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terminates in books. The thinking which issues in getting things done, in deeds, actions, achievements, is undervalued and too often ignored. University men are waking up to this defect in their thinking. They are throwing themselves into movements for reform and giving the world splendid examples of the translation of thought into vigorous action. The effort to carry theory into practice reacts powerfully upon the mind, forces the individual to see things as they are, and saves him from the habit of looking only for things which the schools have taught him to expect. When thinking issues in doing, the process promotes intellectual honesty. This remark is especially applicable to exercises in which the hand makes in wood, metal, marble, or clay what the mind has conceived. The execution cannot be accurate unless the thinking has been accurate and satisfactory. Drawing is a universal language. It imposes upon the mind a degree of accuracy which is wanting in the fleeting spoken word or even in the more permanent printed or written sentences.
Thinking in business.

The movements in manual training are an excellent preparation for the movements in the handicrafts and the daily occupations by which men gain the necessaries and the comforts of life. Ten thousand men are active in supplying our breakfast-table, and many thousand more in providing clothing, shelter, light, heat, and the manifold necessities and luxuries of modern society. All these involve thinking quite as useful, as logical, and as effective as the thinking which ends in talk or printer’s ink. The relation of thinking to doing and the reflex influence which the latter exerts upon the former is seen in the solution of problems and in all exercises involving the application of knowledge. Manual training is really and primarily a training in thinking, but it is the kind of thinking most closely related to thinking in things, and its value in education is so great that it has led to the formulation of the maxim, We learn to do by doing,—a maxim which deserves separate consideration, because, as usually applied, it is taken to mean that doing by the hand necessarily and inevitably leads to thinking and knowing.

Growth of the will.

Another aspect of the relation of thinking to willing claims our attention. Thinking is an important element in the growth of the will. The education of the will is coming to be recognized as a matter of supreme importance. The development of character is everywhere emphasized. No teacher in these days regards intellectual training as the sole or chief aim of the school. The philosopher is no longer regarded as the highest type of humanity. The age demands that thought shall pass into volition, and that volition shall manifest itself in action. The executive is not satisfied with the investigation of a subject in its essence and relations, with the elaboration of thought into a system; he must get things done. Mere thinking he despises. The philosopher he regards as a man troubled with ideas, the poet as a man troubled with fancies and rhymes; he hates men who let their minds “go astray into regions not peopled with real things, animate or inanimate, even idealized, but with personified shadows created by the illusions of metaphysics or by the mere entanglement of words, and think these shadows the proper objects of the highest, the most transcendental philosophy.” And the sympathies of the multitudes are on the side of the executive in his exaltation of the will as the chief element of utility and success.

The acts of the will should be guided by intelligence. The will is weak and vacillating if the ends to be accomplished are not clearly conceived, if the purposes to be accomplished are not definitely thought out. Thinking is the guide to willing. Thought gives direction to volition.

Self-gratification.
Self-denial.
The right.

There are successive stages in the growth of the will as clearly defined as the activities of memory and imagination. In the first or lowest stage the aim is some form of happiness. In the second stage the will acts under the influence of some ethical idea, commonly finding expression in a maxim like the command, Thou shalt not steal, or in some fixed occupation like a trade or farm work. In the third the will acts under the inspiration of the good or its opposite, and from motives grounded in right or wrong. In all these stages of growth thinking is a most important factor. Let us go into details for purposes of illustration. The human will in its process of development starts on a physical rather than a spiritual basis. On the one hand a want is felt and on the other an impulse towards the satisfaction of that want. In course of time this impulse or appetence assumes the form of intelligent or conscious purpose looking towards the gratification of felt wants, and then the will begins to show itself in the form of clear, definite volitions and actions. The strength of the will depends largely upon these impulses or appetences; and their strength in turn depends upon the health, the temperament, the organization (physical and psychical) of the individual. If by careful diet, exercise, or otherwise, we invigorate these, we thereby furnish capital that will in after years bear compound interest in the form of strong will-power. If the diet, exercise, play, sleep, and work are not properly regulated, first by the parent, the nurse, and the teacher, and later by the individual himself, the appetences develop into appetites that enslave the will and seriously interfere with its further growth. As the power to think is developed, the will passes over into a higher stage of activity. The very longing for happiness leads the child to impose restrictions upon itself. It feels happy if it can secure the approbation of those with whom it associates. If we show our displeasure at something it has done, the little philosopher begins to practise self-denial in certain directions for the purpose of regaining and retaining our good will. The second stage is now reached in which self-gratification gives place to self-denial, the will acting under the influence of one or more ethical ideas. The child at school is lifted upon this loftier plane by the circumstances which surround him; it must practise the school virtues,—punctuality, industry, obedience, and the like; it accepts certain forms of self-restraint in keeping quiet, in abstaining from play, in observing the rules of the school. Where the discipline is rigid and the instruction lacks interest, it may even conceive of the school as a mere place of self-denial and self-restraint. “Why do you come here?” asked a director. The little boy replied, “We come here to sit and wait for school to let out.” The hours at school can be sweetened by exercises in thinking and expressing thought to such an extent that the school becomes the place to which children best like to go. Some full-grown men have not advanced very far beyond this second stage in the growth of the will. They follow some regular occupation as the boy does in going to school; they practise certain forms of virtue,—say honesty, so that you could intrust to them your pocket-book with perfect safety,—but they break the Sabbath, use God’s name in vain, and commit daily many other sins and transgressions. Occasionally one finds a school in which no pupil would dare to be caught telling a lie, and yet the moral tone is low, there being vices which, like a cankerworm, eat out the moral life of the school. The teacher should not feel satisfied until he has raised the pupil to the third stage, where the will is brought under the inspiration of the good, and right becomes the law of life.

Upon this highest plane different phases of development can be detected. The law of right may brandish the avenging rod of conscience and drive the individual into paths of rectitude. The idea of duty thus operating alone may reduce him to the subservience of a slave and prevent him from reaching the high stature of perfect human freedom. This kind of slavery is apt to be followed by a struggle in which the lower nature seeks to assert itself against the higher, and if the latter conquers, the person is apt to be elated with the feeling of victory. Whenever you hear a man boast of the sacrifices he has made in his devotion to duty, you can rest assured he has not yet reached that lofty elevation in will-culture upon which the person does right spontaneously and without effort, and never dreams of having made a sacrifice in the performance of the hardest duties.

Evil.

Of course, the development from the first stage may move in the opposite direction. If the appetences are gratified beyond the requirements of self-preservation, or of the well-being of the child, they grow into uncontrollable desires and passions; the individual sinks deeper and deeper into selfishness. He may deny himself for the sake of some ambition, or vice, or wicked end which the soul cherishes; then, unless lifted up by the grace of God, he will ultimately land in a state bordering on that of Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, a character who found pleasure in human suffering, and whose will was constantly under the direction and inspiration of the principle of evil. He will at last become like Milton’s Satan, who exclaimed, “Evil, be thou my good.” College boys who delight in hazing innocent freshmen have gone far towards this loathsome stage of moral degradation, the lowest which the will can reach in its downward career.

Thought and volition.

Now, it is easy to see the relation of thinking to these several stages of will-development. Volition presupposes something to be done, an end to be sought and accomplished. If the will is to act steadily in the endeavor to realize this end, the end must be clearly thought and held before the soul in definite form. To do the right implies that the right be known as the result of right thinking. A soul ignorant of right cannot be expected to practise the virtues which are grounded in the law of right. On the other hand, many forms of evil are never conceived by young people unless suggested to them by their superiors.

Volition issues in doing, and doing is a powerful stimulus to thinking. Making things out of wood, metal, marble, wax, papier-maché, or even out of paper is genuine thinking in things. It is a species of doing which flows from thinking through willing and reacts upon the process of thinking. To see how a thing is made is better than to be told how, but to make it by our own effort, skill, and thought is vastly more educative than seeing and hearing. Manual training tends to make the pupil intellectually honest. He cannot get away from a thought expressed in wood or other material as he can from a thought expressed in language which may suffice to suggest his idea, but not to give it adequate expression. This influence of doing upon thinking has led to the formulation of the maxim, We learn to do by doing,—a maxim whose limitations and legitimate meaning it will be necessary to discuss in a separate lecture.

XX
THINKING AND DOING

When we turn to modern pedagogics, we see how enormously the field of reactive conduct has been extended by the introduction of all those methods of concrete object-teaching which are the glory of our contemporary schools. Verbal reactions, useful as they are, are insufficient. The pupil’s words may be right, but the concepts corresponding to them are often direfully wrong. In a modern school, therefore, they form only a small part of what the pupil is required to do. He

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