Thinking and learning to think, Nathan C. Schaeffer [each kindness read aloud txt] 📗
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IMAGING AND THINKING
Things more excellent than any image are expressed through images.
Jamblichus.
An unimaginative person can neither be reverent nor kind.
Ruskin.
Few men have imagination enough for the truth of reality.
Goethe.
Science does not know its debt to the imagination.
Emerson.
The human race is governed by its imagination.
Napoleon.
XIIIMAGING AND THINKING
Every human being divides the world into two parts, the self and the not-self. It would not be right to say that he divides the world into two hemispheres, because self may occupy more space and engross more thought than all else in the universe.
The idea of self is complex. It includes our thoughts, emotions, and purposes. Kindred and friends, home and country, creed and occupation, dress and personal appearance, possessions and the work one has done,—in fact, all one has and is and does enters into the idea of self. When we lose a child, a manuscript, an investment, a position, we are apt to feel as if a part of ourselves had been lost. So closely are the things of self identified with the inner self, the self in the narrowest signification of the term, that the latter is oftentimes lost in the former; and the end of existence is sought in wealth, fame, honor, social position, erudition, and the thousand other things which intensify the feeling of self by giving it form and content.
An important element in the thought of self is the image of self that every man carries in his own mind. This image of self is derived from looking-glasses and photographs, from the sight of hands and feet and the other impressions of the physical organism which reach the mind through the senses. In the minds of many persons the image of self is ever present, it matters not whether they are eating or drinking, walking or talking, singing or thinking, posing or working. The perpetual presence of the image of self gives rise to vanity and pride, to avarice, ambition, and other detestable forms of selfishness.
It is the province of education to bring self and the things of self into proper relation with the not-self, with God and the universe. That this may be accomplished the images of sense and the idea of self must be made to take their proper place in the domain of thought and volition.
Not many years ago it was customary in certain quarters to define education as the process of unsensing the mind and unselfing the will. The definition never became popular. It contains a truth and an error, both deserving of careful consideration. The maxim may signify that by the process of education the soul is to be emancipated from the tyranny of the senses and from the domination of selfish desires. The mind may be hindered in its growth because it is under the thraldom of desire and appetite. Excess in eating and drinking, in sight-seeing, and in other pleasures which so easily ripen into dissipation may check the normal development of the higher faculties. The delight which some gifted natures find in beautiful colors and good music may prevent them from acquiring the power of abstract and abstruse thinking. The things of the mind may be sacrificed to the things of sense, the higher life of the soul may be stifled through the exaltation of self and the domination of selfish desires.
What is meant by unsensing the mind? It may mean, for instance, that the student of arithmetic is to be freed from the necessity of counting strokes or fingers in finding the sum or the product of two numbers; that the learner is to get away from the cats and dogs of the First Reader as soon as possible; that he is to be lifted by education to the plane on which he can think in abstract and general terms. In this sense it is correct to say that it is the purpose of education to unsense the mind. The phrase may also be interpreted to imply that the habit of thinking by means of visual images is to be got rid of. In this sense it is a dangerous maxim.
The first thinking of children is carried on in mental pictures. It is one of the aims of the school to lift the learner above this necessity of thinking in things by enabling him to think in symbols. These symbols are in their turn visualized; and we may have specimens of arrested development in the use of figures as well as in the use of fingers, blocks, or other objects employed in teaching the fundamental operations of integers and fractions. The principal of a well-known ward school aimed at great speed in arithmetical calculations. The results which his teachers obtained excited surprise and admiration. The test of progress was the number of digits that a pupil could add, or subtract, or multiply, or divide in a minute. The danger of this instruction became apparent when it was found that of five or six hundred children drilled in that way only one ever reached the high school, and she was only a third-rate student, who never acquired skill or proficiency in thinking in abstract and general terms. Mental energy was exhausted in the attempt to develop lightning calculators. There was no growth in the direction of thinking the laws and truths which make knowledge scientific.
The untutored savage is guided by sense impressions; he thinks in mental pictures; he is incapable of a chain of reasoning like the demonstration of a theorem in geometry. Tribes have been found who could not count beyond three; any number in excess of two was called many or a multitude. Whilst their powers of observation were developed to a remarkable degree, they lacked the power of abstruse thought. Their descendants, who are now at school, make rapid progress in knowledge which appeals to the senses; they find more than the usual difficulty in studies requiring demonstrative reasoning or sustained effort in scientific thought. Music is their delight; they can be taught to sing like birds in the air; their bands give sighs to brass itself. As in the eighteenth century the Iroquois, who would not submit to the doctrines of Christianity, were overcome by concerts, so, in the nineteenth, the missionaries of British Columbia appeal to the red man’s ear for music in winning him for the Christian religion.
Language is full of faded metaphors which show how the things of the mind are conceived in images formed through the senses. Those who address popular audiences clothe their thoughts in figures of speech based upon the mental pictures in which the common people carry on their thinking. The ability to think in the language of science and philosophy is a later development, and those who by disuse or neglect impair their power to think in sense-images pay a penalty in losing, or never acquiring, the power to move the multitudes.
The power to think in mental pictures, or through the sense-impressions which memory recalls, varies in different persons. Occasionally the sense of touch is very active; the child in such cases manifests a desire to handle everything within reach, and undoubtedly gains impressions of peculiar strength answering its desire to know. A limited number of children in every school get their best impressions through the ear, and hence are said to be ear-minded; but the far larger proportion are eye-minded to the extent of connecting their most accurate knowledge with images obtained through vision. Similar peculiarities exist among older persons. A friend claims that he hears the voices of speakers while reading the proof-sheets of their speeches. Another friend claims that he cannot bring up a mental picture of the faces of his children and his friends, but he writes out strains of music which he thinks and hears while seated on railway cars. The power of bringing up a vivid picture of the breakfast-table, or of some scene of special interest, is possessed by many persons. They live over again in memory the delights of travel, and enjoy scenery through the vivid mental pictures stored away in the treasure-house of memory. The ability to appreciate the best literature in prose and poetry depends largely upon the power of visualizing the realities at the basis of the descriptions and figures of speech. Francis Galton thinks that the perspicuous style of French literature and the wonderful manual skill of the French people is due to their power of thinking in visual images. He says,—
“The French appear to possess the visualizing faculty in a high degree. The peculiar ability they show in prearranging ceremonials and fêtes of all kinds and their undoubted genius for tactics and strategy show that they are able to foresee effects with unusual clearness. Their ingenuity in all technical contrivances is an additional testimony in the same direction, and so is their singular clearness of expression. Their phrase ‘figurez-vous,’ or ‘picture to yourself,’ seems to express their dominant mode of perception. Our equivalent of ‘imagine’ is ambiguous.”[29]
The profession of teaching owes Mr. Galton a special debt of gratitude for the light which his investigations throw upon the process of thinking. These investigations were published in a volume entitled “Inquiries into Human Faculty.” When he began to inquire among his friends as to their power to call up mental pictures of the breakfast-table, those engaged in scientific pursuits were inclined to consider him fanciful and fantastic in supposing that the words mental imagery really expressed what he thought everybody supposed them to mean. He says they had no more notion of its true nature than a color-blind man who has not discerned his defect has of the nature of color. When he spoke to persons in general society, he got very different replies. Among other curious things which he discovered, he found that the power of thinking in sense-images, or mental pictures, may
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