developments,
such problems are both interesting and important, and solving them
supplies a very genuine training of thinking power. The joy the child shows
in learning to use his limbs, to translate what he sees into what he handles,
to connect sounds with sights, sights with taste and touch, and the rapidity
with which intelligence grows in the first year and a half of life (the time
during which the more fundamental problems of the use of the organism are
mastered), are sufficient evidence that the development of physical control is
not a physical but an intellectual achievement.
2. The problem of social adjustment and intercourse
Although in the early months the child is mainly oc[Pg 159]cupied in
learning to use his body to accommodate himself to physical conditions in a
comfortable way and to use things skillfully and effectively, yet social
adjustments are very important. In connection with parents, nurse, brother,
and sister, the child learns the signs of satisfaction of hunger, of removal of
discomfort, of the approach of agreeable light, color, sound, and so on. His
contact with physical things is regulated by persons, and he soon
distinguishes persons as the most important and interesting of all the
objects with which he has to do. Speech, the accurate adaptation of sounds
heard to the movements of tongue and lips, is, however, the great
instrument of social adaptation; and with the development of speech
(usually in the second year) adaptation of the baby's activities to and with
those of other persons gives the keynote of mental life. His range of possible
activities is indefinitely widened as he watches what other persons do, and
as he tries to understand and to do what they encourage him to attempt.
The outline pattern of mental life is thus set in the first four or five years.
Years, centuries, generations of invention and planning, may have gone to
the development of the performances and occupations of the adults
surrounding the child. Yet for him their activities are direct stimuli; they are
part of his natural environment; they are carried on in physical terms that
appeal to his eye, ear, and touch. He cannot, of course, appropriate their
meaning directly through his senses; but they furnish stimuli to which he
responds, so that his attention is focussed upon a higher order of materials
and of problems. Were it not for this process by which the achievements of
one generation form the stimuli that direct the activities of the next, the
story of civilization[Pg 160] would be writ in water, and each generation
would have laboriously to make for itself, if it could, its way out of savagery.
Social adjustment results in imitation but is not caused by it
Imitation is one (though only one, see p. 47) of the means by which the
activities of adults supply stimuli which are so interesting, so varied, so
complex, and so novel, as to occasion a rapid progress of thought. Mere
imitation, however, would not give rise to thinking; if we could learn like
parrots by simply copying the outward acts of others, we should never have
to think; nor should we know, after we had mastered the copied act, what
was the meaning of the thing we had done. Educators (and psychologists)
have often assumed that acts which reproduce the behavior of others are
acquired merely by imitation. But a child rarely learns by conscious
imitation; and to say that his imitation is unconscious is to say that it is not
from his standpoint imitation at all. The word, the gesture, the act, the
occupation of another, falls in line with some impulse already active and
suggests some satisfactory mode of expression, some end in which it may
find fulfillment. Having this end of his own, the child then notes other
persons, as he notes natural events, to get further suggestions as to means
of its realization. He selects some of the means he observes, tries them on,
finds them successful or unsuccessful, is confirmed or weakened in his
belief in their value, and so continues selecting, arranging, adapting, testing,
till he can accomplish what he wishes. The onlooker may then observe the
resemblance of this act to some act of an adult, and conclude that it was
acquired by imitation, while as a matter of fact it was acquired by attention,
observation, selection, experimentation, and confirmation by results.
Only[Pg 161] because this method is employed is there intellectual discipline
and an educative result. The presence of adult activities plays an enormous
rôle in the intellectual growth of the child because they add to the natural
stimuli of the world new stimuli which are more exactly adapted to the
needs of a human being, which are richer, better organized, more complex
in range, permitting more flexible adaptations, and calling out novel
reactions. But in utilizing these stimuli the child follows the same methods
that he uses when he is forced to think in order to master his body.
§ 2. Play, Work, and Allied Forms of Activity
Play indicates the domination of activity by meanings or ideas
Organization of ideas involved in play
When things become signs, when they gain a representative capacity as
standing for other things, play is transformed from mere physical
exuberance into an activity involving a mental factor. A little girl who had
broken her doll was seen to perform with the leg of the doll all the
operations of washing, putting to bed, and fondling, that she had been
accustomed to perform with the entire doll. The part stood for the whole; she
reacted not to the stimulus sensibly present, but to the meaning suggested
by the sense object. So children use a stone for a table, leaves for plates,
acorns for cups. So they use their dolls, their trains, their blocks, their other
toys. In manipulating them, they are living not with the physical things, but
in the large world of meanings, natural and social, evoked by these things.
So when children play horse, play store, play house or making calls, they
are subordinating the physically present to the ideally signified. In this way,
a world of meanings, a store of concepts (so fundamental to all intellectual
achievement), is defined and built up.[Pg 162] Moreover, not only do
meanings thus become familiar acquaintances, but they are organized,
arranged in groups, made to cohere in connected ways. A play and a story
blend insensibly into each other. The most fanciful plays of children rarely
lose all touch with the mutual fitness and pertinency of various meanings to
one another; the "freest" plays observe some principles of coherence and
unification. They have a beginning, middle, and end. In games, rules of
order run through various minor acts and bind them into a connected
whole. The rhythm, the competition, and coöperation involved in most plays
and games also introduce organization. There is, then, nothing mysterious
or mystical in the discovery made by Plato and remade by Froebel that play
is the chief, almost the only, mode of education for the child in the years of
later infancy.
The playful attitude
Playfulness is a more important consideration than play. The former is an
attitude of mind; the latter is a passing outward manifestation of this
attitude. When things are treated simply as vehicles of suggestion, what is
suggested overrides the thing. Hence the playful attitude is one of freedom.
The person is not bound to the physical traits of things, nor does he care
whether a thing really means (as we say) what he takes it to represent.
When the child plays horse with a broom and cars with chairs, the fact that
the broom does not really represent a horse, or a chair a locomotive, is of no
account. In order, then, that playfulness may not terminate in arbitrary
fancifulness and in building up an imaginary world alongside the world of
actual things, it is necessary that the play attitude should gradually pass
into a work attitude.
The work attitude is interested in means and ends
What is work—work not as mere external perform[Pg 163]ance, but as
attitude of mind? It signifies that the person is not content longer to accept
and to act upon the meanings that things suggest, but demands congruity
of meaning with the things themselves. In the natural course of growth,
children come to find irresponsible make-believe plays inadequate. A fiction
is too easy a way out to afford content. There is not enough stimulus to call
forth satisfactory mental response. When this point is reached, the ideas
that things suggest must be applied to the things with some regard to
fitness. A small cart, resembling a "real" cart, with "real" wheels, tongue, and
body, meets the mental demand better than merely making believe that
anything which comes to hand is a cart. Occasionally to take part in setting
a "real" table with "real" dishes brings more reward than forever to make
believe a flat stone is a table and that leaves are dishes. The interest may
still center in the meanings, the things may be of importance only as
amplifying a certain meaning. So far the attitude is one of play. But the
meaning is now of such a character that it must find appropriate
embodiment in actual things.
The dictionary does not permit us to call such activities work. Nevertheless,
they represent a genuine passage of play into work. For work (as a mental
attitude, not as mere external performance) means interest in the adequate
embodiment of a meaning (a suggestion, purpose, aim) in objective form
through the use of appropriate materials and appliances. Such an attitude
takes advantage of the meanings aroused and built up in free play,
but controls their development by seeing to it that they are applied to things
in ways consistent with the observable structure of the things themselves.[Pg
164]
and in processes on account of their results
The point of this distinction between play and work may be cleared up by
comparing it with a more usual way of stating the difference. In play activity,
it is said, the interest is in the activity for its own sake; in work, it is in the
product or result in which the activity terminates. Hence the former is
purely free, while the latter is tied down by the end to be achieved. When the
difference is stated in this sharp fashion, there is almost always introduced
a false, unnatural separation between process and product, between activity
and its achieved outcome. The true distinction is not between an interest in
activity for its own sake and interest in the external result of that activity,
but between an interest in an activity just as it flows on from moment to
moment, and an interest in an activity as tending to a culmination, to an
outcome, and therefore possessing a thread of continuity binding together
its successive stages. Both may equally exemplify interest in an activity "for
its own sake"; but in one case the activity in which the interest resides is
more or less casual, following the accident of circumstance and whim, or of
dictation; in the other, the activity is enriched by the sense that it leads
somewhere, that it amounts to something.
Consequences of the sharp separation of play and work
Were it not that the false theory of the relation of the play and the work
attitudes has been connected with unfortunate modes of school practice,
insistence upon a truer view might seem an unnecessary refinement. But
the sharp break that unfortunately prevails between the kindergarten and
the grades is evidence that the theoretical distinction has practical
implications. Under the title of play, the former is rendered unduly symbolic,
fanciful, sentimental, and arbitrary; while under the antithetical caption of
work the latter con[Pg 165]tains many tasks externally assigned. The former
has no end and the latter an end so remote that only the educator, not the
child, is aware that it is an end.
There comes a time when children must extend and make more exact their
acquaintance with existing things; must conceive ends and consequences
with sufficient definiteness to guide their actions by them, and must acquire
some technical skill in selecting and arranging means to realize these ends.
Unless these factors are gradually introduced in the earlier play period, they
must be introduced later abruptly and arbitrarily, to the manifest
disadvantage of both the earlier and the later stages.
False notions of imagination and utility
The sharp opposition of play and work is usually associated with false
notions of utility and imagination. Activity that is directed upon matters of
home and neighborhood interest is depreciated as merely utilitarian. To let
the child wash dishes, set the table, engage in cooking, cut and sew dolls'
clothes, make boxes that will hold "real things," and construct his own
playthings by using hammer and nails, excludes, so it is said, the æsthetic
and appreciative factor, eliminates imagination, and subjects the child's
development to material and practical concerns; while (so it is said) to
reproduce symbolically the domestic relationships of birds and other
animals, of human father and mother and child, of workman and
tradesman, of knight, soldier, and magistrate, secures a liberal exercise of
mind, of great moral as well as intellectual value. It has been even stated
that it is over-physical and utilitarian if a child plants seeds and takes care
of growing plants in the kindergarten; while reproducing dramatically
operations of planting, cultivating, reaping, and so on, either[Pg 166] with
no physical materials or with symbolic representatives, is highly educative to
the imagination and to spiritual appreciation. Toy dolls, trains of cars,
boats, and engines are rigidly excluded, and the employ of cubes, balls, and
other symbols for representing these social activities is recommended on the
same ground. The more unfitted the physical object for its imagined
purpose, such as a cube for a boat, the greater is the supposed appeal to the
imagination.
Imagination a medium of realizing the absent and significant
There are several fallacies in this way of thinking. (a) The healthy
imagination deals not with the unreal, but with the mental realization of
what is suggested. Its exercise is not a flight into the purely fanciful and
ideal, but a method of expanding and filling in what is real. To the child the
homely activities going on about him are not utilitarian devices for
accomplishing physical ends; they exemplify a wonderful world the depths of
which he has not sounded, a world full of the mystery and promise that
attend all the doings of the grown-ups whom he admires. However prosaic
this world may be to the adults who find its duties routine affairs, to the
child it is fraught with social meaning. To engage in it is to exercise the
imagination in constructing an experience of wider value than any the child
has yet mastered.
Only the already experienced can be symbolized
(b) Educators sometimes think children are reacting to a great moral or
spiritual truth when the children's reactions are largely physical and
sensational. Children have great powers of dramatic simulation, and their
physical bearing may seem (to adults prepossessed with a philosophic
theory) to indicate they have been impressed with some lesson of chivalry,
devotion, or nobility, when the children themselves are occupied only[Pg
167] with transitory physical excitations. To symbolize great truths far
beyond the child's range of actual experience is an impossibility, and to
attempt it is to invite love of momentary stimulation.
Useful work is not necessarily labor
(c) Just as the opponents of play in education always conceive of play as
mere amusement, so the opponents of direct and useful activities confuse
occupation with labor. The adult is acquainted with responsible labor upon
which serious financial results depend. Consequently he seeks relief,
relaxation, amusement. Unless children have prematurely worked for hire,
unless they have come under the blight of child labor, no such division
exists for them. Whatever appeals to them at all, appeals directly on its own
account. There is no contrast between doing things for utility and for fun.
Their life is more united and more wholesome. To suppose that activities
customarily performed by adults only under the pressure of utility may not
be done perfectly freely and joyously by children indicates a lack of
imagination. Not the thing done but the quality of mind that goes into the
doing settles what is utilitarian and what is unconstrained and educative.
§ 3. Constructive Occupations
The historic growth of sciences out of occupations
The history of culture shows that mankind's scientific knowledge and
technical abilities have developed, especially in all their earlier stages, out of
the fundamental problems of life. Anatomy and physiology grew out of the
practical needs of keeping healthy and active; geometry and mechanics out
of demands for measuring land, for building, and for making labor-saving
machines; astronomy has been closely connected with navigation, keeping
record of the passage of time; botany grew out[Pg 168] of the requirements
of medicine and of agronomy; chemistry has been associated with dyeing,
metallurgy, and other industrial pursuits. In turn, modern industry is
almost wholly a matter of applied science; year by year the domain of
routine and crude empiricism is narrowed by the translation of scientific
discovery into industrial invention. The trolley, the telephone, the electric
light, the steam engine, with all their revolutionary consequences for social
intercourse and control, are the fruits of science.
The intellectual possibilities of school occupations
These facts are full of educational significance. Most children are
preëminently active in their tendencies. The schools have also taken on—
largely from utilitarian, rather than from strictly educative reasons—a large
number of active pursuits commonly grouped under the head of manual
training, including also school gardens, excursions, and various graphic
arts. Perhaps the most pressing problem of education at the present
moment is to organize and relate these subjects so that they will become
instruments for forming alert, persistent, and fruitful intellectual habits.
That they take hold of the more primary and native equipment of children
(appealing to their desire to do) is generally recognized; that they afford great
opportunity for training in self-reliant and efficient social service is gaining
acknowledgment. But they may also be used for presenting typical problems
to be solved by personal reflection and experimentation, and by acquiring
definite bodies of knowledge leading later to more specialized scientific
knowledge. There is indeed no magic by which mere physical activity or deft
manipulation will secure intellectual results. (See p. 43.) Manual subjects
may be taught by routine, by dictation, or by convention as readily[Pg
169] as bookish subjects. But intelligent consecutive work in gardening,
cooking, or weaving, or in elementary wood and iron, may be planned which
will inevitably result in students not only amassing information of practical
and scientific importance in botany, zoölogy, chemistry, physics, and other
sciences, but (what is more significant) in their becoming versed in methods
of experimental inquiry and proof.
Reorganization of the course of study
That the elementary curriculum is overloaded is a common complaint. The
only alternative to a reactionary return to the educational traditions of the
past lies in working out the intellectual possibilities resident in the various
arts, crafts, and occupations, and reorganizing the curriculum accordingly.
Here, more than elsewhere, are found the means by which the blind and
routine experience of the race may be transformed into illuminated and
emancipated experiment.[Pg 170]

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LANGUAGE AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
§ 1. Language as the Tool of Thinking
Ambiguous position of language
Speech has such a peculiarly intimate connection with thought as to require
special discussion. Although the very word logic comes from logos (λογος),
meaning indifferently both word or speech, and thought or reason, yet
"words, words, words" denote intellectual barrenness, a sham of thought.
Although schooling has language as its chief instrument (and often as its
chief matter) of study, educational reformers have for centuries brought
their severest indictments against the current use of language in the
schools. The conviction that language is necessary to thinking (is even
identical with it) is met by the contention that language perverts and
conceals thought.
Language a necessary tool of thinking,
for it alone fixes meanings
Three typical views have been maintained regarding the relation of thought
and language: first, that they are identical; second, that words are the garb
or clothing of thought, necessary not for thought but only for conveying it;
and third (the view we shall here maintain) that while language is not
thought it is necessary for thinking as well as for its communication. When
it is said, however, that thinking is impossible without language, we must
recall that language includes much more than oral and written speech.
Gestures, pictures, monuments, visual images, finger movements—anything
con[Pg 171]sciously employed as a sign is, logically, language. To say that
language is necessary for thinking is to say that signs are necessary.
Thought deals not with bare things, but with their meanings, their
suggestions; and meanings, in order to be apprehended, must be embodied
in sensible and particular existences. Without meaning, things are nothing
but blind stimuli or chance sources of pleasure and pain; and since
meanings are not themselves tangible things, they must be anchored by
attachment to some physical existence. Existences that are especially set
aside to fixate and convey meanings are signs or symbols. If a man moves
toward another to throw him out of the room, his movement is not a sign. If,
however, the man points to the door with his hand, or utters the sound go,
his movement is reduced to a vehicle of meaning: it is a sign or symbol. In
the case of signs we care nothing for what they are in themselves, but
everything for what they signify and represent. Canis, hund, chien, dog—it
makes no difference what the outward thing is, so long as the meaning is
presented.
Limitations of natural symbols
Natural objects are signs of other things and events. Clouds stand for rain; a
footprint represents game or an enemy; a projecting rock serves to indicate
minerals below the surface. The limitations of natural signs are, however,
great. (i) The physical or direct sense excitation tends to distract attention
from what is meant or indicated. [27] Almost every one will recall pointing out
to a kitten or puppy some object of food, only to have the animal devote
himself to the hand pointing, not to the thing pointed at. (ii) Where natural
signs alone exist, we are mainly at the mercy of external happenings; we[Pg
172] have to wait until the natural event presents itself in order to be
warned or advised of the possibility of some other event. (iii) Natural signs,
not being originally intended to be signs, are cumbrous, bulky,
inconvenient, unmanageable.
Artificial signs overcome these restrictions.
It is therefore indispensable for any high development of thought that there
should be also intentional signs. Speech supplies the requirement.
Gestures, sounds, written or printed forms, are strictly physical existences,
but their native value is intentionally subordinated to the value they acquire
as representative of meanings. (i) The direct and sensible value of faint
sounds and minute written or printed marks is very slight. Accordingly,
attention is not distracted from their representative function. (ii) Their
production is under our direct control so that they may be produced when
needed. When we can make the word rain, we do not have to wait for some
physical forerunner of rain to call our thoughts in that direction. We cannot
make the cloud; we can make the sound, and as a token of meaning the
sound serves the purpose as well as the cloud. (iii) Arbitrary linguistic signs
are convenient and easy to manage. They are compact, portable, and
delicate. As long as we live we breathe; and modifications by the muscles of
throat and mouth of the volume and quality of the air are simple, easy, and
indefinitely controllable. Bodily postures and gestures of the hand and arm
are also employed as signs, but they are coarse and unmanageable
compared with modifications of breath to produce sounds. No wonder that
oral speech has been selected as the main stuff of intentional intellectual
signs. Sounds, while subtle, refined, and easily modifiable, are transitory.
This defect is met by the system of written[Pg 173] and printed words,
appealing to the eye. Litera scripta manet.
Bearing in mind the intimate connection of meanings and signs (or
language), we may note in more detail what language does (1) for specific
meanings, and (2) for the organization of meanings.
I. Individual Meanings. A verbal sign (a) selects, detaches, a meaning from
what is otherwise a vague flux and blur (see p. 121); (b) it retains, registers,
stores that meaning; and (c) applies it, when needed, to the comprehension
of other things. Combining these various functions in a mixture of
metaphors, we may say that a linguistic sign is a fence, a label, and a
vehicle—all in one.
A sign makes a meaning distinct
(a) Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what
was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some
meaning seems almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense
into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost
impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the
void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account. When Emerson
said that he would almost rather know the true name, the poet's name, for a
thing, than to know the thing itself, he presumably had this irradiating and
illuminating function of language in mind. The delight that children take in
demanding and learning the names of everything about them indicates that
meanings are becoming concrete individuals to them, so that their
commerce with things is passing from the physical to the intellectual plane.
It is hardly surprising that savages attach a magic efficacy to words. To
name anything is to give it a title; to dignify and honor it by[Pg 174] raising
it from a mere physical occurrence to a meaning that is distinct and
permanent. To know the names of people and things and to be able to
manipulate these names is, in savage lore, to be in possession of their
dignity and worth, to master them.
A sign preserves a meaning
(b) Things come and go; or we come and go, and either way things escape
our notice. Our direct sensible relation to things is very limited. The
suggestion of meanings by natural signs is limited to occasions of direct
contact or vision. But a meaning fixed by a linguistic sign is conserved for
future use. Even if the thing is not there to represent the meaning, the word
may be produced so as to evoke the meaning. Since intellectual life depends
on possession of a store of meanings, the importance of language as a tool of
preserving meanings cannot be overstated. To be sure, the method of
storage is not wholly aseptic; words often corrupt and modify the meanings
they are supposed to keep intact, but liability to infection is a price paid by
every living thing for the privilege of living.
A sign transfers a meaning
(c) When a meaning is detached and fixed by a sign, it is possible to use that
meaning in a new context and situation. This transfer and reapplication is
the key to all judgment and inference. It would little profit a man to
recognize that a given particular cloud was the premonitor of a given
particular rainstorm if his recognition ended there, for he would then have
to learn over and over again, since the next cloud and the next rain are
different events. No cumulative growth of intelligence would occur;
experience might form habits of physical adaptation but it would not teach
anything, for we should not be able to use a prior experience consciously to
anticipate and regulate a further experience. To be able to use[Pg 175] the
past to judge and infer the new and unknown implies that, although the
past thing has gone, its meaning abides in such a way as to be applicable in
determining the character of the new. Speech forms are our great carriers:
the easy-running vehicles by which meanings are transported from
experiences that no longer concern us to those that are as yet dark and
dubious.
Logical organization depends upon signs
II. Organization of Meanings. In emphasizing the importance of signs in
relation to specific meanings, we have overlooked another aspect, equally
valuable. Signs not only mark off specific or individual meanings, but they
are also instruments of grouping meanings in relation to one another. Words
are not only names or titles of single meanings; they also form sentences in
which meanings are organized in relation to one another. When we say "That
book is a dictionary," or "That blur of light in the heavens is Halley's comet,"
we express a logical connection—an act of classifying and defining that goes
beyond the physical thing into the logical region of genera and species,
things and attributes. Propositions, sentences, bear the same relation to
judgments that distinct words, built up mainly by analyzing propositions in
their various types, bear to meanings or conceptions; and just as words
imply a sentence, so a sentence implies a larger whole of consecutive
discourse into which it fits. As is often said, grammar expresses the
unconscious logic of the popular mind. The chief intellectual classifications
that constitute the working capital of thought have been built up for us by our
mother tongue. Our very lack of explicit consciousness in using language
that we are employing the intellectual systematizations of the race shows
how thoroughly accustomed we have become to its logical distinctions and
groupings.[Pg 176]
§ 2. The Abuse of Linguistic Methods in Education
Teaching merely things, not educative
Taken literally, the maxim, "Teach things, not words," or "Teach things
before words," would be the negation of education; it would reduce mental
life to mere physical and sensible adjustments. Learning, in the proper
sense, is not learning things, but the meanings of things, and this process
involves the use of signs, or language in its generic sense. In like fashion,
the warfare of some educational reformers against symbols, if pushed to
extremes, involves the destruction of the intellectual life, since this lives,
moves, and has its being in those processes of definition, abstraction,
generalization, and classification that are made possible by symbols alone.
Nevertheless, these contentions of educational reformers have been needed.
The liability of a thing to abuse is in proportion to the value of its right use.
But words separated from things are not true signs
Symbols are themselves, as pointed out above, particular, physical, sensible
existences, like any other things. They are symbols only by virtue of what
they suggest and represent, i.e. meanings. (i) They stand for these meanings
to any individual only when he has had experience of some situation to
which these meanings are actually relevant. Words can detach and preserve
a meaning only when the meaning has been first involved in our own direct
intercourse with things. To attempt to give a meaning through a word alone
without any dealings with a thing is to deprive the word of intelligible
signification; against this attempt, a tendency only too prevalent in
education, reformers have protested. Moreover, there is a tendency to
assume that whenever there is a definite word or form of speech there is also
a definite idea; while, as a matter of fact, adults and children alike are
capable of using even precise verbal formulæ[Pg 177] with only the vaguest
and most confused sense of what they mean. Genuine ignorance is more
profitable because likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and
open-mindedness; while ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar
propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with a varnish
waterproof to new ideas.
Language tends to arrest personal inquiry and reflection
(ii) Again, although new combinations of words without the intervention of
physical things may supply new ideas, there are limits to this possibility.
Lazy inertness causes individuals to accept ideas that have currency about
them without personal inquiry and testing. A man uses thought, perhaps, to
find out what others believe, and then stops. The ideas of others as
embodied in language become substitutes for one's own ideas. The use of
linguistic studies and methods to halt the human mind on the level of the
attainments of the past, to prevent new inquiry and discovery, to put the
authority of tradition in place of the authority of natural facts and laws, to
reduce the individual to a parasite living on the secondhand experience of
others—these things have been the source of the reformers' protest against
the preëminence assigned to language in schools.
Words as mere stimuli
Finally, words that originally stood for ideas come, with repeated use, to be
mere counters; they become physical things to be manipulated according to
certain rules, or reacted to by certain operations without consciousness of
their meaning. Mr. Stout (who has called such terms "substitute
signs")remarks that "algebraical and arithmetical signs are to a great extent
used as mere substitute signs.... It is possible to use signs of this kind
whenever fixed and definite rules of opera[Pg 178]tion can be derived from
the nature of the things symbolized, so as to be applied in manipulating the
signs, without further reference to their signification. A word is an
instrument for thinking about the meaning which it expresses; a substitute
sign is a means of not thinking about the meaning which it symbolizes." The
principle applies, however, to ordinary words, as well as to algebraic signs;
they also enable us to use meanings so as to get results without thinking. In
many respects, signs that are means of not thinking are of great advantage;
standing for the familiar, they release attention for meanings that, being
novel, require conscious interpretation. Nevertheless, the premium put in
the schoolroom upon attainment of technical facility, upon skill in
producing external results (ante, p. 51), often changes this advantage into a
positive detriment. In manipulating symbols so as to recite well, to get and
give correct answers, to follow prescribed formulæ of analysis, the pupil's
attitude becomes mechanical, rather than thoughtful; verbal memorizing is
substituted for inquiry into the meaning of things. This danger is perhaps
the one uppermost in mind when verbal methods of education are attacked.
§ 3. The Use of Language in its Educational Bearings
Language stands in a twofold relation to the work of education. On the one
hand, it is continually used in all studies as well as in all the social
discipline of the school; on the other, it is a distinct object of study. We shall
consider only the ordinary use of language, since its effects upon habits of
thought are much deeper than those of conscious study.
Language not primarily intellectual in purpose
The common statement that "language is the expres[Pg 179]sion of thought"
conveys only a half-truth, and a half-truth that is likely to result in positive
error. Language does express thought, but not primarily, nor, at first, even
consciously. The primary motive for language is to influence (through the
expression of desire, emotion, and thought) the activity of others; its
secondary use is to enter into more intimate sociable relations with them; its
employment as a conscious vehicle of thought and knowledge is a tertiary,
and relatively late, formation. The contrast is well brought out by the
statement of John Locke that words have a double use,—"civil" and
"philosophical." "By their civil use, I mean such a communication of
thoughts and ideas by words as may serve for the upholding of common
conversation and commerce about the ordinary affairs and conveniences of
civil life.... By the philosophical use of words, I mean such a use of them as
may serve to convey the precise notions of things, and to express in general
propositions certain and undoubted truths."
Hence education has to transform it into an intellectual tool
This distinction of the practical and social from the intellectual use of
language throws much light on the problem of the school in respect to
speech. That problem is to direct pupils' oral and written speech, used
primarily for practical and social ends, so that gradually it shall become a
conscious tool of conveying knowledge and assisting thought. How without
checking the spontaneous, natural motives—motives to which language
owes its vitality, force, vividness, and variety—are we to modify speech
habits so as to render them accurate and flexible intellectual instruments? It
is comparatively easy to encourage the original spontaneous flow and not
make language over into a servant of reflective thought; it is comparatively
easy to check and[Pg 180] almost destroy (so far as the schoolroom is
concerned) native aim and interest, and to set up artificial and formal modes
of expression in some isolated and technical matters. The difficulty lies in
making over habits that have to do with "ordinary affairs and conveniences"
into habits concerned with "precise notions." The successful accomplishing
of the transformation requires (i) enlargement of the pupil's vocabulary; (ii)
rendering its terms more precise and accurate, and (iii) formation of habits
of consecutive discourse.
To enlarge vocabulary, the fund of concepts should be enlarged
(i) Enlargement of vocabulary. This takes place, of course, by wider
intelligent contact with things and persons, and also vicariously, by
gathering the meanings of words from the context in which they are heard
or read. To grasp by either method a word in its meaning is to exercise
intelligence, to perform an act of intelligent selection or analysis, and it is
also to widen the fund of meanings or concepts readily available in further
intellectual enterprises (ante, p. 126). It is usual to distinguish between
one's active and one's passive vocabulary, the latter being composed of the
words that are understood when they are heard or seen, the former of words
that are used intelligently. The fact that the passive vocabulary is ordinarily
much larger than the active indicates a certain amount of inert energy, of
power not freely controlled by an individual. Failure to use meanings that
are nevertheless understood reveals dependence upon external stimulus,
and lack of intellectual initiative. This mental laziness is to some extent an
artificial product of education. Small children usually attempt to put to use
every new word they get hold of, but when they learn to read they are
introduced to a large variety of terms that there is no ordinary opportunity
to use.[Pg 181] The result is a kind of mental suppression, if not
smothering. Moreover, the meaning of words not actively used in building up
and conveying ideas is never quite clear-cut or complete.
Looseness of thinking accompanies a limited vocabulary
While a limited vocabulary may be due to a limited range of experience, to a
sphere of contact with persons and things so narrow as not to suggest or
require a full store of words, it is also due to carelessness and vagueness. A
happy-go-lucky frame of mind makes the individual averse to clear
discriminations, either in perception or in his own speech. Words are used
loosely in an indeterminate kind of reference to things, and the mind
approaches a condition where practically everything is just a thing-um-bob
or a what-do-you-call-it. Paucity of vocabulary on the part of those with
whom the child associates, triviality and meagerness in the child's reading
matter (as frequently even in his school readers and text-books), tend to
shut down the area of mental vision.
Command of language involves command of things
We must note also the great difference between flow of words and command
of language. Volubility is not necessarily a sign of a large vocabulary; much
talking or even ready speech is quite compatible with moving round and
round in a circle of moderate radius. Most schoolrooms suffer from a lack of
materials and appliances save perhaps books—and even these are "written
down" to the supposed capacity, or incapacity, of children. Occasion and
demand for an enriched vocabulary are accordingly restricted. The
vocabulary of things studied in the schoolroom is very largely isolated; it
does not link itself organically to the range of the ideas and words that are
in vogue outside the school. Hence the enlargement that takes place is often
nominal,[Pg 182] adding to the inert, rather than to the active, fund of
meanings and terms.
(ii) Accuracy of vocabulary. One way in which the fund of words and
concepts is increased is by discovering and naming shades of meaning—that
is to say, by making the vocabulary more precise. Increase in definiteness is
as important relatively as is the enlargement of the capital stock absolutely.
The general as the vague and as the distinctly generic
The first meanings of terms, since they are due to superficial acquaintance
with things, are general in the sense of being vague. The little child calls all
men papa; acquainted with a dog, he may call the first horse he sees a big
dog. Differences of quantity and intensity are noted, but the fundamental
meaning is so vague that it covers things that are far apart. To many
persons trees are just trees, being discriminated only into deciduous trees
and evergreens, with perhaps recognition of one or two kinds of each. Such
vagueness tends to persist and to become a barrier to the advance of
thinking. Terms that are miscellaneous in scope are clumsy tools at best; in
addition they are frequently treacherous, for their ambiguous reference
causes us to confuse things that should be distinguished.
Twofold growth of words in sense or signification
The growth of precise terms out of original vagueness takes place normally
in two directions: toward words that stand for relationships and words that
stand for highly individualized traits (compare what was said about the
development of meanings, p. 122); the first being associated with abstract,
the second with concrete, thinking. Some Australian tribes are said to have
no words for animal or for plant, while they have specific names for every
variety of plant and animal in their neighborhoods. This minuteness of
vocabulary repre[Pg 183]sents progress toward definiteness, but in a one-
sided way. Specific properties are distinguished, but not relationships. [28] On
the other hand, students of philosophy and of the general aspects of natural
and social science are apt to acquire a store of terms that signify relations
without balancing them up with terms that designate specific individuals
and traits. The ordinary use of such terms
as causation, law, society, individual, capital, illustrates this tendency.
Words alter their meanings so as to change their logical functions
In the history of language we find both aspects of the growth of vocabulary
illustrated by changes in the sense of words: some words originally wide in
their application are narrowed to denote shades of meaning; others
originally specific are widened to express relationships. The term vernacular,
now meaning mother speech, has been generalized from the word verna,
meaning a slave born in the master's household. Publication has evolved its
meaning of communication by means of print, through restricting an earlier
meaning of any kind of communication—although the wider meaning is
retained in legal procedure, as publishing a libel. The sense of the
word average has been generalized from a use connected with dividing loss
by shipwreck proportionately among various sharers in an enterprise. [29]
Similar changes occur in the vocabulary of every student
These historical changes assist the educator to appreciate the changes that
occur with individuals together with advance in intellectual resources. In
studying[Pg 184] geometry, a pupil must learn both to narrow and to extend
the meanings of such familiar words as line, surface, angle, square, circle; to
narrow them to the precise meanings involved in demonstrations; to extend
them to cover generic relations not expressed in ordinary usage. Qualities of
color and size must be excluded; relations of direction, of variation in
direction, of limit, must be definitely seized. A like transformation occurs, of
course, in every subject of study. Just at this point lies the danger, alluded
to above, of simply overlaying common meanings with new and isolated
meanings instead of effecting a genuine working-over of popular and
practical meanings into adequate logical tools.
The value of technical terms
Terms used with intentional exactness so as to express a meaning, the
whole meaning, and only the meaning, are called technical. For educational
purposes, a technical term indicates something relative, not absolute; for a
term is technical not because of its verbal form or its unusualness, but
because it is employed to fix a meaning precisely. Ordinary words get a
technical quality when used intentionally for this end. Whenever thought
becomes more accurate, a (relatively) technical vocabulary grows up.
Teachers are apt to oscillate between extremes in regard to technical terms.
On the one hand, these are multiplied in every direction, seemingly on the
assumption that learning a new piece of terminology, accompanied by verbal
description or definition, is equivalent to grasping a new idea. When it is
seen how largely the net outcome is the accumulation of an isolated set of
words, a jargon or scholastic cant, and to what extent the natural power of
judgment is clogged by this accumulation, there is a reaction to the opposite
extreme. Technical terms are banished:[Pg 185] "name words" exist but not
nouns; "action words" but not verbs; pupils may "take away," but not
subtract; they may tell what four fives are, but not what four times five are,
and so on. A sound instinct underlies this reaction—aversion to words that
give the pretense, but not the reality, of meaning. Yet the fundamental
difficulty is not with the word, but with the idea. If the idea is not grasped,
nothing is gained by using a more familiar word; if the idea is perceived, the
use of the term that exactly names it may assist in fixing the idea. Terms
denoting highly exact meanings should be introduced only sparingly, that is,
a few at a time; they should be led up to gradually, and great pains should
be taken to secure the circumstances that render precision of meaning
significant.
Importance of consecutive discourse
(iii) Consecutive discourse. As we saw, language connects and organizes
meanings as well as selects and fixes them. As every meaning is set in the
context of some situation, so every word in concrete use belongs to some
sentence (it may itself represent a condensed sentence), and the sentence, in
turn, belongs to some larger story, description, or reasoning process. It is
unnecessary to repeat what has been said about the importance of
continuity and ordering of meanings. We may, however, note some ways in
which school practices tend to interrupt consecutiveness of language and
thereby interfere harmfully with systematic reflection. (a) Teachers have a
habit of monopolizing continued discourse. Many, if not most, instructors
would be surprised if informed at the end of the day of the amount of time
they have talked as compared with any pupil. Children's conversation is
often confined to answering questions in brief phrases, or in single
disconnected sentences. Expatia[Pg 186]tion and explanation are reserved
for the teacher, who often admits any hint at an answer on the part of the
pupil, and then amplifies what he supposes the child must have meant. The
habits of sporadic and fragmentary discourse thus promoted have inevitably
a disintegrating intellectual influence.
Too minute questioning
(b) Assignment of too short lessons when accompanied (as it usually is in
order to pass the time of the recitation period) by minute "analytic"
questioning has the same effect. This evil is usually at its height in such
subjects as history and literature, where not infrequently the material is so
minutely subdivided as to break up the unity of meaning belonging to a
given portion of the matter, to destroy perspective, and in effect to reduce
the whole topic to an accumulation of disconnected details all upon the
same level. More often than the teacher is aware, his mind carries and
supplies the background of unity of meaning against which pupils project
isolated scraps.
Making avoidance of error the aim
(c) Insistence upon avoiding error instead of attaining power tends also to
interruption of continuous discourse and thought. Children who begin with
something to say and with intellectual eagerness to say it are sometimes
made so conscious of minor errors in substance and form that the energy
that should go into constructive thinking is diverted into anxiety not to
make mistakes, and even, in extreme cases, into passive quiescence as the
best method of minimizing error. This tendency is especially marked in
connection with the writing of compositions, essays, and themes. It has even
been gravely recommended that little children should always write on trivial
subjects and in short sentences because in that way they are less likely to
make mistakes, while[Pg 187] the teaching of writing to high school and
college students occasionally reduces itself to a technique for detecting and
designating mistakes. The resulting self-consciousness and constraint are
only part of the evil that comes from a negative ideal.[Pg 188]

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
OBSERVATION AND INFORMATION IN THE TRAINING OF MIND
No thinking without acquaintance with facts
Thinking is an ordering of subject-matter with reference to discovering what
it signifies or indicates. Thinking no more exists apart from this arranging of
subject-matter than digestion occurs apart from the assimilating of food.
The way in which the subject-matter is furnished marks, therefore, a
fundamental point. If the subject-matter is provided in too scanty or too
profuse fashion, if it comes in disordered array or in isolated scraps, the
effect upon habits of thought is detrimental. If personal observation and
communication of information by others (whether in books or speech) are
rightly conducted, half the logical battle is won, for they are the channels of
obtaining subject-matter.
§ 1. The Nature and Value of Observation
Fallacy of making "facts" an end in themselves
The protest, mentioned in the last chapter, of educational reformers against
the exaggerated and false use of language, insisted upon personal and direct
observation as the proper alternative course. The reformers felt that the
current emphasis upon the linguistic factor eliminated all opportunity for
first-hand acquaintance with real things; hence they appealed to sense-
perception to fill the gap. It is not surprising that this enthusiastic zeal
failed frequently to ask how and why[Pg 189] observation is educative, and
hence fell into the error of making observation an end in itself and was
satisfied with any kind of material under any kind of conditions. Such
isolation of observation is still manifested in the statement that this faculty
develops first, then that of memory and imagination, and finally the faculty
of thought. From this point of view, observation is regarded as furnishing
crude masses of raw material, to which, later on, reflective processes may be
applied. Our previous pages should have made obvious the fallacy of this
point of view by bringing out the fact that simple concrete thinking attends
all our intercourse with things which is not on a purely physical level.
The sympathetic motive in extending acquaintance
I. All persons have a natural desire—akin to curiosity—for a widening of
their range of acquaintance with persons and things. The sign in art
galleries that forbids the carrying of canes and umbrellas is obvious
testimony to the fact that simply to see is not enough for many people; there
is a feeling of lack of acquaintance until some direct contact is made. This
demand for fuller and closer knowledge is quite different from any conscious
interest in observation for its own sake. Desire for expansion, for "self-
realization," is its motive. The interest is sympathetic, socially and
æsthetically sympathetic, rather than cognitive. While the interest is
especially keen in children (because their actual experience is so small and
their possible experience so large), it still characterizes adults when routine
has not blunted its edge. This sympathetic interest provides the medium for
carrying and binding together what would otherwise be a multitude of items,
diverse, disconnected, and of no intellectual use. These systems are indeed
social and æsthetic rather than consciously intel[Pg 190]lectual; but they
provide the natural medium for more conscious intellectual explorations.
Some educators have recommended that nature study in the elementary
schools be conducted with a love of nature and a cultivation of æsthetic
appreciation in view rather than in a purely analytic spirit. Others have
urged making much of the care of animals and plants. Both of these
important recommendations have grown out of experience, not out of theory,
but they afford excellent exemplifications of the theoretic point just made.
Analytic inspection for the sake of doing
Direct and indirect sense training
II. In normal development, specific analytic observations are originally
connected almost exclusively with the imperative need for noting means and
ends in carrying on activities. When one is doing something, one is
compelled, if the work is to succeed (unless it is purely routine), to use eyes,
ears, and sense of touch as guides to action. Without a constant and alert
exercise of the senses, not even plays and games can go on; in any form of
work, materials, obstacles, appliances, failures, and successes, must be
intently watched. Sense-perception does not occur for its own sake or for
purposes of training, but because it is an indispensable factor of success in
doing what one is interested in doing. Although not designed for sense-
training, this method effects sense-training in the most economical and
thoroughgoing way. Various schemes have been designed by teachers for
cultivating sharp and prompt observation of forms, as by writing words,—
even in an unknown language,—making arrangements of figures and
geometrical forms, and having pupils reproduce them after a momentary
glance. Children often attain great skill in quick seeing and full reproducing
of even complicated meaningless combinations. But such methods of
training[Pg 191]—however valuable as occasional games and diversions—
compare very unfavorably with the training of eye and hand that comes as
an incident of work with tools in wood or metals, or of gardening, cooking, or
the care of animals. Training by isolated exercises leaves no deposit, leads
nowhere; and even the technical skill acquired has little radiating power, or
transferable value. Criticisms made upon the training of observation on the
ground that many persons cannot correctly reproduce the forms and
arrangement of the figures on the face of their watches misses the point
because persons do not look at a watch to find out whether four o'clock is
indicated by IIII or by IV, but to find out what time it is, and, if observation
decides this matter, noting other details is irrelevant and a waste of time. In
the training of observation the question of end and motive is all-important.
Scientific observations are linked to problems
"Object-lessons" rarely supply problems
III. The further, more intellectual or scientific, development of observation
follows the line of the growth of practical into theoretical reflection already
traced (ante, Chapter Ten). As problems emerge and are dwelt upon,
observation is directed less to the facts that bear upon a practical aim and
more upon what bears upon a problem as such. What makes observations
in schools often intellectually ineffective is (more than anything else) that
they are carried on independently of a sense of a problem that they serve to
define or help to solve. The evil of this isolation is seen through the entire
educational system, from the kindergarten, through the elementary and
high schools, to the college. Almost everywhere may be found, at some time,
recourse to observations as if they were of complete and final value in
themselves, instead of the means[Pg 192] of getting material that bears upon
some difficulty and its solution. In the kindergarten are heaped up
observations regarding geometrical forms, lines, surfaces, cubes, colors, and
so on. In the elementary school, under the name of "object-lessons," the
form and properties of objects,—apple, orange, chalk,—selected almost at
random, are minutely noted, while under the name of "nature study" similar
observations are directed upon leaves, stones, insects, selected in almost
equally arbitrary fashion. In high school and college, laboratory and
microscopic observations are carried on as if the accumulation of observed
facts and the acquisition of skill in manipulation were educational ends in
themselves.
Compare with these methods of isolated observations the statement of
Jevons that observation as conducted by scientific men is effective "only
when excited and guided by hope of verifying a theory"; and again, "the
number of things which can be observed and experimented upon are
infinite, and if we merely set to work to record facts without any distinct
purpose, our records will have no value." Strictly speaking, the first
statement of Jevons is too narrow. Scientific men institute observations not
merely to test an idea (or suggested explanatory meaning), but also to locate
the nature of a problem and thereby guide the formation of a hypothesis.
But the principle of his remark, namely, that scientific men never make the
accumulation of observations an end in itself, but always a means to a
general intellectual conclusion, is absolutely sound. Until the force of this
principle is adequately recognized in education, observation will be largely a
matter of uninteresting dead work or of acquiring forms of technical skill
that are not available as intellectual resources.[Pg 193]
§ 2. Methods and Materials of Observation in the Schools The best methods
in use in our schools furnish many suggestions for giving observation its
right place in mental training.
Observation should involve discovery
I. They rest upon the sound assumption that observation is
an active process. Observation is exploration, inquiry for the sake of
discovering something previously hidden and unknown, this something
being needed in order to reach some end, practical or theoretical.
Observation is to be discriminated from recognition, or perception of what is
familiar. The identification of something already understood is, indeed, an
indispensable function of further investigation (ante, p. 119); but it is
relatively automatic and passive, while observation proper is searching and
deliberate. Recognition refers to the already mastered; observation is
concerned with mastering the unknown. The common notions that
perception is like writing on a blank piece of paper, or like impressing an
image on the mind as a seal is imprinted on wax or as a picture is formed on
a photographic plate (notions that have played a disastrous rôle in
educational methods), arise from a failure to distinguish between automatic
recognition and the searching attitude of genuine observation.
and suspense during an unfolding change
II. Much assistance in the selection of appropriate material for observation
may be derived from considering the eagerness and closeness of observation
that attend the following of a story or drama. Alertness of observation is at
its height wherever there is "plot interest." Why? Because of the balanced
combination of the old and the new, of the familiar and the unexpected. We
hang on the lips of the story-teller because of the element of mental
suspense. Alternatives are suggested,[Pg 194] but are left ambiguous, so
that our whole being questions: What befell next? Which way did things turn
out? Contrast the ease and fullness with which a child notes all the salient
traits of a story, with the labor and inadequacy of his observation of some
dead and static thing where nothing raises a question or suggests
alternative outcomes.
This "plot interest" manifested in activity,
When an individual is engaged in doing or making something (the activity
not being of such a mechanical and habitual character that its outcome is
assured), there is an analogous situation. Something is going to come of
what is present to the sense, but just what is doubtful. The plot is unfolding
toward success or failure, but just when or how is uncertain. Hence the
keen and tense observation of conditions and results that attends
constructive manual operations. Where the subject-matter is of a more
impersonal sort, the same principle of movement toward a dénouement may
apply. It is a commonplace that what is moving attracts notice when that
which is at rest escapes it. Yet too often it would almost seem as if pains
had been taken to deprive the material of school observations of all life and
dramatic quality, to reduce it to a dead and inert form. Mere change is not
enough, however. Vicissitude, alteration, motion, excite observation; but if
they merely excite it, there is no thought. The changes must (like the
incidents of a well-arranged story or plot) take place in a certain cumulative
order; each successive change must at once remind us of its predecessor
and arouse interest in its successor if observations of change are to be
logically fruitful.
and in cycles of growth
Living beings, plants, and animals, fulfill the twofold requirement to an
extraordinary degree. Where there[Pg 195] is growth, there is motion,
change, process; and there is also arrangement of the changes in a cycle.
The first arouses, the second organizes, observation. Much of the
extraordinary interest that children take in planting seeds and watching the
stages of their growth is due to the fact that a drama is enacting before their
eyes; there is something doing, each step of which is important in the
destiny of the plant. The great practical improvements that have occurred of
late years in the teaching of botany and zoölogy will be found, upon
inspection, to involve treating plants and animals as beings that act, that do
something, instead of as mere inert specimens having static properties to be
inventoried, named, and registered. Treated in the latter fashion,
observation is inevitably reduced to the falsely "analytic" (ante, p. 112),—to
mere dissection and enumeration.
Observation of structure grows out of noting function
There is, of course, a place, and an important place, for observation of the
mere static qualities of objects. When, however, the primary interest is
in function, in what the object does, there is a motive for more minute
analytic study, for the observation of structure. Interest in noting an activity
passes insensibly into noting how the activity is carried on; the interest in
what is accomplished passes over into an interest in the organs of its
accomplishing. But when the beginning is made with the morphological, the
anatomical, the noting of peculiarities of form, size, color, and distribution of
parts, the material is so cut off from significance as to be dead and dull. It is
as natural for children to look intently for the stomata of a plant after they
have become interested in its function of breathing, as it is repulsive to
attend minutely to them when they are considered as isolated peculiarities
of structure.[Pg 196]
Scientific observation
III. As the center of interest of observations becomes less personal, less a
matter of means for effecting one's own ends, and less æsthetic, less a
matter of contribution of parts to a total emotional effect, observation
becomes more consciously intellectual in quality. Pupils learn to observe for
the sake (i) of finding out what sort of perplexity confronts them; (ii) of
inferring hypothetical explanations for the puzzling features that observation
reveals; and (iii) of testing the ideas thus suggested.
should be extensive
and intensive
In short, observation becomes scientific in nature. Of such observations it
may be said that they should follow a rhythm between the extensive and the
intensive. Problems become definite, and suggested explanations significant
by a certain alternation between a wide and somewhat loose soaking in of
relevant facts and a minutely accurate study of a few selected facts. The
wider, less exact observation is necessary to give the student a feeling for
the reality of the field of inquiry, a sense of its bearings and possibilities,
and to store his mind with materials that imagination may transform into
suggestions. The intensive study is necessary for limiting the problem, and
for securing the conditions of experimental testing. As the latter by itself is
too specialized and technical to arouse intellectual growth, the former by
itself is too superficial and scattering for control of intellectual development.
In the sciences of life, field study, excursions, acquaintance with living
things in their natural habitats, may alternate with microscopic and
laboratory observation. In the physical sciences, phenomena of light, of
heat, of electricity, of moisture, of gravity, in their broad setting in nature—
their physiographic setting—should prepare for an exact study of selected
facts under conditions of laboratory[Pg 197] control. In this way, the student
gets the benefit of technical scientific methods of discovery and testing,
while he retains his sense of the identity of the laboratory modes of energy
with large out-of-door realities, thereby avoiding the impression (that so
often accrues) that the facts studied are peculiar to the laboratory.
§ 3. Communication of Information
Importance of hearsay acquaintance
When all is said and done the field of fact open to any one observer by
himself is narrow. Into every one of our beliefs, even those that we have
worked out under the conditions of utmost personal, first-hand
acquaintance, much has insensibly entered from what we have heard or
read of the observations and conclusions of others. In spite of the great
extension of direct observation in our schools, the vast bulk of educational
subject-matter is derived from other sources—from text-book, lecture, and
viva-voce interchange. No educational question is of greater import than how
to get the most logical good out of learning through transmission from
others.
Logically, this ranks only as evidence or testimony
Doubtless the chief meaning associated with the word instruction is this
conveying and instilling of the results of the observations and inferences of
others. Doubtless the undue prominence in education of the ideal of
amassing information (ante, p. 52) has its source in the prominence of the
learning of other persons. The problem then is how to convert it into an
intellectual asset. In logical terms, the material supplied from the experience
of others is testimony: that is to say, evidence submitted by others to be
employed by one's own judgment in reaching a conclusion. How shall we
treat the subject-matter supplied by text-book and teacher so that it shall
rank as material for reflec[Pg 198]tive inquiry, not as ready-made
intellectual pabulum to be accepted and swallowed just as supplied by the
store?
Communication by others should not encroach on observation,
In reply to this question, we may say (i) that the communication of material
should be needed. That is to say, it should be such as cannot readily be
attained by personal observation. For teacher or book to cram pupils with
facts which, with little more trouble, they could discover by direct inquiry is
to violate their intellectual integrity by cultivating mental servility. This does
not mean that the material supplied through communication of others
should be meager or scanty. With the utmost range of the senses, the world
of nature and history stretches out almost infinitely beyond. But the fields
within which direct observation is feasible should be carefully chosen and
sacredly protected.
should not be dogmatic in tone,
(ii) Material should be supplied by way of stimulus, not with dogmatic
finality and rigidity. When pupils get the notion that any field of study has
been definitely surveyed, that knowledge about it is exhaustive and final,
they may continue docile pupils, but they cease to be students. All thinking
whatsoever—so be it is thinking—contains a phase of originality. This
originality does not imply that the student's conclusion varies from the
conclusions of others, much less that it is a radically novel conclusion. His
originality is not incompatible with large use of materials and suggestions
contributed by others. Originality means personal interest in the question,
personal initiative in turning over the suggestions furnished by others, and
sincerity in following them out to a tested conclusion. Literally, the phrase
"Think for yourself" is tautological; any thinking is thinking for one's self.[Pg
199]
should have relation to a personal problem,
(iii) The material furnished by way of information should be relevant to a
question that is vital in the student's own experience. What has been said
about the evil of observations that begin and end in themselves may be
transferred without change to communicated learning. Instruction in
subject-matter that does not fit into any problem already stirring in the
student's own experience, or that is not presented in such a way as to
arouse a problem, is worse than useless for intellectual purposes. In that it
fails to enter into any process of reflection, it is useless; in that it remains in
the mind as so much lumber and débris, it is a barrier, an obstruction in
the way of effective thinking when a problem arises.
and to prior systems of experience
Another way of stating the same principle is that material furnished by
communication must be such as to enter into some existing system or
organization of experience. All students of psychology are familiar with the
principle of apperception—that we assimilate new material with what we
have digested and retained from prior experiences. Now the "apperceptive
basis" of material furnished by teacher and text-book should be found, as
far as possible, in what the learner has derived from more direct forms of his
own experience. There is a tendency to connect material of the schoolroom
simply with the material of prior school lessons, instead of linking it to what
the pupil has acquired in his out-of-school experience. The teacher says, "Do
you not remember what we learned from the book last week?"—instead of
saying, "Do you not recall such and such a thing that you have seen or
heard?" As a result, there are built up detached and independent systems of
school knowledge that inertly overlay the[Pg 200] ordinary systems of
experience instead of reacting to enlarge and refine them. Pupils are taught
to live in two separate worlds, one the world of out-of-school experience, the
other the world of books and lessons.[Pg 201]

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE RECITATION AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
Importance of the recitation
In the recitation the teacher comes into his closest contact with the pupil. In
the recitation focus the possibilities of guiding children's activities,
influencing their language habits, and directing their observations. In
discussing the significance of the recitation as an instrumentality of
education, we are accordingly bringing to a head the points considered in
the last three chapters, rather than introducing a new topic. The method in
which the recitation is carried on is a crucial test of a teacher's skill in
diagnosing the intellectual state of his pupils and in supplying the
conditions that will arouse serviceable mental responses: in short, of his art
as a teacher.
Re-citing versus reflecting
The use of the word recitation to designate the period of most intimate
intellectual contact of teacher with pupil and pupil with pupil is a fateful
fact. To re-cite is to cite again, to repeat, to tell over and over. If we were to
call this period reiteration, the designation would hardly bring out more
clearly than does the word recitation, the complete domination of instruction
by rehearsing of secondhand information, by memorizing for the sake of
producing correct replies at the proper time. Everything that is said in this
chapter is insignificant in comparison with the primary truth that the
recitation is a place and time for stimulating and directing reflection, and
that reproducing memorized[Pg 202] matter is only an incident—even
though an indispensable incident—in the process of cultivating a thoughtful
attitude.
§ 1. The Formal Steps of Instruction
Herbart's analysis of method of teaching
But few attempts have been made to formulate a method, resting on general
principles, of conducting a recitation. One of these is of great importance
and has probably had more and better influence upon the "hearing of
lessons" than all others put together; namely, the analysis by Herbart of a
recitation into five successive steps. The steps are commonly known as "the
formal steps of instruction." The underlying notion is that no matter how
subjects vary in scope and detail there is one and only one best way of
mastering them, since there is a single "general method" uniformly followed
by the mind in effective attack upon any subject. Whether it be a first-grade
child mastering the rudiments of number, a grammar-school pupil studying
history, or a college student dealing with philology, in each case the first
step is preparation, the second presentation, followed in turn by comparison
and generalization, ending in the application of the generalizations to
specific and new instances.
Illustration of method
By preparation is meant asking questions to remind pupils of familiar
experiences of their own that will be useful in acquiring the new topic. What
one already knows supplies the means with which one apprehends the
unknown. Hence the process of learning the new will be made easier if
related ideas in the pupil's mind are aroused to activity—are brought to the
foreground of consciousness. When pupils take up the study of rivers, they
are first questioned about streams or brooks[Pg 203] with which they are
already acquainted; if they have never seen any, they may be asked about
water running in gutters. Somehow "apperceptive masses" are stirred that
will assist in getting hold of the new subject. The step of preparation ends
with statement of the aim of the lesson. Old knowledge having been made
active, new material is then "presented" to the pupils. Pictures and relief
models of rivers are shown; vivid oral descriptions are given; if possible, the
children are taken to see an actual river. These two steps terminate the
acquisition of particular facts.
The next two steps are directed toward getting a general principle or
conception. The local river is compared with, perhaps, the Amazon, the St.
Lawrence, the Rhine; by this comparison accidental and unessential
features are eliminated and the river concept is formed: the elements
involved in the river-meaning are gathered together and formulated. This
done, the resulting principle is fixed in mind and is clarified by being applied
to other streams, say to the Thames, the Po, the Connecticut.
Comparison with our prior analysis of reflection
If we compare this account of the methods of instruction with our own
analysis of a complete operation of thinking, we are struck by obvious
resemblances. In our statement (compare Chapter Six) the "steps" are the
occurrence of a problem or a puzzling phenomenon; then observation,
inspection of facts, to locate and clear up the problem; then the formation of
a hypothesis or the suggestion of a possible solution together with its
elaboration by reasoning; then the testing of the elaborated idea by using it
as a guide to new observations and experimentations. In each account, there
is the sequence of (i) specific facts and[Pg 204] events, (ii) ideas and
reasonings, and (iii) application of their result to specific facts. In each case,
the movement is inductive-deductive. We are struck also by one difference:
the Herbartian method makes no reference to a difficulty, a discrepancy
requiring explanation, as the origin and stimulus of the whole process. As a
consequence, it often seems as if the Herbartian method deals with thought
simply as an incident in the process of acquiring information, instead of
treating the latter as an incident in the process of developing thought.
The formal steps concern the teacher's preparation rather than the
recitation itself
Before following up this comparison in more detail, we may raise the
question whether the recitation should, in any case, follow a uniform
prescribed series of steps—even if it be admitted that this series expresses
the normal logical order. In reply, it may be said that just because the order
is logical, it represents the survey of subject-matter made by one who
already understands it, not the path of progress followed by a mind that is
learning. The former may describe a uniform straight-way course, the latter
must be a series of tacks, of zigzag movements back and forth. In short, the
formal steps indicate the points that should be covered by the teacher in
preparing to conduct a recitation, but should not prescribe the actual
course of teaching.
The teacher's problem
Lack of any preparation on the part of a teacher leads, of course, to a
random, haphazard recitation, its success depending on the inspiration of
the moment, which may or may not come. Preparation in simply the subject-
matter conduces to a rigid order, the teacher examining pupils on their
exact knowledge of their text. But the teacher's problem—as a teacher—does
not reside in mastering a subject-matter, but in adjusting a subject-matter
to the nurture of thought. Now the[Pg 205] formal steps indicate excellently
well the questions a teacher should ask in working out the problem of
teaching a topic. What preparation have my pupils for attacking this
subject? What familiar experiences of theirs are available? What have they
already learned that will come to their assistance? How shall I present the
matter so as to fit economically and effectively into their present equipment?
What pictures shall I show? To what objects shall I call their attention?
What incidents shall I relate? What comparisons shall I lead them to draw,
what similarities to recognize? What is the general principle toward which
the whole discussion should point as its conclusion? By what applications
shall I try to fix, to clear up, and to make real their grasp of this general
principle? What activities of their own may bring it home to them as a
genuinely significant principle?
Only flexibility of procedure gives a recitation vitality
Any step may come first
No teacher can fail to teach better if he has considered such questions
somewhat systematically. But the more the teacher has reflected upon
pupils' probable intellectual response to a topic from the various stand-
points indicated by the five formal steps, the more he will be prepared to
conduct the recitation in a flexible and free way, and yet not let the subject
go to pieces and the pupils' attention drift in all directions; the less
necessary will he find it, in order to preserve a semblance of intellectual
order, to follow some one uniform scheme. He will be ready to take
advantage of any sign of vital response that shows itself from any direction.
One pupil may already have some inkling—probably erroneous—of a general
principle. Application may then come at the very beginning in order to show
that the principle will not work, and thereby[Pg 206] induce search for new
facts and a new generalization. Or the abrupt presentation of some fact or
object may so stimulate the minds of pupils as to render quite superfluous
any preliminary preparation. If pupils' minds are at work at all, it is quite
impossible that they should wait until the teacher has conscientiously taken
them through the steps of preparation, presentation, and comparison before
they form at least a working hypothesis or generalization. Moreover, unless
comparison of the familiar and the unfamiliar is introduced at the
beginning, both preparation and presentation will be aimless and without
logical motive, isolated, and in so far meaningless. The student's mind
cannot be prepared at large, but only for something in particular, and
presentation is usually the best way of evoking associations. The emphasis
may fall now on the familiar concept that will help grasp the new, now on
the new facts that frame the problem; but in either case it is comparison
and contrast with the other term of the pair which gives either its force. In
short, to transfer the logical steps from the points that the teacher needs to
consider to uniform successive steps in the conduct of a recitation, is to
impose the logical review of a mind that already understands the subject,
upon the mind that is struggling to comprehend it, and thereby to obstruct
the logic of the student's own mind.
§ 2. The Factors in the Recitation
Bearing in mind that the formal steps represent intertwined factors of a
student's progress and not mileposts on a beaten highway, we may consider
each by itself. In so doing, it will be convenient to follow the example of
many of the Herbartians and reduce the steps to[Pg 207] three: first, the
apprehension of specific or particular facts; second, rational generalization;
third, application and verification.
Preparation is getting the sense of a problem
I. The processes having to do with particular facts are preparation and
presentation. The best, indeed the only preparation is arousal to a
perception of something that needs explanation, something unexpected,
puzzling, peculiar. When the feeling of a genuine perplexity lays hold of any
mind (no matter how the feeling arises), that mind is alert and inquiring,
because stimulated from within. The shock, the bite, of a question will force
the mind to go wherever it is capable of going, better than will the most
ingenious pedagogical devices unaccompanied by this mental ardor. It is the
sense of a problem that forces the mind to a survey and recall of the past to
discover what the question means and how it may be dealt with.
Pitfalls in preparation
The teacher in his more deliberate attempts to call into play the familiar
elements in a student's experience, must guard against certain dangers. (i)
The step of preparation must not be too long continued or too exhaustive, or
it defeats its own end. The pupil loses interest and is bored, when a
plunge in medias res might have braced him to his work. The preparation
part of the recitation period of some conscientious teachers reminds one of
the boy who takes so long a run in order to gain headway for a jump that
when he reaches the line, he is too tired to jump far. (ii) The organs by which
we apprehend new material are our habits. To insist too minutely upon
turning over habitual dispositions into conscious ideas is to interfere with
their best workings. Some factors of familiar experience must indeed be
brought to conscious recognition, just as trans[Pg 208]planting is necessary
for the best growth of some plants. But it is fatal to be forever digging up
either experiences or plants to see how they are getting along. Constraint,
self-consciousness, embarrassment, are the consequence of too much
conscious refurbishing of familiar experiences.
Statement of aim of lesson
Strict Herbartians generally lay it down that statement—by the teacher—of
the aim of a lesson is an indispensable part of preparation. This preliminary
statement of the aim of the lesson hardly seems more intellectual in
character, however, than tapping a bell or giving any other signal for
attention and transfer of thoughts from diverting subjects. To the teacher
the statement of an end is significant, because he has already been at the
end; from a pupil's standpoint the statement of what he is going to learn is
something of an Irish bull. If the statement of the aim is taken too seriously
by the instructor, as meaning more than a signal to attention, its probable
result is forestalling the pupil's own reaction, relieving him of the
responsibility of developing a problem and thus arresting his mental
initiative.
How much the teacher should tell or show
It is unnecessary to discuss at length presentation as a factor in the
recitation, because our last chapter covered the topic under the captions of
observation and communication. The function of presentation is to supply
materials that force home the nature of a problem and furnish suggestions
for dealing with it. The practical problem of the teacher is to preserve a
balance between so little showing and telling as to fail to stimulate reflection
and so much as to choke thought. Provided the student is genuinely
engaged upon a topic, and provided the teacher is willing to give the student
a good deal of leeway as to what he assimilates and retains (not requiring
rigidly that everything be grasped or repro[Pg 209]duced), there is
comparatively little danger that one who is himself enthusiastic will
communicate too much concerning a topic.
The pupil's responsibility for making out a reasonable case
II. The distinctively rational phase of reflective inquiry consists, as we have
already seen, in the elaboration of an idea, or working hypothesis, through
conjoint comparison and contrast, terminating in definition or formulation.
(i) So far as the recitation is concerned, the primary requirement is that the
student be held responsible for working out mentally every suggested
principle so as to show what he means by it, how it bears upon the facts at
hand, and how the facts bear upon it. Unless the pupil is made responsible
for developing on his own account the reasonableness of the guess he puts
forth, the recitation counts for practically nothing in the training of
reasoning power. A clever teacher easily acquires great skill in dropping out
the inept and senseless contributions of pupils, and in selecting and
emphasizing those in line with the result he wishes to reach. But this
method (sometimes called "suggestive questioning") relieves the pupils of
intellectual responsibility, save for acrobatic agility in following the teacher's
lead.
The necessity for mental leisure
(ii) The working over of a vague and more or less casual idea into coherent
and definite form is impossible without a pause, without freedom from
distraction. We say "Stop and think"; well, all reflection involves, at some
point, stopping external observations and reactions so that an idea may
mature. Meditation, withdrawal or abstraction from clamorous assailants of
the senses and from demands for overt action, is as necessary at the
reasoning stage, as are observation and experiment at other periods. The
metaphors of digestion and[Pg 210] assimilation, that so readily occur to
mind in connection with rational elaboration, are highly instructive. A silent,
uninterrupted working-over of considerations by comparing and weighing
alternative suggestions, is indispensable for the development of coherent
and compact conclusions. Reasoning is no more akin to disputing or
arguing, or to the abrupt seizing and dropping of suggestions, than digestion
is to a noisy champing of the jaws. The teacher must secure opportunity for
leisurely mental digestion.
A typical central object necessary
(iii) In the process of comparison, the teacher must avert the distraction that
ensues from putting before the mind a number of facts on the same level of
importance. Since attention is selective, some one object normally claims
thought and furnishes the center of departure and reference. This fact is
fatal to the success of the pedagogical methods that endeavor to conduct
comparison on the basis of putting before the mind a row of objects of equal
importance. In comparing, the mind does not naturally begin with
objects a, b, c, d, and try to find the respect in which they agree. It begins
with a single object or situation more or less vague and inchoate in
meaning, and makes excursions to other objects in order to render
understanding of the central object consistent and clear. The mere
multiplication of objects of comparison is adverse to successful reasoning.
Each fact brought within the field of comparison should clear up some
obscure feature or extend some fragmentary trait of the primary object.
Importance of types
In short, pains should be taken to see that the object on which thought
centers is typical: material being typical when, although individual or
specific, it is such as readily and fruitfully suggests the principles of an
en[Pg 211]tire class of facts. No sane person begins to think about rivers
wholesale or at large. He begins with the one river that has presented some
puzzling trait. Then he studies other rivers to get light upon the baffling
features of this one, and at the same time he employs the characteristic
traits of his original object to reduce to order the multifarious details that
appear in connection with other rivers. This working back and forth
preserves unity of meaning, while protecting it from monotony and
narrowness. Contrast, unlikeness, throws significant features into relief,
and these become instruments for binding together into an organized or
coherent meaning dissimilar characters. The mind is defended against the
deadening influence of many isolated particulars and also against the
barrenness of a merely formal principle. Particular cases and properties
supply emphasis and concreteness; general principles convert the
particulars into a single system.
All insight into meaning effects generalization
(iv) Hence generalization is not a separate and single act; it is rather a
constant tendency and function of the entire discussion or recitation. Every
step forward toward an idea that comprehends, that explains, that unites
what was isolated and therefore puzzling, generalizes. The little child
generalizes as truly as the adolescent or adult, even though he does not
arrive at the same generalities. If he is studying a river basin, his knowledge
is generalized in so far as the various details that he apprehends are found
to be the effects of a single force, as that of water pushing downward from
gravity, or are seen to be successive stages of a single history of formation.
Even if there were acquaintance with only one river, knowledge of it under
such conditions would be generalized knowledge.[Pg 212]
Insight into meaning requires formulation
The factor of formulation, of conscious stating, involved in generalization,
should also be a constant function, not a single formal act. Definition means
essentially the growth of a meaning out of vagueness into definiteness. Such
final verbal definition as takes place should be only the culmination of a
steady growth in distinctness. In the reaction against ready-made verbal
definitions and rules, the pendulum should never swing to the opposite
extreme, that of neglecting to summarize the net meaning that emerges from
dealing with particular facts. Only as general summaries are made from
time to time does the mind reach a conclusion or a resting place; and only
as conclusions are reached is there an intellectual deposit available in
future understanding.
Generalization means capacity for application to the new
III. As the last words indicate, application and generalization lie close
together. Mechanical skill for further use may be achieved without any
explicit recognition of a principle; nay, in routine and narrow technical
matters, conscious formulation may be a hindrance. But without recognition
of a principle, without generalization, the power gained cannot be
transferred to new and dissimilar matters. The inherent significance of
generalization is that it frees a meaning from local restrictions; rather,
generalization is meaning so freed; it is meaning emancipated from
accidental features so as to be available in new cases. The surest test for
detecting a spurious generalization (a statement general in verbal form but
not accompanied by discernment of meaning), is the failure of the so-called
principle spontaneously to extend itself. The essence of the general is
application. (Ante, p. 29.)
Fossilized versus flexible principles
The true purpose of exercises that apply rules and principles is, then, not so
much to drive or drill them[Pg 213] in as to give adequate insight into an
idea or principle. To treat application as a separate final step is disastrous.
In every judgment some meaning is employed as a basis for estimating and
interpreting some fact; by this application the meaning is itself enlarged and
tested. When the general meaning is regarded as complete in itself,
application is treated as an external, non-intellectual use to which, for
practical purposes alone, it is advisable to put the meaning. The principle is
one self-contained thing; its use is another and independent thing. When
this divorce occurs, principles become fossilized and rigid; they lose their
inherent vitality, their self-impelling power.
Self-application a mark of genuine principles
A true conception is a moving idea, and it seeks outlet, or application to the
interpretation of particulars and the guidance of action, as naturally as
water runs downhill. In fine, just as reflective thought requires particular
facts of observation and events of action for its origination, so it also
requires particular facts and deeds for its own consummation. "Glittering
generalities" are inert because they are spurious. Application is as much an
intrinsic part of genuine reflective inquiry as is alert observation or
reasoning itself. Truly general principles tend to apply themselves. The
teacher needs, indeed, to supply conditions favorable to use and exercise;
but something is wrong when artificial tasks have arbitrarily to be invented
in order to secure application for principles.[Pg 214]

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SOME GENERAL CONCLUSIONS
We shall conclude our survey of how we think and how we should think by
presenting some factors of thinking which should balance each other, but
which constantly tend to become so isolated that they work against each
other instead of cooperating to make reflective inquiry efficient.
§ 1. The Unconscious and the Conscious
The understood as the unconsciously assumed
It is significant that one meaning of the term understood is something so
thoroughly mastered, so completely agreed upon, as to be assumed; that is
to say, taken as a matter of course without explicit statement. The familiar
"goes without saying" means "it is understood." If two persons can converse
intelligently with each other, it is because a common experience supplies a
background of mutual understanding upon which their respective remarks
are projected. To dig up and to formulate this common background would be
imbecile; it is "understood"; that is, it is silently supplied and implied as the
taken-for-granted medium of intelligent exchange of ideas.
Inquiry as conscious formulation
If, however, the two persons find themselves at cross-purposes, it is
necessary to dig up and compare the presuppositions, the implied context,
on the basis of which each is speaking. The implicit is made explicit; what
was unconsciously assumed is exposed to the light of conscious day. In this
way, the root of the misunder[Pg 215]standing is removed. Some such
rhythm of the unconscious and the conscious is involved in all fruitful
thinking. A person in pursuing a consecutive train of thoughts takes some
system of ideas for granted (which accordingly he leaves unexpressed,
"unconscious") as surely as he does in conversing with others. Some
context, some situation, some controlling purpose dominates his explicit
ideas so thoroughly that it does not need to be consciously formulated and
expounded. Explicit thinking goes on within the limits of what is implied or
understood. Yet the fact that reflection originates in a problem makes it
necessary at some points consciously to inspect and examine this familiar
background. We have to turn upon some unconscious assumption and
make it explicit.
Rules cannot be given for attaining a balance
No rules can be laid down for attaining the due balance and rhythm of these
two phases of mental life. No ordinance can prescribe at just what point the
spontaneous working of some unconscious attitude and habit is to be
checked till we have made explicit what is implied in it. No one can tell in
detail just how far the analytic inspection and formulation are to be carried.
We can say that they must be carried far enough so that the individual will
know what he is about and be able to guide his thinking; but in a given case
just how far is that? We can say that they must be carried far enough to
detect and guard against the source of some false perception or reasoning,
and to get a leverage on the investigation; but such statements only restate
the original difficulty. Since our reliance must be upon the disposition and
tact of the individual in the particular case, there is no test of the success of
an education more important than the extent to which it nurtures a type of
mind competent to[Pg 216] maintain an economical balance of the
unconscious and the conscious.
The over-analytic to be avoided
The ways of teaching criticised in the foregoing pages as false "analytic"
methods of instruction (ante, p. 112), all reduce themselves to the mistake of
directing explicit attention and formulation to what would work better if left
an unconscious attitude and working assumption. To pry into the familiar,
the usual, the automatic, simply for the sake of making it conscious, simply
for the sake of formulating it, is both an impertinent interference, and a
source of boredom. To be forced to dwell consciously upon the accustomed
is the essence of ennui; to pursue methods of instruction that have that
tendency is deliberately to cultivate lack of interest.
The detection of error, the clinching of truth, demand conscious
statement
On the other hand, what has been said in criticism of merely routine forms
of skill, what has been said about the importance of having a genuine
problem, of introducing the novel, and of reaching a deposit of general
meaning weighs on the other side of the scales. It is as fatal to good thinking
to fail to make conscious the standing source of some error or failure as it is
to pry needlessly into what works smoothly. To over-simplify, to exclude the
novel for the sake of prompt skill, to avoid obstacles for the sake of averting
errors, is as detrimental as to try to get pupils to formulate everything they
know and to state every step of the process employed in getting a result.
Where the shoe pinches, analytic examination is indicated. When a topic is
to be clinched so that knowledge of it will carry over into an effective
resource in further topics, conscious condensation and summarizing are
imperative. In the early stage of acquaintance with a subject, a good deal of
unconstrained unconscious mental play about it may be[Pg 217] permitted,
even at the risk of some random experimenting; in the later stages,
conscious formulation and review may be encouraged. Projection and
reflection, going directly ahead and turning back in scrutiny, should
alternate. Unconsciousness gives spontaneity and freshness; consciousness,
conviction and control.
§ 2. Process and Product
Play and work again
A like balance in mental life characterizes process and product. We met one
important phase of this adjustment in considering play and work. In play,
interest centers in activity, without much reference to its outcome. The
sequence of deeds, images, emotions, suffices on its own account. In work,
the end holds attention and controls the notice given to means. Since the
difference is one of direction of interest, the contrast is one of emphasis, not
of cleavage. When comparative prominence in consciousness of activity or
outcome is transformed into isolation of one from the other, play
degenerates into fooling, and work into drudgery.
Play should not be fooling,
By "fooling" we understand a series of disconnected temporary overflows of
energy dependent upon whim and accident. When all reference to outcome
is eliminated from the sequence of ideas and acts that make play, each
member of the sequence is cut loose from every other and becomes
fantastic, arbitrary, aimless; mere fooling follows. There is some inveterate
tendency to fool in children as well as in animals; nor is the tendency wholly
evil, for at least it militates against falling into ruts. But when it is excessive
in amount, dissipation and disintegration follow; and the only way of
preventing this consequence is to make regard for results enter into even the
freest play activity.[Pg 218]
nor work, drudgery
Exclusive interest in the result alters work to drudgery. For by drudgery is
meant those activities in which the interest in the outcome does not suffuse
the means of getting the result. Whenever a piece of work becomes drudgery,
the process of doing loses all value for the doer; he cares solely for what is to
be had at the end of it. The work itself, the putting forth of energy, is
hateful; it is just a necessary evil, since without it some important end
would be missed. Now it is a commonplace that in the work of the world
many things have to be done the doing of which is not intrinsically very
interesting. However, the argument that children should be kept doing
drudgery-tasks because thereby they acquire power to be faithful to
distasteful duties, is wholly fallacious. Repulsion, shirking, and evasion are
the consequences of having the repulsive imposed—not loyal love of duty.
Willingness to work for ends by means of acts not naturally attractive is best
attained by securing such an appreciation of the value of the end that a
sense of its value is transferred to its means of accomplishment. Not
interesting in themselves, they borrow interest from the result with which
they are associated.
Balance of playfulness and seriousness the intellectual ideal
Free play of mind
is normal in childhood
The intellectual harm accruing from divorce of work and play, product and
process, is evidenced in the proverb, "All work and no play makes Jack a
dull boy." That the obverse is true is perhaps sufficiently signalized in the
fact that fooling is so near to foolishness. To be playful and serious at the
same time is possible, and it defines the ideal mental condition. Absence of
dogmatism and prejudice, presence of intellectual curiosity and flexibility,
are manifest in the free play of the mind upon a topic. To give the mind
this[Pg 219] free play is not to encourage toying with a subject, but is to be
interested in the unfolding of the subject on its own account, apart from its
subservience to a preconceived belief or habitual aim. Mental play is open-
mindedness, faith in the power of thought to preserve its own integrity
without external supports and arbitrary restrictions. Hence free mental play
involves seriousness, the earnest following of the development of subject-
matter. It is incompatible with carelessness or flippancy, for it exacts
accurate noting of every result reached in order that every conclusion may
be put to further use. What is termed the interest in truth for its own sake is
certainly a serious matter, yet this pure interest in truth coincides with love
of the free play of thought.
In spite of many appearances to the contrary—usually due to social
conditions of either undue superfluity that induces idle fooling or undue
economic pressure that compels drudgery—childhood normally realizes the
ideal of conjoint free mental play and thoughtfulness. Successful portrayals
of children have always made their wistful intentness at least as obvious as
their lack of worry for the morrow. To live in the present is compatible with
condensation of far-reaching meanings in the present. Such enrichment of
the present for its own sake is the just heritage of childhood and the best
insurer of future growth. The child forced into premature concern with
economic remote results may develop a surprising sharpening of wits in a
particular direction, but this precocious specialization is always paid for by
later apathy and dullness.
The attitude of the artist
That art originated in play is a common saying. Whether or not the saying is
historically correct, it[Pg 220] suggests that harmony of mental playfulness
and seriousness describes the artistic ideal. When the artist is preoccupied
overmuch with means and materials, he may achieve wonderful technique,
but not the artistic spirit par excellence. When the animating idea is in
excess of the command of method, æsthetic feeling may be indicated, but
the art of presentation is too defective to express the feeling thoroughly.
When the thought of the end becomes so adequate that it compels
translation into the means that embody it, or when attention to means is
inspired by recognition of the end they serve, we have the attitude typical of
the artist, an attitude that may be displayed in all activities, even though
not conventionally designated arts.
The art of the teacher culminates in nurturing this attitude
That teaching is an art and the true teacher an artist is a familiar saying.
Now the teacher's own claim to rank as an artist is measured by his ability
to foster the attitude of the artist in those who study with him, whether they
be youth or little children. Some succeed in arousing enthusiasm, in
communicating large ideas, in evoking energy. So far, well; but the final test
is whether the stimulus thus given to wider aims succeeds in transforming
itself into power, that is to say, into the attention to detail that ensures
mastery over means of execution. If not, the zeal flags, the interest dies out,
the ideal becomes a clouded memory. Other teachers succeed in training
facility, skill, mastery of the technique of subjects. Again it is well—so far.
But unless enlargement of mental vision, power of increased discrimination
of final values, a sense for ideas—for principles—accompanies this training,
forms of skill ready to be put indifferently to any end may be the result.
Such modes of technical skill may display themselves, accord[Pg 221]ing to
circumstances, as cleverness in serving self-interest, as docility in carrying
out the purposes of others, or as unimaginative plodding in ruts. To nurture
inspiring aim and executive means into harmony with each other is at once
the difficulty and the reward of the teacher.
§ 3. The Far and the Near
"Familiarity breeds contempt,"
Teachers who have heard that they should avoid matters foreign to pupils'
experience, are frequently surprised to find pupils wake up when something
beyond their ken is introduced, while they remain apathetic in considering
the familiar. In geography, the child upon the plains seems perversely
irresponsive to the intellectual charms of his local environment, and
fascinated by whatever concerns mountains or the sea. Teachers who have
struggled with little avail to extract from pupils essays describing the details
of things with which they are well acquainted, sometimes find them eager to
write on lofty or imaginary themes. A woman of education, who has recorded
her experience as a factory worker, tried retelling Little Women to some
factory girls during their working hours. They cared little for it, saying,
"Those girls had no more interesting experience than we have," and
demanded stories of millionaires and society leaders. A man interested in
the mental condition of those engaged in routine labor asked a Scotch girl in
a cotton factory what she thought about all day. She replied that as soon as
her mind was free from starting the machinery, she married a duke, and
their fortunes occupied her for the remainder of the day.
since only the novel demands attention,
Naturally, these incidents are not told in order to encourage methods of
teaching that appeal to the sensa[Pg 222]tional, the extraordinary, or the
incomprehensible. They are told, however, to enforce the point that the
familiar and the near do not excite or repay thought on their own account,
but only as they are adjusted to mastering the strange and remote. It is a
commonplace of psychology that we do not attend to the old, nor
consciously mind that to which we are thoroughly accustomed. For this,
there is good reason: to devote attention to the old, when new circumstances
are constantly arising to which we should adjust ourselves, would be
wasteful and dangerous. Thought must be reserved for the new, the
precarious, the problematic. Hence the mental constraint, the sense of being
lost, that comes to pupils when they are invited to turn their thoughts upon
that with which they are already familiar. The old, the near, the accustomed,
is not that to which but that with which we attend; it does not furnish the
material of a problem, but of its solution.
which, in turn, can be given only through the old
The last sentence has brought us to the balancing of new and old, of the far
and that close by, involved in reflection. The more remote supplies the
stimulus and the motive; the nearer at hand furnishes the point of approach
and the available resources. This principle may also be stated in this form:
the best thinking occurs when the easy and the difficult are duly
proportioned to each other. The easy and the familiar are equivalents, as are
the strange and the difficult. Too much that is easy gives no ground for
inquiry; too much of the hard renders inquiry hopeless.
The given and the suggested
The necessity of the interaction of the near and the far follows directly from
the nature of thinking. Where there is thought, something present suggests
and indicates something absent. Accordingly unless the familiar[Pg 223] is
presented under conditions that are in some respect unusual, it gives no jog
to thinking, it makes no demand upon what is not present in order to be
understood. And if the subject presented is totally strange, there is no basis
upon which it may suggest anything serviceable for its comprehension.
When a person first has to do with fractions, for example, they will be wholly
baffling so far as they do not signify to him some relation that he has
already mastered in dealing with whole numbers. When fractions have
become thoroughly familiar, his perception of them acts simply as a signal
to do certain things; they are a "substitute sign," to which he can react
without thinking. (Ante, p. 178.) If, nevertheless, the situation as a whole
presents something novel and hence uncertain, the entire response is not
mechanical, because this mechanical operation is put to use in solving a
problem. There is no end to this spiral process: foreign subject-matter
transformed through thinking into a familiar possession becomes a resource
for judging and assimilating additional foreign subject-matter.
Observation supplies the near, imagination the remote
The need for both imagination and observation in every mental enterprise
illustrates another aspect of the same principle. Teachers who have tried
object-lessons of the conventional type have usually found that when the
lessons were new, pupils were attracted to them as a diversion, but as soon
as they became matters of course they were as dull and wearisome as was
ever the most mechanical study of mere symbols. Imagination could not play
about the objects so as to enrich them. The feeling that instruction in "facts,
facts" produces a narrow Gradgrind is justified not because facts in
themselves are limiting, but because facts are dealt out[Pg 224] as such
hard and fast ready-made articles as to leave no room to imagination. Let
the facts be presented so as to stimulate imagination, and culture ensues
naturally enough. The converse is equally true. The imaginative is not
necessarily the imaginary; that is, the unreal. The proper function of
imagination is vision of realities that cannot be exhibited under existing
conditions of sense-perception. Clear insight into the remote, the absent, the
obscure is its aim. History, literature, and geography, the principles of
science, nay, even geometry and arithmetic, are full of matters that must be
imaginatively realized if they are realized at all. Imagination supplements
and deepens observation; only when it turns into the fanciful does it become
a substitute for observation and lose logical force.
Experience through communication of others' experience
A final exemplification of the required balance between near and far is found
in the relation that obtains between the narrower field of experience realized
in an individual's own contact with persons and things, and the wider
experience of the race that may become his through communication.
Instruction always runs the risk of swamping the pupil's own vital, though
narrow, experience under masses of communicated material. The instructor
ceases and the teacher begins at the point where communicated matter
stimulates into fuller and more significant life that which has entered by the
strait and narrow gate of sense-perception and motor activity. Genuine
communication involves contagion; its name should not be taken in vain by
terming communication that which produces no community of thought and
purpose between the child and the race of which he is the heir.[Pg 225]

INDEX
Abstract, 135-144

Abstraction, 155 f.

Action, activity, activities, 46, 140 f., 157-169, 190 f.

Active attitude and the concept, 128

Analysis, 111-115, 152 f.;
in education, 112

Apperception, 199;
apperceptive masses, 203

Application, 129 f., 212 f.

Apprehension, 119 f.;
see Understanding.

Artist, attitude of, 219 f.

Articulation, 3

Authority, 4, 25

Bacon, 22, 25, 33

Bain, 155
Balance, 38

Behavior, 5, 42-4, 54 f.;
see Action, Occupations

Belief, 1, 3-7;
reached indirectly, 18

Central factor in thinking, 7

Children, 42 f.

Clifford, 148

Coherence, 3, 80

Comparison, 89 f., 202

Comprehension, 120;
see Understanding.

Concentration, 40

Concept, conception, 107, 125-9, 213;
see Meaning.

Conclusion, 3, 5 f., 40, 77, 80 f.;
technique of, 87 f.

Concrete, 135-44

Congruity, 3, 72

Connection, 7;
see Relation.

Consecutive, 2, 40, 42

Consequence, consequential, 2;
consequences, 5

Consistency, 40

Continuity, 3, 40, 80

Control, 18-28;
of deduction, 93-100;
of induction, 84-93;
of suggestion, 84 f., 93;
see Regulation.

Corroborate, corroboration, 9, 77

Curiosity, 31 ff., 105

Darwin, 38, 90, 127

Data, 79 f., 95, 103 f., 106

Decision, 107

Deduction, 79, 93-100, 103;
control of, 93-100

Definition, 130 f.;
definitions, 131-4, 212

Development, of ideas, 83;
see Elaboration, Ratiocination, Reasoning.

Discipline, 63, 78;
formal, 45, 50

Discourse, consecutive, 185 f.

Discovery, inductive, 81, 116

Division, 131

Dogmatism, 149, 198

[Pg 226]Doing, 139, 190

Doubt, 6, 9, 13, 102;
see Perplexity, Uncertainty.

Drill, 52, 63

Drudgery, 218

Education, intellectual, 57, 62;
aim of, 143 f., 156

Elaboration, of ideas, 75 f., 84, 94 f., 103, 106, 209;
see Development, Ratiocination, Reasoning.
Emerson, 173

Emotion, 4, 11, 74

Emphasis, 112, 114 f.

Empirical thinking, 145-9

End, 11 f.

Evidence, 5, 7 f., 27, 103 f.;
see Grounds.

Experience, 132, 156, 199 f., 224

Experiment, experimental, 70 f., 77, 91 f., 99 f., 151 f., 154

Extension, 130 f.

Fact vs idea, 109;
facts, 3, 5

Faculty psychology, 45

Familiar, familiarity, 120-25, 136 f., 206, 214 f., 221 f.

Fooling, 217

Formalism;
see Discipline.

Formal steps of instruction, 202, 206

Formulation, 112 f., 209, 212, 214-17

Freedom, 64 f.;
intellectual, 66

Function, 123;
function of signifying, 7, 15

General 80, 82, 99, 182 f.;
see Principles, Universal.

Generality, 129, 134
Generalization, 211 f.

Grounds, 1, 4-8, 80;
see Evidence.

Guiding factor in reflection, 11

Habits;
see Action.

Herbart, 202

Herbartian method, 202-6

Hobhouse, 31

Hypothesis, 5, 75, 77, 81 f., 94 f., 108, 209

Idea, 75, 77, 79, 107-10;
see Meaning.

Idle thinking, 2

Image, 109

Imagination, 165 f., 223 f.

Imitation, 47, 51, 160

Implication, 5, 75, 77

Impulse, 64

Induction, 79-93, 103;
control of, 84-93;
scientific, 86

Inference, 26 f., 75, 77, 101;
critical, 74, 82;
systematic, 81

Information, 52 f., 197-200

Inquiry, 5, 9 f.

Intellect, intellectual activity, 44, 50, 62

Internal congruity, 3

Isolation, 96-100, 117, 191

James, 119, 121, 153 f.

Jevons, 91 f., 183, 192

Judgment, 5;
factors of, 101;
good judgment, 101, 103, 106 f.;
and inference, 101 ff.;
intuitive, 104 f.;
principles of, 106 f.;
suspended, 74, 82, 105, 108;
[Pg 227]tentative, 101

Knowledge, 3 f., 6, 95;
spiral movement of, 120, 223

Language, 170-87;
and education, 176-87;
and meaning, 171;
technical, 184 f.;
as a tool of thought, 170 ff., 179

Leap, in inference, 26, 75

Leisure, 209 f.

Locke, 19 n., 22-5

Logical, 56 f.;
vs. psychological, 62 f.

Meaning, meanings, 7, 17, 79 f., 82, 94, 116-34;
capital fund of, store of, 118, 120, 126, 161, 174, 180;
individual, 173 f.;
organization of, 175, 185;
as tools, keys, instruments, 108 f., 120, 125 f., 129;
See Concept.

Memory, 107
Method, 46-50, 58;
analytic and synthetic, 114;
formal, 60

Mill, 18 n.

Mood, 5

Motivation, 42

Negative cases, 90

Notion. See Concept.

Object lessons, 140, 192

Observation, 3, 7, 69 f., 76 f., 85, 91, 96, 188-97, 223 f.;
in schools, 193-7;
scientific, 196

Occupation, occupations, 43, 99, 167 f.

Openmindedness, 219

Order, orderliness, 2, 39, 41, 46, 57;
see Consecutive.

Organization, 39, 41;
of subject matter, 62

Originality, 198

Particulars, 80, 82;
cf. General, Universal.

Passion, 4, 23, 25, 106

Perception, 3, 190;
cf. Observation

Perplexity, 9, 11, 72

Placing, 114, 126

Play, 161-7, 217-21;
of mind, 219

Playfulness, 162, 218 f.

Practical deliberation, 68 f.

Prejudice, 4

Principles, 212 f.

Problem, 9, 12, 33, 72, 74, 76, 109, 120, 191 f., 199, 207

Proof, 7, 27, 81

Pseudo-idea, 109

Psychological (vs. logical), 62 f.

Purpose, 11

Ratiocination, 75 f., 83

Reason, reasoning, 75-8, 94 f., 98

Reasons, 5 f.

Recitation, 201-13;
factors in, 206-13

Reflection, 2 f., 5 f.;
central function of, 116;
double movement of, 79-84;
five steps in, 72-8, 203 f.

Regulation, 18-28;
see Control.

Relation, relationship, 82, 97;
see Connection.

Scientific thinking, 145-6

Sense training, 190-97

[Pg 228]Sequence, 2; cf. Consequence.

Sidgwick, 127
Signify, 7, 15

Signs, 16, 171-6

Spiral movement, see Knowledge.

Stimulus-response, 47

Studies, types of, 50

Subject matter, 58 f.;
intellectual, 45 f.;
logical, 61 f.;
practical, 49;
theoretical, 49;
and the teacher, 204 f.

Substitute signs, 177 f., 223

Succession, 3

Suggestion, 7, 12, 27, 74 f., 84 f.;
control of, 84 f., 93;
dimensions of, 34-7

Supposition, 4, 9

Suspense of judgment, 13, 74, 82

Symbols, see Signs.

Synthesis, 114 f.

Terms, 3, 72 f., 76, 79, 95

Testing, 9, 13, 41, 82, 116;
of deduction, 96, 99

Theory, 138

Theoretical, 137

Thinking, complete, 96, 98 f., 100;
see Reasoning, Reflection.

Thought, 8 f.;
educative value of, 2;
reflective, 2;
train of, 3;
types of, 1

Truth, truths, 3

Uncertainty, see Doubt, Perplexity.

Unconscious, 214 ff.

Uncritical thinking, 12

Understanding, 116-20;
direct and indirect, 118-20, 136

Universal, 9

Vagueness, 129 f., 182, 212

Vailati, 81 n.

Venn, 17

Verification, 77

Vocabulary, 180-4

Ward, 110 n.

Warrant, 7

Wisdom, 52

Wonder, 31, 33 f.

Wordsworth, 31

Work, 162-7, 217-19
 
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This mode of thinking in its contrast with thoughtful inquiry receives
special notice in the next chapter.
[2] Implies is more often used when a principle or general truth brings about
belief in some other truth; the other phrases are more frequently used to
denote the cases in which one fact or event leads us to believe in something
else.
[3] Mill, System of Logic, Introduction, § 5.
[4] Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, first paragraph.[Pg 20]
[5] In another place he says: "Men's prejudices and inclinations impose often
upon themselves.... Inclination suggests and slides into discourse favorable
terms, which introduce favorable ideas; till at last by this means that is
concluded clear and evident, thus dressed up, which, taken in its native
state, by making use of none but precise determined ideas, would find no
admittance at all."
[6] The Conduct of the Understanding, § 3.
[7] Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. IV, ch. XX, "Of Wrong
Assent or Error."
[8] Hobhouse, Mind in Evolution, p. 195.
[9] A child of four or five who had been repeatedly called to the house by his
mother with no apparent response on his own part, was asked if he did not
hear her. He replied quite judicially, "Oh, yes, but she doesn't call very mad
yet."
[10] People who have number-forms—i.e. project number series into space
and see them arranged in certain shapes—when asked why they have not
mentioned the fact before, often reply that it never occurred to them; they
supposed that everybody had the same power.
[11] Of course, any one subject has all three aspects: e.g. in arithmetic,
counting, writing, and reading numbers, rapid adding, etc., are cases of skill
in doing; the tables of weights and measures are a matter of information,
etc.
[12] Denoting whatever has to do with the natural constitution and
functions of an individual.
[13] These are taken, almost verbatim, from the class papers of students.
[14] This term is sometimes extended to denote the entire reflective process
—just as inference (which in the sense of test is best reserved for the third
step) is sometimes used in the same broad sense.
But reasoning (or ratiocination) seems to be peculiarly adapted to express
what the older writers called the "notional" or "dialectic" process of
developing the meaning of a given idea.
[15] See Vailati, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods,
Vol. V, No. 12.
[16] In terms of the phrases used in logical treatises, the so-called "methods
of agreement" (comparison) and "difference" (contrast) must accompany each
other or constitute a "joint method" in order to be of logical use.
[17] These processes are further discussed in Chapter IX.
[18] Compare what was said about analysis.
[19] The term idea is also used popularly to denote (a) a mere fancy, (b) an
accepted belief, and also (c) judgment itself. But logically it denotes a
certain factor in judgment, as explained in the text.
[20] See Ward, Psychic Factors of Civilization, p. 153.
[21] Thus arise all those falsely analytic methods in geography, reading,
writing, drawing, botany, arithmetic, which we have already considered in
another connection. (See p. 59.)
[22] James, Principles of Psychology, vol. I, p. 221. To know and to know
that are perhaps more precise equivalents; compare "I know him" and "I
know that he has gone home." The former expresses a fact simply; for the
latter, evidence might be demanded and supplied.
[23] Principles of Psychology, vol. I, p. 488.
[24] The next two paragraphs repeat, for purposes of the present discussion,
what we have already noted in a different context. See p. 88 and p. 99.
[25] Psychology, vol. II. p. 342.
[26] Bain, The Senses and Intellect, third American ed., 1879, p. 492 (italics
not in original).
[27] Compare the quotation from Bain on p. 155.
[28] The term general is itself an ambiguous term, meaning (in its best
logical sense) the related and also (in its natural usage) the indefinite, the
vague. General, in the first sense, denotes the discrimination of a principle
or generic relation; in the second sense, it denotes the absence of
discrimination of specific or individual properties.
[29] A large amount of material illustrating the twofold change in the sense
of words will be found in Jevons, Lessons in Logic.