Thinking and learning to think, Nathan C. Schaeffer [each kindness read aloud txt] 📗
- Author: Nathan C. Schaeffer
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The bearing of all this upon the art of teaching is easily shown. A teacher of geometry, whose mind was quite logical, failed, through lack of power, to make things plain. If the class did not grasp the demonstration of a theorem, he invariably started at the beginning, tried to throw light upon every link in the chain of proof, and by the time he reached the point of difficulty the members of the class were thinking of something else. A younger colleague pursued a different plan. Starting some pupil upon the demonstration, he detected the difficulty, and by a few words of explanation, or by a well-framed question, he focussed attention upon the simple elements, into which he resolved the difficulty, and frequently surprised the class by showing the simplicity of what had puzzled their minds. Under the clarifying light of analysis half the difficulties and half the sophistries of human thinking vanish like dew and mist before the morning sun.
For the purpose of making an impression upon the moral nature word-painting is sometimes very helpful. All the text-books on physiology and hygiene intended for use in the public schools seek to teach the evils of strong drink by showing the effect of alcoholic stimulants upon different parts of the human system. Yet the most exhaustive lessons on how whiskey is made, and what are its exhilarating and its pernicious effects, cannot equal the effects of the word painting of Robert Ingersoll and the paraphrase by Dr. Buckley. In making a gift to a friend the former penned the following eulogy on whiskey:
“I send you some of the most wonderful whiskey that ever drove the skeleton from the feast or painted landscapes in the brain of man. It is the mingled souls of wheat and corn. In it you will find the sunshine and the shadow that chased each other over the billowy fields, the breath of June, the carol of the lark, the dew of night, the wealth of summer, and autumn’s rich content, all golden with imprisoned light. Drink it, and you will hear the voice of men and maidens singing the ‘Harvest Home,’ mingled with the laughter of children. Drink it, and you will feel within your blood the starlit dawns, the dreamy, tawny dusks of perfect days. For forty years this liquid joy has been within the staves of oak, longing to touch the lips of man.”
This was Dr. Buckley’s statement of the other side:
“I send you some of the most wonderful whiskey that ever brought a skeleton into the closet, or painted scenes of lust and bloodshed in the brain of man. It is the ghosts of wheat and corn, crazed by the loss of their natural bodies. In it you will find a transient sunshine chased by a shadow as cold as an Arctic midnight, in which the breath of June grows icy and the carol of the lark gives place to the foreboding cry of the raven. Drink it, and you shall have ‘woe,’ ‘sorrow,’ ‘babbling,’ and ‘wounds without cause.’ Your eyes shall behold strange women, and ‘your heart shall utter perverse things.’ Drink it deep, and you shall hear the voices of demons shrieking, women wailing, and worse than orphaned children mourning the loss of a father who yet lives. Drink it deep and long, and serpents will hiss in your ears, coil themselves about your neck, and seize you with their fangs; for at the last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder. For forty years this liquid death has been within staves of oak, harmless there as purest water. I send it to you that you may put an enemy in your mouth to steal away your brains, and yet I call myself your friend.”
There comes a stage of development of the learner at which the word itself becomes the object of thought. Words are then classified as parts of speech, and their function in sentences is studied. Their properties and endings must be learned and compared. There is abundant room for thought in the eleven hundred variations of the Greek verb. The variations of words by declension and conjugation can be made the material for thought, and as these are always at hand in the text-book, no excursions to the field being needed to secure specimens, and no preparation of difficult experiments being required on the part of the teacher, the ancient languages have held their own in the schools with most wonderful tenacity. The study of language has not merely the advantage of supplying material for thought in the words, grammatical forms, and sentences which are always at hand in the text, but through the classics it brings the learner into intellectual contact with the best thoughts of the best men in ancient and modern times. To translate an author like Virgil or Demosthenes is to think the thoughts of a master mind, to weigh words as in a most nicely adjusted balance, and finally to arrange them in sentences that shall adequately convey the meaning of the original text.
Science is, of course, a product of the human mind, quite as much as the so-called humanities, and answers the same purpose when studied as literature; but then it ceases to have the value of training the intellect in the rigid methods of original research and scientific investigation. Whilst it is the function of the laboratory to initiate the student into the mysteries of the methods by which new discoveries are made and verified, and thus to enable him to avail himself of the labors of others through their publications, it does not bring the student into living contact with human hopes, emotions, and aspirations as do the poems of Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare.
History deals with what man has achieved. The materials for thought which it furnishes are mostly in the shape of the testimony of eye-witnesses and other original sources of information. The incidents, the achievements, the struggles, the victories and the defeats, the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of historic personages, are an inexhaustible supply of material from which authors, editors, and orators draw illustrations, figures of speech, and other matter for their thinking. Here is a field which must not be neglected by those who would influence their fellows or figure as leaders of men.
Some minds are slow at gathering materials; yet they think vigorously. They look at facts and ideas from every possible point of view, explore their nature and relations, their content and extent, and point out their bearing upon other things by the conclusions they reach. Sometimes they go astray because they do not have sufficient data to warrant a conclusion. Their condition resembles that of the King of Siam, who did not believe that water could become solid because he had been in the nine points of his kingdom and had not seen ice.
Other men are intellectual gluttons. They keep pouring into themselves knowledge from every quarter, carry it in their minds as the overloaded stomach carries food, and end in mental dyspepsia. Better the man with few ideas, who can apply these in practical life, than the man of erudition who cannot apply his knowledge.
Too little food produces inanition and starvation; too much food brings on dyspepsia and a host of other ills and distempers. The haphazard selection of studies by inexperienced youth from the large list of electives offered by a great university is apt to result either in mental overfeeding or in intellectual starvation. The mind can be rightly formed only when it is rightly informed. To expect satisfactory thought-products when the mind lacks proper materials to act upon would be as irrational as to expect good grist from a flour-mill whose supply of grain is deficient in quality and quantity. In the process of making flour very much depends upon the instruments employed. The rude implements of antiquity, the buhr-stones of our fathers, and the improved machinery of the roller process make a difference in the product, even though the same quality of grain is used. In the elaboration of the thought-material the well-educated man uses instruments which may be likened to our modern inventions for saving labor in the domain of the mechanic arts. These instruments of thought will next claim our attention.
VTHE INSTRUMENTS OF THOUGHT
The great Lagrange specifies among the many advantages of algebraic notation that it expresses truths more general than those which were at first contemplated, so that by availing ourselves of such extensions we may develop a multitude of new truths from formulæ founded on limited truths. A glance at the history of science will show this. For example, when Kepler conceived the happy idea of infinitely great and infinitely small quantities (an idea at which common sense must have shaken its head pityingly), he devised an instrument which in expert hands may be made to reach conclusions for an infinite series of approximations without the infinite labor of going successively through these. Again, when Napier invented logarithms, even he had no suspicion of the value of this instrument. He calculated the tables merely to facilitate arithmetical computation, little dreaming that he was at the same time constructing a scale whereon to measure the density of the strata of the atmosphere, the height of the mountains, the areas of innumerable curves, and the relation of stimuli to sensations.
Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind.
VTHE INSTRUMENTS OF THOUGHT
Of the people who, though inheriting a rich vernacular like the English, spend their lives in the routine of a farm, a trade, or a store, very few have an adequate conception of the labor-saving instruments and appliances which modern civilization places at the disposal of the thinker. The machinery by which one man does as much as a thousand hands formerly did is not a whit more wonderful than the modern appliances for reaching results in the domain of thought. Reference might be made to the machines for adding used in counting-houses, to the tables of interest used by bankers, to the tables of logarithms by which it is as easy to find the one-hundredth power as the square of a number. The last named have, so to speak, multiplied the lives of astronomers by enabling them to make in a short time calculations that formerly occupied months, and even years. It is not necessary to discuss these; their value is apparent at a glance. But the value of a rich vocabulary, the function of the symbols and formulas of chemistry, physics, mathematics, and other sciences, and the advantages derived from the use of the technical terms peculiar to every domain of thought are not so easily seen. The teacher who fails at the right time to put the pupils in possession of these instruments of thought cripples their thinking, wastes their time and effort, and seriously mars their progress. Hence it is worth while to devote a chapter or two to the consideration of instruments of thought, for the purpose of showing how, by means of them, thinking is made easier and more effective. Let some one write the amounts in a ledger column by the Roman notation, then endeavor to add them without using any figures of the Arabic notation, either in his mind or in any other way, and he will
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