Thinking and learning to think, Nathan C. Schaeffer [each kindness read aloud txt] 📗
- Author: Nathan C. Schaeffer
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For the sake of cultivating ability to think, students are advised to read the works of great thinkers, like Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel. Such reading is often a sham and a delusion. No one has done more to shape the critical thinking of the world than Kant; and yet how many young men waste time upon his pages because they are not prepared to think his thoughts. Schleiermacher stimulated and modified the thinking of theologians in every department of their science except Old Testament exegesis; and yet the celebrated Dr. Kahnis, of the University of Leipsic, used to say of Schleiermacher, “Er ist rein nicht zum studiren.” Nevertheless, students for the ministry have been known to waste hours in trying to read his writings, which they were not prepared to understand. Of the obscurer passages in Hegel an eminent authority says, “It is a fair question whether the rationality included in them be anything more than the fact that the words all belong to a common vocabulary, and are strung together on a scheme of predication and relation,—immediacy, self-relation, and what not,—which has habitually recurred. Yet there seems no reason to doubt that the subjective feeling of the rationality of these sentences was strong in the writer as he penned them, or even that some readers by straining may have reproduced it in themselves.”[36]
It may be worth an honest effort for students and teachers to try to grasp the meaning of such writers; but if after a fair trial the mind is left empty of meaning, it is wise to follow the advice of Locke with regard to obscure ancient authors:
“In reading of them, if they do not use their words with a due clearness and perspicuity, we may lay them aside, and, without any injury done them, resolve thus with ourselves:
“Si non vis intelligi, debes negligi.”[37]
Several months or years of study may be required to prepare the mind for grasping the ideas or phraseology of new departments of investigation. No one can comprehend the treatises on physiological psychology without devoting several weeks to the anatomy of the brain.
The words, phrases, and sentences of the printed or written page should call up in the mind of the reader that for which they stand in the mind of the author. What the stream of thought should be in reading a book is well worthy of careful consideration. G. H. Lewes, in “Problems of Life and Mind,” claims that “our thought is a constant interchange of ideas and images, some trains of thought being carried on mainly by images more or less vivid, others mainly by ideas with only a faint escort of images.” It should be said, by way of explanation, that he does not use the word “ideas” in the Platonic sense of patterns fixed in nature, of which the individual objects in any given class are but imperfect copies, and by participation in which they have their being; nor in the sense of a mental image or picture, which (in opposition to Sir William Hamilton), the Century Dictionary claims, has been the more common meaning of the term in English literature since the sixteenth century. In Lewes’s pages ideas never stand for images, nor for copies of sensations. Sully says that the term idea is used to include both images and concepts, marking off the whole region of the representative from the presentative, but that, like the term notion, it now tends to be confined to concepts. With Lewes all ideas are thoughts, but not all thoughts are ideas. He does not reject the popular usage of the word in phrases like the idea of Shakespeare’s Othello, of Bismarck’s policy. Take the following sentence from Justin McCarthy’s “History of Our Own Times:” “Unluckily, Lord Palmerston became possessed with the idea that the French minister in Greece was secretly setting the Greek government on to resist our claims.” In thinking the thought of this sentence the mind is not filled with any images of Greece or mental pictures of any other kind. Possibly the adjective Greek may bring to the minds of some persons the map symbol of Greece or even scenery and cities in Greece, especially if they have travelled or resided there; but such mental pictures really interfere with the current of thought in reading. In planning a route from New York to San Francisco one is apt to think it in the lines and dots of railway maps. That in the mind for which words stand may be styled their meaning, and Lewes claims that much of our reading does not translate the words into their full signification, but proceeds by a process of logical symbolism. He asserts that “the greater proportion of all men’s thinking goes forward with confident reliance on the correctness of the logical operations, and with only an occasional translation of symbols into images. The translation—verification—does, indeed, from time to time take place, and always in proportion to the novelty of the connections; but how easily and how fatally the mind glides along the path of logical operation without pausing to interpret more than the relation of the symbols is humorously illustrated in the common story of a physicist, whose claim to omniscience was the joke of his friends. Being asked earnestly whether he had ‘read Biot’s paper on the malleability of light?’ ‘No,’ he replied; ‘he sent it me, but I have not yet had time to read it.’”
Lewes’s meaning is made somewhat clearer by two examples which he uses. “Suppose you inform me that the blood rushed violently from the man’s heart, quickening his pulse, at the sight of his enemy. Of the many latent images in this phrase, how many were salient in your mind and in mine? Probably two,—the man and his enemy,—and these images were faint. Images of blood, heart, violent rushing, pulse, quickening, and sight were either not revived at all or were passing shadows. Had any such images arisen, they would have hampered thought, retarding the logical process of judgment by irrelevant connections. The symbols had substituted relations for these values,—the logical relations of inclusion and exclusion which constitute judgment. You were not anxious to inform me respecting the qualities of blood, heart, pulse, etc., but only of a certain effect produced on one man by sight of another; and this effect you expressed in the physiological terms which came first to hand; you might have expressed it equally well in very different psychological terms,—‘fierce anger seized the man’s soul, rousing all his energies at the sight of his enemy,’ when assuredly there would not have been present images of ‘anger,’ ‘seizing,’ ‘soul,’ ‘rousing,’ and ‘energies.’ These terms are symbols which stand for clusters of images, and can at will be translated into images, just as algebraic letters stand for values which can be assigned. But for purposes of thought and calculation such translation is unnecessary, is hampering; all that is necessary is that the terms should occupy their proper logical position.”[38]
The other example is still more striking. “Suppose I read the phrase, ‘The ship which carried Nelson was appropriately named the Victory;’ unless the ship itself is the prominent interest, I have probably no image at all, or at least only a faint and fleeting shadow of some vague outline. I do not picture a man-of-war, I do not see the hull, masts, cordage, and cannon, though these, with the figure-head, fluttering flags, and pennons, may successfully emerge if I dwell on the ship. I perhaps do not see Nelson, or, at any rate, do not see his pale face, one eye, and one arm, but only some faint suggestion of a human form. The purpose of the phrase was not to raise images, but to communicate a fact respecting the name of the ship; and my intelligence has been occupied with this purpose. I must, it is true, have understood each word, or, at any rate, each clause of the sentence; but for this understanding it is not necessary that I should translate, nor even that I should be capable of translating, each word into an image or cluster of images; it is enough if I apprehend a series of logical relations. We all use occasional words with intelligent and intelligible propriety, the meaning of which as isolated terms we cannot translate. We read Shakespeare and Goethe without a suspicion of the many words which for us have no images. But if one of these words occurs in an unfamiliar connection we are at once arrested, as we are if any familiar word is placed in an unfamiliar position. Suppose we come upon the sentence, ‘The ship which carried Nelson was named Victory; the ship which carried Napoleon across the desert was named Akbar,’—we are at once arrested; the connection of ship and desert is unusual, and is seen, on reflection, to be contrary to experience; but when we learn that the camel is called the ‘ship of the desert,’ we recognize the new value assigned to the term, and the logical correctness of the phrase is thereby recognized.”[39]
These examples, and others like them which Lewes gives, bring us face to face with the proposition that “much of our thinking is carried on by means of symbols without any images, which is the same thing as thinking being carried on by words without any meanings and with only the accompanying intuition of their logical relations.” Thus, after a century of exhortation against the blind use of words we are brought face to face with the question of using words in thinking without realizing the full meaning, an abuse of words for which reformers have shot their arrows at rote teaching from every possible point of view. What truth is there in the statement of Mr. Lewes? What can be his meaning?
It must be admitted that men in mature life skim newspapers, magazines, and books, especially books of fiction and books of reference, without realizing in their minds the import of all the words upon which the eye falls. The aim may be to get the plot of the story or a fact for some specific use, or a hurried view of the news and current events of the last twenty-four hours. But this is not the kind of thinking which the teacher aims to beget in the minds of his pupils. Nor does it ever lead to a just appreciation of literature. All literature which appeals to the imagination cannot be read and enjoyed in that way. No one can rightly read a choice selection without thinking what was in the author’s mind, reconstructing the images and scenes which were before his mental eye and following the movements depicted by his language. Movement is more easily conceived than scenery, and abounds in the stories which are most popular among children. Judicious exercises will soon enable the pupil to call up all kinds of imagery. In the Standard Fifth Reader it is suggested that the pupils sit with closed eyes and close attention while the teacher or one of the pupils reads a paragraph or stanza. For illustration, Kate Putnam Osgood’s poem, entitled “Driving Home the Cows,” is selected.
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