Thinking and learning to think, Nathan C. Schaeffer [each kindness read aloud txt] 📗
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The aim of the teacher should be to make himself useless. In other words, the school should aim to lift the pupil to the plane of an independent thinker, capable of giving conscious direction to his intellectual life and of concentrating all his powers upon anything that is to be mastered. It is to be reckoned a piece of good fortune for a bright and talented youth to fall under the dominating influence of a master mind. In endeavoring to walk in the footsteps of an intellectual giant, to comprehend his theories and speculations, and to carry the burden of his thoughts, unexpected strength and power are developed, and when the day of emancipation comes—as it always does come in the case of gifted youth—the learner will find that he has entered a higher sphere of intellectual activity, and will henceforth rank among the world’s productive thinkers.
As was said at the beginning of the chapter, the competition of men in mature life is usually sufficient to stimulate their thinking. The men whose duties make a constant drain upon their productivity need other forms of thought-stimulation. Reference is not here made to the narcotics, alcoholic stimulants, and other drugs which brain-workers use in periods of reaction and fatigue: these stimulate only for a short time, and leave the nervous system and the brain weaker than before; they shorten life by burning the candle at both ends; they cannot supply the need of sleep, rest, and recreation. To take rational exercise, to eat proper food, and to obey all the laws of health is the sacred duty of every person who teaches by word of mouth or pen. Every effort should be made to keep vitality at its maximum. Often the mind resembles the soil which yields a richer harvest if permitted to lie fallow for a time. If at the close of a period of rest or a summer vacation the mind refuses to work, what shall then be done to stimulate mental activity? Different men derive stimulus from different sources. One finds help from taking a pen in hand, another by facing a sea of upturned faces. A clergyman of considerable repute uses an Indian story to start his mental machinery. Henry Ward Beecher declared that the greatest kindness which could be shown him was to oppose his public utterances. Opposition roused all his powers and helped him to think vigorously and to the best advantage. Schiller is said to have kept rotten apples in his desk, because he believed that the odor stimulated his mind. Some men find help in solitude, from the singing of birds, from the sound of rustling leaves and falling waters, from the noise of ocean waves, or from the glimpse of distant waters or far-off mountains. An eminent theologian is stimulated by the playing of a piano in the next room. The stimulus from books is reserved for discussion in a separate chapter on the Right Use of Books.
As there are helps, so there are hinderances to good thinking. Petty cares, executive duties, noises in the same room, or in the next room, or upon the street, are well-known examples. Their name is legion, and their cost is enormous if they come from manufacturing establishments near the school. A word about the extra-mural music which emanates from vile machinery on the streets is not out of place in this connection. An English writer asserts that the organ-grinders of London have done more in the last twenty years to detract from the quality and quantity of the higher mental work of the nation than any two or three colleges at Oxford have effected to increase it. A mathematician estimates the cost of the increased mental labor these street-musicians have imposed upon him and his clerks at several thousand pounds’ worth of first-class work, for which the government actually paid in added length of the time needed for his calculations.
In matters of this kind every man must be a law unto himself. Since no two human beings are exactly alike, but each is a new creation fresh from the hands of the Creator, it follows that each person must study his own peculiarities, form his own habits of work, and acquire the power to think in the midst of the circumstances in which he is placed. By resolute effort the mind can ignore many a hinderance and distraction. The best stimulus from without comes from our fellow-men. “Our minds need the stimulus of other minds, as our lungs need oxygen to perform their functions.” At school the stimulus comes from classmates, from those in the higher and lower classes, but above all else, from the best books and the best teachers. In the life beyond the school the stimulus comes from the daily contact and competition with others, from conversation and discussions with those who think, from communion with the best books, with nature, and with nature’s God.
After the powers of the mind have been awakened and disciplined, stimulus and inspiration may come from ten thousand sources. Silence and solitude, city and country, business and pleasure, observation and travel, observatories and laboratories, libraries and museums, nature and art, poetry and prose, fiction and history, may each in turn serve as a spur to creative, inventive, and productive thinking, as an incentive to original research, fruitful investigation, and profitable reasoning. Among all the sources of stimulation, the good teacher and the good book take superlative rank.
IXTHE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS
Even the very greatest of authors are indebted to miscellaneous reading, often in several different languages, for the suggestion of their most original works, and for the light which has kindled many a shining thought of their own.
Hamerton.
He reads a book most wisely who thinks everything into a book that it is capable of holding, and it is the stamp and token of a great book so to incorporate itself with our own being, so to quicken our insight and stimulate our thought, as to make us feel as if we helped to create it while we read. Whatever we can find in a book that aids us in the conduct of life, or to a truer interpretation of it, or to a franker reconcilement with it, we may with a good conscience believe is not there by accident, but that the author meant we should find it there.
Lowell.
Much as a man gains from actual conflict with living minds, he may gain much even of the same kind of knowledge, though different in detail, from the accumulated thinking of the past. No living generation can outweigh all the past. If books without experience in real life cannot develop a man all round, neither can life without books do it. There is a certain dignity of culture which lives only in the atmosphere of libraries. There is a breadth and a genuineness of self-knowledge which one gets from the silent friendship of great authors without which the best work that is in a man cannot come out of him in large professional successes.
Phelps.
The great secret of reading consists in this,—that it does not matter so much what we read or how we read it as what we think and how we think it. Reading is only the fuel; and, the mind once on fire, any and all material will feed the flame, provided only it have any combustible matter in it. And we cannot tell from what quarter the next material will come. The thought we need, the facts we are in search of, may make their appearance in the corner of the newspaper, or in some forgotten volume long ago consigned to dust and oblivion. Hawthorne in the parlor of a country inn on a rainy day could find mental nutriment in an old directory. That accomplished philologist, the late Lord Strangford, could find ample amusement for an hour’s delay at a railway station in tracing out the etymology of the names in Bradshaw. The mind that is not awake and alive will find a library a barren wilderness.
Charles F. Richardson.
IXTHE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS
A clergyman who found the reaction from his pulpit efforts so great that often he could not bring himself to think vigorously and consecutively before the middle of the following week was advised by his physician to try the effect of an Indian tale or an exciting story, and found that a good novel works like a charm in bringing the mind back to normal action. After the interest in the story or novel begins to grow there is danger of reading too long, of reading until another spell of fatigue and reaction comes. The book should be laid aside as soon as the first glow of mental action is felt.
Most thinkers need the stimulating influence of other minds. These can be found at their best upon the shelves of a well-selected library. They are ready to help us whenever we feel ready to give them our attention. Men put the best part of themselves into their books. The process of writing for print intensifies mental activity, spurs the intellect to the keenest, most vigorous effort, and arouses the highest energy of thought and feeling. Authors that exert a quickening influence upon our thinking should be kept for use whenever we need a stimulus to rouse the mind from its lethargy.
Leibnitz got his best ideas while reading books. He had acquired the habits of a librarian to whom favorite volumes are always accessible.
A scientist of repute says he gets the necessary stimulus from Jevons’s treatise on the inductive sciences. Professor Phelps has collected an instructive list of authors whose writings have been helpful to other authors of note. He says,—
“Voltaire used to read Massillon as a stimulus to production. Bossuet read Homer for the same purpose. Gray read Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ as the preliminary to the use of his pen. The favorites of Milton were Homer and Euripides. Fénelon resorted to the ancient classics promiscuously. Pope read Dryden as his habitual aid to composing. Corneille read Tacitus and Livy. Clarendon did the same. Sir William Jones, on his passage to India, planned five different volumes, and assigned to each the author he resolved to read as a guide and awakener to his own mind for its work. Buffon made the same use of the works of
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