Title: How We Think
Author: John Dewey
Catagory:Education
Author:
Posted Date:10/30/2024
Posted By:utopia online
CHAPTER ONE
WHAT IS THOUGHT?
§ 1. Varied Senses of the Term
Four senses of thought, from the wider to the limited
No words are oftener on our lips than thinking and thought. So profuse and varied, indeed, is our
use of these words that it is not easy to define just what we mean by them. The aim of this
chapter is to find a single consistent meaning. Assistance may be had by considering some
typical ways in which the terms are employed. In the first place thought is used broadly, not to
say loosely. Everything that comes to mind, that "goes through our heads," is called a thought.
To think of a thing is just to be conscious of it in any way whatsoever. Second, the term is
restricted by excluding whatever is directly presented; we think (or think of) only such things as
we do not directly see, hear, smell, or taste. Then, third, the meaning is further limited to beliefs
that rest upon some kind of evidence or testimony. Of this third type, two kinds—or, rather, two
degrees—must be discriminated. In some cases, a belief is accepted with slight or almost no
attempt to state the grounds that support it. In other cases, the ground or basis for a belief is
deliberately sought and its[Pg 2] adequacy to support the belief examined. This process is called
reflective thought; it alone is truly educative in value, and it forms, accordingly, the principal
subject of this volume. We shall now briefly describe each of the four senses.
Chance and idle thinking
I. In its loosest sense, thinking signifies everything that, as we say, is "in our heads" or that "goes
through our minds." He who offers "a penny for your thoughts" does not expect to drive any
great bargain. In calling the objects of his demand thoughts, he does not intend to ascribe to them
dignity, consecutiveness, or truth. Any idle fancy, trivial recollection, or flitting impression will
satisfy his demand. Daydreaming, building of castles in the air, that loose flux of casual and
disconnected material that floats through our minds in relaxed moments are, in this random
sense, thinking. More of our waking life than we should care to admit, even to ourselves, is
likely to be whiled away in this inconsequential trifling with idle fancy and unsubstantial hope.
Reflective thought is consecutive, not merely a sequence
In this sense, silly folk and dullards think. The story is told of a man in slight repute for
intelligence, who, desiring to be chosen selectman in his New England town, addressed a knot of
neighbors in this wise: "I hear you don't believe I know enough to hold office. I wish you to
understand that I am thinking about something or other most of the time." Now reflective
thought is like this random coursing of things through the mind in that it consists of a succession
of things thought of; but it is unlike, in that the mere chance occurrence of any chance
"something or other" in an irregular sequence does not suffice. Reflection involves not simply a
sequence of ideas, but a consequence—a consecutive ordering in such a way that[Pg 3] each
determines the next as its proper outcome, while each in turn leans back on its predecessors. The
successive portions of the reflective thought grow out of one another and support one another;
they do not come and go in a medley. Each phase is a step from something to something—
technically speaking, it is a term of thought. Each term leaves a deposit which is utilized in the
next term. The stream or flow becomes a train, chain, or thread.
The restriction of thinking to what goes beyond direct observation
Reflective thought aims, however, at belief
II. Even when thinking is used in a broad sense, it is usually restricted to matters not directly
perceived: to what we do not see, smell, hear, or touch. We ask the man telling a story if he saw
a certain incident happen, and his reply may be, "No, I only thought of it." A note of invention,
as distinct from faithful record of observation, is present. Most important in this class are
successions of imaginative incidents and episodes which, having a certain coherence, hanging
together on a continuous thread, lie between kaleidoscopic flights of fancy and considerations
deliberately employed to establish a conclusion. The imaginative stories poured forth by children
possess all degrees of internal congruity; some are disjointed, some are articulated. When
connected, they simulate reflective thought; indeed, they usually occur in minds of logical
capacity. These imaginative enterprises often precede thinking of the close-knit type and prepare
the way for it. But they do not aim at knowledge, at belief about facts or in truths; and thereby
they are marked off from reflective thought even when they most resemble it. Those who
express such thoughts do not expect credence, but rather credit for a well-constructed plot or a
well-arranged climax. They produce good stories, not—unless by chance[Pg 4]—knowledge. Such
thoughts are an efflorescence of feeling; the enhancement of a mood or sentiment is their aim;
congruity of emotion, their binding tie.
Thought induces belief in two ways
III. In its next sense, thought denotes belief resting upon some basis, that is, real or supposed
kn
owledge going beyond what is directly present. It is marked by acceptance or rejection of
something as reasonably probable or improbable. This phase of thought, however, includes two
such distinct types of belief that, even though their difference is strictly one of degree, not of
kind, it becomes practically important to consider them separately. Some beliefs are accepted
when their grounds have not themselves been considered, others are accepted because their
grounds have been examined.
When we say, "Men used to think the world was flat," or, "I thought you went by the house," we
express belief: something is accepted, held to, acquiesced in, or affirmed. But such thoughts may
mean a supposition accepted without reference to its real grounds. These may be adequate, they
may not; but their value with reference to the support they afford the belief has not been
considered.
Such thoughts grow up unconsciously and without reference to the attainment of correct belief.
They are picked up—we know not how. From obscure sources and by unnoticed channels they
insinuate themselves into acceptance and become unconsciously a part of our mental furniture.
Tradition, instruction, imitation—all of which depend upon authority in some form, or appeal to
our own advantage, or fall in with a strong passion—are responsible for them. Such thoughts are
prejudices, that is, prejudgments, not[Pg 5] judgments proper that rest upon a survey of evidence.[1]
Thinking in its best sense is that which considers the basis and consequences of beliefs
IV. Thoughts that result in belief have an importance attached to them which leads to reflective
thought, to conscious inquiry into the nature, conditions, and bearings of the belief. To think of
whales and camels in the clouds is to entertain ourselves with fancies, terminable at our pleasure,
which do not lead to any belief in particular. But to think of the world as flat is to ascribe a
quality to a real thing as its real property. This conclusion denotes a connection among things
and hence is not, like imaginative thought, plastic to our mood. Belief in the world's flatness
commits him who holds it to thinking in certain specific ways of other objects, such as the
heavenly bodies, antipodes, the possibility of navigation. It prescribes to him actions in
accordance with his conception of these objects.
The consequences of a belief upon other beliefs and upon behavior may be so important, then,
that men are forced to consider the grounds or reasons of their belief and its logical
consequences. This means reflective thought—thought in its eulogistic and emphatic sense.
Reflective thought defined
Men thought the world was flat until Columbus thought it to be round. The earlier thought was a
belief held because men had not the energy or the courage to question what those about them
accepted and taught, especially as it was suggested and seemingly confirmed by obvious sensible
fa
cts. The thought of Columbus was a reasoned conclusion. It marked the close of study into
fa
cts, of scrutiny and revision of evidence, of working out the implications of various
hypotheses, and of[Pg 6] comparing these theoretical results with one another and with known
fa
cts. Because Columbus did not accept unhesitatingly the current traditional theory, because he
doubted and inquired, he arrived at his thought. Skeptical of what, from long habit, seemed most
certain, and credulous of what seemed impossible, he went on thinking until he could produce
evidence for both his confidence and his disbelief. Even if his conclusion had finally turned out
wrong, it would have been a different sort of belief from those it antagonized, because it was
reached by a different method. Active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or
supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further
conclusions to which it tends, constitutes reflective thought. Any one of the first three kinds of
thought may elicit this type; but once begun, it is a conscious and voluntary effort to establish
belief upon a firm basis of reasons.
§ 2. The Central Factor in Thinking
There is a common element in all types of thought:
There are, however, no sharp lines of demarcation between the various operations just outlined.
The problem of attaining correct habits of reflection would be much easier than it is, did not the
different modes of thinking blend insensibly into one another. So far, we have considered rather
extreme instances of each kind in order to get the field clearly before us. Let us now reverse this
operation; let us consider a rudimentary case of thinking, lying between careful examination of
evidence and a mere irresponsible stream of fancies. A man is walking on a warm day. The sky
was clear the last time he observed it; but presently he notes, while occupied primarily with other
things, that the air is cooler. It occurs to him that it is probably going to[Pg 7] rain; looking up, he
sees a dark cloud between him and the sun, and he then quickens his steps. What, if anything, in
such a situation can be called thought? Neither the act of walking nor the noting of the cold is a
thought. Walking is one direction of activity; looking and noting are other modes of activity. The
likelihood that it will rain is, however, something suggested. The pedestrian feels the cold; he
thinks of clouds and a coming shower.
viz. suggestion of something not observed
But reflection involves also the relation of signifying
So far there is the same sort of situation as when one looking at a cloud is reminded of a human
figure and face. Thinking in both of these cases (the cases of belief and of fancy) involves a
noted or perceived fact, followed by something else which is not observed but which is brought
to mind, suggested by the thing seen. One reminds us, as we say, of the other. Side by side,
however, with this factor of agreement in the two cases of suggestion is a factor of marked
disagreement. We do not believe in the face suggested by the cloud; we do not consider at all the
probability of its being a fact. There is no reflective thought. The danger of rain, on the contrary,
presents itself to us as a genuine possibility—as a possible fact of the same nature as the
observed coolness. Put differently, we do not regard the cloud as meaning or indicating a face,
but merely as suggesting it, while we do consider that the coolness may mean rain. In the first
case, seeing an object, we just happen, as we say, to think of something else; in the second, we
consider the possibility and nature of the connection between the object seen and the object
suggested. The seen thing is regarded as in some way the ground or basis of belief in the
suggested thing; it possesses the quality of evidence.[Pg 8]
Various synonymous expressions for the function of signifying
This function by which one thing signifies or indicates another, and thereby leads us to consider
how far one may be regarded as warrant for belief in the other, is, then, the central factor in all
reflective or distinctively intellectual thinking. By calling up various situations to which such
terms as signifies and indicates apply, the student will best realize for himself the actual facts
denoted by the words reflective thought. Synonyms for these terms are: points to, tells of,
betokens, prognosticates, represents, stands for, implies.[2] We also say one thing portends
another; is ominous of another, or a symptom of it, or a key to it, or (if the connection is quite
obscure) that it gives a hint, clue, or intimation.
Reflection and belief on evidence
Reflection thus implies that something is believed in (or disbelieved in), not on its own direct
account, but through something else which stands as witness, evidence, proof, voucher, warrant;
that is, as ground of belief. At one time, rain is actually felt or directly experienced; at another
time, we infer that it has rained from the looks of the grass and trees, or that it is going to rain
because of the condition of the air or the state of the barometer. At one time, we see a man (or
suppose we do) without any intermediary fact; at another time, we are not quite sure what we
see, and hunt for accompanying facts that will serve as signs, indications, tokens of what is to be
believed.
Thinking, for the purposes of this inquiry, is defined accordingly as that operation in which
present facts suggest other facts (or truths) in such a way as to induce be[Pg 9]lief in the latter
upon the ground or warrant of the former. We do not put beliefs that rest simply on inference on
the surest level of assurance. To say "I think so" implies that I do not as yet know so. The
inferential belief may later be confirmed and come to stand as sure, but in itself it always has a
certain element of supposition.
§ 3. Elements in Reflective Thinking
So much for the description of the more external and obvious aspects of the fact called thinking.
Further consideration at once reveals certain subprocesses which are involved in every reflective
operation. These are: (a) a state of perplexity, hesitation, doubt; and (b) an act of search or
investigation directed toward bringing to light further facts which serve to corroborate or to
nullify the suggested belief.
The importance of uncertainty
(a) In our illustration, the shock of coolness generated confusion and suspended belief, at least
momentarily. Because it was unexpected, it was a shock or an interruption needing to be
accounted for, identified, or placed. To say that the abrupt occurrence of the change of
temperature constitutes a problem may sound forced and artificial; but if we are willing to extend
the meaning of the word problem to whatever—no matter how slight and commonplace in
character—perplexes and challenges the mind so that it makes belief at all uncertain, there is a
genuine problem or question involved in this experience of sudden change.
and of inquiry in order to test
(b) The turning of the head, the lifting of the eyes, the scanning of the heavens, are activities
adapted to bring to recognition facts that will answer the question presented by the sudden
coolness. The facts as they[Pg 10] first presented themselves were perplexing; they suggested,
however, clouds. The act of looking was an act to discover if this suggested explanation held
good. It may again seem forced to speak of this looking, almost automatic, as an act of research
or inquiry. But once more, if we are willing to generalize our conceptions of our mental
operations to include the trivial and ordinary as well as the technical and recondite, there is no
good reason for refusing to give such a title to the act of looking. The purport of this act of
inquiry is to confirm or to refute the suggested belief. New facts are brought to perception,
which either corroborate the idea that a change of weather is imminent, or negate it.
Finding one's way an illustration of reflection
Another instance, commonplace also, yet not quite so trivial, may enforce this lesson. A man
traveling in an unfamiliar region comes to a branching of the roads. Having no sure knowledge
to fall back upon, he is brought to a standstill of hesitation and suspense. Which road is right?
And how shall perplexity be resolved? There are but two alternatives: he must either blindly and
arbitrarily take his course, trusting to luck for the outcome, or he must discover grounds for the
conclusion that a given road is right. Any attempt to decide the matter by thinking will involve
inquiry into other facts, whether brought out by memory or by further observation, or by both.
The perplexed wayfarer must carefully scrutinize what is before him and he must cudgel his
memory. He looks for evidence that will support belief in favor of either of the roads—for
evidence that will weight down one suggestion. He may climb a tree; he may go first in this
direction, then in that, looking, in either case, for signs, clues,[Pg 11] indications. He wants
something in the nature of a signboard or a map, and his reflection is aimed at the discovery of
facts that will serve this purpose.
Possible, yet incompatible, suggestions
The above illustration may be generalized. Thinking begins in what may fairly enough be called
a forked-road situation, a situation which is ambiguous, which presents a dilemma, which
proposes alternatives. As long as our activity glides smoothly along from one thing to another, or
as long as we permit our imagination to entertain fancies at pleasure, there is no call for
reflection. Difficulty or obstruction in the way of reaching a belief brings us, however, to a
pause. In the suspense of uncertainty, we metaphorically climb a tree; we try to find some
standpoint from which we may survey additional facts and, getting a more commanding view of
the situation, may decide how the facts stand related to one another.
Regulation of thinking by its purpose
Demand for the solution of a perplexity is the steadying and guiding factor in the entire process
of reflection. Where there is no question of a problem to be solved or a difficulty to be
surmounted, the course of suggestions flows on at random; we have the first type of thought
described. If the stream of suggestions is controlled simply by their emotional congruity, their
fitting agreeably into a single picture or story, we have the second type. But a question to be
answered, an ambiguity to be resolved, sets up an end and holds the current of ideas to a definite
channel. Every suggested conclusion is tested by its reference to this regulating end, by its
pertinence to the problem in hand. This need of straightening out a perplexity also controls the
kind of inquiry undertaken. A traveler whose end is the most beautiful path will look for other
considerations and[Pg 12] will test suggestions occurring to him on another principle than if he
wishes to discover the way to a given city. The problem fixes the end of thought and the end
controls the process of thinking.
§ 4. Summary
Origin and stimulus
We may recapitulate by saying that the origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion, or
doubt. Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on "general
principles." There is something specific which occasions and evokes it. General appeals to a
child (or to a grown-up) to think, irrespective of the existence in his own experience of some
difficulty that troubles him and disturbs his equilibrium, are as futile as advice to lift himself by
his boot-straps.
Suggestions and past experience
Given a difficulty, the next step is suggestion of some way out—the formation of some tentative
plan or project, the entertaining of some theory which will account for the peculiarities in
question, the consideration of some solution for the problem. The data at hand cannot supply the
solution; they can only suggest it. What, then, are the sources of the suggestion? Clearly past
experience and prior knowledge. If the person has had some acquaintance with similar situations,
if he has dealt with material of the same sort before, suggestions more or less apt and helpful are
likely to arise. But unless there has been experience in some degree analogous, which may now
be represented in imagination, confusion remains mere confusion. There is nothing upon which
to draw in order to clarify it. Even when a child (or a grown-up) has a problem, to urge him to
think when he has no prior experiences involving some of the same conditions, is wholly
fu
tile.[Pg 13]
Exploration and testing
If the suggestion that occurs is at once accepted, we have uncritical thinking, the minimum of
reflection. To turn the thing over in mind, to reflect, means to hunt for additional evidence, for
new data, that will develop the suggestion, and will either, as we say, bear it out or else make
obvious its absurdity and irrelevance. Given a genuine difficulty and a reasonable amount of
analogous experience to draw upon, the difference, par excellence, between good and bad
thinking is found at this point. The easiest way is to accept any suggestion that seems plausible
and thereby bring to an end the condition of mental uneasiness. Reflective thinking is always
more or less troublesome because it involves overcoming the inertia that inclines one to accept
suggestions at their face value; it involves willingness to endure a condition of mental unrest and
disturbance. Reflective thinking, in short, means judgment suspended during further inquiry; and
suspense is likely to be somewhat painful. As we shall see later, the most important factor in the
training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in
mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first
suggestions that occur. To maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted
inquiry—these are the essentials of thinking.[Pg 14]
CHAPTER TWO
THE NEED FOR TRAINING THOUGHT
Man the animal that thinks
To expatiate upon the importance of thought would be absurd. The traditional definition of man
as "the thinking animal" fixes thought as the essential difference between man and the brutes,—
surely an important matter. More relevant to our purpose is the question how thought is
important, for an answer to this question will throw light upon the kind of training thought
requires if it is to subserve its end.
§ 1. The Values of Thought
The possibility of deliberate and intentional activity
I. Thought affords the sole method of escape from purely impulsive or purely routine action. A
being without capacity for thought is moved only by instincts and appetites, as these are called
fo
rt
h by outward conditions and by the inner state of the organism. A being thus moved is, as it
were, pushed from behind. This is what we mean by the blind nature of brute actions. The agent
does not see or foresee the end for which he is acting, nor the results produced by his behaving
in one way rather than in another. He does not "know what he is about." Where there is thought,
things present act as signs or tokens of things not yet experienced. A thinking being can,
accordingly, act on the basis of the absent and the future. Instead of being pushed into a mode of
action by the sheer urgency of forces, whether[Pg 15] instincts or habits, of which he is not aware,
a reflective agent is drawn (to some extent at least) to action by some remoter object of which he
is indirectly aware.
Natural events come to be a language
An animal without thought may go into its hole when rain threatens, because of some immediate
stimulus to its organism. A thinking agent will perceive that certain given facts are probable
signs of a future rain, and will take steps in the light of this anticipated future. To plant seeds, to
cultivate the soil, to harvest grain, are intentional acts, possible only to a being who has learned
to subordinate the immediately felt elements of an experience to those values which these hint at
and prophesy. Philosophers have made much of the phrases "book of nature," "language of
nature." Well, it is in virtue of the capacity of thought that given things are significant of absent
things, and that nature speaks a language which may be interpreted. To a being who thinks,
things are records of their past, as fossils tell of the prior history of the earth, and are prophetic of
their future, as from the present positions of heavenly bodies remote eclipses are foretold.
Shakespeare's "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks," expresses literally enough the
power superadded to existences when they appeal to a thinking being. Upon the function of
signification depend all foresight, all intelligent planning, deliberation, and calculation.
The possibility of systematized foresight
II. By thought man also develops and arranges artificial signs to remind him in advance of
consequences, and of ways of securing and avoiding them. As the trait just mentioned makes the
difference between savage man and brute, so this trait makes the difference between civilized
man and savage. A savage who has been shipwrecked in a river may note certain things which[Pg
16] serve him as signs of danger in the future. But civilized man deliberately makes such signs; he
sets up in advance of wreckage warning buoys, and builds lighthouses where he sees signs that
such events may occur. A savage reads weather signs with great expertness; civilized man
institutes a weather service by which signs are artificially secured and information is distributed
in advance of the appearance of any signs that could be detected without special methods. A
savage finds his way skillfully through a wilderness by reading certain obscure indications;
civilized man builds a highway which shows the road to all. The savage learns to detect the signs
of fire and thereby to invent methods of producing flame; civilized man invents permanent
conditions for producing light and heat whenever they are needed. The very essence of civilized
culture is that we deliberately erect monuments and memorials, lest we forget; and deliberately
institute, in advance of the happening of various contingencies and emergencies of life, devices
fo
r detecting their approach and registering their nature, for warding off what is unfavorable, or
at least for protecting ourselves from its full impact and for making more secure and extensive
what is favorable. All forms of artificial apparatus are intentionally designed modifications of
natural things in order that they may serve better than in their natural estate to indicate the
hidden, the absent, and the remote.
The possibility of objects rich in quality
III. Finally, thought confers upon physical events and objects a very different status and value
from that which they possess to a being that does not reflect. These words are mere scratches,
curious variations of light and shade, to one to whom they are not linguistic signs. To him for
whom they are signs of other things,[Pg 17] each has a definite individuality of its own, according
to the meaning that it is used to convey. Exactly the same holds of natural objects. A chair is a
different object to a being to whom it consciously suggests an opportunity for sitting down,
repose, or sociable converse, from what it is to one to whom it presents itself merely as a thing to
be smelled, or gnawed, or jumped over; a stone is different to one who knows something of its
past history and its future use from what it is to one who only feels it directly through his senses.
It is only by courtesy, indeed, that we can say that an unthinking animal experiences an object at
all—so largely is anything that presents itself to us as an object made up by the qualities it
possesses as a sign of other things.
The nature of the objects an animal perceives
An English logician (Mr. Venn) has remarked that it may be questioned whether a dog sees a
rainbow any more than he apprehends the political constitution of the country in which he lives.
The same principle applies to the kennel in which he sleeps and the meat that he eats. When he is
sleepy, he goes to the kennel; when he is hungry, he is excited by the smell and color of meat;
beyond this, in what sense does he see an object? Certainly he does not see a house—i.e. a thing
with all the properties and relations of a permanent residence, unless he is capable of making
what is present a uniform sign of what is absent—unless he is capable of thought. Nor does he
see what he eats as meat unless it suggests the absent properties by virtue of which it is a certain
joint of some animal, and is known to afford nourishment. Just what is left of an object stripped
of all such qualities of meaning, we cannot well say; but we can be sure that the object is then a
very different sort of thing from the objects that we perceive. There[Pg 18] is moreover no
particular limit to the possibilities of growth in the fusion of a thing as it is to sense and as it is to
thought, or as a sign of other things. The child today soon regards as constituent parts of objects
qualities that once it required the intelligence of a Copernicus or a Newton to apprehend.
Mill on the business of life and the occupation of mind
These various values of the power of thought may be summed up in the following quotation
from John Stuart Mill. "To draw inferences," he says, "has been said to be the great business of
life. Every one has daily, hourly, and momentary need of ascertaining facts which he has not
directly observed: not from any general purpose of adding to his stock of knowledge, but
because the facts themselves are of importance to his interests or to his occupations. The
business of the magistrate, of the military commander, of the navigator, of the physician, of the
agriculturist, is merely to judge of evidence and to act accordingly.... As they do this well or ill,
so they discharge well or ill the duties of their several callings. It is the only occupation in which
the mind never ceases to be engaged."[3]
§ 2. Importance of Direction in order to Realize these Values
Thinking goes astray
What a person has not only daily and hourly, but momentary need of performing, is not a
technical and abstruse matter; nor, on the other hand, is it trivial and negligible. Such a function
must be congenial to the mind, and must be performed, in an unspoiled mind, upon every fitting
occasion. Just because, however, it is an operation of drawing inferences, of basing conclusions
upon evidence, of reaching belief indirectly, it is[Pg 19] an operation that may go wrong as well as
right, and hence is one that needs safeguarding and training. The greater its importance the
greater are the evils when it is ill-exercised.
Ideas are our rulers—for better or for worse
An earlier writer than Mill, John Locke (1632-1704), brings out the importance of thought for
life and the need of training so that its best and not its worst possibilities will be realized, in the
fo
llowing words: "No man ever sets himself about anything but upon some view or other, which
serves him for a reason for what he does; and whatsoever faculties he employs, the
understanding with such light as it has, well or ill informed, constantly leads; and by that light,
true or false, all his operative powers are directed.... Temples have their sacred images, and we
see what influence they have always had over a great part of mankind. But in truth the ideas and
images in men's minds are the invisible powers that constantly govern them, and to these they
all, universally, pay a ready submission. It is therefore of the highest concernment that great care
should be taken of the understanding, to conduct it aright in the search of knowledge and in the
judgments it makes."[4] If upon thought hang all deliberate activities and the uses we make of all
our other powers, Locke's assertion that it is of the highest concernment that care should be
taken of its conduct is a moderate statement. While the power of thought frees us from servile
subjection to instinct, appetite, and routine, it also brings with it the occasion and possibility of
error and mistake. In elevating us above the brute, it opens to us the possibility of failures to
which the animal, limited to instinct, cannot sink.
§ 3. Tendencies Needing Constant Regulation
Physical and social sanctions of correct thinking
Up to a certain point, the ordinary conditions of life, natural and social, provide the conditions
requisite for regulating the operations of inference. The necessities of life enforce a fundamental
and persistent discipline for which the most cunningly devised artifices would be ineffective
substitutes. The burnt child dreads the fire; the painful consequence emphasizes the need of
correct inference much more than would learned discourse on the properties of heat. Social
conditions also put a premium on correct inferring in matters where action based on valid
thought is socially important. These sanctions of proper thinking may affect life itself, or at least
a life reasonably free from perpetual discomfort. The signs of enemies, of shelter, of food, of the
main social conditions, have to be correctly apprehended.
The serious limitations of such sanctions
But this disciplinary training, efficacious as it is within certain limits, does not carry us beyond a
restricted boundary. Logical attainment in one direction is no bar to extravagant conclusions in
another. A savage expert in judging signs of the movements and location of animals that he
hunts, will accept and gravely narrate the most preposterous yarns concerning the origin of their
habits and structures. When there is no directly appreciable reaction of the inference upon the
security and prosperity of life, there are no natural checks to the acceptance of wrong beliefs.
Conclusions may be generated by a modicum of fact merely because the suggestions are vivid
and interesting; a large accumulation of data may fail to suggest a proper conclusion because
existing customs are averse to entertaining it. Independent of training, there is a "primitive
credulity"[Pg 21] which tends to make no distinction between what a trained mind calls fancy and
that which it calls a reasonable conclusion. The face in the clouds is believed in as some sort of
fa
ct, merely because it is forcibly suggested. Natural intelligence is no barrier to the propagation
of error, nor large but untrained experience to the accumulation of fixed false beliefs. Errors may
support one another mutually and weave an ever larger and firmer fabric of misconception.
Dreams, the positions of stars, the lines of the hand, may be regarded as valuable signs, and the
fa
ll of cards as an inevitable omen, while natural events of the most crucial significance go
disregarded. Beliefs in portents of various kinds, now mere nook and cranny superstitions, were
once universal. A long discipline in exact science was required for their conquest.
Superstition as natural a result as science
In the mere function of suggestion, there is no difference between the power of a column of
mercury to portend rain, and that of the entrails of an animal or the flight of birds to foretell the
fo
rt
unes of war. For all anybody can tell in advance, the spilling of salt is as likely to import bad
luck as the bite of a mosquito to import malaria. Only systematic regulation of the conditions
under which observations are made and severe discipline of the habits of entertaining
suggestions can secure a decision that one type of belief is vicious and the other sound. The
substitution of scientific for superstitious habits of inference has not been brought about by any
improvement in the acuteness of the senses or in the natural workings of the function of
suggestion. It is the result of regulation of the conditions under which observation and inference
take place.[Pg 22]
General causes of bad thinking: Bacon's "idols"
It is instructive to note some of the attempts that have been made to classify the main sources of
error in reaching beliefs. Francis Bacon, for example, at the beginnings of modern scientific
inquiry, enumerated four such classes, under the somewhat fantastic title of "idols" (Gr. ειδωλα,
images), spectral forms that allure the mind into false paths. These he called the idols, or
phantoms, of the (a) tribe, (b) the marketplace, (c) the cave or den, and (d) the theater; or, less
metaphorically, (a) standing erroneous methods (or at least temptations to error) that have their
roots in human nature generally; (b) those that come from intercourse and language; (c) those
that are due to causes peculiar to a specific individual; and finally, (d) those that have their
sources in the fashion or general current of a period. Classifying these causes of fallacious belief
somewhat differently, we may say that two are intrinsic and two are extrinsic. Of the intrinsic,
one is common to all men alike (such as the universal tendency to notice instances that
corroborate a favorite belief more readily than those that contradict it), while the other resides in
the specific temperament and habits of the given individual. Of the extrinsic, one proceeds from
generic social conditions—like the tendency to suppose that there is a fact wherever there is a
word, and no fact where there is no linguistic term—while the other proceeds from local and
temporary social currents.
Locke on the influence of
Locke's method of dealing with typical forms of wrong belief is less formal and may be more
enlightening. We can hardly do better than quote his forcible and quaint language, when,
enumerating different classes of men, he shows different ways in which thought goes wrong:[Pg
23]
(a) dependence on others,
1. "The first is of those who seldom reason at all, but do and think according to the example of
others, whether parents, neighbors, ministers, or who else they are pleased to make choice of to
have an implicit faith in, for the saving of themselves the pains and troubles of thinking and
examining for themselves."
(b) self-interest,
2. "This kind is of those who put passion in the place of reason, and being resolved that shall
govern their actions and arguments, neither use their own, nor hearken to other people's reason,
any farther than it suits their humor, interest, or party."[5]
(c) circumscribed experience
3. "The third sort is of those who readily and sincerely follow reason, but for want of having that
which one may call large, sound, roundabout sense, have not a full view of all that relates to the
question.... They converse but with one sort of men, they read but one sort of books, they will
not come in the hearing but of one sort of notions.... They have a pretty traffic with known
correspondents in some little creek ... but will not venture out into the great ocean of
kn
owledge." Men of originally equal natural parts may finally arrive at very different stores of
kn
owledge and truth, "when all the odds between them has been the different scope that has been
given to their understandings to range in, for the gathering up of information and furnishing their
heads with ideas and notions and observations, whereon to employ their mind."[6]
[Pg 24]
In another portion of his writings,[7] Locke states the same ideas in slightly different form.
Effect of dogmatic principles,
1. "That which is inconsistent with our principles is so far from passing for probable with us that
it will not be allowed possible. The reverence borne to these principles is so great, and their
au
thority so paramount to all other, that the testimony, not only of other men, but the evidence of
our own senses are often rejected, when they offer to vouch anything contrary to these
established rules.... There is nothing more ordinary than children's receiving into their minds
propositions ... from their parents, nurses, or those about them; which being insinuated in their
unwary as well as unbiased understandings, and fastened by degrees, are at last (and this whether
true or false) riveted there by long custom and education, beyond all possibility of being pulled
out again. For men, when they are grown up, reflecting upon their opinions and finding those of
this sort to be as ancient in their minds as their very memories, not having observed their early
insinuation, nor by what means they got them, they are apt to reverence them as sacred things,
and not to suffer them to be profaned, touched, or questioned." They take them as standards "to
be the great and unerring deciders of truth and falsehood, and the judges to which they are to
ap
peal in all manner of controversies."
of closed minds,
2. "Secondly, next to these are men whose understandings are cast into a mold, and fashioned
just to the size of a received hypothesis." Such men, Locke goes on to say, while not denying the
existence of facts and evidence, cannot be convinced by the evidence that[Pg 25] would decide
them if their minds were not so closed by adherence to fixed belief.
of strong passion,
3. "Predominant Passions. Thirdly, probabilities which cross men's appetites and prevailing
passions run the same fate. Let ever so much probability hang on one side of a covetous man's
reasoning, and money on the other, it is easy to foresee which will outweigh. Earthly minds, like
mud walls, resist the strongest batteries.
of dependence upon authority of others
4. "Authority. The fourth and last wrong measure of probability I shall take notice of, and which
keeps in ignorance or error more people than all the others together, is the giving up our assent to
the common received opinions, either of our friends or party, neighborhood or country."
Causes of bad mental habits are social as well as inborn
Both Bacon and Locke make it evident that over and above the sources of misbelief that reside in
the natural tendencies of the individual (like those toward hasty and too far-reaching
conclusions), social conditions tend to instigate and confirm wrong habits of thinking by
au
thority, by conscious instruction, and by the even more insidious half-conscious influences of
language, imitation, sympathy, and suggestion. Education has accordingly not only to safeguard
an individual against the besetting erroneous tendencies of his own mind—its rashness,
presumption, and preference of what chimes with self-interest to objective evidence—but also to
undermine and destroy the accumulated and self-perpetuating prejudices of long ages. When
social life in general has become more reasonable, more imbued with rational conviction, and
less moved by stiff authority and blind passion, educational agencies may be more positive and
constructive than at present, for they will[Pg 26] work in harmony with the educative influence
exercised willy-nilly by other social surroundings upon an individual's habits of thought and
belief. At present, the work of teaching must not only transform natural tendencies into trained
habits of thought, but must also fortify the mind against irrational tendencies current in the social
environment, and help displace erroneous habits already produced.
§ 4. Regulation Transforms Inference into Proof
A leap is involved in all thinking
Thinking is important because, as we have seen, it is that function in which given or ascertained
fa
cts stand for or indicate others which are not directly ascertained. But the process of reaching
the absent from the present is peculiarly exposed to error; it is liable to be influenced by almost
any number of unseen and unconsidered causes,—past experience, received dogmas, the stirring
of self-interest, the arousing of passion, sheer mental laziness, a social environment steeped in
biased traditions or animated by false expectations, and so on. The exercise of thought is, in the
literal sense of that word, inference; by it one thing carries us over to the idea of, and belief in,
another thing. It involves a jump, a leap, a going beyond what is surely known to something else
accepted on its warrant. Unless one is an idiot, one simply cannot help having all things and
events suggest other things not actually present, nor can one help a tendency to believe in the
latter on the basis of the former. The very inevitableness of the jump, the leap, to something
unknown, only emphasizes the necessity of attention to the conditions under which it occurs so
that the danger of a false step may be lessened and the probability of a right landing increased.[Pg
27]
Hence, the need of regulation which, when adequate, makes proof
Such attention consists in regulation (1) of the conditions under which the function of suggestion
takes place, and (2) of the conditions under which credence is yielded to the suggestions that
occur. Inference controlled in these two ways (the study of which in detail constitutes one of the
chief objects of this book) forms proof. To prove a thing means primarily to try, to test it. The
guest bidden to the wedding feast excused himself because he had to prove his oxen. Exceptions
are said to prove a rule; i.e. they furnish instances so extreme that they try in the severest fashion
its applicability; if the rule will stand such a test, there is no good reason for further doubting it.
Not until a thing has been tried—"tried out," in colloquial language—do we know its true worth.
Till then it may be pretense, a bluff. But the thing that has come out victorious in a test or trial of
strength carries its credentials with it; it is approved, because it has been proved. Its value is
clearly evinced, shown, i.e. demonstrated. So it is with inferences. The mere fact that inference
in general is an invaluable function does not guarantee, nor does it even help out the correctness
of any particular inference. Any inference may go astray; and as we have seen, there are standing
influences ever ready to assist its going wrong. What is important, is that every inference shall
be a tested inference; or (since often this is not possible) that we shall discriminate between
beliefs that rest upon tested evidence and those that do not, and shall be accordingly on our
guard as to the kind and degree of assent yielded.
The office of education in forming skilled
powers of thinking
While it is not the business of education to prove every statement made, any more than to teach
every possible item of information, it is its business to culti[Pg 28]vate deep-seated and effective
habits of discriminating tested beliefs from mere assertions, guesses, and opinions; to develop a
lively, sincere, and open-minded preference for conclusions that are properly grounded, and to
ingrain into the individual's working habits methods of inquiry and reasoning appropriate to the
various problems that present themselves. No matter how much an individual knows as a matter
of hearsay and information, if he has not attitudes and habits of this sort, he is not intellectually
educated. He lacks the rudiments of mental discipline. And since these habits are not a gift of
nature (no matter how strong the aptitude for acquiring them); since, moreover, the casual
circumstances of the natural and social environment are not enough to compel their acquisition,
the main office of education is to supply conditions that make for their cultivation. The
fo
rm
ation of these habits is the Training of Mind.[Pg 29]
CHAPTER THREE
NATURAL RESOURCES IN THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
Only native powers can be trained.
In the last chapter we considered the need of transforming, through training, the natural
capacities of inference into habits of critical examination and inquiry. The very importance of
thought for life makes necessary its control by education because of its natural tendency to go
astray, and because social influences exist that tend to form habits of thought leading to
inadequate and erroneous beliefs. Training must, however, be itself based upon the natural
tendencies,—that is, it must find its point of departure in them. A being who could not think
without training could never be trained to think; one may have to learn to think well, but not to
think. Training, in short, must fall back upon the prior and independent existence of natural
powers; it is concerned with their proper direction, not with creating them.
Hence, the one taught must take the initiative
Teaching and learning are correlative or corresponding processes, as much so as selling and
buying. One might as well say he has sold when no one has bought, as to say that he has taught
when no one has learned. And in the educational transaction, the initiative lies with the learner
even more than in commerce it lies with the buyer. If an individual can learn to think only in the
sense of learning to employ more economically and[Pg 30] effectively powers he already
possesses, even more truly one can teach others to think only in the sense of appealing to and
fo
stering powers already active in them. Effective appeal of this kind is impossible unless the
teacher has an insight into existing habits and tendencies, the natural resources with which he
has to ally himself.
Three important natural resources
Any inventory of the items of this natural capital is somewhat arbitrary because it must pass over
many of the complex details. But a statement of the factors essential to thought will put before us
in outline the main elements. Thinking involves (as we have seen) the suggestion of a conclusion
fo
r acceptance, and also search or inquiry to test the value of the suggestion before finally
accepting it. This implies (a) a certain fund or store of experiences and facts from which
suggestions proceed; (b) promptness, flexibility, and fertility of suggestions; and (c) orderliness,
consecutiveness, appropriateness in what is suggested. Clearly, a person may be hampered in
any of these three regards: His thinking may be irrelevant, narrow, or crude because he has not
enough actual material upon which to base conclusions; or because concrete facts and raw
material, even if extensive and bulky, fail to evoke suggestions easily and richly; or finally,
because, even when these two conditions are fulfilled, the ideas suggested are incoherent and
fa
ntastic, rather than pertinent and consistent.
§ 1. Curiosity
Desire for fullness of experience:
The most vital and significant factor in supplying the primary material whence suggestion may
issue is, without doubt, curiosity. The wisest of the Greeks used to[Pg 31] say that wonder is the
mother of all science. An inert mind waits, as it were, for experiences to be imperiously forced
upon it. The pregnant saying of Wordsworth:
"The eye—it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against or with our will"—
holds good in the degree in which one is naturally possessed by curiosity. The curious mind is
constantly alert and exploring, seeking material for thought, as a vigorous and healthy body is on
the qui vive for nutriment. Eagerness for experience, for new and varied contacts, is found where
wonder is found. Such curiosity is the only sure guarantee of the acquisition of the primary facts
upon which inference must base itself.
(a) physical
(a) In its first manifestations, curiosity is a vital overflow, an expression of an abundant organic
energy. A physiological uneasiness leads a child to be "into everything,"—to be reaching,
poking, pounding, prying. Observers of animals have noted what one author calls "their
inveterate tendency to fool." "Rats run about, smell, dig, or gnaw, without real reference to the
business in hand. In the same way Jack [a dog] scrabbles and jumps, the kitten wanders and
picks, the otter slips about everywhere like ground lightning, the elephant fumbles ceaselessly,
the monkey pulls things about."[8] The most casual notice of the activities of a young child
reveals a ceaseless display of exploring and testing activity. Objects are sucked, fingered, and
thumped; drawn and pushed, handled and thrown; in short, experi[Pg 32]mented with, till they
cease to yield new qualities. Such activities are hardly intellectual, and yet without them
intellectual activity would be feeble and intermittent through lack of stuff for its operations.
(b) social
(b) A higher stage of curiosity develops under the influence of social stimuli. When the child
learns that he can appeal to others to eke out his store of experiences, so that, if objects fail to
respond interestingly to his experiments, he may call upon persons to provide interesting
material, a new epoch sets in. "What is that?" "Why?" become the unfailing signs of a child's
presence. At first this questioning is hardly more than a projection into social relations of the
physical overflow which earlier kept the child pushing and pulling, opening and shutting. He
asks in succession what holds up the house, what holds up the soil that holds the house, what
holds up the earth that holds the soil; but his questions are not evidence of any genuine
consciousness of rational connections. His why is not a demand for scientific explanation; the
motive behind it is simply eagerness for a larger acquaintance with the mysterious world in
which he is placed. The search is not for a law or principle, but only for a bigger fact. Yet there
is more than a desire to accumulate just information or heap up disconnected items, although
sometimes the interrogating habit threatens to degenerate into a mere disease of language. In the
fe
eling, however dim, that the facts which directly meet the senses are not the whole story, that
there is more behind them and more to come from them, lies the germ of intellectual curiosity.
(c) intellectual
(c) Curiosity rises above the organic and the social planes and becomes intellectual in the degree
in which[Pg 33] it is transformed into interest in problems provoked by the observation of things
and the accumulation of material. When the question is not discharged by being asked of
another, when the child continues to entertain it in his own mind and to be alert for whatever will
help answer it, curiosity has become a positive intellectual force. To the open mind, nature and
social experience are full of varied and subtle challenges to look further. If germinating powers
are not used and cultivated at the right moment, they tend to be transitory, to die out, or to wane
in intensity. This general law is peculiarly true of sensitiveness to what is uncertain and
questionable; in a few people, intellectual curiosity is so insatiable that nothing will discourage
it, but in most its edge is easily dulled and blunted. Bacon's saying that we must become as little
children in order to enter the kingdom of science is at once a reminder of the open-minded and
flexible wonder of childhood and of the ease with which this endowment is lost. Some lose it in
indifference or carelessness; others in a frivolous flippancy; many escape these evils only to
become incased in a hard dogmatism which is equally fatal to the spirit of wonder. Some are so
taken up with routine as to be inaccessible to new facts and problems. Others retain curiosity
only with reference to what concerns their personal advantage in their chosen career. With many,
curiosity is arrested on the plane of interest in local gossip and in the fortunes of their neighbors;
indeed, so usual is this result that very often the first association with the word curiosity is a
prying inquisitiveness into other people's business. With respect then to curiosity, the teacher has
usually more to learn than to teach. Rarely can he aspire to the office of kindling or[Pg 34] even
increasing it. His task is rather to keep alive the sacred spark of wonder and to fan the flame that
already glows. His problem is to protect the spirit of inquiry, to keep it from becoming blasé
from overexcitement, wooden from routine, fossilized through dogmatic instruction, or
dissipated by random exercise upon trivial things.
§ 2. Suggestion
Out of the subject-matter, whether rich or scanty, important or trivial, of present experience issue
suggestions, ideas, beliefs as to what is not yet given. The function of suggestion is not one that
can be produced by teaching; while it may be modified for better or worse by conditions, it
cannot be destroyed. Many a child has tried his best to see if he could not "stop thinking," but the
flow of suggestions goes on in spite of our will, quite as surely as "our bodies feel, where'er they
be, against or with our will." Primarily, naturally, it is not we who think, in any actively
responsible sense; thinking is rather something that happens in us. Only so far as one has
acquired control of the method in which the function of suggestion occurs and has accepted
responsibility for its consequences, can one truthfully say, "I think so and so."
The dimensions of suggestion:
(a) ease
The function of suggestion has a variety of aspects (or dimensions as we may term them),
varying in different persons, both in themselves and in their mode of combination. These
dimensions are ease or promptness, extent or variety, and depth or persistence. (a) The common
classification of persons into the dull and the bright is made primarily on the basis of the
readiness or facility with which suggestions follow upon the presenta[Pg 35]tion of objects and
upon the happening of events. As the metaphor of dull and bright implies, some minds are
impervious, or else they absorb passively. Everything presented is lost in a drab monotony that
gives nothing back. But others reflect, or give back in varied lights, all that strikes upon them.
The dull make no response; the bright flash back the fact with a changed quality. An inert or
stupid mind requires a heavy jolt or an intense shock to move it to suggestion; the bright mind is
quick, is alert to react with interpretation and suggestion of consequences to follow.
Yet the teacher is not entitled to assume stupidity or even dullness merely because of
irresponsiveness to school subjects or to a lesson as presented by text-book or teacher. The pupil
labeled hopeless may react in quick and lively fashion when the thing-in-hand seems to him
worth while, as some out-of-school sport or social affair. Indeed, the school subject might move
him, were it set in a different context and treated by a different method. A boy dull in geometry
may prove quick enough when he takes up the subject in connection with manual training; the
girl who seems inaccessible to historical facts may respond promptly when it is a question of
judging the character and deeds of people of her acquaintance or of fiction. Barring physical
defect or disease, slowness and dullness in all directions are comparatively rare.
(b) range
(b) Irrespective of the difference in persons as to the ease and promptness with which ideas
respond to facts, there is a difference in the number or range of the suggestions that occur. We
speak truly, in some cases, of the flood of suggestions; in others, there is but a slender trickle.
Occasionally, slowness of outward[Pg 36] response is due to a great variety of suggestions which
check one another and lead to hesitation and suspense; while a lively and prompt suggestion may
take such possession of the mind as to preclude the development of others. Too few suggestions
indicate a dry and meager mental habit; when this is joined to great learning, there results a
pedant or a Gradgrind. Such a person's mind rings hard; he is likely to bore others with mere
bulk of information. He contrasts with the person whom we call ripe, juicy, and mellow.
A conclusion reached after consideration of a few alternatives may be formally correct, but it
will not possess the fullness and richness of meaning of one arrived at after comparison of a
greater variety of alternative suggestions. On the other hand, suggestions may be too numerous
and too varied for the best interests of mental habit. So many suggestions may rise that the
person is at a loss to select among them. He finds it difficult to reach any definite conclusion and
wanders more or less helplessly among them. So much suggests itself pro and con, one thing
leads on to another so naturally, that he finds it difficult to decide in practical affairs or to
conclude in matters of theory. There is such a thing as too much thinking, as when action is
paralyzed by the multiplicity of views suggested by a situation. Or again, the very number of
suggestions may be hostile to tracing logical sequences among them, for it may tempt the mind
away from the necessary but trying task of search for real connections, into the more congenial
occupation of embroidering upon the given facts a tissue of agreeable fancies. The best mental
habit involves a balance between paucity and redundancy of suggestions.[Pg 37]
(c) profundity
(c) Depth. We distinguish between people not only upon the basis of their quickness and fertility
of intellectual response, but also with respect to the plane upon which it occurs—the intrinsic
quality of the response.
One man's thought is profound while another's is superficial; one goes to the roots of the matter,
and another touches lightly its most external aspects. This phase of thinking is perhaps the most
untaught of all, and the least amenable to external influence whether for improvement or harm.
Nevertheless, the conditions of the pupil's contact with subject-matter may be such that he is
compelled to come to quarters with its more significant features, or such that he is encouraged to
deal with it upon the basis of what is trivial. The common assumptions that, if the pupil only
thinks, one thought is just as good for his mental discipline as another, and that the end of study
is the amassing of information, both tend to foster superficial, at the expense of significant,
thought. Pupils who in matters of ordinary practical experience have a ready and acute
perception of the difference between the significant and the meaningless, often reach in school
subjects a point where all things seem equally important or equally unimportant; where one thing
is just as likely to be true as another, and where intellectual effort is expended not in
discriminating between things, but in trying to make verbal connections among words.
Balance of mind
Sometimes slowness and depth of response are intimately connected. Time is required in order to
digest impressions, and translate them into substantial ideas. "Brightness" may be but a flash in
the pan. The "slow but sure" person, whether man or child, is one in whom impressions sink and
accumulate, so that thinking is done[Pg 38] at a deeper level of value than with a slighter load.
Many a child is rebuked for "slowness," for not "answering promptly," when his forces are
taking time to gather themselves together to deal effectively with the problem at hand. In such
cases, failure to afford time and leisure conduce to habits of speedy, but snapshot and superficial,
judgment. The depth to which a sense of the problem, of the difficulty, sinks, determines the
quality of the thinking that follows; and any habit of teaching which encourages the pupil for the
sake of a successful recitation or of a display of memorized information to glide over the thin ice
of genuine problems reverses the true method of mind training.
Individual differences
It is profitable to study the lives of men and women who achieve in adult life fine things in their
respective callings, but who were called dull in their school days. Sometimes the early wrong
judgment was due mainly to the fact that the direction in which the child showed his ability was
not one recognized by the good old standards in use, as in the case of Darwin's interest in
beetles, snakes, and frogs. Sometimes it was due to the fact that the child dwelling habitually on
a deeper plane of reflection than other pupils—or than his teachers—did not show to advantage
when prompt answers of the usual sort were expected. Sometimes it was due to the fact that the
pupil's natural mode of approach clashed habitually with that of the text or teacher, and the
method of the latter was assumed as an absolute basis of estimate.
Any subject may be intellectual
In any event, it is desirable that the teacher should rid himself of the notion that "thinking" is a
single, unalterable faculty; that he should recognize that it is a term denoting the various ways in
which things acquire[Pg 39] significance. It is desirable to expel also the kindred notion that some
subjects are inherently "intellectual," and hence possessed of an almost magical power to train
the faculty of thought. Thinking is specific, not a machine-like, ready-made apparatus to be
turned indifferently and at will upon all subjects, as a lantern may throw its light as it happens
upon horses, streets, gardens, trees, or river. Thinking is specific, in that different things suggest
their own appropriate meanings, tell their own unique stories, and in that they do this in very
different ways with different persons. As the growth of the body is through the assimilation of
fo
od, so the growth of mind is through the logical organization of subject-matter. Thinking is not
like a sausage machine which reduces all materials indifferently to one marketable commodity,
but is a power of following up and linking together the specific suggestions that specific things
arouse. Accordingly, any subject, from Greek to cooking, and from drawing to mathematics, is
intellectual, if intellectual at all, not in its fixed inner structure, but in its function—in its power
to start and direct significant inquiry and reflection. What geometry does for one, the
manipulation of laboratory apparatus, the mastery of a musical composition, or the conduct of a
business affair, may do for another.
§ 3. Orderliness: Its Nature
Continuity
Facts, whether narrow or extensive, and conclusions suggested by them, whether many or few,
do not constitute, even when combined, reflective thought. The suggestions must be organized;
they must be arranged with reference to one another and with reference to the facts on which
they depend for proof. When the[Pg 40] factors of facility, of fertility, and of depth are properly
balanced or proportioned, we get as the outcome continuity of thought. We desire neither the
slow mind nor yet the hasty. We wish neither random diffuseness nor fixed rigidity.
Consecutiveness means flexibility and variety of materials, conjoined with singleness and
definiteness of direction. It is opposed both to a mechanical routine uniformity and to a
grasshopper-like movement. Of bright children, it is not infrequently said that "they might do
anything, if only they settled down," so quick and apt are they in any particular response. But,
alas, they rarely settle.
On the other hand, it is not enough not to be diverted. A deadly and fanatic consistency is not our
goal. Concentration does not mean fixity, nor a cramped arrest or paralysis of the flow of
suggestion. It means variety and change of ideas combined into a single steady trend moving
toward a unified conclusion. Thoughts are concentrated not by being kept still and quiescent, but
by being kept moving toward an object, as a general concentrates his troops for attack or
defense. Holding the mind to a subject is like holding a ship to its course; it implies constant
change of place combined with unity of direction. Consistent and orderly thinking is precisely
such a change of subject-matter. Consistency is no more the mere absence of contradiction than
concentration is the mere absence of diversion—which exists in dull routine or in a person "fast
asleep." All kinds of varied and incompatible suggestions may sprout and be followed in their
growth, and yet thinking be consistent and orderly, provided each one of the suggestions is
viewed in relation to the main topic.
Practical demands enforce some degree of continuity
In the main, for most persons, the primary resource[Pg 41] in the development of orderly habits of
thought is indirect, not direct. Intellectual organization originates and for a time grows as an
accompaniment of the organization of the acts required to realize an end, not as the result of a
direct appeal to thinking power. The need of thinking to accomplish something beyond thinking
is more potent than thinking for its own sake. All people at the outset, and the majority of people
probably all their lives, attain ordering of thought through ordering of action. Adults normally
carry on some occupation, profession, pursuit; and this furnishes the continuous axis about
which their knowledge, their beliefs, and their habits of reaching and testing conclusions are
organized. Observations that have to do with the efficient performance of their calling are
extended and rendered precise. Information related to it is not merely amassed and then left in a
heap; it is classified and subdivided so as to be available as it is needed. Inferences are made by
most men not from purely speculative motives, but because they are involved in the efficient
performance of "the duties involved in their several callings." Thus their inferences are
constantly tested by results achieved; futile and scattering methods tend to be discounted; orderly
arrangements have a premium put upon them. The event, the issue, stands as a constant check on
the thinking that has led up to it; and this discipline by efficiency in action is the chief sanction,
in practically all who are not scientific specialists, of orderliness of thought.
Such a resource—the main prop of disciplined thinking in adult life—is not to be despised in
training the young in right intellectual habits. There are, however, profound differences between
the immature and the[Pg 42] adult in the matter of organized activity—differences which must be
taken seriously into account in any educational use of activities: (i) The external achievement
resulting from activity is a more urgent necessity with the adult, and hence is with him a more
effective means of discipline of mind than with the child; (ii) The ends of adult activity are more
specialized than those of child activity.
Peculiar difficulty with children
(i) The selection and arrangement of appropriate lines of action is a much more difficult problem
as respects youth than it is in the case of adults. With the latter, the main lines are more or less
settled by circumstances. The social status of the adult, the fact that he is a citizen, a
householder, a parent, one occupied in some regular industrial or professional calling, prescribes
the chief features of the acts to be performed, and secures, somewhat automatically, as it were,
ap
propriate and related modes of thinking. But with the child there is no such fixity of status and
pursuit; there is almost nothing to dictate that such and such a consecutive line of action, rather
than another, should be followed, while the will of others, his own caprice, and circumstances
ab
out him tend to produce an isolated momentary act. The absence of continued motivation
coöperates with the inner plasticity of the immature to increase the importance of educational
training and the difficulties in the way of finding consecutive modes of activities which may do
fo
r child and youth what serious vocations and functions do for the adult. In the case of children,
the choice is so peculiarly exposed to arbitrary factors, to mere school traditions, to waves of
pedagogical fad and fancy, to fluctuating social cross currents, that sometimes, in sheer disgust
at the inadequacy of results, a reaction occurs[Pg 43] to the total neglect of overt activity as an
educational factor, and a recourse to purely theoretical subjects and methods.
Peculiar opportunity with children
(ii) This very difficulty, however, points to the fact that the opportunity for selecting truly
educative activities is indefinitely greater in child life than in adult. The factor of external
pressure is so strong with most adults that the educative value of the pursuit—its reflex influence
upon intelligence and character—however genuine, is incidental, and frequently almost
accidental. The problem and the opportunity with the young is selection of orderly and
continuous modes of occupation, which, while they lead up to and prepare for the indispensable
activities of adult life, have their own sufficient justification in their present reflex influence
upon the formation of habits of thought.
Action and reaction between extremes
Educational practice shows a continual tendency to oscillate between two extremes with respect
to overt and exertive activities. One extreme is to neglect them almost entirely, on the ground
that they are chaotic and fluctuating, mere diversions appealing to the transitory unformed taste
and caprice of immature minds; or if they avoid this evil, are objectionable copies of the highly
specialized, and more or less commercial, activities of adult life. If activities are admitted at all
into the school, the admission is a grudging concession to the necessity of having occasional
relief from the strain of constant intellectual work, or to the clamor of outside utilitarian
demands upon the school. The other extreme is an enthusiastic belief in the almost magical
educative efficacy of any kind of activity, granted it is an activity and not a passive absorption of
academic and theoretic material. The conceptions of play, of[Pg 44] self-expression, of natural
growth, are appealed to almost as if they meant that opportunity for any kind of spontaneous
activity inevitably secures the due training of mental power; or a mythological brain physiology
is appealed to as proof that any exercise of the muscles trains power of thought.
Locating the problem of education
While we vibrate from one of these extremes to the other, the most serious of all problems is
ignored: the problem, namely, of discovering and arranging the forms of activity (a) which are
most congenial, best adapted, to the immature stage of development; (b) which have the most
ulterior promise as preparation for the social responsibilities of adult life; and (c) which, at the
same time, have the maximum of influence in forming habits of acute observation and of
consecutive inference. As curiosity is related to the acquisition of material of thought, as
suggestion is related to flexibility and force of thought, so the ordering of activities, not
themselves primarily intellectual, is related to the forming of intellectual powers of
consecutiveness.[Pg 45]
CHAPTER FOUR
SCHOOL CONDITIONS AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
§ 1. Introductory: Methods and Conditions
Formal discipline
The so-called faculty-psychology went hand in hand with the vogue of the formal-discipline idea
in education. If thought is a distinct piece of mental machinery, separate from observation,
memory, imagination, and common-sense judgments of persons and things, then thought should
be trained by special exercises designed for the purpose, as one might devise special exercises
fo
r developing the biceps muscles. Certain subjects are then to be regarded as intellectual or
logical subjects par excellence, possessed of a predestined fitness to exercise the thought-faculty,
just as certain machines are better than others for developing arm power. With these three
notions goes the fourth, that method consists of a set of operations by which the machinery of
thought is set going and kept at work upon any subject-matter.
versus real thinking
We have tried to make it clear in the previous chapters that there is no single and uniform power
of thought, but a multitude of different ways in which specific things—things observed,
remembered, heard of, read about—evoke suggestions or ideas that are pertinent to the occasion
and fruitful in the sequel. Training is such development of curiosity, suggestion, and habits of
exploring and testing, as increases their scope[Pg 46] and efficiency. A subject—any subject—is
intellectual in the degree in which with any given person it succeeds in effecting this growth. On
this view the fourth factor, method, is concerned with providing conditions so adapted to
individual needs and powers as to make for the permanent improvement of observation,
suggestion, and investigation.
True and false meaning of method
The teacher's problem is thus twofold. On the one side, he needs (as we saw in the last chapter)
to be a student of individual traits and habits; on the other side, he needs to be a student of the
conditions that modify for better or worse the directions in which individual powers habitually
express themselves. He needs to recognize that method covers not only what he intentionally
devises and employs for the purpose of mental training, but also what he does without any
conscious reference to it,—anything in the atmosphere and conduct of the school which reacts in
any way upon the curiosity, the responsiveness, and the orderly activity of children. The teacher
who is an intelligent student both of individual mental operations and of the effects of school
conditions upon those operations, can largely be trusted to develop for himself methods of
instruction in their narrower and more technical sense—those best adapted to achieve results in
particular subjects, such as reading, geography, or algebra. In the hands of one who is not
intelligently aware of individual capacities and of the influence unconsciously exerted upon
them by the entire environment, even the best of technical methods are likely to get an
immediate result only at the expense of deep-seated and persistent habits. We may group the
conditioning influences of the school environment under three heads: (1) the mental attitudes and
habits of the[Pg 47] persons with whom the child is in contact; (2) the subjects studied; (3) current
educational aims and ideals.
§ 2. Influence of the Habits of Others
Bare reference to the imitativeness of human nature is enough to suggest how profoundly the
mental habits of others affect the attitude of the one being trained. Example is more potent than
precept; and a teacher's best conscious efforts may be more than counteracted by the influence of
personal traits which he is unaware of or regards as unimportant. Methods of instruction and
discipline that are technically faulty may be rendered practically innocuous by the inspiration of
the personal method that lies back of them.
Response to environment fundamental in method
To confine, however, the conditioning influence of the educator, whether parent or teacher, to
imitation is to get a very superficial view of the intellectual influence of others. Imitation is but
one case of a deeper principle—that of stimulus and response. Everything the teacher does, as
well as the manner in which he does it, incites the child to respond in some way or other, and
each response tends to set the child's attitude in some way or other. Even the inattention of the
child to the adult is often a mode of response which is the result of unconscious training.[9] The
teacher is rarely (and even then never entirely) a transparent medium of access by another mind
to a subject. With the young, the influence of the teacher's personality is intimately fused with
that of the subject; the child does not separate[Pg 48] nor even distinguish the two. And as the
child's response is toward or away from anything presented, he keeps up a running commentary,
of which he himself is hardly distinctly aware, of like and dislike, of sympathy and aversion, not
merely to the acts of the teacher, but also to the subject with which the teacher is occupied.
Influence of teacher's own habits
Judging others by ourselves
The extent and power of this influence upon morals and manners, upon character, upon habits of
speech and social bearing, are almost universally recognized. But the tendency to conceive of
thought as an isolated faculty has often blinded teachers to the fact that this influence is just as
real and pervasive in intellectual concerns. Teachers, as well as children, stick more or less to the
main points, have more or less wooden and rigid methods of response, and display more or less
intellectual curiosity about matters that come up. And every trait of this kind is an inevitable part
of the teacher's method of teaching. Merely to accept without notice slipshod habits of speech,
slovenly inferences, unimaginative and literal response, is to indorse these tendencies, and to
ratify them into habits—and so it goes throughout the whole range of contact between teacher
and student. In this complex and intricate field, two or three points may well be singled out for
special notice. (a) Most persons are quite unaware of the distinguishing peculiarities of their own
mental habit. They take their own mental operations for granted, and unconsciously make them
the standard for judging the mental processes of others.[10] Hence there[Pg 49] is a tendency to
encourage everything in the pupil which agrees with this attitude, and to neglect or fail to
understand whatever is incongruous with it. The prevalent overestimation of the value, for mindtraining, of theoretic subjects as compared with practical pursuits, is doubtless due partly to the
fa
ct that the teacher's calling tends to select those in whom the theoretic interest is specially
strong and to repel those in whom executive abilities are marked. Teachers sifted out on this
basis judge pupils and subjects by a like standard, encouraging an intellectual one-sidedness in
those to whom it is naturally congenial, and repelling from study those in whom practical
instincts are more urgent.
Exaggeration of direct personal influence
(b) Teachers—and this holds especially of the stronger and better teachers—tend to rely upon
their personal strong points to hold a child to his work, and thereby to substitute their personal
influence for that of subject-matter as a motive for study. The teacher finds by experience that
his own personality is often effective where the power of the subject to command attention is
almost nil; then he utilizes the former more and more, until the pupil's relation to the teacher
almost takes the place of his relation to the subject. In this way the teacher's personality may
become a source of personal dependence and weakness, an influence that renders the pupil
indifferent to the value of the subject for its own sake.
Independent thinking versus "getting the answer"
(c) The operation of the teacher's own mental habit tends, unless carefully watched and guided,
to make the child a student of the teacher's peculiarities rather than of the subjects that he is
supposed to study. His chief concern is to accommodate himself to what the[Pg 50] teacher expects
of him, rather than to devote himself energetically to the problems of subject-matter. "Is this
right?" comes to mean "Will this answer or this process satisfy the teacher?"—instead of
meaning, "Does it satisfy the inherent conditions of the problem?" It would be folly to deny the
legitimacy or the value of the study of human nature that children carry on in school; but it is
obviously undesirable that their chief intellectual problem should be that of producing an answer
ap
proved by the teacher, and their standard of success be successful adaptation to the
requirements of another.
§ 3. Influence of the Nature of Studies
Types of studies
Studies are conventionally and conveniently grouped under these heads: (1) Those especially
involving the acquisition of skill in performance—the school arts, such as reading, writing,
figuring, and music. (2) Those mainly concerned with acquiring knowledge—"informational"
studies, such as geography and history. (3) Those in which skill in doing and bulk of information
are relatively less important, and appeal to abstract thinking, to "reasoning," is most marked—
"disciplinary" studies, such as arithmetic and formal grammar.[11] Each of these groups of
subjects has its own special pitfalls.
The abstract as the isolated
(a) In the case of the so-called disciplinary or pre-eminently logical studies, there is danger of
the isolation of intellectual activity from the ordinary affairs[Pg 51] of life. Teacher and student
alike tend to set up a chasm between logical thought as something abstract and remote, and the
specific and concrete demands of everyday events. The abstract tends to become so aloof, so far
away from application, as to be cut loose from practical and moral bearing. The gullibility of
specialized scholars when out of their own lines, their extravagant habits of inference and
speech, their ineptness in reaching conclusions in practical matters, their egotistical engrossment
in their own subjects, are extreme examples of the bad effects of severing studies completely
from their ordinary connections in life.
Overdoing the mechanical and automatic
"Drill"
(b) The danger in those studies where the main emphasis is upon acquisition of skill is just the
reverse. The tendency is to take the shortest cuts possible to gain the required end. This makes
the subjects mechanical, and thus restrictive of intellectual power. In the mastery of reading,
writing, drawing, laboratory technique, etc., the need of economy of time and material, of
neatness and accuracy, of promptness and uniformity, is so great that these things tend to
become ends in themselves, irrespective of their influence upon general mental attitude. Sheer
imitation, dictation of steps to be taken, mechanical drill, may give results most quickly and yet
strengthen traits likely to be fatal to reflective power. The pupil is enjoined to do this and that
specific thing, with no knowledge of any reason except that by so doing he gets his result most
speedily; his mistakes are pointed out and corrected for him; he is kept at pure repetition of
certain acts till they become automatic. Later, teachers wonder why the pupil reads with so little
expression, and figures with so little intelligent consideration of the terms[Pg 52] of his problem. In
some educational dogmas and practices, the very idea of training mind seems to be hopelessly
confused with that of a drill which hardly touches mind at all—or touches it for the worse—since
it is wholly taken up with training skill in external execution. This method reduces the "training"
of human beings to the level of animal training. Practical skill, modes of effective technique, can
be intelligently, non-mechanically used, only when intelligence has played a part in their
acquisition.
Wisdom versus information
(c) Much the same sort of thing is to be said regarding studies where emphasis traditionally falls
upon bulk and accuracy of information. The distinction between information and wisdom is old,
and yet requires constantly to be redrawn. Information is knowledge which is merely acquired
and stored up; wisdom is knowledge operating in the direction of powers to the better living of
life. Information, merely as information, implies no special training of intellectual capacity;
wisdom is the finest fruit of that training. In school, amassing information always tends to escape
from the ideal of wisdom or good judgment. The aim often seems to be—especially in such a
subject as geography—to make the pupil what has been called a "cyclopedia of useless
information." "Covering the ground" is the primary necessity; the nurture of mind a bad second.
Thinking cannot, of course, go on in a vacuum; suggestions and inferences can occur only upon
a basis of information as to matters of fact.
But there is all the difference in the world whether the acquisition of information is treated as an
end in itself, or is made an integral portion of the training of thought. The assumption that
information which has[Pg 53] been accumulated apart from use in the recognition and solution of a
problem may later on be freely employed at will by thought is quite false. The skill at the ready
command of intelligence is the skill acquired with the aid of intelligence; the only information
which, otherwise than by accident, can be put to logical use is that acquired in the course of
thinking. Because their knowledge has been achieved in connection with the needs of specific
situations, men of little book-learning are often able to put to effective use every ounce of
kn
owledge they possess; while men of vast erudition are often swamped by the mere bulk of
their learning, because memory, rather than thinking, has been operative in obtaining it.
§4. The Influence of Current Aims and Ideals
It is, of course, impossible to separate this somewhat intangible condition from the points just
dealt with; for automatic skill and quantity of information are educational ideals which pervade
the whole school. We may distinguish, however, certain tendencies, such as that to judge
education from the standpoint of external results, instead of from that of the development of
personal attitudes and habits. The ideal of the product, as against that of the mental process by
which the product is attained, shows itself in both instruction and moral discipline.
External results versus processes
(a) In instruction, the external standard manifests itself in the importance attached to the "correct
answer." No one other thing, probably, works so fatally against focussing the attention of
teachers upon the training of mind as the domination of their minds by the idea that the chief
thing is to get pupils to recite their lessons correctly.[Pg 54] As long as this end is uppermost
(whether consciously or unconsciously), training of mind remains an incidental and secondary
consideration. There is no great difficulty in understanding why this ideal has such vogue. The
large number of pupils to be dealt with, and the tendency of parents and school authorities to
demand speedy and tangible evidence of progress, conspire to give it currency. Knowledge of
subject-matter—not of children—is alone exacted of teachers by this aim; and, moreover,
kn
owledge of subject-matter only in portions definitely prescribed and laid out, and hence
mastered with comparative ease. Education that takes as its standard the improvement of the
intellectual attitude and method of students demands more serious preparatory training, for it
exacts sympathetic and intelligent insight into the workings of individual minds, and a very wide
and flexible command of subject-matter—so as to be able to select and apply just what is needed
when it is needed. Finally, the securing of external results is an aim that lends itself naturally to
the mechanics of school administration—to examinations, marks, gradings, promotions, and so
on.
Reliance upon others
(b) With reference to behavior also, the external ideal has a great influence. Conformity of acts
to precepts and rules is the easiest, because most mechanical, standard to employ. It is no part of
our present task to tell just how far dogmatic instruction, or strict adherence to custom,
convention, and the commands of a social superior, should extend in moral training; but since
problems of conduct are the deepest and most common of all the problems of life, the ways in
which they are met have an influence that radiates into every other mental attitude, even those
fa
r remote from any[Pg 55] direct or conscious moral consideration. Indeed, the deepest plane of
the mental attitude of every one is fixed by the way in which problems of behavior are treated. If
the function of thought, of serious inquiry and reflection, is reduced to a minimum in dealing
with them, it is not reasonable to expect habits of thought to exercise great influence in less
important matters. On the other hand, habits of active inquiry and careful deliberation in the
significant and vital problems of conduct afford the best guarantee that the general structure of
mind will be reasonable.[Pg 56]
CHAPTER FIVE
THE MEANS AND END OF MENTAL TRAINING: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND
THE LOGICAL
§ 1. Introductory: The Meaning of Logical
Special topic of this chapter
In the preceding chapters we have considered (i) what thinking is; (ii) the importance of its
special training; (iii) the natural tendencies that lend themselves to its training; and (iv) some of
the special obstacles in the way of its training under school conditions. We come now to the
relation of logic to the purpose of mental training.
Three senses of term logical
The practical is the important meaning of logical
In its broadest sense, any thinking that ends in a conclusion is logical—whether the conclusion
reached be justified or fallacious; that is, the term logical covers both the logically good and the
illogical or the logically bad. In its narrowest sense, the term logical refers only to what is
demonstrated to follow necessarily from premises that are definite in meaning and that are either
self-evidently true, or that have been previously proved to be true. Stringency of proof is here the
equivalent of the logical. In this sense mathematics and formal logic (perhaps as a branch of
mathematics) alone are strictly logical. Logical, however, is used in a third sense, which is at
once more vital and more practical; to denote, namely, the systematic care, negative and
positive, taken to safeguard reflection so that it may yield the best results under the given
conditions. If only the word artificial were associated with the idea[Pg 57] of art, or expert skill
gained through voluntary apprenticeship (instead of suggesting the factitious and unreal), we
might say that logical refers to artificial thought.
Care, thoroughness, and exactness the marks of the logical
In this sense, the word logical is synonymous with wide-awake, thorough, and careful
reflection—thought in its best sense (ante, p. 5). Reflection is turning a topic over in various
aspects and in various lights so that nothing significant about it shall be overlooked—almost as
one might turn a stone over to see what its hidden side is like or what is covered by it.
Th
oughtfulness means, practically, the same thing as careful attention; to give our mind to a
subject is to give heed to it, to take pains with it. In speaking of reflection, we naturally use the
words weigh, ponder, deliberate—terms implying a certain delicate and scrupulous balancing of
things against one another. Closely related names are scrutiny, examination, consideration,
inspection—terms which imply close and careful vision. Again, to think is to relate things to one
another definitely, to "put two and two together" as we say. Analogy with the accuracy and
definiteness of mathematical combinations gives us such expressions as calculate, reckon,
account for; and even reason itself—ratio. Caution, carefulness, thoroughness, definiteness,
exactness, orderliness, methodic arrangement, are, then, the traits by which we mark off the
logical from what is random and casual on one side, and from what is academic and formal on
the other.
Whole object of intellectual education is formation of logical disposition
False opposition of the logical and psychological
No argument is needed to point out that the educator is concerned with the logical in its practical
and vital sense. Argument is perhaps needed to show that the intellectual (as distinct from the
moral) end of education is entirely and only the logical in this sense; namely,[Pg 58] the formation
of careful, alert, and thorough habits of thinking. The chief difficulty in the way of recognition
of this principle is a false conception of the relation between the psychological tendencies of an
individual and his logical achievements. If it be assumed—as it is so frequently—that these
have, intrinsically, nothing to do with each other, then logical training is inevitably regarded as
something foreign and extraneous, something to be ingrafted upon the individual from without,
so that it is absurd to identify the object of education with the development of logical power.
Opposing the natural to the logical
The conception that the psychology of individuals has no intrinsic connections with logical
methods and results is held, curiously enough, by two opposing schools of educational theory.
To one school, the natural[12] is primary and fundamental; and its tendency is to make little of
distinctly intellectual nurture. Its mottoes are freedom, self-expression, individuality,
spontaneity, play, interest, natural unfolding, and so on. In its emphasis upon individual attitude
and activity, it sets slight store upon organized subject-matter, or the material of study, and
conceives method to consist of various devices for stimulating and evoking, in their natural order
of growth, the native potentialities of individuals.
Neglect of the innate logical resources
Identification of logical with subject-matter, exclusively
The other school estimates highly the value of the logical, but conceives the natural tendency of
individuals to be averse, or at least indifferent, to logical achievement. It relies upon subject-
matter—upon matter already defined and classified. Method, then, has to do with the devices by
which these characteristics may be imported into a mind naturally reluctant and re[Pg 59]bellious.
Hence its mottoes are discipline, instruction, restraint, voluntary or conscious effort, the
necessity of tasks, and so on. From this point of view studies, rather than attitudes and habits,
embody the logical factor in education. The mind becomes logical only by learning to conform
to an external subject-matter. To produce this conformity, the study should first be analyzed (by
text-book or teacher) into its logical elements; then each of these elements should be defined;
finally, all of the elements should be arranged in series or classes according to logical formulæ or
general principles. Then the pupil learns the definitions one by one; and progressively adding
one to another builds up the logical system, and thereby is himself gradually imbued, from
without, with logical quality.
Illustration from geography,
This description will gain meaning through an illustration. Suppose the subject is geography.
The first thing is to give its definition, marking it off from every other subject. Then the various
ab
stract terms upon which depends the scientific development of the science are stated and
defined one by one—pole, equator, ecliptic, zone,—from the simpler units to the more complex
which are formed out of them; then the more concrete elements are taken in similar series:
continent, island, coast, promontory, cape, isthmus, peninsula, ocean, lake, coast, gulf, bay, and
so on. In acquiring this material, the mind is supposed not only to gain important information,
but, by accommodating itself to ready-made logical definitions, generalizations, and
classifications, gradually to acquire logical habits.
fr
om drawing
This type of method has been applied to every subject taught in the schools—reading, writing,
music, physics, grammar, arithmetic. Drawing for example,[Pg 60] has been taught on the theory
that since all pictorial representation is a matter of combining straight and curved lines, the
simplest procedure is to have the pupil acquire the ability first to draw straight lines in various
positions (horizontal, perpendicular, diagonals at various angles), then typical curves; and
finally, to combine straight and curved lines in various permutations to construct actual pictures.
This seemed to give the ideal "logical" method, beginning with analysis into elements, and then
proceeding in regular order to more and more complex syntheses, each element being defined
when used, and thereby clearly understood.
Formal method
Even when this method in its extreme form is not followed, few schools (especially of the
middle or upper elementary grades) are free from an exaggerated attention to forms supposedly
employed by the pupil if he gets his result logically. It is thought that there are certain steps
arranged in a certain order, which express preëminently an understanding of the subject, and the
pupil is made to "analyze" his procedure into these steps, i.e. to learn a certain routine formula of
statement. While this method is usually at its height in grammar and arithmetic, it invades also
history and even literature, which are then reduced, under plea of intellectual training, to
"outlines," diagrams, and schemes of division and subdivision. In memorizing this simulated cut
and dried copy of the logic of an adult, the child generally is induced to stultify his own subtle
and vital logical movement. The adoption by teachers of this misconception of logical method
has probably done more than anything else to bring pedagogy into disrepute; for to many persons
"pedagogy" means precisely a set of mechanical, self-conscious devices for replacing by some[Pg
61] cast-iron external scheme the personal mental movement of the individual.
Reaction toward lack of form and method
A reaction inevitably occurs from the poor results that accrue from these professedly "logical"
methods. Lack of interest in study, habits of inattention and procrastination, positive aversion to
intellectual application, dependence upon sheer memorizing and mechanical routine with only a
modicum of understanding by the pupil of what he is about, show that the theory of logical
definition, division, gradation, and system does not work out practically as it is theoretically
supposed to work. The consequent disposition—as in every reaction—is to go to the opposite
extreme. The "logical" is thought to be wholly artificial and extraneous; teacher and pupil alike
are to turn their backs upon it, and to work toward the expression of existing aptitudes and tastes.
Emphasis upon natural tendencies and powers as the only possible starting-point of development
is indeed wholesome. But the reaction is false, and hence misleading, in what it ignores and
denies: the presence of genuinely intellectual factors in existing powers and interests.
Logic of subject-matter is logic of adult or trained mind
What is conventionally termed logical (namely, the logical from the standpoint of subjectmatter) represents in truth the logic of the trained adult mind. Ability to divide a subject, to
define its elements, and to group them into classes according to general principles represents
logical capacity at its best point reached after thorough training. The mind that habitually
exhibits skill in divisions, definitions, generalizations, and systematic recapitulations no longer
needs training in logical methods. But it is absurd to suppose that a mind which needs training
because it cannot perform these opera[Pg 62]tions can begin where the expert mind stops. The
logical from the standpoint of subject-matter represents the goal, the last term of training, not
the point of departure.
The immature mind has its own logic
Hence, the psychological and the logical represent the two ends of the same movement
In truth, the mind at every stage of development has its own logic. The error of the notion that by
ap
peal to spontaneous tendencies and by multiplication of materials we may completely dismiss
logical considerations, lies in overlooking how large a part curiosity, inference, experimenting,
and testing already play in the pupil's life. Therefore it underestimates the intellectual factor in
the more spontaneous play and work of individuals—the factor that alone is truly educative. Any
teacher who is alive to the modes of thought naturally operative in the experience of the normal
child will have no difficulty in avoiding the identification of the logical with a ready-made
organization of subject-matter, as well as the notion that the only way to escape this error is to
pay no attention to logical considerations. Such a teacher will have no difficulty in seeing that
the real problem of intellectual education is the transformation of natural powers into expert,
tested powers: the transformation of more or less casual curiosity and sporadic suggestion into
attitudes of alert, cautious, and thorough inquiry. He will see that the psychological and the
logical, instead of being opposed to each other (or even independent of each other), are
connected as the earlier and the later stages in one continuous process of normal growth. The
natural or psychological activities, even when not consciously controlled by logical
considerations, have their own intellectual function and integrity; conscious and deliberate skill
in thinking, when it is achieved, makes habitual or second nature. The first is already logical in
spirit; the last, in presenting an ingrained disposi[Pg 63]tion and attitude, is then as psychological
(as personal) as any caprice or chance impulse could be.
§ 2. Discipline and Freedom
True and false notions of discipline
Discipline of mind is thus, in truth, a result rather than a cause. Any mind is disciplined in a
subject in which independent intellectual initiative and control have been achieved. Discipline
represents original native endowment turned, through gradual exercise, into effective power. So
fa
r as a mind is disciplined, control of method in a given subject has been attained so that the
mind is able to manage itself independently without external tutelage. The aim of education is
precisely to develop intelligence of this independent and effective type—a disciplined mind.
Discipline is positive and constructive.
Discipline as drill
Discipline, however, is frequently regarded as something negative—as a painfully disagreeable
fo
rcing of mind away from channels congenial to it into channels of constraint, a process
grievous at the time but necessary as preparation for a more or less remote future. Discipline is
then generally identified with drill; and drill is conceived after the mechanical analogy of
driving, by unremitting blows, a foreign substance into a resistant material; or is imaged after the
analogy of the mechanical routine by which raw recruits are trained to a soldierly bearing and
habits that are naturally wholly foreign to their possessors. Training of this latter sort, whether it
be called discipline or not, is not mental discipline. Its aim and result are not habits of thinking,
but uniform external modes of action. By failing to ask what he means by discipline, many a
teacher is misled into supposing that he is developing[Pg 64] mental force and efficiency by
methods which in fact restrict and deaden intellectual activity, and which tend to create
mechanical routine, or mental passivity and servility.
As independent power or freedom
Freedom and external spontaneity
When discipline is conceived in intellectual terms (as the habitual power of effective mental
attack), it is identified with freedom in its true sense. For freedom of mind means mental power
capable of independent exercise, emancipated from the leading strings of others, not mere
unhindered external operation. When spontaneity or naturalness is identified with more or less
casual discharge of transitory impulses, the tendency of the educator is to supply a multitude of
stimuli in order that spontaneous activity may be kept up. All sorts of interesting materials,
equipments, tools, modes of activity, are provided in order that there may be no flagging of free
self-expression. This method overlooks some of the essential conditions of the attainment of
genuine freedom.
Some obstacle necessary for thought
(a) Direct immediate discharge or expression of an impulsive tendency is fatal to thinking. Only
when the impulse is to some extent checked and thrown back upon itself does reflection ensue. It
is, indeed, a stupid error to suppose that arbitrary tasks must be imposed from without in order to
fu
rn
ish the factor of perplexity and difficulty which is the necessary cue to thought. Every vital
activity of any depth and range inevitably meets obstacles in the course of its effort to realize
itself—a fact that renders the search for artificial or external problems quite superfluous. The
difficulties that present themselves within the development of an experience are, however, to be
cherished by the educator, not minimized, for they are the natural stimuli[Pg 65] to reflective
inquiry. Freedom does not consist in keeping up uninterrupted and unimpeded external activity,
but is something achieved through conquering, by personal reflection, a way out of the
difficulties that prevent an immediate overflow and a spontaneous success.
Intellectual factors are natural
(b) The method that emphasizes the psychological and natural, but yet fails to see what an
important part of the natural tendencies is constituted at every period of growth by curiosity,
inference, and the desire to test, cannot secure a natural development. In natural growth each
successive stage of activity prepares unconsciously, but thoroughly, the conditions for the
manifestation of the next stage—as in the cycle of a plant's growth. There is no ground for
assuming that "thinking" is a special, isolated natural tendency that will bloom inevitably in due
season simply because various sense and motor activities have been freely manifested before; or
because observation, memory, imagination, and manual skill have been previously exercised
without thought. Only when thinking is constantly employed in using the senses and muscles for
the guidance and application of observations and movements, is the way prepared for subsequent
higher types of thinking.
Genesis of thought contemporaneous with genesis of any human mental activity
At present, the notion is current that childhood is almost entirely unreflective—a period of mere
sensory, motor, and memory development, while adolescence suddenly brings the manifestation
of thought and reason.
Adolescence is not, however, a synonym for magic. Doubtless youth should bring with it an
enlargement of the horizon of childhood, a susceptibility to larger concerns and issues, a more
generous and a more general standpoint toward nature and social life. This development affords
an opportunity for thinking of a more com[Pg 66]prehensive and abstract type than has previously
obtained. But thinking itself remains just what it has been all the time: a matter of following up
and testing the conclusions suggested by the facts and events of life. Thinking begins as soon as
the baby who has lost the ball that he is playing with begins to foresee the possibility of
something not yet existing—its recovery; and begins to forecast steps toward the realization of
this possibility, and, by experimentation, to guide his acts by his ideas and thereby also test the
ideas. Only by making the most of the thought-factor, already active in the experiences of
childhood, is there any promise or warrant for the emergence of superior reflective power at
adolescence, or at any later period.
Fixation of bad mental habits
(c) In any case positive habits are being formed: if not habits of careful looking into things, then
habits of hasty, heedless, impatient glancing over the surface; if not habits of consecutively
fo
llowing up the suggestions that occur, then habits of haphazard, grasshopper-like guessing; if
not habits of suspending judgment till inferences have been tested by the examination of
evidence, then habits of credulity alternating with flippant incredulity, belief or unbelief being
based, in either case, upon whim, emotion, or accidental circumstances. The only way to achieve
traits of carefulness, thoroughness, and continuity (traits that are, as we have seen, the elements
of the "logical") is by exercising these traits from the beginning, and by seeing to it that
conditions call for their exercise.
Genuine freedom is intellectual, not external
Genuine freedom, in short, is intellectual; it rests in the trained power of thought, in ability to
"turn things over," to look at matters deliberately, to judge whether the amount and kind of
evidence requisite for decision[Pg 67] is at hand, and if not, to tell where and how to seek such
evidence. If a man's actions are not guided by thoughtful conclusions, then they are guided by
inconsiderate impulse, unbalanced appetite, caprice, or the circumstances of the moment. To
cultivate unhindered, unreflective external activity is to foster enslavement, for it leaves the
person at the mercy of appetite, sense, and circumstance.[Pg 68]
PART TWO: LOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
CHAPTER SIX
THE ANALYSIS OF A COMPLETE ACT OF THOUGHT
Object of Part Two
After a brief consideration in the first chapter of the nature of reflective thinking, we turned, in
the second, to the need for its training. Then we took up the resources, the difficulties, and the
aim of its training. The purpose of this discussion was to set before the student the general
problem of the training of mind. The purport of the second part, upon which we are now
entering, is giving a fuller statement of the nature and normal growth of thinking, preparatory to
considering in the concluding part the special problems that arise in connection with its
education.
In this chapter we shall make an analysis of the process of thinking into its steps or elementary
constituents, basing the analysis upon descriptions of a number of extremely simple, but
genuine, cases of reflective experience.[13]
A simple case of practical deliberation
1. "The other day when I was down town on 16th Street a clock caught my eye. I saw that the
hands pointed to 12.20. This suggested that I had an engagement at 124th Street, at one o'clock. I
reasoned that[Pg 69] as it had taken me an hour to come down on a surface car, I should probably
be twenty minutes late if I returned the same way. I might save twenty minutes by a subway
express. But was there a station near? If not, I might lose more than twenty minutes in looking
fo
r one. Then I thought of the elevated, and I saw there was such a line within two blocks. But
where was the station? If it were several blocks above or below the street I was on, I should lose
time instead of gaining it. My mind went back to the subway express as quicker than the
elevated; furthermore, I remembered that it went nearer than the elevated to the part of 124th
Street I wished to reach, so that time would be saved at the end of the journey. I concluded in
fa
vor of the subway, and reached my destination by one o'clock."
A simple case of reflection upon an observation
2. "Projecting nearly horizontally from the upper deck of the ferryboat on which I daily cross the
river, is a long white pole, bearing a gilded ball at its tip. It suggested a flagpole when I first saw
it; its color, shape, and gilded ball agreed with this idea, and these reasons seemed to justify me
in this belief. But soon difficulties presented themselves. The pole was nearly horizontal, an
unusual position for a flagpole; in the next place, there was no pulley, ring, or cord by which to
attach a flag; finally, there were elsewhere two vertical staffs from which flags were occasionally
flown. It seemed probable that the pole was not there for flag-flying.
"I then tried to imagine all possible purposes of such a pole, and to consider for which of these it
was best suited: (a) Possibly it was an ornament. But as all the ferryboats and even the tugboats
carried like poles,[Pg 70] this hypothesis was rejected. (b) Possibly it was the terminal of a wireless
telegraph. But the same considerations made this improbable. Besides, the more natural place for
such a terminal would be the highest part of the boat, on top of the pilot house. (c) Its purpose
might be to point out the direction in which the boat is moving.
"In support of this conclusion, I discovered that the pole was lower than the pilot house, so that
the steersman could easily see it. Moreover, the tip was enough higher than the base, so that,
from the pilot's position, it must appear to project far out in front of the boat. Moreover, the pilot
being near the front of the boat, he would need some such guide as to its direction. Tugboats
would also need poles for such a purpose. This hypothesis was so much more probable than the
others that I accepted it. I formed the conclusion that the pole was set up for the purpose of
showing the pilot the direction in which the boat pointed, to enable him to steer correctly."
A simple case of reflection involving experiment
3. "In washing tumblers in hot soapsuds and placing them mouth downward on a plate, bubbles
ap
peared on the outside of the mouth of the tumblers and then went inside. Why? The presence
of bubbles suggests air, which I note must come from inside the tumbler. I see that the soapy
water on the plate prevents escape of the air save as it may be caught in bubbles. But why should
air leave the tumbler? There was no substance entering to force it out. It must have expanded. It
expands by increase of heat or by decrease of pressure, or by both. Could the air have become
heated after the tumbler was taken from the hot suds? Clearly not the air that was already
entangled[Pg 71] in the water. If heated air was the cause, cold air must have entered in transferring
the tumblers from the suds to the plate. I test to see if this supposition is true by taking several
more tumblers out. Some I shake so as to make sure of entrapping cold air in them. Some I take
out holding mouth downward in order to prevent cold air from entering. Bubbles appear on the
outside of every one of the former and on none of the latter. I must be right in my inference. Air
from the outside must have been expanded by the heat of the tumbler, which explains the
ap
pearance of the bubbles on the outside.
"But why do they then go inside? Cold contracts. The tumbler cooled and also the air inside it.
Tension was removed, and hence bubbles appeared inside. To be sure of this, I test by placing a
cup of ice on the tumbler while the bubbles are still forming outside. They soon reverse."
The three cases form a series
These three cases have been purposely selected so as to form a series from the more rudimentary
to more complicated cases of reflection. The first illustrates the kind of thinking done by every
one during the day's business, in which neither the data, nor the ways of dealing with them, take
one outside the limits of everyday experience. The last furnishes a case in which neither problem
nor mode of solution would have been likely to occur except to one with some prior scientific
training. The second case forms a natural transition; its materials lie well within the bounds of
everyday, unspecialized experience; but the problem, instead of being directly involved in the
person's business, arises indirectly out of his activity, and accordingly appeals to a somewhat
theoretic and impartial interest. We[Pg 72] shall deal, in a later chapter, with the evolution of
ab
stract thinking out of that which is relatively practical and direct; here we are concerned only
with the common elements found in all the types.
Five distinct steps in reflection
Upon examination, each instance reveals, more or less clearly, five logically distinct steps: (i) a
fe
lt difficulty; (ii) its location and definition; (iii) suggestion of possible solution; (iv)
development by reasoning of the bearings of the suggestion; (v) further observation and
experiment leading to its acceptance or rejection; that is, the conclusion of belief or disbelief.
1. The occurrence of a difficulty
(a) in the lack of adaptation of means to end
1. The first and second steps frequently fuse into one. The difficulty may be felt with sufficient
definiteness as to set the mind at once speculating upon its probable solution, or an undefined
uneasiness and shock may come first, leading only later to definite attempt to find out what is the
matter. Whether the two steps are distinct or blended, there is the factor emphasized in our
original account of reflection—viz. the perplexity or problem. In the first of the three cases cited,
the difficulty resides in the conflict between conditions at hand and a desired and intended result,
between an end and the means for reaching it. The purpose of keeping an engagement at a
certain time, and the existing hour taken in connection with the location, are not congruous. The
object of thinking is to introduce congruity between the two. The given conditions cannot
themselves be altered; time will not go backward nor will the distance between 16th Street and
124th Street shorten itself. The problem is the discovery of intervening terms which when
inserted between the remoter end and the given means will harmonize them with each other.[Pg 73]
(b) in identifying the character of an object
In the second case, the difficulty experienced is the incompatibility of a suggested and
(temporarily) accepted belief that the pole is a flagpole, with certain other facts. Suppose we
symbolize the qualities that suggest flagpole by the letters a, b, c; those that oppose this
suggestion by the letters p, q, r. There is, of course, nothing inconsistent in the qualities
themselves; but in pulling the mind to different and incongruous conclusions they conflict—
hence the problem. Here the object is the discovery of some object (O), of which a, b, c, and p,
q, r, may all be appropriate traits—just as, in our first case, it is to discover a course of action
which will combine existing conditions and a remoter result in a single whole. The method of
solution is also the same: discovery of intermediate qualities (the position of the pilot house, of
the pole, the need of an index to the boat's direction) symbolized by d, g, l, o, which bind
together otherwise incompatible traits.
(c) in explaining an unexpected event
In the third case, an observer trained to the idea of natural laws or uniformities finds something
odd or exceptional in the behavior of the bubbles. The problem is to reduce the apparent
anomalies to instances of well-established laws. Here the method of solution is also to seek for
intermediary terms which will connect, by regular linkage, the seemingly extraordinary
movements of the bubbles with the conditions known to follow from processes supposed to be
operative.
2. Definition of the difficulty
2. As already noted, the first two steps, the feeling of a discrepancy, or difficulty, and the acts of
observation that serve to define the character of the difficulty may, in a given instance, telescope
together. In cases of striking novelty or unusual perplexity, the difficulty, however, is likely to
present itself at first as a shock, as[Pg 74] emotional disturbance, as a more or less vague feeling of
the unexpected, of something queer, strange, funny, or disconcerting. In such instances, there are
necessary observations deliberately calculated to bring to light just what is the trouble, or to
make clear the specific character of the problem. In large measure, the existence or nonexistence of this step makes the difference between reflection proper, or safeguarded critical
inference and uncontrolled thinking. Where sufficient pains to locate the difficulty are not taken,
suggestions for its resolution must be more or less random. Imagine a doctor called in to
prescribe for a patient. The patient tells him some things that are wrong; his experienced eye, at a
glance, takes in other signs of a certain disease. But if he permits the suggestion of this special
disease to take possession prematurely of his mind, to become an accepted conclusion, his
scientific thinking is by that much cut short. A large part of his technique, as a skilled
practitioner, is to prevent the acceptance of the first suggestions that arise; even, indeed, to
postpone the occurrence of any very definite suggestion till the trouble—the nature of the
problem—has been thoroughly explored. In the case of a physician this proceeding is known as
diagnosis, but a similar inspection is required in every novel and complicated situation to prevent
ru
shing to a conclusion. The essence of critical thinking is suspended judgment; and the essence
of this suspense is inquiry to determine the nature of the problem before proceeding to attempts
at its solution. This, more than any other thing, transforms mere inference into tested inference,
suggested conclusions into proof.
3. Occurrence of a suggested explanation or possible solution
3. The third factor is suggestion. The situation in[Pg 75] which the perplexity occurs calls up
something not present to the senses: the present location, the thought of subway or elevated
train; the stick before the eyes, the idea of a flagpole, an ornament, an apparatus for wireless
telegraphy; the soap bubbles, the law of expansion of bodies through heat and of their
contraction through cold. (a) Suggestion is the very heart of inference; it involves going from
what is present to something absent. Hence, it is more or less speculative, adventurous. Since
inference goes beyond what is actually present, it involves a leap, a jump, the propriety of which
cannot be absolutely warranted in advance, no matter what precautions be taken. Its control is
indirect, on the one hand, involving the formation of habits of mind which are at once
enterprising and cautious; and on the other hand, involving the selection and arrangement of the
particular facts upon perception of which suggestion issues. (b) The suggested conclusion so far
as it is not accepted but only tentatively entertained constitutes an idea. Synonyms for this are
supposition, conjecture, guess, hypothesis, and (in elaborate cases) theory. Since suspended
belief, or the postponement of a final conclusion pending further evidence, depends partly upon
the presence of rival conjectures as to the best course to pursue or the probable explanation to
fa
vor, cultivation of a variety of alternative suggestions is an important factor in good thinking.
4. The rational elaboration of an idea
4. The process of developing the bearings—or, as they are more technically termed, the
implications—of any idea with respect to any problem, is termed reasoning.[14] As an idea is
inferred from given facts, so reasoning[Pg 76] sets out from an idea. The idea of elevated road is
developed into the idea of difficulty of locating station, length of time occupied on the journey,
distance of station at the other end from place to be reached. In the second case, the implication
of a flagpole is seen to be a vertical position; of a wireless apparatus, location on a high part of
the ship and, moreover, absence from every casual tugboat; while the idea of index to direction
in which the boat moves, when developed, is found to cover all the details of the case.
Reasoning has the same effect upon a suggested solution as more intimate and extensive
observation has upon the original problem. Acceptance of the suggestion in its first form is
prevented by looking into it more thoroughly. Conjectures that seem plausible at first sight are
often found unfit or even absurd when their full consequences are traced out. Even when
reasoning out the bearings of a supposition does not lead to rejection, it develops the idea into a
fo
rm
in which it is more apposite to the problem. Only when, for example, the conjecture that a
pole was an index-pole had been thought out into its bearings could its particular applicability to
the case in hand be judged. Suggestions at first seemingly remote and wild are frequently so
transformed by being elaborated into what follows from them as to become apt and fruitful. The
development of an idea through reasoning helps at least to supply the intervening or intermediate
terms that link together into a consistent whole apparently discrepant extremes (ante, p. 72).[Pg 77]
5. Corroboration of an idea and formation of a concluding belief
5. The concluding and conclusive step is some kind of experimental corroboration, or
verification, of the conjectural idea. Reasoning shows that if the idea be adopted, certain
consequences follow. So far the conclusion is hypothetical or conditional. If we look and find
present all the conditions demanded by the theory, and if we find the characteristic traits called
fo
r by rival alternatives to be lacking, the tendency to believe, to accept, is almost irresistible.
Sometimes direct observation furnishes corroboration, as in the case of the pole on the boat. In
other cases, as in that of the bubbles, experiment is required; that is, conditions are deliberately
arranged in accord with the requirements of an idea or hypothesis to see if the results
theoretically indicated by the idea actually occur. If it is found that the experimental results
agree with the theoretical, or rationally deduced, results, and if there is reason to believe that
only the conditions in question would yield such results, the confirmation is so strong as to
induce a conclusion—at least until contrary facts shall indicate the advisability of its revision.
Thinking comes between observations at the beginning and at the end
Observation exists at the beginning and again at the end of the process: at the beginning, to
determine more definitely and precisely the nature of the difficulty to be dealt with; at the end, to
test the value of some hypothetically entertained conclusion. Between those two termini of
observation, we find the more distinctively mental aspects of the entire thought-cycle: (i)
inference, the suggestion of an explanation or solution; and (ii) reasoning, the development of
the bearings and implications of the suggestion. Reasoning requires some experimental
observation to confirm it, while experiment can be economically and fruitfully conducted only[Pg
78] on the basis of an idea that has been tentatively developed by reasoning.
The trained mind one that judges the extent of each step advisable in a given situation
The disciplined, or logically trained, mind—the aim of the educative process—is the mind able
to judge how far each of these steps needs to be carried in any particular situation. No cast-iron
ru
les can be laid down. Each case has to be dealt with as it arises, on the basis of its importance
and of the context in which it occurs. To take too much pains in one case is as foolish—as
illogical—as to take too little in another. At one extreme, almost any conclusion that insures
prompt and unified action may be better than any long delayed conclusion; while at the other,
decision may have to be postponed for a long period—perhaps for a lifetime. The trained mind is
the one that best grasps the degree of observation, forming of ideas, reasoning, and experimental
testing required in any special case, and that profits the most, in future thinking, by mistakes
made in the past. What is important is that the mind should be sensitive to problems and skilled
in methods of attack and solution.[Pg 79]
CHAPTER SEVEN
SYSTEMATIC INFERENCE: INDUCTION AND DEDUCTION
§ 1. The Double Movement of Reflection
Back and forth between facts and meanings
The characteristic outcome of thinking we saw to be the organization of facts and conditions
which, just as they stand, are isolated, fragmentary, and discrepant, the organization being
effected through the introduction of connecting links, or middle terms. The facts as they stand
are the data, the raw material of reflection; their lack of coherence perplexes and stimulates to
reflection. There follows the suggestion of some meaning which, if it can be substantiated, will
give a whole in which various fragmentary and seemingly incompatible data find their proper
place. The meaning suggested supplies a mental platform, an intellectual point of view, from
which to note and define the data more carefully, to seek for additional observations, and to
institute, experimentally, changed conditions.
Inductive and deductive
There is thus a double movement in all reflection: a movement from the given partial and
confused data to a suggested comprehensive (or inclusive) entire situation; and back from this
suggested whole—which as suggested is a meaning, an idea—to the particular facts, so as to
connect these with one another and with additional facts to which the suggestion has directed
attention. Roughly speaking, the first of these movements[Pg 80] is inductive; the second
deductive. A complete act of thought involves both—it involves, that is, a fruitful interaction of
observed (or recollected) particular considerations and of inclusive and far-reaching (general)
meanings.
Hurry versus caution
This double movement to and from a meaning may occur, however, in a casual, uncritical way,
or in a cautious and regulated manner. To think means, in any case, to bridge a gap in
experience, to bind together facts or deeds otherwise isolated. But we may make only a hurried
jump from one consideration to another, allowing our aversion to mental disquietude to override
the gaps; or, we may insist upon noting the road traveled in making connections. We may, in
short, accept readily any suggestion that seems plausible; or we may hunt out additional factors,
new difficulties, to see whether the suggested conclusion really ends the matter. The latter
method involves definite formulation of the connecting links; the statement of a principle, or, in
logical phrase, the use of a universal. If we thus formulate the whole situation, the original data
are transformed into premises of reasoning; the final belief is a logical or rational conclusion,
not a mere de facto termination.
Continuity of relationship the mark of the latter
The importance of connections binding isolated items into a coherent single whole is embodied
in all the phrases that denote the relation of premises and conclusions to each other. (1) The
premises are called grounds, foundations, bases, and are said to underlie, uphold, support the
conclusion. (2) We "descend" from the premises to the conclusion, and "ascend" or "mount" in
the opposite direction—as a river may be continuously traced from source to sea or vice versa.
So the conclusion springs, flows, or is drawn from its premises.[Pg 81] (3) The conclusion—as the
word itself implies—closes, shuts in, locks up together the various factors stated in the premises.
We say that the premises "contain" the conclusion, and that the conclusion "contains" the
premises, thereby marking our sense of the inclusive and comprehensive unity in which the
elements of reasoning are bound tightly together.[15] Systematic inference, in short, means the
recognition of definite relations of interdependence between considerations previously
unorganized and disconnected, this recognition being brought about by the discovery and
insertion of new facts and properties.
Scientific induction and deduction
This more systematic thinking is, however, like the cruder forms in its double movement, the
movement toward the suggestion or hypothesis and the movement back to facts. The difference
is in the greater conscious care with which each phase of the process is performed. The
conditions under which suggestions are allowed to spring up and develop are regulated. Hasty
acceptance of any idea that is plausible, that seems to solve the difficulty, is changed into a
conditional acceptance pending further inquiry. The idea is accepted as a working hypothesis, as
something to guide investigation and bring to light new facts, not as a final conclusion. When
pains are taken to make each aspect of the movement as accurate as possible, the movement
toward building up the idea is known as inductive discovery (induction, for short); the movement
toward developing, applying, and testing, as deductive proof (deduction, for short).
Particular and universal
While induction moves from fragmentary details (or[Pg 82] particulars) to a connected view of a
situation (universal), deduction begins with the latter and works back again to particulars,
connecting them and binding them together. The inductive movement is toward discovery of a
binding principle; the deductive toward its testing—confirming, refuting, modifying it on the
basis of its capacity to interpret isolated details into a unified experience. So far as we conduct
each of these processes in the light of the other, we get valid discovery or verified critical
thinking.
Illustration from everyday experience
A commonplace illustration may enforce the points of this formula. A man who has left his
rooms in order finds them upon his return in a state of confusion, articles being scattered at
random. Automatically, the notion comes to his mind that burglary would account for the
disorder. He has not seen the burglars; their presence is not a fact of observation, but is a
thought, an idea. Moreover, the man has no special burglars in mind; it is the relation, the
meaning of burglary—something general—that comes to mind. The state of his room is
perceived and is particular, definite,—exactly as it is; burglars are inferred, and have a general
status. The state of the room is a fact, certain and speaking for itself; the presence of burglars is a
possible meaning which may explain the facts.
of induction,
So far there is an inductive tendency, suggested by particular and present facts. In the same
inductive way, it occurs to him that his children are mischievous, and that they may have thrown
the things about. This rival hypothesis (or conditional principle of explanation) prevents him
from dogmatically accepting the first suggestion. Judgment is held in suspense and a positive
conclusion postponed.[Pg 83]
of deduction
Then deductive movement begins. Further observations, recollections, reasonings are conducted
on the basis of a development of the ideas suggested: if burglars were responsible, such and such
things would have happened; articles of value would be missing. Here the man is going from a
general principle or relation to special features that accompany it, to particulars,—not back,
however, merely to the original particulars (which would be fruitless or take him in a circle), but
to new details, the actual discovery or nondiscovery of which will test the principle. The man
turns to a box of valuables; some things are gone; some, however, are still there. Perhaps he has
himself removed the missing articles, but has forgotten it. His experiment is not a decisive test.
He thinks of the silver in the sideboard—the children would not have taken that nor would he
ab
sent-mindedly have changed its place. He looks; all the solid ware is gone. The conception of
burglars is confirmed; examination of windows and doors shows that they have been tampered
with. Belief culminates; the original isolated facts have been woven into a coherent fabric. The
idea first suggested (inductively) has been employed to reason out hypothetically certain
additional particulars not yet experienced, that ought to be there, if the suggestion is correct.
Then new acts of observation have shown that the particulars theoretically called for are present,
and by this process the hypothesis is strengthened, corroborated. This moving back and forth
between the observed facts and the conditional idea is kept up till a coherent experience of an
object is substituted for the experience of conflicting details—or else the whole matter is given
up as a bad job.
Science is the same operations carefully performed
Sciences exemplify similar attitudes and operations,[Pg 84] but with a higher degree of elaboration
of the instruments of caution, exactness and thoroughness. This greater elaboration brings about
specialization, an accurate marking off of various types of problems from one another, and a
corresponding segregation and classification of the materials of experience associated with each
type of problem. We shall devote the remainder of this chapter to a consideration of the devices
by which the discovery, the development, and the testing of meanings are scientifically carried
on.
§ 2. Guidance of the Inductive Movement
Guidance is indirect
Control of the formation of suggestion is necessarily indirect, not direct; imperfect, not perfect.
Just because all discovery, all apprehension involving thought of the new, goes from the known,
the present, to the unknown and absent, no rules can be stated that will guarantee correct
inference. Just what is suggested to a person in a given situation depends upon his native
constitution (his originality, his genius), temperament, the prevalent direction of his interests, his
early environment, the general tenor of his past experiences, his special training, the things that
have recently occupied him continuously or vividly, and so on; to some extent even upon an
accidental conjunction of present circumstances. These matters, so far as they lie in the past or in
external conditions, clearly escape regulation. A suggestion simply does or does not occur; this
or that suggestion just happens, occurs, springs up. If, however, prior experience and training
have developed an attitude of patience in a condition of doubt, a capacity for suspended
judgment, and a liking for inquiry, indirect control of the course of suggestions is possible.[Pg 85]
The individual may return upon, revise, restate, enlarge, and analyze the facts out of which
suggestion springs. Inductive methods, in the technical sense, all have to do with regulating the
conditions under which observation, memory, and the acceptance of the testimony of others (the
operations supplying the raw data) proceed.
Method of indirect regulation
Given the facts A B C D on one side and certain individual habits on the other, suggestion occurs
au
tomatically. But if the facts A B C D are carefully looked into and thereby resolved into the
fa
cts A´ B´´ R S, a suggestion will automatically present itself different from that called up by the
fa
cts in their first form. To inventory the facts, to describe exactly and minutely their respective
traits, to magnify artificially those that are obscure and feeble, to reduce artificially those that are
so conspicuous and glaring as to be distracting,—these are ways of modifying the facts that
exercise suggestive force, and thereby indirectly guiding the formation of suggested inferences.
Illustration from diagnosis
Consider, for example, how a physician makes his diagnosis—his inductive interpretation. If he
is scientifically trained, he suspends—postpones—reaching a conclusion in order that he may
not be led by superficial occurrences into a snap judgment. Certain conspicuous phenomena may
fo
rcibly suggest typhoid, but he avoids a conclusion, or even any strong preference for this or
that conclusion until he has greatly (i) enlarged the scope of his data, and (ii) rendered them
more minute. He not only questions the patient as to his feelings and as to his acts prior to the
disease, but by various manipulations with his hands (and with instruments made for the
purpose) brings to light a large number of facts of which the patient is quite unaware. The state
of tem[Pg 86]perature, respiration, and heart-action is accurately noted, and their fluctuations from
time to time are exactly recorded. Until this examination has worked out toward a wider
collection and in toward a minuter scrutiny of details, inference is deferred.
Summary: definition of scientific induction
Scientific induction means, in short, all the processes by which the observing and amassing of
da
ta are regulated with a view to facilitating the formation of explanatory conceptions and
theories. These devices are all directed toward selecting the precise facts to which weight and
significance shall attach in forming suggestions or ideas. Specifically, this selective
determination involves devices of (1) elimination by analysis of what is likely to be misleading
and irrelevant, (2) emphasis of the important by collection and comparison of cases, (3)
deliberate construction of data by experimental variation.
Elimination of irrelevant meanings
(1) It is a common saying that one must learn to discriminate between observed facts and
judgments based upon them. Taken literally, such advice cannot be carried out; in every
observed thing there is—if the thing have any meaning at all—some consolidation of meaning
with what is sensibly and physically present, such that, if this were entirely excluded, what is left
would have no sense. A says: "I saw my brother." The term brother, however, involves a relation
that cannot be sensibly or physically observed; it is inferential in status. If A contents himself
with saying, "I saw a man," the factor of classification, of intellectual reference, is less complex,
but still exists. If, as a last resort, A were to say, "Anyway, I saw a colored object," some
relationship, though more rudimentary and undefined, still subsists. Theoretically, it is possible
that no[Pg 87] object was there, only an unusual mode of nerve stimulation. None the less, the
advice to discriminate what is observed from what is inferred is sound practical advice. Its
working import is that one should eliminate or exclude those inferences as to which experience
has shown that there is greatest liability to error. This, of course, is a relative matter. Under
ordinary circumstances no reasonable doubt would attach to the observation, "I see my brother";
it would be pedantic and silly to resolve this recognition back into a more elementary form.
Under other circumstances it might be a perfectly genuine question as to whether A saw even a
colored thing, or whether the color was due to a stimulation of the sensory optical apparatus (like
"seeing stars" upon a blow) or to a disordered circulation. In general, the scientific man is one
who knows that he is likely to be hurried to a conclusion, and that part of this precipitancy is due
to certain habits which tend to make him "read" certain meanings into the situation that confronts
him, so that he must be on the lookout against errors arising from his interests, habits, and
current preconceptions.
The technique of conclusion
The technique of scientific inquiry thus consists in various processes that tend to exclude overhasty "reading in" of meanings; devices that aim to give a purely "objective" unbiased rendering
of the data to be interpreted. Flushed cheeks usually mean heightened temperature; paleness
means lowered temperature. The clinical thermometer records automatically the actual
temperature and hence checks up the habitual associations that might lead to error in a given
case. All the instrumentalities of observation—the various -meters and -graphs and -scopes—fill
a part[Pg 88] of their scientific rôle in helping to eliminate meanings supplied because of habit,
prejudice, the strong momentary preoccupation of excitement and anticipation, and by the vogue
of existing theories. Photographs, phonographs, kymographs, actinographs, seismographs,
plethysmographs, and the like, moreover, give records that are permanent, so that they can be
employed by different persons, and by the same person in different states of mind, i.e. under the
influence of varying expectations and dominant beliefs. Thus purely personal prepossessions
(due to habit, to desire, to after-effects of recent experience) may be largely eliminated. In
ordinary language, the facts are objectively, rather than subjectively, determined. In this way
tendencies to premature interpretation are held in check.
Collection of instances
(2) Another important method of control consists in the multiplication of cases or instances. If I
doubt whether a certain handful gives a fair sample, or representative, for purposes of judging
value, of a whole carload of grain, I take a number of handfuls from various parts of the car and
compare them. If they agree in quality, well and good; if they disagree, we try to get enough
samples so that when they are thoroughly mixed the result will be a fair basis for an evaluation.
This illustration represents roughly the value of that aspect of scientific control in induction
which insists upon multiplying observations instead of basing the conclusion upon one or a few
cases.
This method not the whole of induction
So prominent, indeed, is this aspect of inductive method that it is frequently treated as the whole
of induction. It is supposed that all inductive inference is based upon collecting and comparing a
number of like cases. But in fact such comparison and collection is a[Pg 89] secondary
development within the process of securing a correct conclusion in some single case. If a man
infers from a single sample of grain as to the grade of wheat of the car as a whole, it is induction
and, under certain circumstances, a sound induction; other cases are resorted to simply for the
sake of rendering that induction more guarded, and more probably correct. In like fashion, the
reasoning that led up to the burglary idea in the instance already cited (p. 83) was inductive,
though there was but one single case examined. The particulars upon which the general meaning
(or relation) of burglary was grounded were simply the sum total of the unlike items and
qualities that made up the one case examined. Had this case presented very great obscurities and
difficulties, recourse might then have been had to examination of a number of similar cases. But
this comparison would not make inductive a process which was not previously of that character;
it would only render induction more wary and adequate. The object of bringing into
consideration a multitude of cases is to facilitate the selection of the evidential or significant
features upon which to base inference in some single case.
Contrast as important as likeness
Accordingly, points of unlikeness are as important as points of likeness among the cases
examined. Comparison, without contrast, does not amount to anything logically. In the degree in
which other cases observed or remembered merely duplicate the case in question, we are no
better off for purposes of inference than if we had permitted our single original fact to dictate a
conclusion. In the case of the various samples of grain, it is the fact that the samples are unlike,
at least in the part of the carload from which they are taken, that is important. Were it not for this
unlikeness, their like[Pg 90]ness in quality would be of no avail in assisting inference.[16] If we are
endeavoring to get a child to regulate his conclusions about the germination of a seed by taking
into account a number of instances, very little is gained if the conditions in all these instances
closely approximate one another. But if one seed is placed in pure sand, another in loam, and
another on blotting-paper, and if in each case there are two conditions, one with and another
without moisture, the unlike factors tend to throw into relief the factors that are significant (or
"essential") for reaching a conclusion. Unless, in short, the observer takes care to have the
differences in the observed cases as extreme as conditions allow, and unless he notes
unlikenesses as carefully as likenesses, he has no way of determining the evidential force of the
data that confront him.
Importance of exceptions and contrary cases
Another way of bringing out this importance of unlikeness is the emphasis put by the scientist
upon negative cases—upon instances which it would seem ought to fall into line but which as
matter of fact do not. Anomalies, exceptions, things which agree in most respects but disagree in
some crucial point, are so important that many of the devices of scientific technique are designed
purely to detect, record, and impress upon memory contrasting cases. Darwin remarked that so
easy is it to pass over cases that oppose a favorite generalization, that he had made it a habit not
merely to hunt for contrary instances, but also to write down any exception he noted or thought
of—as otherwise it was almost sure to be forgotten.[Pg 91]
§ 3. Experimental Variation of Conditions
Experiment the typical method of introducing contrast factors
We have already trenched upon this factor of inductive method, the one that is the most
important of all wherever it is feasible. Theoretically, one sample case of the right kind will be as
good a basis for an inference as a thousand cases; but cases of the "right kind" rarely turn up
spontaneously. We have to search for them, and we may have to make them. If we take cases just
as we find them—whether one case or many cases—they contain much that is irrelevant to the
problem in hand, while much that is relevant is obscure, hidden. The object of experimentation is
the construction, by regular steps taken on the basis of a plan thought out in advance, of a
typical, crucial case, a case formed with express reference to throwing light on the difficulty in
question. All inductive methods rest (as already stated, p. 85) upon regulation of the conditions
of observation and memory; experiment is simply the most adequate regulation possible of these
conditions. We try to make the observation such that every factor entering into it, together with
the mode and the amount of its operation, may be open to recognition. Such making of
observations constitutes experiment.
Three advantages of experiment
Such observations have many and obvious advantages over observations—no matter how
extensive—with respect to which we simply wait for an event to happen or an object to present
itself. Experiment overcomes the defects due to (a) the rarity, (b) the subtlety and minuteness (or
the violence), and (c) the rigid fixity of facts as we ordinarily experience them. The following
quotations from Jevons's Elementary Lessons in Logic bring out all these points:
(i) "We might have to wait years or centuries to meet[Pg 92] accidentally with facts which we can
readily produce at any moment in a laboratory; and it is probable that most of the chemical
substances now known, and many excessively useful products would never have been
discovered at all by waiting till nature presented them spontaneously to our observation."
This quotation refers to the infrequency or rarity of certain facts of nature, even very important
ones. The passage then goes on to speak of the minuteness of many phenomena which makes
them escape ordinary experience:
(ii) "Electricity doubtless operates in every particle of matter, perhaps at every moment of time;
and even the ancients could not but notice its action in the loadstone, in lightning, in the Aurora
Borealis, or in a piece of rubbed amber. But in lightning electricity was too intense and
dangerous; in the other cases it was too feeble to be properly understood. The science of
electricity and magnetism could only advance by getting regular supplies of electricity from the
common electric machine or the galvanic battery and by making powerful electromagnets. Most,
if not all, the effects which electricity produces must go on in nature, but altogether too
obscurely for observation."
Jevons then deals with the fact that, under ordinary conditions of experience, phenomena which
can be understood only by seeing them under varying conditions are presented in a fixed and
uniform way.
(iii) "Thus carbonic acid is only met in the form of a gas, proceeding from the combustion of
carbon; but when exposed to extreme pressure and cold, it is condensed into a liquid, and may
even be converted into a snowlike solid substance. Many other gases have in[Pg 93] like manner
been liquefied or solidified, and there is reason to believe that every substance is capable of
taking all three forms of solid, liquid, and gas, if only the conditions of temperature and pressure
can be sufficiently varied. Mere observation of nature would have led us, on the contrary, to
suppose that nearly all substances were fixed in one condition only, and could not be converted
from solid into liquid and from liquid into gas."
Many volumes would be required to describe in detail all the methods that investigators have
developed in various subjects for analyzing and restating the facts of ordinary experience so that
we may escape from capricious and routine suggestions, and may get the facts in such a form
and in such a light (or context) that exact and far-reaching explanations may be suggested in
place of vague and limited ones. But these various devices of inductive inquiry all have one goal
in view: the indirect regulation of the function of suggestion, or formation of ideas; and, in the
main, they will be found to reduce to some combination of the three types of selecting and
arranging subject-matter just described.
§ 4. Guidance of the Deductive Movement
Value of deduction for guiding induction
Before dealing directly with this topic, we must note that systematic regulation of induction
depends upon the possession of a body of general principles that may be applied deductively to
the examination or construction of particular cases as they come up. If the physician does not
kn
ow the general laws of the physiology of the human body, he has little way of telling what is
either peculiarly significant or peculiarly[Pg 94] exceptional in any particular case that he is called
upon to treat. If he knows the laws of circulation, digestion, and respiration, he can deduce the
conditions that should normally be found in a given case. These considerations give a base line
from which the deviations and abnormalities of a particular case may be measured. In this way,
the nature of the problem at hand is located and defined. Attention is not wasted upon features
which though conspicuous have nothing to do with the case; it is concentrated upon just those
traits which are out of the way and hence require explanation. A question well put is half
answered; i.e. a difficulty clearly apprehended is likely to suggest its own solution,—while a
vague and miscellaneous perception of the problem leads to groping and fumbling. Deductive
systems are necessary in order to put the question in a fruitful form.
"Reasoning a thing out"
The control of the origin and development of hypotheses by deduction does not cease, however,
with locating the problem. Ideas as they first present themselves are inchoate and incomplete.
Deduction is their elaboration into fullness and completeness of meaning (see p. 76). The
phenomena which the physician isolates from the total mass of facts that exist in front of him
suggest, we will say, typhoid fever. Now this conception of typhoid fever is one that is capable
of development. If there is typhoid, wherever there is typhoid, there are certain results, certain
characteristic symptoms. By going over mentally the full bearing of the concept of typhoid, the
scientist is instructed as to further phenomena to be found. Its development gives him an
instrument of inquiry, of observation and experimentation. He can go to work deliberately to see
whether[Pg 95] the case presents those features that it should have if the supposition is valid. The
deduced results form a basis for comparison with observed results. Except where there is a
system of principles capable of being elaborated by theoretical reasoning, the process of testing
(or proof) of a hypothesis is incomplete and haphazard.
Such reasoning implies systematized knowledge,
These considerations indicate the method by which the deductive movement is guided.
Deduction requires a system of allied ideas which may be translated into one another by regular
or graded steps. The question is whether the facts that confront us can be identified as typhoid
fe
ver. To all appearances, there is a great gap between them and typhoid. But if we can, by some
method of substitutions, go through a series of intermediary terms (see p. 72), the gap may, after
all, be easily bridged. Typhoid may mean p which in turn means o, which means n which means
m, which is very similar to the data selected as the key to the problem.
or definition and classification
One of the chief objects of science is to provide for every typical branch of subject-matter a set
of meanings and principles so closely interknit that any one implies some other according to
definite conditions, which under certain other conditions implies another, and so on. In this way,
various substitutions of equivalents are possible, and reasoning can trace out, without having
recourse to specific observations, very remote consequences of any suggested principle.
Definition, general formulæ, and classification are the devices by which the fixation and
elaboration of a meaning into its detailed ramifications are carried on. They are not ends in
themselves—as they are frequently regarded even in elementary education—but
instrumentalities for facilitating[Pg 96] the development of a conception into the form where its
ap
plicability to given facts may best be tested.[17]
The final control of deduction
The final test of deduction lies in experimental observation. Elaboration by reasoning may make
a suggested idea very rich and very plausible, but it will not settle the validity of that idea. Only
if facts can be observed (by methods either of collection or of experimentation), that agree in
detail and without exception with the deduced results, are we justified in accepting the deduction
as giving a valid conclusion. Thinking, in short, must end as well as begin in the domain of
concrete observations, if it is to be complete thinking. And the ultimate educative value of all
deductive processes is measured by the degree to which they become working tools in the
creation and development of new experiences.
§ 5. Some Educational Bearings of the Discussion
Educational counterparts of false logical theories
Isolation of "facts"
Some of the points of the foregoing logical analysis may be clinched by a consideration of their
educational implications, especially with reference to certain practices that grow out of a false
separation by which each is thought to be independent of the other and complete in itself. (i) In
some school subjects, or at all events in some topics or in some lessons, the pupils are immersed
in details; their minds are loaded with disconnected items (whether gleaned by observation and
memory, or accepted on hearsay and authority). Induction is treated as beginning and ending
with the amassing of facts, of particular isolated pieces of information. That these items are
educative only as suggesting a view of some larger situation in which the[Pg 97] particulars are
included and thereby accounted for, is ignored. In object lessons in elementary education and in
laboratory instruction in higher education, the subject is often so treated that the student fails to
"see the forest on account of the trees." Things and their qualities are retailed and detailed,
without reference to a more general character which they stand for and mean. Or, in the
laboratory, the student becomes engrossed in the processes of manipulation,—irrespective of the
reason for their performance, without recognizing a typical problem for the solution of which
they afford the appropriate method. Only deduction brings out and emphasizes consecutive
relationships, and only when relationships are held in view does learning become more than a
miscellaneous scrap-bag.
Failure to follow up by reasoning
(ii) Again, the mind is allowed to hurry on to a vague notion of the whole of which the
fragmentary facts are portions, without any attempt to become conscious of how they are bound
together as parts of this whole. The student feels that "in a general way," as we say, the facts of
the history or geography lesson are related thus and so; but "in a general way" here stands only
fo
r "in a vague way," somehow or other, with no clear recognition of just how.
The pupil is encouraged to form, on the basis of the particular facts, a general notion, a
conception of how they stand related; but no pains are taken to make the student follow up the
notion, to elaborate it and see just what its bearings are upon the case in hand and upon similar
cases. The inductive inference, the guess, is formed by the student; if it happens to be correct, it
is at once accepted by the teacher; or if it is false, it is rejected. If any amplification of the idea
occurs, it is[Pg 98] quite likely carried through by the teacher, who thereby assumes the
responsibility for its intellectual development. But a complete, an integral, act of thought
requires that the person making the suggestion (the guess) be responsible also for reasoning out
its bearings upon the problem in hand; that he develop the suggestion at least enough to indicate
the ways in which it applies to and accounts for the specific data of the case. Too often when a
recitation does not consist in simply testing the ability of the student to display some form of
technical skill, or to repeat facts and principles accepted on the authority of text-book or lecturer,
the teacher goes to the opposite extreme; and after calling out the spontaneous reflections of the
pupils, their guesses or ideas about the matter, merely accepts or rejects them, assuming himself
the responsibility for their elaboration. In this way, the function of suggestion and of
interpretation is excited, but it is not directed and trained. Induction is stimulated but is not
carried over into the reasoning phase necessary to complete it.
In other subjects and topics, the deductive phase is isolated, and is treated as if it were complete
in itself. This false isolation may show itself in either (and both) of two points; namely, at the
beginning or at the end of the resort to general intellectual procedure.
Isolation of deduction by commencing with it
(iii) Beginning with definitions, rules, general principles, classifications, and the like, is a
common form of the first error. This method has been such a uniform object of attack on the part
of all educational reformers that it is not necessary to dwell upon it further than to note that the
mistake is, logically, due to the attempt to introduce deductive considerations without first
making acquaintance with the particular facts that[Pg 99] create a need for the generalizing rational
devices. Unfortunately, the reformer sometimes carries his objection too far, or rather locates it
in the wrong place. He is led into a tirade against all definition, all systematization, all use of
general principles, instead of confining himself to pointing out their futility and their deadness
when not properly motivated by familiarity with concrete experiences.
Isolation of deduction from direction of new observations
(iv) The isolation of deduction is seen, at the other end, wherever there is failure to clinch and
test the results of the general reasoning processes by application to new concrete cases. The final
point of the deductive devices lies in their use in assimilating and comprehending individual
cases. No one understands a general principle fully—no matter how adequately he can
demonstrate it, to say nothing of repeating it—till he can employ it in the mastery of new
situations, which, if they are new, differ in manifestation from the cases used in reaching the
generalization. Too often the text-book or teacher is contented with a series of somewhat
perfunctory examples and illustrations, and the student is not forced to carry the principle that he
has formulated over into further cases of his own experience. In so far, the principle is inert and
dead.
Lack of provision for experimentation
(v) It is only a variation upon this same theme to say that every complete act of reflective inquiry
makes provision for experimentation—for testing suggested and accepted principles by
employing them for the active construction of new cases, in which new qualities emerge. Only
slowly do our schools accommodate themselves to the general advance of scientific method.
From the scientific side, it is demonstrated that effective and integral thinking is possible only
where the experi[Pg 100]mental method in some form is used. Some recognition of this principle is
evinced in higher institutions of learning, colleges and high schools. But in elementary
education, it is still assumed, for the most part, that the pupil's natural range of observations,
supplemented by what he accepts on hearsay, is adequate for intellectual growth. Of course it is
not necessary that laboratories shall be introduced under that name, much less that elaborate
ap
paratus be secured; but the entire scientific history of humanity demonstrates that the
conditions for complete mental activity will not be obtained till adequate provision is made for
the carrying on of activities that actually modify physical conditions, and that books, pictures,
and even objects that are passively observed but not manipulated do not furnish the provision
required.[Pg 101]
CHAPTER EIGHT
JUDGMENT: THE INTERPRETATION OF FACTS
§ 1. The Three Factors of Judging
Good judgment
A man of good judgment in a given set of affairs is a man in so far educated, trained, whatever
may be his literacy. And if our schools turn out their pupils in that attitude of mind which is
conducive to good judgment in any department of affairs in which the pupils are placed, they
have done more than if they sent out their pupils merely possessed of vast stores of information,
or high degrees of skill in specialized branches. To know what is good judgment we need first to
kn
ow what judgment is.
Judgment and inference
That there is an intimate connection between judgment and inference is obvious enough. The
aim of inference is to terminate itself in an adequate judgment of a situation, and the course of
inference goes on through a series of partial and tentative judgments. What are these units, these
terms of inference when we examine them on their own account? Their significant traits may be
readily gathered from a consideration of the operations to which the word judgment was
originally applied: namely, the authoritative decision of matters in legal controversy—the
procedure of the judge on the bench. There are three such features: (1) a controversy, consisting
of opposite claims regarding the same objective situation; (2) a process of defining and
elaborating these claims and of sifting the facts adduced to[Pg 102] support them; (3) a final
decision, or sentence, closing the particular matter in dispute and also serving as a rule or
principle for deciding future cases.
Uncertainty the antecedent of judgment
1. Unless there is something doubtful, the situation is read off at a glance; it is taken in on sight,
i.e. there is merely apprehension, perception, recognition, not judgment. If the matter is wholly
doubtful, if it is dark and obscure throughout, there is a blind mystery and again no judgment
occurs. But if it suggests, however vaguely, different meanings, rival possible interpretations,
there is some point at issue, some matter at stake. Doubt takes the form of dispute, controversy;
different sides compete for a conclusion in their favor. Cases brought to trial before a judge
illustrate neatly and unambiguously this strife of alternative interpretations; but any case of
trying to clear up intellectually a doubtful situation exemplifies the same traits. A moving blur
catches our eye in the distance; we ask ourselves: "What is it? Is it a cloud of whirling dust? a
tree waving its branches? a man signaling to us?" Something in the total situation suggests each
of these possible meanings. Only one of them can possibly be sound; perhaps none of them is
ap
propriate; yet some meaning the thing in question surely has. Which of the alternative
suggested meanings has the rightful claim? What does the perception really mean? How is it to
be interpreted, estimated, appraised, placed? Every judgment proceeds from some such situation.
Judgment defines the issue,
2. The hearing of the controversy, the trial, i.e. the weighing of alternative claims, divides into
two branches, either of which, in a given case, may be more conspicuous than the other. In the
consideration of a legal dispute, these two branches are sifting the evidence and[Pg 103] selecting
the rules that are applicable; they are "the facts" and "the law" of the case. In judgment they are
(a) the determination of the data that are important in the given case (compare the inductive
movement); and (b) the elaboration of the conceptions or meanings suggested by the crude data
(compare the deductive movement). (a) What portions or aspects of the situation are significant
in controlling the formation of the interpretation? (b) Just what is the full meaning and bearing of
the conception that is used as a method of interpretation? These questions are strictly correlative;
the answer to each depends upon the answer to the other. We may, however, for convenience,
consider them separately.
(a) by selecting what facts are evidence
(a) In every actual occurrence, there are many details which are part of the total occurrence, but
which nevertheless are not significant in relation to the point at issue. All parts of an experience
are equally present, but they are very far from being of equal value as signs or as evidences. Nor
is there any tag or label on any trait saying: "This is important," or "This is trivial." Nor is
intensity, or vividness or conspicuousness, a safe measure of indicative and proving value. The
glaring thing may be totally insignificant in this particular situation, and the key to the
understanding of the whole matter may be modest or hidden (compare p. 74). Features that are
not significant are distracting; they proffer their claims to be regarded as clues and cues to
interpretation, while traits that are significant do not appear on the surface at all. Hence,
judgment is required even in reference to the situation or event that is present to the senses;
elimination or rejection, selection, discovery, or bringing to light must take place.[Pg 104] Till we
have reached a final conclusion, rejection and selection must be tentative or conditional. We
select the things that we hope or trust are cues to meaning. But if they do not suggest a situation
that accepts and includes them (see p. 81), we reconstitute our data, the facts of the case; for we
mean, intellectually, by the facts of the case those traits that are used as evidence in reaching a
conclusion or forming a decision.
Expertness in selecting evidence
No hard and fast rules for this operation of selecting and rejecting, or fixing upon the facts, can
be given. It all comes back, as we say, to the good judgment, the good sense, of the one judging.
To be a good judge is to have a sense of the relative indicative or signifying values of the various
fe
atures of the perplexing situation; to know what to let go as of no account; what to eliminate as
irrelevant; what to retain as conducive to outcome; what to emphasize as a clue to the
difficulty.[18] This power in ordinary matters we call knack, tact, cleverness; in more important
affairs, insight, discernment. In part it is instinctive or inborn; but it also represents the funded
outcome of long familiarity with like operations in the past. Possession of this ability to seize
what is evidential or significant and to let the rest go is the mark of the expert, the connoisseur,
the judge, in any matter.
Intuitive judgments
Mill cites the following case, which is worth noting as an instance of the extreme delicacy and
accuracy to which may be developed this power of sizing up the significant factors of a situation.
"A Scotch manufacturer procured from England, at a high rate of wages, a working dyer, famous
fo
r producing very fine colors, with the view of teaching to his other workmen the same[Pg 105]
skill. The workman came; but his method of proportioning the ingredients, in which lay the
secret of the effects he produced, was by taking them up in handfuls, while the common method
was to weigh them. The manufacturer sought to make him turn his handling system into an
equivalent weighing system, that the general principles of his peculiar mode of proceeding might
be ascertained. This, however, the man found himself quite unable to do, and could therefore
impart his own skill to nobody. He had, from individual cases of his own experience, established
a connection in his mind between fine effects of color and tactual perceptions in handling his
dyeing materials; and from these perceptions he could, in any particular case, infer the means to
be employed and the effects which would be produced." Long brooding over conditions, intimate
contact associated with keen interest, thorough absorption in a multiplicity of allied experiences,
tend to bring about those judgments which we then call intuitive; but they are true judgments
because they are based on intelligent selection and estimation, with the solution of a problem as
the controlling standard. Possession of this capacity makes the difference between the artist and
the intellectual bungler.
Such is judging ability, in its completest form, as to the data of the decision to be reached. But in
any case there is a certain feeling along for the way to be followed; a constant tentative picking
out of certain qualities to see what emphasis upon them would lead to; a willingness to hold final
selection in suspense; and to reject the factors entirely or relegate them to a different position in
the evidential scheme if other features yield more solvent suggestions. Alertness, flexibility,
curios[Pg 106]ity are the essentials; dogmatism, rigidity, prejudice, caprice, arising from routine,
passion, and flippancy are fatal.
(b) To decide an issue, the appropriate principles must also be selected
(b) This selection of data is, of course, for the sake of controlling the development and
elaboration of the suggested meaning in the light of which they are to be interpreted (compare p.
76). An evolution of conceptions thus goes on simultaneously with the determination of the
fa
cts; one possible meaning after another is held before the mind, considered in relation to the
data to which it is applied, is developed into its more detailed bearings upon the data, is dropped
or tentatively accepted and used. We do not approach any problem with a wholly naïve or virgin
mind; we approach it with certain acquired habitual modes of understanding, with a certain store
of previously evolved meanings, or at least of experiences from which meanings may be educed.
If the circumstances are such that a habitual response is called directly into play, there is an
immediate grasp of meaning. If the habit is checked, and inhibited from easy application, a
possible meaning for the facts in question presents itself. No hard and fast rules decide whether a
meaning suggested is the right and proper meaning to follow up. The individual's own good (or
bad) judgment is the guide. There is no label on any given idea or principle which says
au
tomatically, "Use me in this situation"—as the magic cakes of Alice in Wonderland were
inscribed "Eat me." The thinker has to decide, to choose; and there is always a risk, so that the
prudent thinker selects warily, subject, that is, to confirmation or frustration by later events. If
one is not able to estimate wisely what is relevant to the interpretation of a given perplexing or
doubtful issue, it avails[Pg 107] little that arduous learning has built up a large stock of concepts.
For learning is not wisdom; information does not guarantee good judgment. Memory may
provide an antiseptic refrigerator in which to store a stock of meanings for future use, but
judgment selects and adopts the one used in a given emergency—and without an emergency
(some crisis, slight or great) there is no call for judgment. No conception, even if it is carefully
and firmly established in the abstract, can at first safely be more than a candidate for the office
of interpreter. Only greater success than that of its rivals in clarifying dark spots, untying hard
kn
ots, reconciling discrepancies, can elect it or prove it a valid idea for the given situation.
Judging terminates in a decision or statement
3. The judgment when formed is a decision; it closes (or concludes) the question at issue. This
determination not only settles that particular case, but it helps fix a rule or method for deciding
similar matters in the future; as the sentence of the judge on the bench both terminates that
dispute and also forms a precedent for future decisions. If the interpretation settled upon is not
controverted by subsequent events, a presumption is built up in favor of similar interpretation in
other cases where the features are not so obviously unlike as to make it inappropriate. In this
way, principles of judging are gradually built up; a certain manner of interpretation gets weight,
au
thority. In short, meanings get standardized, they become logical concepts (see below, p. 118).
§ 2. The Origin and Nature of Ideas
Ideas are conjectures employed in judging
This brings us to the question of ideas in relation to judgments.[19] Something in an obscure
situation sug[Pg 108]gests something else as its meaning. If this meaning is at once accepted, there
is no reflective thinking, no genuine judging. Thought is cut short uncritically; dogmatic belief,
with all its attending risks, takes place. But if the meaning suggested is held in suspense, pending
examination and inquiry, there is true judgment. We stop and think, we de-fer conclusion in
order to in-fer more thoroughly. In this process of being only conditionally accepted, accepted
only for examination, meanings become ideas. That is to say, an idea is a meaning that is
tentatively entertained, formed, and used with reference to its fitness to decide a perplexing
situation,—a meaning used as a tool of judgment.
Or tools of interpretation
Let us recur to our instance of a blur in motion appearing at a distance. We wonder what the
thing is, i.e. what the blur means. A man waving his arms, a friend beckoning to us, are
suggested as possibilities. To accept at once either alternative is to arrest judgment. But if we
treat what is suggested as only a suggestion, a supposition, a possibility, it becomes an idea,
having the following traits: (a) As merely a suggestion, it is a conjecture, a guess, which in cases
of greater dignity we call a hypothesis or a theory. That is to say, it is a possible but as yet
do
ubtful mode of interpretation. (b) Even though doubtful, it has an office to perform; namely,
that of directing inquiry and examination. If this blur means a friend beckoning, then careful
observation should show certain other traits. If it is a man driving unruly cattle, certain other
traits should be found. Let us look and see if these traits are found. Taken merely as a doubt, an
idea would paralyze inquiry. Taken merely as a certainty, it would arrest[Pg 109] inquiry. Taken as
a doubtful possibility, it affords a standpoint, a platform, a method of inquiry.
Pseudo-ideas
Ideas are not then genuine ideas unless they are tools in a reflective examination which tends to
solve a problem. Suppose it is a question of having the pupil grasp the idea of the sphericity of
the earth. This is different from teaching him its sphericity as a fact. He may be shown (or
reminded of) a ball or a globe, and be told that the earth is round like those things; he may then
be made to repeat that statement day after day till the shape of the earth and the shape of the ball
are welded together in his mind. But he has not thereby acquired any idea of the earth's
sphericity; at most, he has had a certain image of a sphere and has finally managed to image the
earth after the analogy of his ball image. To grasp sphericity as an idea, the pupil must first have
realized certain perplexities or confusing features in observed facts and have had the idea of
spherical shape suggested to him as a possible way of accounting for the phenomena in question.
Only by use as a method of interpreting data so as to give them fuller meaning does sphericity
become a genuine idea. There may be a vivid image and no idea; or there may be a fleeting,
obscure image and yet an idea, if that image performs the function of instigating and directing
the observation and relation of facts.
Ideas furnish the only alternative to "hit or miss" methods
Logical ideas are like keys which are shaping with reference to opening a lock. Pike, separated
by a glass partition from the fish upon which they ordinarily prey, will—so it is said—butt their
heads against the glass until it is literally beaten into them that they cannot get at their food.
Animals learn (when they learn at all) by a "cut and try" method; by doing at random[Pg 110] first
one thing and another thing and then preserving the things that happen to succeed. Action
directed consciously by ideas—by suggested meanings accepted for the sake of experimenting
with them—is the sole alternative both to bull-headed stupidity and to learning bought from that
dear teacher—chance experience.
They are methods of indirect attack
It is significant that many words for intelligence suggest the idea of circuitous, evasive activity—
often with a sort of intimation of even moral obliquity. The bluff, hearty man goes straight (and
stupidly, it is implied) at some work. The intelligent man is cunning, shrewd (crooked), wily,
subtle, crafty, artful, designing—the idea of indirection is involved.[20] An idea is a method of
evading, circumventing, or surmounting through reflection obstacles that otherwise would have
to be attacked by brute force. But ideas may lose their intellectual quality as they are habitually
used. When a child was first learning to recognize, in some hesitating suspense, cats, dogs,
houses, marbles, trees, shoes, and other objects, ideas—conscious and tentative meanings—
intervened as methods of identification. Now, as a rule, the thing and the meaning are so
completely fused that there is no judgment and no idea proper, but only automatic recognition.
On the other hand, things that are, as a rule, directly apprehended and familiar become subjects
of judgment when they present themselves in unusual contexts: as forms, distances, sizes,
positions when we attempt to draw them; triangles, squares, and circles when they turn up, not in
connection with familiar toys, implements, and utensils, but as problems in geometry.
[Pg 111]
§ 3. Analysis and Synthesis
Judging clears up things: analysis
Through judging confused data are cleared up, and seemingly incoherent and disconnected facts
brought together. Things may have a peculiar feeling for us, they may make a certain
indescribable impression upon us; the thing may feel round (that is, present a quality which we
afterwards define as round), an act may seem rude (or what we afterwards classify as rude), and
yet this quality may be lost, absorbed, blended in the total value of the situation. Only as we need
to use just that aspect of the original situation as a tool of grasping something perplexing or
obscure in another situation, do we abstract or detach the quality so that it becomes
individualized. Only because we need to characterize the shape of some new object or the moral
quality of some new act, does the element of roundness or rudeness in the old experience detach
itself, and stand out as a distinctive feature. If the element thus selected clears up what is
otherwise obscure in the new experience, if it settles what is uncertain, it thereby itself gains in
positiveness and definiteness of meaning. This point will meet us again in the following chapter;
here we shall speak of the matter only as it bears upon the questions of analysis and synthesis.
Mental analysis is not like physical division
Misapprehension of analysis in education
Even when it is definitely stated that intellectual and physical analyses are different sorts of
operations, intellectual analysis is often treated after the analogy of physical; as if it were the
breaking up of a whole into all its constituent parts in the mind instead of in space. As nobody
can possibly tell what breaking a whole into its parts in the mind means, this conception leads to
the further notion that logical analysis is a mere enumeration and listing of all conceivable
qualities and relations.[Pg 112] The influence upon education of this conception has been very
great.[21] Every subject in the curriculum has passed through—or still remains in—what may be
called the phase of anatomical or morphological method: the stage in which understanding the
subject is thought to consist of multiplying distinctions of quality, form, relation, and so on, and
attaching some name to each distinguished element. In normal growth, specific properties are
emphasized and so individualized only when they serve to clear up a present difficulty. Only as
they are involved in judging some specific situation is there any motive or use for analyses, i.e.
fo
r emphasis upon some element or relation as peculiarly significant.
Effects of premature formulation
The same putting the cart before the horse, the product before the process, is found in that
overconscious formulation of methods of procedure so current in elementary instruction. (See p.
60.) The method that is employed in discovery, in reflective inquiry, cannot possibly be
identified with the method that emerges after the discovery is made. In the genuine operation of
inference, the mind is in the attitude of search, of hunting, of projection, of trying this and that;
when the conclusion is reached, the search is at an end. The Greeks used to discuss: "How is
learning (or inquiry) possible? For either we know already what we are after, and then we do not
learn or inquire; or we do not know, and then we cannot inquire, for we do not know what to
look for." The dilemma is at least suggestive, for it points to the true alternative: the use in
inquiry of doubt, of tentative suggestion, of experimen[Pg 113]tation. After we have reached the
conclusion, a reconsideration of the steps of the process to see what is helpful, what is harmful,
what is merely useless, will assist in dealing more promptly and efficaciously with analogous
problems in the future. In this way, more or less explicit method is gradually built up. (Compare
the earlier discussion on p. 62 of the psychological and the logical.)
Method comes before its formulation
It is, however, a common assumption that unless the pupil from the outset consciously
recognizes and explicitly states the method logically implied in the result he is to reach, he will
have no method, and his mind will work confusedly or anarchically; while if he accompanies his
performance with conscious statement of some form of procedure (outline, topical analysis, list
of headings and subheadings, uniform formula) his mind is safeguarded and strengthened. As a
matter of fact, the development of an unconscious logical attitude and habit must come first. A
conscious setting forth of the method logically adapted for reaching an end is possible only after
the result has first been reached by more unconscious and tentative methods, while it is valuable
only when a review of the method that achieved success in a given case will throw light upon a
new, similar case. The ability to fasten upon and single out (abstract, analyze) those features of
one experience which are logically best is hindered by premature insistence upon their explicit
fo
rm
ulation. It is repeated use that gives a method definiteness; and given this definiteness,
precipitation into formulated statement should follow naturally. But because teachers find that
the things which they themselves best understand are marked off and defined in clear-cut ways,
our schoolrooms are pervaded[Pg 114] with the superstition that children are to begin with already
crystallized formulæ of method.
Judgment reveals the bearing or significance of facts: synthesis
As analysis is conceived to be a sort of picking to pieces, so synthesis is thought to be a sort of
physical piecing together; and so imagined, it also becomes a mystery. In fact, synthesis takes
place wherever we grasp the bearing of facts on a conclusion, or of a principle on facts. As
analysis is emphasis, so synthesis is placing; the one causes the emphasized fact or property to
stand out as significant; the other gives what is selected its context, or its connection with what is
signified. Every judgment is analytic in so far as it involves discernment, discrimination,
marking off the trivial from the important, the irrelevant from what points to a conclusion; and it
is synthetic in so far as it leaves the mind with an inclusive situation within which the selected
fa
cts are placed.
Analysis and synthesis are correlative
Educational methods that pride themselves on being exclusively analytic or exclusively synthetic
are therefore (so far as they carry out their boasts) incompatible with normal operations of
judgment. Discussions have taken place, for example, as to whether the teaching of geography
should be analytic or synthetic. The synthetic method is supposed to begin with the partial,
limited portion of the earth's surface already familiar to the pupil, and then gradually piece on
adjacent regions (the county, the country, the continent, and so on) till an idea of the entire globe
is reached, or of the solar system that includes the globe. The analytic method is supposed to
begin with the physical whole, the solar system or globe, and to work down through its
constituent portions till the immediate environment is reached. The underlying conceptions are
of physical wholes and physical[Pg 115] parts. As matter of fact, we cannot assume that the portion
of the earth already familiar to the child is such a definite object, mentally, that he can at once
begin with it; his knowledge of it is misty and vague as well as incomplete. Accordingly, mental
progress will involve analysis of it—emphasis of the features that are significant, so that they
will stand out clearly. Moreover, his own locality is not sharply marked off, neatly bounded, and
measured. His experience of it is already an experience that involves sun, moon, and stars as
parts of the scene he surveys; it involves a changing horizon line as he moves about; that is, even
his more limited and local experience involves far-reaching factors that take his imagination
clear beyond his own street and village. Connection, relationship with a larger whole, is already
involved. But his recognition of these relations is inadequate, vague, incorrect. He needs to
utilize the features of the local environment which are understood to help clarify and enlarge his
conceptions of the larger geographical scene to which they belong. At the same time, not till he
has grasped the larger scene will many of even the commonest features of his environment
become intelligible. Analysis leads to synthesis; while synthesis perfects analysis. As the pupil
grows in comprehension of the vast complicated earth in its setting in space, he also sees more
definitely the meaning of the familiar local details. This intimate interaction between selective
emphasis and interpretation of what is selected is found wherever reflection proceeds normally.
Hence the folly of trying to set analysis and synthesis over against each other.[Pg 116]
CHAPTER NINE
MEANING: OR CONCEPTIONS AND UNDERSTANDING
§ 1. The Place of Meanings in Mental Life
Meaning is central
As in our discussion of judgment we were making more explicit what is involved in inference, so
in the discussion of meaning we are only recurring to the central function of all reflection. For
one thing to mean, signify, betoken, indicate, or point to, another we saw at the outset to be the
essential mark of thinking (see p. 8). To find out what facts, just as they stand, mean, is the
object of all discovery; to find out what facts will carry out, substantiate, support a given
meaning, is the object of all testing. When an inference reaches a satisfactory conclusion, we
attain a goal of meaning. The act of judging involves both the growth and the application of
meanings. In short, in this chapter we are not introducing a new topic; we are only coming to
closer quarters with what hitherto has been constantly assumed. In the first section, we shall
consider the equivalence of meaning and understanding, and the two types of understanding,
direct and indirect.
I. MEANING AND UNDERSTANDING
To understand is to grasp meaning
If a person comes suddenly into your room and calls out "Paper," various alternatives are
possible. If you do not understand the English language, there is simply a noise which may or
may not act as a physical stimulus[Pg 117] and irritant. But the noise is not an intellectual object; it
does not have intellectual value. (Compare above, p. 15.) To say that you do not understand it
and that it has no meaning are equivalents. If the cry is the usual accompaniment of the delivery
of the morning paper, the sound will have meaning, intellectual content; you will understand it.
Or if you are eagerly awaiting the receipt of some important document, you may assume that the
cry means an announcement of its arrival. If (in the third place) you understand the English
language, but no context suggests itself from your habits and expectations, the word has
meaning, but not the whole event. You are then perplexed and incited to think out, to hunt for,
some explanation of the apparently meaningless occurrence. If you find something that accounts
fo
r the performance, it gets meaning; you come to understand it. As intelligent beings, we
presume the existence of meaning, and its absence is an anomaly. Hence, if it should turn out
that the person merely meant to inform you that there was a scrap of paper on the sidewalk, or
that paper existed somewhere in the universe, you would think him crazy or yourself the victim
of a poor joke. To grasp a meaning, to understand, to identify a thing in a situation in which it is
important, are thus equivalent terms; they express the nerves of our intellectual life. Without
them there is (a) lack of intellectual content, or (b) intellectual confusion and perplexity, or else
(c) intellectual perversion—nonsense, insanity.
Knowledge and meaning
All knowledge, all science, thus aims to grasp the meaning of objects and events, and this
process always consists in taking them out of their apparent brute isolation as events, and finding
them to be parts of some[Pg 118] larger whole suggested by them, which, in turn, accounts for,
explains, interprets them; i.e. renders them significant. (Compare above, p. 75.) Suppose that a
stone with peculiar markings has been found. What do these scratches mean? So far as the object
fo
rces the raising of this question, it is not understood; while so far as the color and form that we
see mean to us a stone, the object is understood. It is such peculiar combinations of the
understood and the nonunderstood that provoke thought. If at the end of the inquiry, the
markings are decided to mean glacial scratches, obscure and perplexing traits have been
translated into meanings already understood: namely, the moving and grinding power of large
bodies of ice and the friction thus induced of one rock upon another. Something already
understood in one situation has been transferred and applied to what is strange and perplexing in
another, and thereby the latter has become plain and familiar, i.e. understood. This summary
illustration discloses that our power to think effectively depends upon possession of a capital
fu
nd of meanings which may be applied when desired. (Compare what was said about deduction,
p. 94.)
II. DIRECT AND INDIRECT UNDERSTANDING
Direct and circuitous understanding
In the above illustrations two types of grasping of meaning are exemplified. When the English
language is understood, the person grasps at once the meaning of "paper." He may not, however,
see any meaning or sense in the performance as a whole. Similarly, the person identifies the
object on sight as a stone; there is no secret, no mystery, no perplexity about that. But he does
not understand the markings on it. They have[Pg 119] some meaning, but what is it? In one case,
owing to familiar acquaintance, the thing and its meaning, up to a certain point, are one. In the
other, the thing and its meaning are, temporarily at least, sundered, and meaning has to be sought
in order to understand the thing. In one case understanding is direct, prompt, immediate; in the
other, it is roundabout and delayed.
Interaction of the two types
Most languages have two sets of words to express these two modes of understanding; one for the
direct taking in or grasp of meaning, the other for its circuitous apprehension, thus: γνωναι and
ειδεναι in Greek; noscere and scire in Latin; kennen and wissen in German; connaître and savoir
in French; while in English to be acquainted with and to know of or about have been suggested
as equivalents.[22] Now our intellectual life consists of a peculiar interaction between these two
types of understanding. All judgment, all reflective inference, presupposes some lack of
understanding, a partial absence of meaning. We reflect in order that we may get hold of the full
and adequate significance of what happens. Nevertheless, something must be already
understood, the mind must be in possession of some meaning which it has mastered, or else
thinking is impossible. We think in order to grasp meaning, but none the less every extension of
kn
owledge makes us aware of blind and opaque spots, where with less knowledge all had
seemed obvious and natural. A scientist brought into a new district will find many things that he
does not understand, where the native savage or[Pg 120] rustic will be wholly oblivious to any
meanings beyond those directly apparent. Some Indians brought to a large city remained stolid at
the sight of mechanical wonders of bridge, trolley, and telephone, but were held spellbound by
the sight of workmen climbing poles to repair wires. Increase of the store of meanings makes us
conscious of new problems, while only through translation of the new perplexities into what is
already familiar and plain do we understand or solve these problems. This is the constant spiral
movement of knowledge.
Intellectual progress a rhythm
Our progress in genuine knowledge always consists in part in the discovery of something not
understood in what had previously been taken for granted as plain, obvious, matter-of-course,
and in part in the use of meanings that are directly grasped without question, as instruments for
getting hold of obscure, doubtful, and perplexing meanings. No object is so familiar, so obvious,
so commonplace that it may not unexpectedly present, in a novel situation, some problem, and
thus arouse reflection in order to understand it. No object or principle is so strange, peculiar, or
remote that it may not be dwelt upon till its meaning becomes familiar—taken in on sight
without reflection. We may come to see, perceive, recognize, grasp, seize, lay hold of principles,
laws, abstract truths—i.e. to understand their meaning in very immediate fashion. Our
intellectual progress consists, as has been said, in a rhythm of direct understanding—technically
called apprehension—with indirect, mediated understanding—technically called comprehension.
§ 2. The Process of Acquiring Meanings
Familiarity
The first problem that comes up in connection with direct understanding is how a store of
directly apprehen[Pg 121]sible meanings is built up. How do we learn to view things on sight as
significant members of a situation, or as having, as a matter of course, specific meanings? Our
chief difficulty in answering this question lies in the thoroughness with which the lesson of
fa
miliar things has been learnt. Thought can more easily traverse an unexplored region than it
can undo what has been so thoroughly done as to be ingrained in unconscious habit. We
ap
prehend chairs, tables, books, trees, horses, clouds, stars, rain, so promptly and directly that it
is hard to realize that as meanings they had once to be acquired,—the meanings are now so much
parts of the things themselves.
Confusion is prior to familiarity
In an often quoted passage, Mr. James has said: "The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin,
and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion."[23] Mr. James is
speaking of a baby's world taken as a whole; the description, however, is equally applicable to
the way any new thing strikes an adult, so far as the thing is really new and strange. To the
traditional "cat in a strange garret," everything is blurred and confused; the wonted marks that
label things so as to separate them from one another are lacking. Foreign languages that we do
not understand always seem jabberings, babblings, in which it is impossible to fix a definite,
clear-cut, individualized group of sounds. The countryman in the crowded city street, the
landlubber at sea, the ignoramus in sport at a contest between experts in a complicated game, are
fu
rt
her instances. Put an unexperienced man in a factory, and at first the work seems to him a
meaningless medley. All strangers of another race proverbially look alike to the visiting[Pg 122]
fo
reigner. Only gross differences of size or color are perceived by an outsider in a flock of sheep,
each of which is perfectly individualized to the shepherd. A diffusive blur and an
indiscriminately shifting suction characterize what we do not understand. The problem of the
acquisition of meaning by things, or (stated in another way) of forming habits of simple
ap
prehension, is thus the problem of introducing (i) definiteness and distinction and (ii)
consistency or stability of meaning into what is otherwise vague and wavering.
Practical responses clarify confusion
The acquisition of definiteness and of coherency (or constancy) of meanings is derived primarily
from practical activities. By rolling an object, the child makes its roundness appreciable; by
bouncing it, he singles out its elasticity; by throwing it, he makes weight its conspicuous
distinctive factor. Not through the senses, but by means of the reaction, the responsive
adjustment, is the impression made distinctive, and given a character marked off from other
qualities that call out unlike reactions. Children, for example, are usually quite slow in
ap
prehending differences of color. Differences from the standpoint of the adult so glaring that it
is impossible not to note them are recognized and recalled with great difficulty. Doubtless they
do not all feel alike, but there is no intellectual recognition of what makes the difference. The
redness or greenness or blueness of the object does not tend to call out a reaction that is
sufficiently peculiar to give prominence or distinction to the color trait. Gradually, however,
certain characteristic habitual responses associate themselves with certain things; the white
becomes the sign, say, of milk and sugar, to which the child reacts favorably; blue becomes the
sign of a dress that the child likes to wear, and so on: and the[Pg 123] distinctive reactions tend to
single out color qualities from other things in which they had been submerged.
We identify by use or function
Take another example. We have little difficulty in distinguishing from one another rakes, hoes,
plows and harrows, shovels and spades. Each has its own associated characteristic use and
fu
nction. We may have, however, great difficulty in recalling the difference between serrate and
dentate, ovoid and obovoid, in the shapes and edges of leaves, or between acids in ic and in ous.
There is some difference; but just what? Or, we know what the difference is; but which is
which? Variations in form, size, color, and arrangement of parts have much less to do, and the
uses, purposes, and functions of things and of their parts much more to do, with distinctness of
character and meaning than we should be likely to think. What misleads us is the fact that the
qualities of form, size, color, and so on, are now so distinct that we fail to see that the problem is
precisely to account for the way in which they originally obtained their definiteness and
conspicuousness. So far as we sit passive before objects, they are not distinguished out of a
vague blur which swallows them all. Differences in the pitch and intensity of sounds leave
behind a different feeling, but until we assume different attitudes toward them, or do something
special in reference to them, their vague difference cannot be intellectually gripped and retained.
Children's drawings illustrate domination by value
Children's drawings afford a further exemplification of the same principle. Perspective does not
exist, for the child's interest is not in pictorial representation, but in the things represented; and
while perspective is essential to the former, it is no part of the characteristic uses and values of
the things themselves. The house[Pg 124] is drawn with transparent walls, because the rooms,
chairs, beds, people inside, are the important things in the house-meaning; smoke always comes
out of the chimney—otherwise, why have a chimney at all? At Christmas time, the stockings
may be drawn almost as large as the house or even so large that they have to be put outside of
it:—in any case, it is the scale of values in use that furnishes the scale for their qualities, the
pictures being diagrammatic reminders of these values, not impartial records of physical and
sensory qualities. One of the chief difficulties felt by most persons in learning the art of pictorial
representation is that habitual uses and results of use have become so intimately read into the
character of things that it is practically impossible to shut them out at will.
As do sounds used as language signs
The acquiring of meaning by sounds, in virtue of which they become words, is perhaps the most
striking illustration that can be found of the way in which mere sensory stimuli acquire
definiteness and constancy of meaning and are thereby themselves defined and interconnected
fo
r purposes of recognition. Language is a specially good example because there are hundreds or
even thousands of words in which meaning is now so thoroughly consolidated with physical
qualities as to be directly apprehended, while in the case of words it is easier to recognize that
this connection has been gradually and laboriously acquired than in the case of physical objects
such as chairs, tables, buttons, trees, stones, hills, flowers, and so on, where it seems as if the
union of intellectual character and meaning with the physical fact were aboriginal, and thrust
upon us passively rather than acquired through active explorations. And in the case of the
meaning of words, we see readily that it is by making[Pg 125] sounds and noting the results which
fo
llow, by listening to the sounds of others and watching the activities which accompany them,
that a given sound finally becomes the stable bearer of a meaning.
Summary
Familiar acquaintance with meanings thus signifies that we have acquired in the presence of
objects definite attitudes of response which lead us, without reflection, to anticipate certain
possible consequences. The definiteness of the expectation defines the meaning or takes it out of
the vague and pulpy; its habitual, recurrent character gives the meaning constancy, stability,
consistency, or takes it out of the fluctuating and wavering.
§ 3. Conceptions and Meaning
A conception is a definite meaning
The word meaning is a familiar everyday term; the words conception, notion, are both popular
and technical terms. Strictly speaking, they involve, however, nothing new; any meaning
sufficiently individualized to be directly grasped and readily used, and thus fixed by a word, is a
conception or notion. Linguistically, every common noun is the carrier of a meaning, while
proper nouns and common nouns with the word this or that prefixed, refer to the things in which
the meanings are exemplified. That thinking both employs and expands notions, conceptions, is
then simply saying that in inference and judgment we use meanings, and that this use also
corrects and widens them.
which is standardized
Various persons talk about an object not physically present, and yet all get the same material of
belief. The same person in different moments often refers to the same object or kind of objects.
The sense experience, the physical conditions, the psychological conditions, vary, but the same
meaning is conserved. If pounds[Pg 126] arbitrarily changed their weight, and foot rules their
length, while we were using them, obviously we could not weigh nor measure. This would be
our intellectual position if meanings could not be maintained with a certain stability and
constancy through a variety of physical and personal changes.
By it we identify the unknown
and supplement the sensibly present
and also systematize things
To insist upon the fundamental importance of conceptions would, accordingly, only repeat what
has been said. We shall merely summarize, saying that conceptions, or standard meanings, are
instruments (i) of identification, (ii) of supplementation, and (iii) of placing in a system. Suppose
a little speck of light hitherto unseen is detected in the heavens. Unless there is a store of
meanings to fall back upon as tools of inquiry and reasoning, that speck of light will remain just
what it is to the senses—a mere speck of light. For all that it leads to, it might as well be a mere
irritation of the optic nerve. Given the stock of meanings acquired in prior experience, this speck
of light is mentally attacked by means of appropriate concepts. Does it indicate asteroid, or
comet, or a new-forming sun, or a nebula resulting from some cosmic collision or disintegration?
Each of these conceptions has its own specific and differentiating characters, which are then
sought for by minute and persistent inquiry. As a result, then, the speck is identified, we will say,
as a comet. Through a standard meaning, it gets identity and stability of character.
Supplementation then takes place. All the known qualities of comets are read into this particular
thing, even though they have not been as yet observed. All that the astronomers of the past have
learned about the paths and structure of comets becomes available capital with which to interpret
the speck[Pg 127] of light. Finally, this comet-meaning is itself not isolated; it is a related portion
of the whole system of astronomic knowledge. Suns, planets, satellites, nebulæ, comets, meteors,
star dust—all these conceptions have a certain mutuality of reference and interaction, and when
the speck of light is identified as meaning a comet, it is at once adopted as a full member in this
vast kingdom of beliefs.
Importance of system to knowledge
Darwin, in an autobiographical sketch, says that when a youth he told the geologist, Sidgwick, of
finding a tropical shell in a certain gravel pit. Thereupon Sidgwick said it must have been thrown
there by some person, adding: "But if it were really embedded there, it would be the greatest
misfortune to geology, because it would overthrow all that we know about the superficial
deposits of the Midland Counties"—since they were glacial. And then Darwin adds: "I was then
utterly astonished at Sidgwick not being delighted at so wonderful a fact as a tropical shell being
fo
und near the surface in the middle of England. Nothing before had made me thoroughly realize
that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from
them." This instance (which might, of course, be duplicated from any branch of science)
indicates how scientific notions make explicit the systematizing tendency involved in all use of
concepts.
§ 4. What Conceptions are Not
The idea that a conception is a meaning that supplies a standard rule for the identification and
placing of particulars may be contrasted with some current misapprehensions of its nature.
A concept is not a bare residue
1. Conceptions are not derived from a multitude of[Pg 128] different definite objects by leaving out
the qualities in which they differ and retaining those in which they agree. The origin of concepts
is sometimes described to be as if a child began with a lot of different particular things, say
particular dogs; his own Fido, his neighbor's Carlo, his cousin's Tray. Having all these different
objects before him, he analyzes them into a lot of different qualities, say (a) color, (b) size, (c)
shape, (d) number of legs, (e) quantity and quality of hair, (f) digestive organs, and so on; and
then strikes out all the unlike qualities (such as color, size, shape, hair), retaining traits such as
quadruped and domesticated, which they all have in general.
but an active attitude
As a matter of fact, the child begins with whatever significance he has got out of the one dog he
has seen, heard, and handled. He has found that he can carry over from one experience of this
object to subsequent experience certain expectations of certain characteristic modes of
behavior—may expect these even before they show themselves. He tends to assume this attitude
of anticipation whenever any clue or stimulus presents itself; whenever the object gives him any
excuse for it. Thus he might call cats little dogs, or horses big dogs. But finding that other
expected traits and modes of behavior are not fulfilled, he is forced to throw out certain traits
from the dog-meaning, while by contrast (see p. 90) certain other traits are selected and
emphasized. As he further applies the meaning to other dogs, the dog-meaning gets still further
defined and refined. He does not begin with a lot of ready-made objects from which he extracts a
common meaning; he tries to apply to every new experience whatever from his old experience
will help him understand it,[Pg 129] and as this process of constant assumption and
experimentation is fulfilled and refuted by results, his conceptions get body and clearness.
It is general because of its application
2. Similarly, conceptions are general because of their use and application, not because of their
ingredients. The view of the origin of conception in an impossible sort of analysis has as its
counterpart the idea that the conception is made up out of all the like elements that remain after
dissection of a number of individuals. Not so; the moment a meaning is gained, it is a working
tool of further apprehensions, an instrument of understanding other things. Thereby the meaning
is extended to cover them. Generality resides in application to the comprehension of new cases,
not in constituent parts. A collection of traits left as the common residuum, the caput mortuum,
of a million objects, would be merely a collection, an inventory or aggregate, not a general idea;
a striking trait emphasized in any one experience which then served to help understand some one
other experience, would become, in virtue of that service of application, in so far general.
Synthesis is not a matter of mechanical addition, but of application of something discovered in
one case to bring other cases into line.
§ 5. Definition and Organization of Meanings
Definiteness versus vagueness
In the abstract meaning is intension
In its application it is extension
A being that cannot understand at all is at least protected from mis-understandings. But beings
that get knowledge by means of inferring and interpreting, by judging what things signify in
relation to one another, are constantly exposed to the danger of mis-apprehension, mis-
understanding, mis-taking—taking a thing amiss. A constant source of misunderstanding and
mistake is indefiniteness of meaning. Through vagueness of[Pg 130] meaning we misunderstand
other people, things, and ourselves; through its ambiguity we distort and pervert. Conscious
distortion of meaning may be enjoyed as nonsense; erroneous meanings, if clear-cut, may be
fo
llowed up and got rid of. But vague meanings are too gelatinous to offer matter for analysis,
and too pulpy to afford support to other beliefs. They evade testing and responsibility.
Vagueness disguises the unconscious mixing together of different meanings, and facilitates the
substitution of one meaning for another, and covers up the failure to have any precise meaning at
all. It is the aboriginal logical sin—the source from which flow most bad intellectual
consequences. Totally to eliminate indefiniteness is impossible; to reduce it in extent and in
fo
rce requires sincerity and vigor. To be clear or perspicuous a meaning must be detached,
single, self-contained, homogeneous as it were, throughout. The technical name for any meaning
which is thus individualized is intension. The process of arriving at such units of meaning (and
of stating them when reached) is definition. The intension of the terms man, river, seed, honesty,
capital, supreme court, is the meaning that exclusively and characteristically attaches to those
terms. This meaning is set forth in the definitions of those words. The test of the distinctness of a
meaning is that it shall successfully mark off a group of things that exemplify the meaning from
other groups, especially of those objects that convey nearly allied meanings. The river-meaning
(or character) must serve to designate the Rhone, the Rhine, the Mississippi, the Hudson, the
Wabash, in spite of their varieties of place, length, quality of water; and must be such as not to
suggest ocean currents, ponds, or brooks. This use of a mean[Pg 131]ing to mark off and group
together a variety of distinct existences constitutes its extension.
Definition and division
As definition sets forth intension, so division (or the reverse process, classification) expounds
extension. Intension and extension, definition and division, are clearly correlative; in language
previously used, intension is meaning as a principle of identifying particulars; extension is the
group of particulars identified and distinguished. Meaning, as extension, would be wholly in the
air or unreal, did it not point to some object or group of objects; while objects would be as
isolated and independent intellectually as they seem to be spatially, were they not bound into
groups or classes on the basis of characteristic meanings which they constantly suggest and
exemplify. Taken together, definition and division put us in possession of individualized or
definite meanings and indicate to what group of objects meanings refer. They typify the fixation
and the organization of meanings. In the degree in which the meanings of any set of experiences
are so cleared up as to serve as principles for grouping those experiences in relation to one
another, that set of particulars becomes a science; i.e. definition and classification are the marks
of a science, as distinct from both unrelated heaps of miscellaneous information and from the
habits that introduce coherence into our experience without our being aware of their operation.
Definitions are of three types, denotative, expository, scientific. Of these, the first and third are
logically important, while the expository type is socially and pedagogically important as an
intervening step.
We define by picking out
I. Denotative. A blind man can never have an adequate understanding of the meaning of color
and red; a seeing person can acquire the knowledge only by hav[Pg 132]ing certain things
designated in such a way as to fix attention upon some of their qualities. This method of
delimiting a meaning by calling out a certain attitude toward objects may be called denotative or
indicative. It is required for all sense qualities—sounds, tastes, colors—and equally for all
emotional and moral qualities. The meanings of honesty, sympathy, hatred, fear, must be
grasped by having them presented in an individual's first-hand experience. The reaction of
educational reformers against linguistic and bookish training has always taken the form of
demanding recourse to personal experience. However advanced the person is in knowledge and
in scientific training, understanding of a new subject, or a new aspect of an old subject, must
always be through these acts of experiencing directly the existence or quality in question.
and also by combining what is already more definite,
2. Expository. Given a certain store of meanings which have been directly or denotatively
marked out, language becomes a resource by which imaginative combinations and variations
may be built up. A color may be defined to one who has not experienced it as lying between
green and blue; a tiger may be defined (i.e. the idea of it made more definite) by selecting some
qualities from known members of the cat tribe and combining them with qualities of size and
weight derived from other objects. Illustrations are of the nature of expository definitions; so are
the accounts of meanings given in a dictionary. By taking better-known meanings and
associating them,—the attained store of meanings of the community in which one resides is put
at one's disposal. But in themselves these definitions are secondhand and conventional; there is
danger that instead of inciting one to effort after personal experiences that[Pg 133] will exemplify
and verify them, they will be accepted on authority as substitutes.
and by discovering method of production
3. Scientific. Even popular definitions serve as rules for identifying and classifying individuals,
but the purpose of such identifications and classifications is mainly practical and social, not
intellectual. To conceive the whale as a fish does not interfere with the success of whalers, nor
does it prevent recognition of a whale when seen, while to conceive it not as fish but as mammal
serves the practical end equally well, and also furnishes a much more valuable principle for
scientific identification and classification. Popular definitions select certain fairly obvious traits
as keys to classification. Scientific definitions select conditions of causation, production, and
generation as their characteristic material. The traits used by the popular definition do not help
us to understand why an object has its common meanings and qualities; they simply state the fact
that it does have them. Causal and genetic definitions fix upon the way an object is constructed
as the key to its being a certain kind of object, and thereby explain why it has its class or
common traits.
Contrast of causal and descriptive definitions
Science is the most perfect type of knowledge because it uses causal definitions
If, for example, a layman of considerable practical experience were asked what he meant or
understood by metal, he would probably reply in terms of the qualities useful (i) in recognizing
any given metal and (ii) in the arts. Smoothness, hardness, glossiness, and brilliancy, heavy
weight for its size, would probably be included in his definition, because such traits enable us to
identify specific things when we see and touch them; the serviceable properties of capacity for
being hammered and pulled without breaking, of being softened by heat and hardened by cold,
of retaining the shape and form[Pg 134] given, of resistance to pressure and decay, would probably
be included—whether or not such terms as malleable or fusible were used. Now a scientific
conception, instead of using, even with additions, traits of this kind, determines meaning on a
different basis. The present definition of metal is about like this: Metal means any chemical
element that enters into combination with oxygen so as to form a base, i.e. a compound that
combines with an acid to form a salt. This scientific definition is founded, not on directly
perceived qualities nor on directly useful properties, but on the way in which certain things are
causally related to other things; i.e. it denotes a relation. As chemical concepts become more
and more those of relationships of interaction in constituting other substances, so physical
concepts express more and more relations of operation: mathematical, as expressing functions of
dependence and order of grouping; biological, relations of differentiation of descent, effected
through adjustment of various environments; and so on through the sphere of the sciences. In
short, our conceptions attain a maximum of definite individuality and of generality (or
ap
plicability) in the degree to which they show how things depend upon one another or influence
one another, instead of expressing the qualities that objects possess statically. The ideal of a
system of scientific conceptions is to attain continuity, freedom, and flexibility of transition in
passing from any fact and meaning to any other; this demand is met in the degree in which we
lay hold of the dynamic ties that hold things together in a continuously changing process—a
principle that states insight into mode of production or growth.[Pg 135]
CHAPTER TEN
CONCRETE AND ABSTRACT THINKING
False notions of concrete and abstract
The maxim enjoined upon teachers, "to proceed from the concrete to the abstract," is perhaps
fa
miliar rather than comprehended. Few who read and hear it gain a clear conception of the
starting-point, the concrete; of the nature of the goal, the abstract; and of the exact nature of the
path to be traversed in going from one to the other. At times the injunction is positively
misunderstood, being taken to mean that education should advance from things to thought—as if
any dealing with things in which thinking is not involved could possibly be educative. So
understood, the maxim encourages mechanical routine or sensuous excitation at one end of the
educational scale—the lower—and academic and unapplied learning at the upper end.
Actually, all dealing with things, even the child's, is immersed in inferences; things are clothed
by the suggestions they arouse, and are significant as challenges to interpretation or as evidences
to substantiate a belief. Nothing could be more unnatural than instruction in things without
thought; in sense-perceptions without judgments based upon them. And if the abstract to which
we are to proceed denotes thought apart from things, the goal recommended is formal and[Pg 136]
empty, for effective thought always refers, more or less directly, to things.
Direct and indirect understanding again
Yet the maxim has a meaning which, understood and supplemented, states the line of
development of logical capacity. What is this signification? Concrete denotes a meaning
definitely marked off from other meanings so that it is readily apprehended by itself. When we
hear the words, table, chair, stove, coat, we do not have to reflect in order to grasp what is
meant. The terms convey meaning so directly that no effort at translating is needed. The
meanings of some terms and things, however, are grasped only by first calling to mind more
fa
miliar things and then tracing out connections between them and what we do not understand.
Roughly speaking, the former kind of meanings is concrete; the latter abstract.
What is familiar is mentally concrete
To one who is thoroughly at home in physics and chemistry, the notions of atom and molecule
are fairly concrete. They are constantly used without involving any labor of thought in
ap
prehending what they mean. But the layman and the beginner in science have first to remind
themselves of things with which they already are well acquainted, and go through a process of
slow translation; the terms atom and molecule losing, moreover, their hard-won meaning only
too easily if familiar things, and the line of transition from them to the strange, drop out of mind.
The same difference is illustrated by any technical terms: coefficient and exponent in algebra,
triangle and square in their geometric as distinct from their popular meanings; capital and value
as used in political economy, and so on.
Practical things are familiar
The difference as noted is purely relative to the intellectual progress of an individual; what is
ab
stract[Pg 137] at one period of growth is concrete at another; or even the contrary, as one finds
that things supposed to be thoroughly familiar involve strange factors and unsolved problems.
There is, nevertheless, a general line of cleavage which, deciding upon the whole what things
fa
ll within the limits of familiar acquaintance and what without, marks off the concrete and the
ab
stract in a more permanent way. These limits are fixed mainly by the demands of practical life.
Things such as sticks and stones, meat and potatoes, houses and trees, are such constant features
of the environment of which we have to take account in order to live, that their important
meanings are soon learnt, and indissolubly associated with objects. We are acquainted with a
thing (or it is familiar to us) when we have so much to do with it that its strange and unexpected
corners are rubbed off. The necessities of social intercourse convey to adults a like concreteness
upon such terms as taxes, elections, wages, the law, and so on. Things the meaning of which I
personally do not take in directly, appliances of cook, carpenter, or weaver, for example, are
nevertheless unhesitatingly classed as concrete, since they are so directly connected with our
common social life.
The theoretical, or strictly intellectual, is abstract
By contrast, the abstract is the theoretical, or that not intimately associated with practical
concerns. The abstract thinker (the man of pure science as he is sometimes called) deliberately
ab
stracts from application in life; that is, he leaves practical uses out of account. This, however,
is a merely negative statement. What remains when connections with use and application are
excluded? Evidently only what has to do with knowing considered as an end in itself. Many
notions of science[Pg 138] are abstract, not only because they cannot be understood without a long
ap
prenticeship in the science (which is equally true of technical matters in the arts), but also
because the whole content of their meaning has been framed for the sole purpose of facilitating
fu
rt
her knowledge, inquiry, and speculation. When thinking is used as a means to some end,
good, or value beyond itself, it is concrete; when it is employed simply as a means to more
thinking, it is abstract. To a theorist an idea is adequate and self-contained just because it
engages and rewards thought; to a medical practitioner, an engineer, an artist, a merchant, a
politician, it is complete only when employed in the furthering of some interest in life—health,
wealth, beauty, goodness, success, or what you will.
Contempt for theory
For the great majority of men under ordinary circumstances, the practical exigencies of life are
almost, if not quite, coercive. Their main business is the proper conduct of their affairs.
Whatever is of significance only as affording scope for thinking is pallid and remote—almost
artificial. Hence the contempt felt by the practical and successful executive for the "mere
theorist"; hence his conviction that certain things may be all very well in theory, but that they
will not do in practice; in general, the depreciatory way in which he uses the terms abstract,
theoretical, and intellectual—as distinct from intelligent.
But theory is highly practical
This attitude is justified, of course, under certain conditions. But depreciation of theory does not
contain the whole truth, as common or practical sense recognizes. There is such a thing, even
from the common-sense standpoint, as being "too practical," as being so intent upon the
immediately practical as not to see[Pg 139] beyond the end of one's nose or as to cut off the limb
upon which one is sitting. The question is one of limits, of degrees and adjustments, rather than
one of absolute separation. Truly practical men give their minds free play about a subject
without asking too closely at every point for the advantage to be gained; exclusive preoccupation
with matters of use and application so narrows the horizon as in the long run to defeat itself. It
does not pay to tether one's thoughts to the post of use with too short a rope. Power in action
requires some largeness and imaginativeness of vision. Men must at least have enough interest in
thinking for the sake of thinking to escape the limits of routine and custom. Interest in
kn
owledge for the sake of knowledge, in thinking for the sake of the free play of thought, is
necessary then to the emancipation of practical life—to make it rich and progressive.
We may now recur to the pedagogic maxim of going from the concrete to the abstract.
Begin with the concrete means begin with practical manipulations
1. Since the concrete denotes thinking applied to activities for the sake of dealing effectively
with the difficulties that present themselves practically, "beginning with the concrete" signifies
that we should at the outset make much of doing; especially, make much in occupations that are
not of a routine and mechanical kind and hence require intelligent selection and adaptation of
means and materials. We do not "follow the order of nature" when we multiply mere sensations
or accumulate physical objects. Instruction in number is not concrete merely because splints or
beans or dots are employed, while whenever the use and bearing of number relations are clearly
perceived, the number idea is concrete even if figures alone are used. Just what sort of[Pg 140]
symbol it is best to use at a given time—whether blocks, or lines, or figures—is entirely a matter
of adjustment to the given case. If physical things used in teaching number or geography or
anything else do not leave the mind illuminated with recognition of a meaning beyond
themselves, the instruction that uses them is as abstract as that which doles out ready-made
definitions and rules; for it distracts attention from ideas to mere physical excitations.
Confusion of the concrete with the sensibly isolated
The conception that we have only to put before the senses particular physical objects in order to
impress certain ideas upon the mind amounts almost to a superstition. The introduction of object
lessons and sense-training scored a distinct advance over the prior method of linguistic symbols,
and this advance tended to blind educators to the fact that only a halfway step had been taken.
Things and sensations develop the child, indeed, but only because he uses them in mastering his
body and in the scheme of his activities. Appropriate continuous occupations or activities
involve the use of natural materials, tools, modes of energy, and do it in a way that compels
thinking as to what they mean, how they are related to one another and to the realization of ends;
while the mere isolated presentation of things remains barren and dead. A few generations ago
the great obstacle in the way of reform of primary education was belief in the almost magical
efficacy of the symbols of language (including number) to produce mental training; at present,
belief in the efficacy of objects just as objects, blocks the way. As frequently happens, the better
is an enemy of the best.
Transfer of interest to intellectual matters
2. The interest in results, in the successful carrying on of an activity, should be gradually
transferred to study[Pg 141] of objects—their properties, consequences, structures, causes, and
effects. The adult when at work in his life calling is rarely free to devote time or energy—
beyond the necessities of his immediate action—to the study of what he deals with. (Ante, p. 43.)
The educative activities of childhood should be so arranged that direct interest in the activity and
its outcome create a demand for attention to matters that have a more and more indirect and
remote connection with the original activity. The direct interest in carpentering or shop work
should yield organically and gradually an interest in geometric and mechanical problems. The
interest in cooking should grow into an interest in chemical experimentation and in the
physiology and hygiene of bodily growth. The making of pictures should pass to an interest in
the technique of representation and the æsthetics of appreciation, and so on. This development is
what the term go signifies in the maxim "go from the concrete to the abstract"; it represents the
dynamic and truly educative factor of the process.
Development of delight in the activity of thinking
3. The outcome, the abstract to which education is to proceed, is an interest in intellectual
matters for their own sake, a delight in thinking for the sake of thinking. It is an old story that
acts and processes which at the outset are incidental to something else develop and maintain an
ab
sorbing value of their own. So it is with thinking and with knowledge; at first incidental to
results and adjustments beyond themselves, they attract more and more attention to themselves
till they become ends, not means. Children engage, unconstrainedly and continually, in reflective
inspection and testing for the sake of what they are interested in doing successfully. Habits of
thinking thus generated may increase in volume[Pg 142] and extent till they become of importance
on their own account.
Examples of the transition
The three instances cited in Chapter Six represented an ascending cycle from the practical to the
theoretical. Taking thought to keep a personal engagement is obviously of the concrete kind.
Endeavoring to work out the meaning of a certain part of a boat is an instance of an intermediate
kind. The reason for the existence and position of the pole is a practical reason, so that to the
architect the problem was purely concrete—the maintenance of a certain system of action. But
fo
r the passenger on the boat, the problem was theoretical, more or less speculative. It made no
difference to his reaching his destination whether he worked out the meaning of the pole. The
third case, that of the appearance and movement of the bubbles, illustrates a strictly theoretical or
ab
stract case. No overcoming of physical obstacles, no adjustment of external means to ends, is
at stake. Curiosity, intellectual curiosity, is challenged by a seemingly anomalous occurrence;
and thinking tries simply to account for an apparent exception in terms of recognized principles.
Theoretical knowledge never the whole end
(i) Abstract thinking, it should be noted, represents an end, not the end. The power of sustained
thinking on matters remote from direct use is an outgrowth of practical and immediate modes of
thought, but not a substitute for them. The educational end is not the destruction of power to
think so as to surmount obstacles and adjust means and ends; it is not its replacement by abstract
reflection. Nor is theoretical thinking a higher type of thinking than practical. A person who has
at command both types of thinking is of a higher order than he who possesses only one. Methods
that in de[Pg 143]veloping abstract intellectual abilities weaken habits of practical or concrete
thinking, fall as much short of the educational ideal as do the methods that in cultivating ability
to plan, to invent, to arrange, to forecast, fail to secure some delight in thinking irrespective of
practical consequences.
Nor that most congenial to the majority of pupils
(ii) Educators should also note the very great individual differences that exist; they should not try
to force one pattern and model upon all. In many (probably the majority) the executive tendency,
the habit of mind that thinks for purposes of conduct and achievement, not for the sake of
kn
owing, remains dominant to the end. Engineers, lawyers, doctors, merchants, are much more
numerous in adult life than scholars, scientists, and philosophers. While education should strive
to make men who, however prominent their professional interests and aims, partake of the spirit
of the scholar, philosopher, and scientist, no good reason appears why education should esteem
the one mental habit inherently superior to the other, and deliberately try to transform the type
from practical to theoretical. Have not our schools (as already suggested, p. 49) been one-sidedly
devoted to the more abstract type of thinking, thus doing injustice to the majority of pupils? Has
not the idea of a "liberal" and "humane" education tended too often in practice to the production
of technical, because overspecialized, thinkers?
Aim of education is a working balance
The aim of education should be to secure a balanced interaction of the two types of mental
attitude, having sufficient regard to the disposition of the individual not to hamper and cripple
whatever powers are naturally strong in him. The narrowness of individuals of strong concrete
bent needs to be liberalized. Every oppor[Pg 144]tunity that occurs within their practical activities
fo
r developing curiosity and susceptibility to intellectual problems should be seized. Violence is
not done to natural disposition, but the latter is broadened. As regards the smaller number of
those who have a taste for abstract, purely intellectual topics, pains should be taken to multiply
opportunities and demands for the application of ideas; for translating symbolic truths into terms
of social life and its ends. Every human being has both capabilities, and every individual will be
more effective and happier if both powers are developed in easy and close interaction with each
other.[Pg 145]
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EMPIRICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THINKING
§ 1. Empirical Thinking
Empirical thinking depends on past habits
Apart from the development of scientific method, inferences depend upon habits that have been
built up under the influence of a number of particular experiences not themselves arranged for
logical purposes. A says, "It will probably rain to-morrow." B asks, "Why do you think so?" and
A replies, "Because the sky was lowering at sunset." When B asks, "What has that to do with it?"
A responds, "I do not know, but it generally does rain after such a sunset." He does not perceive
any connection between the appearance of the sky and coming rain; he is not aware of any
continuity in the facts themselves—any law or principle, as we usually say. He simply, from
frequently recurring conjunctions of the events, has associated them so that when he sees one he
thinks of the other. One suggests the other, or is associated with it. A man may believe it will
rain to-morrow because he has consulted the barometer; but if he has no conception how the
height of the mercury column (or the position of an index moved by its rise and fall) is
connected with variations of atmospheric pressure, and how these in turn are connected with the
amount of moisture in the air, his belief in the likelihood of rain is purely empirical. When men
lived in the open and got their living by hunting, fishing, or[Pg 146] pasturing flocks, the detection
of the signs and indications of weather changes was a matter of great importance. A body of
proverbs and maxims, forming an extensive section of traditionary folklore, was developed. But
as long as there was no understanding why or how certain events were signs, as long as foresight
and weather shrewdness rested simply upon repeated conjunction among facts, beliefs about the
weather were thoroughly empirical.
It is fairly adequate in some matters,
In similar fashion learned men in the Orient learned to predict, with considerable accuracy, the
recurrent positions of the planets, the sun and the moon, and to foretell the time of eclipses,
without understanding in any degree the laws of the movements of heavenly bodies—that is,
without having a notion of the continuities existing among the facts themselves. They had
learned from repeated observations that things happened in about such and such a fashion. Till a
comparatively recent time, the truths of medicine were mainly in the same condition. Experience
had shown that "upon the whole," "as a rule," "generally or usually speaking," certain results
fo
llowed certain remedies, when symptoms were given. Our beliefs about human nature in
individuals (psychology) and in masses (sociology) are still very largely of a purely empirical
sort. Even the science of geometry, now frequently reckoned a typical rational science, began,
among the Egyptians, as an accumulation of recorded observations about methods of
ap
proximate mensuration of land surfaces; and only gradually assumed, among the Greeks,
scientific form.
The disadvantages of purely empirical thinking are obvious.[Pg 147]
but is very apt to lead to false beliefs,
1. While many empirical conclusions are, roughly speaking, correct; while they are exact enough
to be of great help in practical life; while the presages of a weatherwise sailor or hunter may be
more accurate, within a certain restricted range, than those of a scientist who relies wholly upon
scientific observations and tests; while, indeed, empirical observations and records furnish the
raw or crude material of scientific knowledge, yet the empirical method affords no way of
discriminating between right and wrong conclusions. Hence it is responsible for a multitude of
false beliefs. The technical designation for one of the commonest fallacies is post hoc, ergo
propter hoc; the belief that because one thing comes after another, it comes because of the other.
Now this fallacy of method is the animating principle of empirical conclusions, even when
correct—the correctness being almost as much a matter of good luck as of method. That potatoes
should be planted only during the crescent moon, that near the sea people are born at high tide
and die at low tide, that a comet is an omen of danger, that bad luck follows the cracking of a
mirror, that a patent medicine cures a disease—these and a thousand like notions are asseverated
on the basis of empirical coincidence and conjunction. Moreover, habits of expectation and
belief are formed otherwise than by a number of repeated similar cases.
and does not enable us to cope with the novel,
2. The more numerous the experienced instances and the closer the watch kept upon them, the
greater is the trustworthiness of constant conjunction as evidence of connection among the things
themselves. Many of our most important beliefs still have only this sort of warrant. No one can
yet tell, with certainty, the neces[Pg 148]sary cause of old age or of death—which are empirically
the most certain of all expectations. But even the most reliable beliefs of this type fail when they
confront the novel. Since they rest upon past uniformities, they are useless when further
experience departs in any considerable measure from ancient incident and wonted precedent.
Empirical inference follows the grooves and ruts that custom wears, and has no track to follow
when the groove disappears. So important is this aspect of the matter that Clifford found the
difference between ordinary skill and scientific thought right here. "Skill enables a man to deal
with the same circumstances that he has met before, scientific thought enables him to deal with
different circumstances that he has never met before." And he goes so far as to define scientific
thinking as "the application of old experience to new circumstances."
and leads to laziness and presumption,
3. We have not yet made the acquaintance of the most harmful feature of the empirical method.
Mental inertia, laziness, unjustifiable conservatism, are its probable accompaniments. Its general
effect upon mental attitude is more serious than even the specific wrong conclusions in which it
has landed. Wherever the chief dependence in forming inferences is upon the conjunctions
observed in past experience, failures to agree with the usual order are slurred over, cases of
successful confirmation are exaggerated. Since the mind naturally demands some principle of
continuity, some connecting link between separate facts and causes, forces are arbitrarily
invented for that purpose. Fantastic and mythological explanations are resorted to in order to
supply missing links. The pump brings water because nature abhors a vacuum; opium makes
men sleep because it has a dormi[Pg 149]tive potency; we recollect a past event because we have a
fa
culty of memory. In the history of the progress of human knowledge, out and out myths
accompany the first stage of empiricism; while "hidden essences" and "occult forces" mark its
second stage. By their very nature, these "causes" escape observation, so that their explanatory
value can be neither confirmed nor refuted by further observation or experience. Hence belief in
them becomes purely traditionary. They give rise to doctrines which, inculcated and handed
down, become dogmas; subsequent inquiry and reflection are actually stifled. (Ante, p. 23.)
and to dogmatism
Certain men or classes of men come to be the accepted guardians and transmitters—
instructors—of established doctrines. To question the beliefs is to question their authority; to
accept the beliefs is evidence of loyalty to the powers that be, a proof of good citizenship.
Passivity, docility, acquiescence, come to be primal intellectual virtues. Facts and events
presenting novelty and variety are slighted, or are sheared down till they fit into the Procrustean
bed of habitual belief. Inquiry and doubt are silenced by citation of ancient laws or a multitude
of miscellaneous and unsifted cases. This attitude of mind generates dislike of change, and the
resulting aversion to novelty is fatal to progress. What will not fit into the established canons is
outlawed; men who make new discoveries are objects of suspicion and even of persecution.
Beliefs that perhaps originally were the products of fairly extensive and careful observation are
stereotyped into fixed traditions and semi-sacred dogmas accepted simply upon authority, and
are mixed with fantastic conceptions that happen to have won the acceptance of authorities.[Pg 150]
§ 2. Scientific Method
Scientific thinking analyzes the present case
In contrast with the empirical method stands the scientific. Scientific method replaces the
repeated conjunction or coincidence of separate facts by discovery of a single comprehensive
fa
ct, effecting this replacement by breaking up the coarse or gross facts of observation into a
number of minuter processes not directly accessible to perception.
Illustration from suction of empirical method,
If a layman were asked why water rises from the cistern when an ordinary pump is worked, he
would doubtless answer, "By suction." Suction is regarded as a force like heat or pressure. If
such a person is confronted by the fact that water rises with a suction pump only about thirtythree feet, he easily disposes of the difficulty on the ground that all forces vary in their intensities
and finally reach a limit at which they cease to operate. The variation with elevation above the
sea level of the height to which water can be pumped is either unnoticed, or, if noted, is
dismissed as one of the curious anomalies in which nature abounds.
of scientific method
Relies on differences,
Now the scientist advances by assuming that what seems to observation to be a single total fact
is in truth complex. He attempts, therefore, to break up the single fact of water-rising-in-the-pipe
into a number of lesser facts. His method of proceeding is by varying conditions one by one so
fa
r as possible, and noting just what happens when a given condition is eliminated. There are
two methods for varying conditions.[24] The first is an extension of the empirical method of
observation. It consists in comparing very carefully the results of a great number of observations
which have occurred[Pg 151] under accidentally different conditions. The difference in the rise of
the water at different heights above the sea level, and its total cessation when the distance to be
lifted is, even at sea level, more than thirty-three feet, are emphasized, instead of being slurred
over. The purpose is to find out what special conditions are present when the effect occurs and
ab
sent when it fails to occur. These special conditions are then substituted for the gross fact, or
regarded as its principle—the key to understanding it.
and creates differences
The method of analysis by comparing cases is, however, badly handicapped; it can do nothing
until it is presented with a certain number of diversified cases. And even when different cases are
at hand, it will be questionable whether they vary in just these respects in which it is important
that they should vary in order to throw light upon the question at issue. The method is passive
and dependent upon external accidents. Hence the superiority of the active or experimental
method. Even a small number of observations may suggest an explanation—a hypothesis or
theory. Working upon this suggestion, the scientist may then intentionally vary conditions and
note what happens. If the empirical observations have suggested to him the possibility of a
connection between air pressure on the water and the rising of the water in the tube where air
pressure is absent, he deliberately empties the air out of the vessel in which the water is
contained and notes that suction no longer works; or he intentionally increases atmospheric
pressure on the water and notes the result. He institutes experiments to calculate the weight of air
at the sea level and at various levels above, and compares the results of reasoning based upon the
pressure of air[Pg 152] of these various weights upon a certain volume of water with the results
actually obtained by observation. Observations formed by variation of conditions on the basis of
some idea or theory constitute experiment. Experiment is the chief resource in scientific
reasoning because it facilitates the picking out of significant elements in a gross, vague whole.
Analysis and synthesis again
Experimental thinking, or scientific reasoning, is thus a conjoint process of analysis and
synthesis, or, in less technical language, of discrimination and assimilation or identification. The
gross fact of water rising when the suction valve is worked is resolved or discriminated into a
number of independent variables, some of which had never before been observed or even
thought of in connection with the fact. One of these facts, the weight of the atmosphere, is then
selectively seized upon as the key to the entire phenomenon. This disentangling constitutes
analysis. But atmosphere and its pressure or weight is a fact not confined to this single instance.
It is a fact familiar or at least discoverable as operative in a great number of other events. In
fixing upon this imperceptible and minute fact as the essence or key to the elevation of water by
the pump, the pump-fact has thus been assimilated to a whole group of ordinary facts from
which it was previously isolated. This assimilation constitutes synthesis. Moreover, the fact of
atmospheric pressure is itself a case of one of the commonest of all facts—weight or
gravitational force. Conclusions that apply to the common fact of weight are thus transferable to
the consideration and interpretation of the relatively rare and exceptional case of the suction of
water. The suction pump is seen to be a case of the same kind or sort as the siphon, the[Pg 153]
barometer, the rising of the balloon, and a multitude of other things with which at first sight it
has no connection at all. This is another instance of the synthetic or assimilative phase of
scientific thinking.
If we revert to the advantages of scientific over empirical thinking, we find that we now have the
clue to them.
Lessened liability to error
(a) The increased security, the added factor of certainty or proof, is due to the substitution of the
de
tailed and specific fact of atmospheric pressure for the gross and total and relatively
miscellaneous fact of suction. The latter is complex, and its complexity is due to many unknown
and unspecified factors; hence, any statement about it is more or less random, and likely to be
defeated by any unforeseen variation of circumstances. Comparatively, at least, the minute and
detailed fact of air pressure is a measurable and definite fact—one that can be picked out and
managed with assurance.
Ability to manage the new
(b) As analysis accounts for the added certainty, so synthesis accounts for ability to cope with
the novel and variable. Weight is a much commoner fact than atmospheric weight, and this in
turn is a much commoner fact than the workings of the suction pump. To be able to substitute the
common and frequent fact for that which is relatively rare and peculiar is to reduce the
seemingly novel and exceptional to cases of a general and familiar principle, and thus to bring
them under control for interpretation and prediction.
As Professor James says: "Think of heat as motion and whatever is true of motion will be true of
heat; but we have a hundred experiences of motion for every one of heat. Think of rays passing
through this lens as cases of bending toward the perpendicular, and you[Pg 154] substitute for the
comparatively unfamiliar lens the very familiar notion of a particular change in direction of a
line, of which notion every day brings us countless examples."[25]
Interest in the future or in progress
(c) The change of attitude from conservative reliance upon the past, upon routine and custom, to
fa
ith in progress through the intelligent regulation of existing conditions, is, of course, the reflex
of the scientific method of experimentation. The empirical method inevitably magnifies the
influences of the past; the experimental method throws into relief the possibilities of the future.
The empirical method says, "Wait till there is a sufficient number of cases;" the experimental
method says, "Produce the cases." The former depends upon nature's accidentally happening to
present us with certain conjunctions of circumstances; the latter deliberately and intentionally
endeavors to bring about the conjunction. By this method the notion of progress secures
scientific warrant.
Physical versus logical force
Ordinary experience is controlled largely by the direct strength and intensity of various
occurrences. What is bright, sudden, loud, secures notice and is given a conspicuous rating.
What is dim, feeble, and continuous gets ignored, or is regarded as of slight importance.
Customary experience tends to the control of thinking by considerations of direct and immediate
strength rather than by those of importance in the long run. Animals without the power of
fo
recast and planning must, upon the whole, respond to the stimuli that are most urgent at the
moment, or cease to exist. These stimuli lose nothing of their direct urgency and clamorous
insistency when the thinking power develops; and yet thinking[Pg 155] demands the subordination
of the immediate stimulus to the remote and distant. The feeble and the minute may be of much
greater importance than the glaring and the big. The latter may be signs of a force that is already
exhausting itself; the former may indicate the beginnings of a process in which the whole fortune
of the individual is involved. The prime necessity for scientific thought is that the thinker be
freed from the tyranny of sense stimuli and habit, and this emancipation is also the necessary
condition of progress.
Illustration from moving water
Consider the following quotation: "When it first occurred to a reflecting mind that moving water
had a property identical with human or brute force, namely, the property of setting other masses
in motion, overcoming inertia and resistance,—when the sight of the stream suggested through
this point of likeness the power of the animal,—a new addition was made to the class of prime
movers, and when circumstances permitted, this power could become a substitute for the others.
It may seem to the modern understanding, familiar with water wheels and drifting rafts, that the
similarity here was an extremely obvious one. But if we put ourselves back into an early state of
mind, when running water affected the mind by its brilliancy, its roar and irregular devastation,
we may easily suppose that to identify this with animal muscular energy was by no means an
obvious effort."[26]
Value of abstraction
If we add to these obvious sensory features the various social customs and expectations which
fix the attitude of the individual, the evil of the subjection of free and fertile suggestion to
empirical considerations be[Pg 156]comes clear. A certain power of abstraction, of deliberate
turning away from the habitual responses to a situation, was required before men could be
emancipated to follow up suggestions that in the end are fruitful.
Experience as inclusive of thought
In short, the term experience may be interpreted either with reference to the empirical or the
experimental attitude of mind. Experience is not a rigid and closed thing; it is vital, and hence
growing. When dominated by the past, by custom and routine, it is often opposed to the
reasonable, the thoughtful. But experience also includes the reflection that sets us free from the
limiting influence of sense, appetite, and tradition. Experience may welcome and assimilate all
that the most exact and penetrating thought discovers. Indeed, the business of education might be
defined as just such an emancipation and enlargement of experience. Education takes the
individual while he is relatively plastic, before he has become so indurated by isolated
experiences as to be rendered hopelessly empirical in his habit of mind. The attitude of
childhood is naïve, wondering, experimental; the world of man and nature is new. Right methods
of education preserve and perfect this attitude, and thereby short-circuit for the individual the
slow progress of the race, eliminating the waste that comes from inert routine.[Pg 157]
PART THREE: THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
CHAPTER TWELVE
ACTIVITY AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
In this chapter we shall gather together and amplify considerations that have already been
advanced, in various passages of the preceding pages, concerning the relation of action to
thought. We shall follow, though not with exactness, the order of development in the unfolding
human being.
§ 1. The Early Stage of Activity
1. The baby's problem determines his thinking
The sight of a baby often calls out the question: "What do you suppose he is thinking about?" By
the nature of the case, the question is unanswerable in detail; but, also by the nature of the case,
we may be sure about a baby's chief interest. His primary problem is mastery of his body as a
tool of securing comfortable and effective adjustments to his surroundings, physical and social.
The child has to learn to do almost everything: to see, to hear, to reach, to handle, to balance the
body, to creep, to walk, and so on. Even if it be true that human beings have even more
instinctive reactions than lower animals, it is also true that instinctive tendencies are much less
perfect in men, and that most of them are[Pg 158] of little use till they are intelligently combined
and directed. A little chick just out of the shell will after a few trials peck at and grasp grains of
fo
od with its beak as well as at any later time. This involves a complicated coördination of the
eye and the head. An infant does not even begin to reach definitely for things that the eye sees
till he is several months old, and even then several weeks' practice is required before he learns
the adjustment so as neither to overreach nor to underreach. It may not be literally true that the
child will grasp for the moon, but it is true that he needs much practice before he can tell
whether an object is within reach or not. The arm is thrust out instinctively in response to a
stimulus from the eye, and this tendency is the origin of the ability to reach and grasp exactly
and quickly; but nevertheless final mastery requires observing and selecting the successful
movements, and arranging them in view of an end. These operations of conscious selection and
arrangement constitute thinking, though of a rudimentary type.
Mastery of the body is an intellectual problem
Since mastery of the bodily organs is necessary for all later developments, such problems are
both interesting and important, and solving them supplies a very genuine training of thinking
power. The joy the child shows in learning to use his limbs, to translate what he sees into what
he handles, to connect sounds with sights, sights with taste and touch, and the rapidity with
which intelligence grows in the first year and a half of life (the time during which the more
fu
ndamental problems of the use of the organism are mastered), are sufficient evidence that the
development of physical control is not a physical but an intellectual achievement.
2. The problem of social adjustment and intercourse
Although in the early months the child is mainly oc[Pg 159]cupied in learning to use his body to
accommodate himself to physical conditions in a comfortable way and to use things skillfully
and effectively, yet social adjustments are very important. In connection with parents, nurse,
brother, and sister, the child learns the signs of satisfaction of hunger, of removal of discomfort,
of the approach of agreeable light, color, sound, and so on. His contact with physical things is
regulated by persons, and he soon distinguishes persons as the most important and interesting of
all the objects with which he has to do. Speech, the accurate adaptation of sounds heard to the
movements of tongue and lips, is, however, the great instrument of social adaptation; and with
the development of speech (usually in the second year) adaptation of the baby's activities to and
with those of other persons gives the keynote of mental life. His range of possible activities is
indefinitely widened as he watches what other persons do, and as he tries to understand and to do
what they encourage him to attempt. The outline pattern of mental life is thus set in the first four
or five years. Years, centuries, generations of invention and planning, may have gone to the
development of the performances and occupations of the adults surrounding the child. Yet for
him their activities are direct stimuli; they are part of his natural environment; they are carried on
in physical terms that appeal to his eye, ear, and touch. He cannot, of course, appropriate their
meaning directly through his senses; but they furnish stimuli to which he responds, so that his
attention is focussed upon a higher order of materials and of problems. Were it not for this
process by which the achievements of one generation form the stimuli that direct the activities of
the next, the story of civilization[Pg 160] would be writ in water, and each generation would have
laboriously to make for itself, if it could, its way out of savagery.
Social adjustment results in imitation but is not caused by it
Imitation is one (though only one, see p. 47) of the means by which the activities of adults
supply stimuli which are so interesting, so varied, so complex, and so novel, as to occasion a
rapid progress of thought. Mere imitation, however, would not give rise to thinking; if we could
learn like parrots by simply copying the outward acts of others, we should never have to think;
nor should we know, after we had mastered the copied act, what was the meaning of the thing
we had done. Educators (and psychologists) have often assumed that acts which reproduce the
behavior of others are acquired merely by imitation. But a child rarely learns by conscious
imitation; and to say that his imitation is unconscious is to say that it is not from his standpoint
imitation at all. The word, the gesture, the act, the occupation of another, falls in line with some
impulse already active and suggests some satisfactory mode of expression, some end in which it
may find fulfillment. Having this end of his own, the child then notes other persons, as he notes
natural events, to get further suggestions as to means of its realization. He selects some of the
means he observes, tries them on, finds them successful or unsuccessful, is confirmed or
weakened in his belief in their value, and so continues selecting, arranging, adapting, testing, till
he can accomplish what he wishes. The onlooker may then observe the resemblance of this act to
some act of an adult, and conclude that it was acquired by imitation, while as a matter of fact it
was acquired by attention, observation, selection, experimentation, and confirmation by results.
Only[Pg 161] because this method is employed is there intellectual discipline and an educative
result. The presence of adult activities plays an enormous rôle in the intellectual growth of the
child because they add to the natural stimuli of the world new stimuli which are more exactly
adapted to the needs of a human being, which are richer, better organized, more complex in
range, permitting more flexible adaptations, and calling out novel reactions. But in utilizing
these stimuli the child follows the same methods that he uses when he is forced to think in order
to master his body.
§ 2. Play, Work, and Allied Forms of Activity
Play indicates the domination of activity by meanings or ideas
Organization of ideas involved in play
When things become signs, when they gain a representative capacity as standing for other things,
play is transformed from mere physical exuberance into an activity involving a mental factor. A
little girl who had broken her doll was seen to perform with the leg of the doll all the operations
of washing, putting to bed, and fondling, that she had been accustomed to perform with the
entire doll. The part stood for the whole; she reacted not to the stimulus sensibly present, but to
the meaning suggested by the sense object. So children use a stone for a table, leaves for plates,
acorns for cups. So they use their dolls, their trains, their blocks, their other toys. In manipulating
them, they are living not with the physical things, but in the large world of meanings, natural and
social, evoked by these things. So when children play horse, play store, play house or making
calls, they are subordinating the physically present to the ideally signified. In this way, a world
of meanings, a store of concepts (so fundamental to all intellectual achievement), is defined and
built up.[Pg 162] Moreover, not only do meanings thus become familiar acquaintances, but they are
organized, arranged in groups, made to cohere in connected ways. A play and a story blend
insensibly into each other. The most fanciful plays of children rarely lose all touch with the
mutual fitness and pertinency of various meanings to one another; the "freest" plays observe
some principles of coherence and unification. They have a beginning, middle, and end. In games,
ru
les of order run through various minor acts and bind them into a connected whole. The rhythm,
the competition, and coöperation involved in most plays and games also introduce organization.
There is, then, nothing mysterious or mystical in the discovery made by Plato and remade by
Froebel that play is the chief, almost the only, mode of education for the child in the years of
later infancy.
The playful attitude
Playfulness is a more important consideration than play. The former is an attitude of mind; the
latter is a passing outward manifestation of this attitude. When things are treated simply as
vehicles of suggestion, what is suggested overrides the thing. Hence the playful attitude is one of
freedom. The person is not bound to the physical traits of things, nor does he care whether a
thing really means (as we say) what he takes it to represent. When the child plays horse with a
broom and cars with chairs, the fact that the broom does not really represent a horse, or a chair a
locomotive, is of no account. In order, then, that playfulness may not terminate in arbitrary
fa
ncifulness and in building up an imaginary world alongside the world of actual things, it is
necessary that the play attitude should gradually pass into a work attitude.
The work attitude is interested in means and ends
What is work—work not as mere external perform[Pg 163]ance, but as attitude of mind? It signifies
that the person is not content longer to accept and to act upon the meanings that things suggest,
but demands congruity of meaning with the things themselves. In the natural course of growth,
children come to find irresponsible make-believe plays inadequate. A fiction is too easy a way
out to afford content. There is not enough stimulus to call forth satisfactory mental response.
When this point is reached, the ideas that things suggest must be applied to the things with some
regard to fitness. A small cart, resembling a "real" cart, with "real" wheels, tongue, and body,
meets the mental demand better than merely making believe that anything which comes to hand
is a cart. Occasionally to take part in setting a "real" table with "real" dishes brings more reward
than forever to make believe a flat stone is a table and that leaves are dishes. The interest may
still center in the meanings, the things may be of importance only as amplifying a certain
meaning. So far the attitude is one of play. But the meaning is now of such a character that it
must find appropriate embodiment in actual things.
The dictionary does not permit us to call such activities work. Nevertheless, they represent a
genuine passage of play into work. For work (as a mental attitude, not as mere external
performance) means interest in the adequate embodiment of a meaning (a suggestion, purpose,
aim) in objective form through the use of appropriate materials and appliances. Such an attitude
takes advantage of the meanings aroused and built up in free play, but controls their
de
velopment by seeing to it that they are applied to things in ways consistent with the observable
structure of the things themselves.[Pg 164]
and in processes on account of their results
The point of this distinction between play and work may be cleared up by comparing it with a
more usual way of stating the difference. In play activity, it is said, the interest is in the activity
fo
r its own sake; in work, it is in the product or result in which the activity terminates. Hence the
fo
rm
er is purely free, while the latter is tied down by the end to be achieved. When the
difference is stated in this sharp fashion, there is almost always introduced a false, unnatural
separation between process and product, between activity and its achieved outcome. The true
distinction is not between an interest in activity for its own sake and interest in the external result
of that activity, but between an interest in an activity just as it flows on from moment to moment,
and an interest in an activity as tending to a culmination, to an outcome, and therefore possessing
a thread of continuity binding together its successive stages. Both may equally exemplify interest
in an activity "for its own sake"; but in one case the activity in which the interest resides is more
or less casual, following the accident of circumstance and whim, or of dictation; in the other, the
activity is enriched by the sense that it leads somewhere, that it amounts to something.
Consequences of the sharp separation of play and work
Were it not that the false theory of the relation of the play and the work attitudes has been
connected with unfortunate modes of school practice, insistence upon a truer view might seem
an unnecessary refinement. But the sharp break that unfortunately prevails between the
kindergarten and the grades is evidence that the theoretical distinction has practical implications.
Under the title of play, the former is rendered unduly symbolic, fanciful, sentimental, and
arbitrary; while under the antithetical caption of work the latter con[Pg 165]tains many tasks
externally assigned. The former has no end and the latter an end so remote that only the
educator, not the child, is aware that it is an end.
There comes a time when children must extend and make more exact their acquaintance with
existing things; must conceive ends and consequences with sufficient definiteness to guide their
actions by them, and must acquire some technical skill in selecting and arranging means to
realize these ends. Unless these factors are gradually introduced in the earlier play period, they
must be introduced later abruptly and arbitrarily, to the manifest disadvantage of both the earlier
and the later stages.
False notions of imagination and utility
The sharp opposition of play and work is usually associated with false notions of utility and
imagination. Activity that is directed upon matters of home and neighborhood interest is
depreciated as merely utilitarian. To let the child wash dishes, set the table, engage in cooking,
cut and sew dolls' clothes, make boxes that will hold "real things," and construct his own
playthings by using hammer and nails, excludes, so it is said, the æsthetic and appreciative
fa
ctor, eliminates imagination, and subjects the child's development to material and practical
concerns; while (so it is said) to reproduce symbolically the domestic relationships of birds and
other animals, of human father and mother and child, of workman and tradesman, of knight,
soldier, and magistrate, secures a liberal exercise of mind, of great moral as well as intellectual
value. It has been even stated that it is over-physical and utilitarian if a child plants seeds and
takes care of growing plants in the kindergarten; while reproducing dramatically operations of
planting, cultivating, reaping, and so on, either[Pg 166] with no physical materials or with symbolic
representatives, is highly educative to the imagination and to spiritual appreciation. Toy dolls,
trains of cars, boats, and engines are rigidly excluded, and the employ of cubes, balls, and other
symbols for representing these social activities is recommended on the same ground. The more
unfitted the physical object for its imagined purpose, such as a cube for a boat, the greater is the
supposed appeal to the imagination.
Imagination a medium of realizing the absent and significant
There are several fallacies in this way of thinking. (a) The healthy imagination deals not with the
unreal, but with the mental realization of what is suggested. Its exercise is not a flight into the
purely fanciful and ideal, but a method of expanding and filling in what is real. To the child the
homely activities going on about him are not utilitarian devices for accomplishing physical ends;
they exemplify a wonderful world the depths of which he has not sounded, a world full of the
mystery and promise that attend all the doings of the grown-ups whom he admires. However
prosaic this world may be to the adults who find its duties routine affairs, to the child it is fraught
with social meaning. To engage in it is to exercise the imagination in constructing an experience
of wider value than any the child has yet mastered.
Only the already experienced can be symbolized
(b) Educators sometimes think children are reacting to a great moral or spiritual truth when the
children's reactions are largely physical and sensational. Children have great powers of dramatic
simulation, and their physical bearing may seem (to adults prepossessed with a philosophic
theory) to indicate they have been impressed with some lesson of chivalry, devotion, or nobility,
when the children themselves are occupied only[Pg 167] with transitory physical excitations. To
symbolize great truths far beyond the child's range of actual experience is an impossibility, and
to attempt it is to invite love of momentary stimulation.
Useful work is not necessarily labor
(c) Just as the opponents of play in education always conceive of play as mere amusement, so
the opponents of direct and useful activities confuse occupation with labor. The adult is
acquainted with responsible labor upon which serious financial results depend. Consequently he
seeks relief, relaxation, amusement. Unless children have prematurely worked for hire, unless
they have come under the blight of child labor, no such division exists for them. Whatever
ap
peals to them at all, appeals directly on its own account. There is no contrast between doing
things for utility and for fun. Their life is more united and more wholesome. To suppose that
activities customarily performed by adults only under the pressure of utility may not be done
perfectly freely and joyously by children indicates a lack of imagination. Not the thing done but
the quality of mind that goes into the doing settles what is utilitarian and what is unconstrained
and educative.
§ 3. Constructive Occupations
The historic growth of sciences out of occupations
The history of culture shows that mankind's scientific knowledge and technical abilities have
developed, especially in all their earlier stages, out of the fundamental problems of life. Anatomy
and physiology grew out of the practical needs of keeping healthy and active; geometry and
mechanics out of demands for measuring land, for building, and for making labor-saving
machines; astronomy has been closely connected with navigation, keeping record of the passage
of time; botany grew out[Pg 168] of the requirements of medicine and of agronomy; chemistry has
been associated with dyeing, metallurgy, and other industrial pursuits. In turn, modern industry
is almost wholly a matter of applied science; year by year the domain of routine and crude
empiricism is narrowed by the translation of scientific discovery into industrial invention. The
trolley, the telephone, the electric light, the steam engine, with all their revolutionary
consequences for social intercourse and control, are the fruits of science.
The intellectual possibilities of school occupations
These facts are full of educational significance. Most children are preëminently active in their
tendencies. The schools have also taken on—largely from utilitarian, rather than from strictly
educative reasons—a large number of active pursuits commonly grouped under the head of
manual training, including also school gardens, excursions, and various graphic arts. Perhaps the
most pressing problem of education at the present moment is to organize and relate these
subjects so that they will become instruments for forming alert, persistent, and fruitful
intellectual habits. That they take hold of the more primary and native equipment of children
(appealing to their desire to do) is generally recognized; that they afford great opportunity for
training in self-reliant and efficient social service is gaining acknowledgment. But they may also
be used for presenting typical problems to be solved by personal reflection and experimentation,
and by acquiring definite bodies of knowledge leading later to more specialized scientific
kn
owledge. There is indeed no magic by which mere physical activity or deft manipulation will
secure intellectual results. (See p. 43.) Manual subjects may be taught by routine, by dictation, or
by convention as readily[Pg 169] as bookish subjects. But intelligent consecutive work in
gardening, cooking, or weaving, or in elementary wood and iron, may be planned which will
inevitably result in students not only amassing information of practical and scientific importance
in botany, zoölogy, chemistry, physics, and other sciences, but (what is more significant) in their
becoming versed in methods of experimental inquiry and proof.
Reorganization of the course of study
That the elementary curriculum is overloaded is a common complaint. The only alternative to a
reactionary return to the educational traditions of the past lies in working out the intellectual
possibilities resident in the various arts, crafts, and occupations, and reorganizing the curriculum
accordingly. Here, more than elsewhere, are found the means by which the blind and routine
experience of the race may be transformed into illuminated and emancipated experiment.[Pg 170]
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LANGUAGE AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
§ 1. Language as the Tool of Thinking
Ambiguous position of language
Speech has such a peculiarly intimate connection with thought as to require special discussion.
Although the very word logic comes from logos (λογος), meaning indifferently both word or
speech, and thought or reason, yet "words, words, words" denote intellectual barrenness, a sham
of thought. Although schooling has language as its chief instrument (and often as its chief
matter) of study, educational reformers have for centuries brought their severest indictments
against the current use of language in the schools. The conviction that language is necessary to
thinking (is even identical with it) is met by the contention that language perverts and conceals
thought.
Language a necessary tool of thinking,
fo
r it alone fixes meanings
Three typical views have been maintained regarding the relation of thought and language: first,
that they are identical; second, that words are the garb or clothing of thought, necessary not for
thought but only for conveying it; and third (the view we shall here maintain) that while
language is not thought it is necessary for thinking as well as for its communication. When it is
said, however, that thinking is impossible without language, we must recall that language
includes much more than oral and written speech. Gestures, pictures, monuments, visual images,
finger movements—anything con[Pg 171]sciously employed as a sign is, logically, language. To
say that language is necessary for thinking is to say that signs are necessary. Thought deals not
with bare things, but with their meanings, their suggestions; and meanings, in order to be
ap
prehended, must be embodied in sensible and particular existences. Without meaning, things
are nothing but blind stimuli or chance sources of pleasure and pain; and since meanings are not
themselves tangible things, they must be anchored by attachment to some physical existence.
Existences that are especially set aside to fixate and convey meanings are signs or symbols. If a
man moves toward another to throw him out of the room, his movement is not a sign. If,
however, the man points to the door with his hand, or utters the sound go, his movement is
reduced to a vehicle of meaning: it is a sign or symbol. In the case of signs we care nothing for
what they are in themselves, but everything for what they signify and represent. Canis, hund,
chien, dog—it makes no difference what the outward thing is, so long as the meaning is
presented.
Limitations of natural symbols
Natural objects are signs of other things and events. Clouds stand for rain; a footprint represents
game or an enemy; a projecting rock serves to indicate minerals below the surface. The
limitations of natural signs are, however, great. (i) The physical or direct sense excitation tends
to distract attention from what is meant or indicated.[27] Almost every one will recall pointing out
to a kitten or puppy some object of food, only to have the animal devote himself to the hand
pointing, not to the thing pointed at. (ii) Where natural signs alone exist, we are mainly at the
mercy of external happenings; we[Pg 172] have to wait until the natural event presents itself in
order to be warned or advised of the possibility of some other event. (iii) Natural signs, not being
originally intended to be signs, are cumbrous, bulky, inconvenient, unmanageable.
Artificial signs overcome these restrictions.
It is therefore indispensable for any high development of thought that there should be also
intentional signs. Speech supplies the requirement. Gestures, sounds, written or printed forms,
are strictly physical existences, but their native value is intentionally subordinated to the value
they acquire as representative of meanings. (i) The direct and sensible value of faint sounds and
minute written or printed marks is very slight. Accordingly, attention is not distracted from their
representative function. (ii) Their production is under our direct control so that they may be
produced when needed. When we can make the word rain, we do not have to wait for some
physical forerunner of rain to call our thoughts in that direction. We cannot make the cloud; we
can make the sound, and as a token of meaning the sound serves the purpose as well as the
cloud. (iii) Arbitrary linguistic signs are convenient and easy to manage. They are compact,
portable, and delicate. As long as we live we breathe; and modifications by the muscles of throat
and mouth of the volume and quality of the air are simple, easy, and indefinitely controllable.
Bodily postures and gestures of the hand and arm are also employed as signs, but they are coarse
and unmanageable compared with modifications of breath to produce sounds. No wonder that
oral speech has been selected as the main stuff of intentional intellectual signs. Sounds, while
subtle, refined, and easily modifiable, are transitory. This defect is met by the system of
written[Pg 173] and printed words, appealing to the eye. Litera scripta manet.
Bearing in mind the intimate connection of meanings and signs (or language), we may note in
more detail what language does (1) for specific meanings, and (2) for the organization of
meanings.
I. Individual Meanings. A verbal sign (a) selects, detaches, a meaning from what is otherwise a
vague flux and blur (see p. 121); (b) it retains, registers, stores that meaning; and (c) applies it,
when needed, to the comprehension of other things. Combining these various functions in a
mixture of metaphors, we may say that a linguistic sign is a fence, a label, and a vehicle—all in
one.
A sign makes a meaning distinct
(a) Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague
cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems almost within reach, but is
elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it
is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it
stand out as an entity on its own account. When Emerson said that he would almost rather know
the true name, the poet's name, for a thing, than to know the thing itself, he presumably had this
irradiating and illuminating function of language in mind. The delight that children take in
demanding and learning the names of everything about them indicates that meanings are
becoming concrete individuals to them, so that their commerce with things is passing from the
physical to the intellectual plane. It is hardly surprising that savages attach a magic efficacy to
words. To name anything is to give it a title; to dignify and honor it by[Pg 174] raising it from a
mere physical occurrence to a meaning that is distinct and permanent. To know the names of
people and things and to be able to manipulate these names is, in savage lore, to be in possession
of their dignity and worth, to master them.
A sign preserves a meaning
(b) Things come and go; or we come and go, and either way things escape our notice. Our direct
sensible relation to things is very limited. The suggestion of meanings by natural signs is limited
to occasions of direct contact or vision. But a meaning fixed by a linguistic sign is conserved for
fu
ture use. Even if the thing is not there to represent the meaning, the word may be produced so
as to evoke the meaning. Since intellectual life depends on possession of a store of meanings, the
importance of language as a tool of preserving meanings cannot be overstated. To be sure, the
method of storage is not wholly aseptic; words often corrupt and modify the meanings they are
supposed to keep intact, but liability to infection is a price paid by every living thing for the
privilege of living.
A sign transfers a meaning
(c) When a meaning is detached and fixed by a sign, it is possible to use that meaning in a new
context and situation. This transfer and reapplication is the key to all judgment and inference. It
would little profit a man to recognize that a given particular cloud was the premonitor of a given
particular rainstorm if his recognition ended there, for he would then have to learn over and over
again, since the next cloud and the next rain are different events. No cumulative growth of
intelligence would occur; experience might form habits of physical adaptation but it would not
teach anything, for we should not be able to use a prior experience consciously to anticipate and
regulate a further experience. To be able to use[Pg 175] the past to judge and infer the new and
unknown implies that, although the past thing has gone, its meaning abides in such a way as to
be applicable in determining the character of the new. Speech forms are our great carriers: the
easy-running vehicles by which meanings are transported from experiences that no longer
concern us to those that are as yet dark and dubious.
Logical organization depends upon signs
II. Organization of Meanings. In emphasizing the importance of signs in relation to specific
meanings, we have overlooked another aspect, equally valuable. Signs not only mark off specific
or individual meanings, but they are also instruments of grouping meanings in relation to one
another. Words are not only names or titles of single meanings; they also form sentences in
which meanings are organized in relation to one another. When we say "That book is a
dictionary," or "That blur of light in the heavens is Halley's comet," we express a logical
connection—an act of classifying and defining that goes beyond the physical thing into the
logical region of genera and species, things and attributes. Propositions, sentences, bear the same
relation to judgments that distinct words, built up mainly by analyzing propositions in their
various types, bear to meanings or conceptions; and just as words imply a sentence, so a
sentence implies a larger whole of consecutive discourse into which it fits. As is often said,
grammar expresses the unconscious logic of the popular mind. The chief intellectual
classifications that constitute the working capital of thought have been built up for us by our
mother tongue. Our very lack of explicit consciousness in using language that we are employing
the intellectual systematizations of the race shows how thoroughly accustomed we have become
to its logical distinctions and groupings.[Pg 176]
§ 2. The Abuse of Linguistic Methods in Education
Teaching merely things, not educative
Taken literally, the maxim, "Teach things, not words," or "Teach things before words," would be
the negation of education; it would reduce mental life to mere physical and sensible adjustments.
Learning, in the proper sense, is not learning things, but the meanings of things, and this process
involves the use of signs, or language in its generic sense. In like fashion, the warfare of some
educational reformers against symbols, if pushed to extremes, involves the destruction of the
intellectual life, since this lives, moves, and has its being in those processes of definition,
ab
straction, generalization, and classification that are made possible by symbols alone.
Nevertheless, these contentions of educational reformers have been needed. The liability of a
thing to abuse is in proportion to the value of its right use.
But words separated from things are not true signs
Symbols are themselves, as pointed out above, particular, physical, sensible existences, like any
other things. They are symbols only by virtue of what they suggest and represent, i.e. meanings.
(i) They stand for these meanings to any individual only when he has had experience of some
situation to which these meanings are actually relevant. Words can detach and preserve a
meaning only when the meaning has been first involved in our own direct intercourse with
things. To attempt to give a meaning through a word alone without any dealings with a thing is
to deprive the word of intelligible signification; against this attempt, a tendency only too
prevalent in education, reformers have protested. Moreover, there is a tendency to assume that
whenever there is a definite word or form of speech there is also a definite idea; while, as a
matter of fact, adults and children alike are capable of using even precise verbal formulæ[Pg 177]
with only the vaguest and most confused sense of what they mean. Genuine ignorance is more
profitable because likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness; while
ab
ility to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning
and coats the mind with a varnish waterproof to new ideas.
Language tends to arrest personal inquiry and reflection
(ii) Again, although new combinations of words without the intervention of physical things may
supply new ideas, there are limits to this possibility. Lazy inertness causes individuals to accept
ideas that have currency about them without personal inquiry and testing. A man uses thought,
perhaps, to find out what others believe, and then stops. The ideas of others as embodied in
language become substitutes for one's own ideas. The use of linguistic studies and methods to
halt the human mind on the level of the attainments of the past, to prevent new inquiry and
discovery, to put the authority of tradition in place of the authority of natural facts and laws, to
reduce the individual to a parasite living on the secondhand experience of others—these things
have been the source of the reformers' protest against the preëminence assigned to language in
schools.
Words as mere stimuli
Finally, words that originally stood for ideas come, with repeated use, to be mere counters; they
become physical things to be manipulated according to certain rules, or reacted to by certain
operations without consciousness of their meaning. Mr. Stout (who has called such terms
"substitute signs")remarks that "algebraical and arithmetical signs are to a great extent used as
mere substitute signs.... It is possible to use signs of this kind whenever fixed and definite rules
of opera[Pg 178]tion can be derived from the nature of the things symbolized, so as to be applied in
manipulating the signs, without further reference to their signification. A word is an instrument
fo
r thinking about the meaning which it expresses; a substitute sign is a means of not thinking
ab
out the meaning which it symbolizes." The principle applies, however, to ordinary words, as
well as to algebraic signs; they also enable us to use meanings so as to get results without
thinking. In many respects, signs that are means of not thinking are of great advantage; standing
fo
r the familiar, they release attention for meanings that, being novel, require conscious
interpretation. Nevertheless, the premium put in the schoolroom upon attainment of technical
fa
cility, upon skill in producing external results (ante, p. 51), often changes this advantage into a
positive detriment. In manipulating symbols so as to recite well, to get and give correct answers,
to follow prescribed formulæ of analysis, the pupil's attitude becomes mechanical, rather than
thoughtful; verbal memorizing is substituted for inquiry into the meaning of things. This danger
is perhaps the one uppermost in mind when verbal methods of education are attacked.
§ 3. The Use of Language in its Educational Bearings
Language stands in a twofold relation to the work of education. On the one hand, it is continually
used in all studies as well as in all the social discipline of the school; on the other, it is a distinct
object of study. We shall consider only the ordinary use of language, since its effects upon habits
of thought are much deeper than those of conscious study.
Language not primarily intellectual in purpose
The common statement that "language is the expres[Pg 179]sion of thought" conveys only a halftruth, and a half-truth that is likely to result in positive error. Language does express thought, but
not primarily, nor, at first, even consciously. The primary motive for language is to influence
(through the expression of desire, emotion, and thought) the activity of others; its secondary use
is to enter into more intimate sociable relations with them; its employment as a conscious vehicle
of thought and knowledge is a tertiary, and relatively late, formation. The contrast is well
brought out by the statement of John Locke that words have a double use,—"civil" and
"philosophical." "By their civil use, I mean such a communication of thoughts and ideas by
words as may serve for the upholding of common conversation and commerce about the
ordinary affairs and conveniences of civil life.... By the philosophical use of words, I mean such
a use of them as may serve to convey the precise notions of things, and to express in general
propositions certain and undoubted truths."
Hence education has to transform it into an intellectual tool
This distinction of the practical and social from the intellectual use of language throws much
light on the problem of the school in respect to speech. That problem is to direct pupils' oral and
written speech, used primarily for practical and social ends, so that gradually it shall become a
conscious tool of conveying knowledge and assisting thought. How without checking the
spontaneous, natural motives—motives to which language owes its vitality, force, vividness, and
variety—are we to modify speech habits so as to render them accurate and flexible intellectual
instruments? It is comparatively easy to encourage the original spontaneous flow and not make
language over into a servant of reflective thought; it is comparatively easy to check and[Pg 180]
almost destroy (so far as the schoolroom is concerned) native aim and interest, and to set up
artificial and formal modes of expression in some isolated and technical matters. The difficulty
lies in making over habits that have to do with "ordinary affairs and conveniences" into habits
concerned with "precise notions." The successful accomplishing of the transformation requires
(i) enlargement of the pupil's vocabulary; (ii) rendering its terms more precise and accurate, and
(iii) formation of habits of consecutive discourse.
To enlarge vocabulary, the fund of concepts should be enlarged
(i) Enlargement of vocabulary. This takes place, of course, by wider intelligent contact with
things and persons, and also vicariously, by gathering the meanings of words from the context in
which they are heard or read. To grasp by either method a word in its meaning is to exercise
intelligence, to perform an act of intelligent selection or analysis, and it is also to widen the fund
of meanings or concepts readily available in further intellectual enterprises (ante, p. 126). It is
usual to distinguish between one's active and one's passive vocabulary, the latter being composed
of the words that are understood when they are heard or seen, the former of words that are used
intelligently. The fact that the passive vocabulary is ordinarily much larger than the active
indicates a certain amount of inert energy, of power not freely controlled by an individual.
Failure to use meanings that are nevertheless understood reveals dependence upon external
stimulus, and lack of intellectual initiative. This mental laziness is to some extent an artificial
product of education. Small children usually attempt to put to use every new word they get hold
of, but when they learn to read they are introduced to a large variety of terms that there is no
ordinary opportunity to use.[Pg 181] The result is a kind of mental suppression, if not smothering.
Moreover, the meaning of words not actively used in building up and conveying ideas is never
quite clear-cut or complete.
Looseness of thinking accompanies a limited vocabulary
While a limited vocabulary may be due to a limited range of experience, to a sphere of contact
with persons and things so narrow as not to suggest or require a full store of words, it is also due
to carelessness and vagueness. A happy-go-lucky frame of mind makes the individual averse to
clear discriminations, either in perception or in his own speech. Words are used loosely in an
indeterminate kind of reference to things, and the mind approaches a condition where practically
everything is just a thing-um-bob or a what-do-you-call-it. Paucity of vocabulary on the part of
those with whom the child associates, triviality and meagerness in the child's reading matter (as
frequently even in his school readers and text-books), tend to shut down the area of mental
vision.
Command of language involves command of things
We must note also the great difference between flow of words and command of language.
Volubility is not necessarily a sign of a large vocabulary; much talking or even ready speech is
quite compatible with moving round and round in a circle of moderate radius. Most schoolrooms
suffer from a lack of materials and appliances save perhaps books—and even these are "written
down" to the supposed capacity, or incapacity, of children. Occasion and demand for an enriched
vocabulary are accordingly restricted. The vocabulary of things studied in the schoolroom is
very largely isolated; it does not link itself organically to the range of the ideas and words that
are in vogue outside the school. Hence the enlargement that takes place is often nominal,[Pg 182]
adding to the inert, rather than to the active, fund of meanings and terms.
(ii) Accuracy of vocabulary. One way in which the fund of words and concepts is increased is by
discovering and naming shades of meaning—that is to say, by making the vocabulary more
precise. Increase in definiteness is as important relatively as is the enlargement of the capital
stock absolutely.
The general as the vague and as the distinctly generic
The first meanings of terms, since they are due to superficial acquaintance with things, are
general in the sense of being vague. The little child calls all men papa; acquainted with a dog, he
may call the first horse he sees a big dog. Differences of quantity and intensity are noted, but the
fu
ndamental meaning is so vague that it covers things that are far apart. To many persons trees
are just trees, being discriminated only into deciduous trees and evergreens, with perhaps
recognition of one or two kinds of each. Such vagueness tends to persist and to become a barrier
to the advance of thinking. Terms that are miscellaneous in scope are clumsy tools at best; in
addition they are frequently treacherous, for their ambiguous reference causes us to confuse
things that should be distinguished.
Twofold growth of words in sense or signification
The growth of precise terms out of original vagueness takes place normally in two directions:
toward words that stand for relationships and words that stand for highly individualized traits
(compare what was said about the development of meanings, p. 122); the first being associated
with abstract, the second with concrete, thinking. Some Australian tribes are said to have no
words for animal or for plant, while they have specific names for every variety of plant and
animal in their neighborhoods. This minuteness of vocabulary repre[Pg 183]sents progress toward
definiteness, but in a one-sided way. Specific properties are distinguished, but not
relationships.[28] On the other hand, students of philosophy and of the general aspects of natural
and social science are apt to acquire a store of terms that signify relations without balancing
them up with terms that designate specific individuals and traits. The ordinary use of such terms
as causation, law, society, individual, capital, illustrates this tendency.
Words alter their meanings so as to change their logical functions
In the history of language we find both aspects of the growth of vocabulary illustrated by
changes in the sense of words: some words originally wide in their application are narrowed to
denote shades of meaning; others originally specific are widened to express relationships. The
term vernacular, now meaning mother speech, has been generalized from the word verna,
meaning a slave born in the master's household. Publication has evolved its meaning of
communication by means of print, through restricting an earlier meaning of any kind of
communication—although the wider meaning is retained in legal procedure, as publishing a
libel. The sense of the word average has been generalized from a use connected with dividing
loss by shipwreck proportionately among various sharers in an enterprise.[29]
Similar changes occur in the vocabulary of every student
These historical changes assist the educator to appreciate the changes that occur with individuals
together with advance in intellectual resources. In studying[Pg 184] geometry, a pupil must learn
both to narrow and to extend the meanings of such familiar words as line, surface, angle, square,
circle; to narrow them to the precise meanings involved in demonstrations; to extend them to
cover generic relations not expressed in ordinary usage. Qualities of color and size must be
excluded; relations of direction, of variation in direction, of limit, must be definitely seized. A
like transformation occurs, of course, in every subject of study. Just at this point lies the danger,
alluded to above, of simply overlaying common meanings with new and isolated meanings
instead of effecting a genuine working-over of popular and practical meanings into adequate
logical tools.
The value of technical terms
Terms used with intentional exactness so as to express a meaning, the whole meaning, and only
the meaning, are called technical. For educational purposes, a technical term indicates something
relative, not absolute; for a term is technical not because of its verbal form or its unusualness, but
because it is employed to fix a meaning precisely. Ordinary words get a technical quality when
used intentionally for this end. Whenever thought becomes more accurate, a (relatively)
technical vocabulary grows up. Teachers are apt to oscillate between extremes in regard to
technical terms. On the one hand, these are multiplied in every direction, seemingly on the
assumption that learning a new piece of terminology, accompanied by verbal description or
definition, is equivalent to grasping a new idea. When it is seen how largely the net outcome is
the accumulation of an isolated set of words, a jargon or scholastic cant, and to what extent the
natural power of judgment is clogged by this accumulation, there is a reaction to the opposite
extreme. Technical terms are banished:[Pg 185] "name words" exist but not nouns; "action words"
but not verbs; pupils may "take away," but not subtract; they may tell what four fives are, but not
what four times five are, and so on. A sound instinct underlies this reaction—aversion to words
that give the pretense, but not the reality, of meaning. Yet the fundamental difficulty is not with
the word, but with the idea. If the idea is not grasped, nothing is gained by using a more familiar
word; if the idea is perceived, the use of the term that exactly names it may assist in fixing the
idea. Terms denoting highly exact meanings should be introduced only sparingly, that is, a few
at a time; they should be led up to gradually, and great pains should be taken to secure the
circumstances that render precision of meaning significant.
Importance of consecutive discourse
(iii) Consecutive discourse. As we saw, language connects and organizes meanings as well as
selects and fixes them. As every meaning is set in the context of some situation, so every word in
concrete use belongs to some sentence (it may itself represent a condensed sentence), and the
sentence, in turn, belongs to some larger story, description, or reasoning process. It is
unnecessary to repeat what has been said about the importance of continuity and ordering of
meanings. We may, however, note some ways in which school practices tend to interrupt
consecutiveness of language and thereby interfere harmfully with systematic reflection. (a)
Teachers have a habit of monopolizing continued discourse. Many, if not most, instructors
would be surprised if informed at the end of the day of the amount of time they have talked as
compared with any pupil. Children's conversation is often confined to answering questions in
brief phrases, or in single disconnected sentences. Expatia[Pg 186]tion and explanation are reserved
fo
r the teacher, who often admits any hint at an answer on the part of the pupil, and then
amplifies what he supposes the child must have meant. The habits of sporadic and fragmentary
discourse thus promoted have inevitably a disintegrating intellectual influence.
Too minute questioning
(b) Assignment of too short lessons when accompanied (as it usually is in order to pass the time
of the recitation period) by minute "analytic" questioning has the same effect. This evil is usually
at its height in such subjects as history and literature, where not infrequently the material is so
minutely subdivided as to break up the unity of meaning belonging to a given portion of the
matter, to destroy perspective, and in effect to reduce the whole topic to an accumulation of
disconnected details all upon the same level. More often than the teacher is aware, his mind
carries and supplies the background of unity of meaning against which pupils project isolated
scraps.
Making avoidance of error the aim
(c) Insistence upon avoiding error instead of attaining power tends also to interruption of
continuous discourse and thought. Children who begin with something to say and with
intellectual eagerness to say it are sometimes made so conscious of minor errors in substance and
fo
rm
that the energy that should go into constructive thinking is diverted into anxiety not to
make mistakes, and even, in extreme cases, into passive quiescence as the best method of
minimizing error. This tendency is especially marked in connection with the writing of
compositions, essays, and themes. It has even been gravely recommended that little children
should always write on trivial subjects and in short sentences because in that way they are less
likely to make mistakes, while[Pg 187] the teaching of writing to high school and college students
occasionally reduces itself to a technique for detecting and designating mistakes. The resulting
self-consciousness and constraint are only part of the evil that comes from a negative ideal.[Pg 188]
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
OBSERVATION AND INFORMATION IN THE TRAINING OF MIND
No thinking without acquaintance with facts
Thinking is an ordering of subject-matter with reference to discovering what it signifies or
indicates. Thinking no more exists apart from this arranging of subject-matter than digestion
occurs apart from the assimilating of food. The way in which the subject-matter is furnished
marks, therefore, a fundamental point. If the subject-matter is provided in too scanty or too
profuse fashion, if it comes in disordered array or in isolated scraps, the effect upon habits of
thought is detrimental. If personal observation and communication of information by others
(whether in books or speech) are rightly conducted, half the logical battle is won, for they are the
channels of obtaining subject-matter.
§ 1. The Nature and Value of Observation
Fallacy of making "facts" an end in themselves
The protest, mentioned in the last chapter, of educational reformers against the exaggerated and
fa
lse use of language, insisted upon personal and direct observation as the proper alternative
course. The reformers felt that the current emphasis upon the linguistic factor eliminated all
opportunity for first-hand acquaintance with real things; hence they appealed to sense-perception
to fill the gap. It is not surprising that this enthusiastic zeal failed frequently to ask how and
why[Pg 189] observation is educative, and hence fell into the error of making observation an end in
itself and was satisfied with any kind of material under any kind of conditions. Such isolation of
observation is still manifested in the statement that this faculty develops first, then that of
memory and imagination, and finally the faculty of thought. From this point of view, observation
is regarded as furnishing crude masses of raw material, to which, later on, reflective processes
may be applied. Our previous pages should have made obvious the fallacy of this point of view
by bringing out the fact that simple concrete thinking attends all our intercourse with things
which is not on a purely physical level.
The sympathetic motive in extending acquaintance
I. All persons have a natural desire—akin to curiosity—for a widening of their range of
acquaintance with persons and things. The sign in art galleries that forbids the carrying of canes
and umbrellas is obvious testimony to the fact that simply to see is not enough for many people;
there is a feeling of lack of acquaintance until some direct contact is made. This demand for
fu
ller and closer knowledge is quite different from any conscious interest in observation for its
own sake. Desire for expansion, for "self-realization," is its motive. The interest is sympathetic,
socially and æsthetically sympathetic, rather than cognitive. While the interest is especially keen
in children (because their actual experience is so small and their possible experience so large), it
still characterizes adults when routine has not blunted its edge. This sympathetic interest
provides the medium for carrying and binding together what would otherwise be a multitude of
items, diverse, disconnected, and of no intellectual use. These systems are indeed social and
æsthetic rather than consciously intel[Pg 190]lectual; but they provide the natural medium for more
conscious intellectual explorations. Some educators have recommended that nature study in the
elementary schools be conducted with a love of nature and a cultivation of æsthetic appreciation
in view rather than in a purely analytic spirit. Others have urged making much of the care of
animals and plants. Both of these important recommendations have grown out of experience, not
out of theory, but they afford excellent exemplifications of the theoretic point just made.
Analytic inspection for the sake of doing
Direct and indirect sense training
II. In normal development, specific analytic observations are originally connected almost
exclusively with the imperative need for noting means and ends in carrying on activities. When
one is doing something, one is compelled, if the work is to succeed (unless it is purely routine),
to use eyes, ears, and sense of touch as guides to action. Without a constant and alert exercise of
the senses, not even plays and games can go on; in any form of work, materials, obstacles,
ap
pliances, failures, and successes, must be intently watched. Sense-perception does not occur
fo
r its own sake or for purposes of training, but because it is an indispensable factor of success in
doing what one is interested in doing. Although not designed for sense-training, this method
effects sense-training in the most economical and thoroughgoing way. Various schemes have
been designed by teachers for cultivating sharp and prompt observation of forms, as by writing
words,—even in an unknown language,—making arrangements of figures and geometrical
fo
rm
s, and having pupils reproduce them after a momentary glance. Children often attain great
skill in quick seeing and full reproducing of even complicated meaningless combinations. But
such methods of training[Pg 191]—however valuable as occasional games and diversions—
compare very unfavorably with the training of eye and hand that comes as an incident of work
with tools in wood or metals, or of gardening, cooking, or the care of animals. Training by
isolated exercises leaves no deposit, leads nowhere; and even the technical skill acquired has
little radiating power, or transferable value. Criticisms made upon the training of observation on
the ground that many persons cannot correctly reproduce the forms and arrangement of the
figures on the face of their watches misses the point because persons do not look at a watch to
find out whether four o'clock is indicated by IIII or by IV, but to find out what time it is, and, if
observation decides this matter, noting other details is irrelevant and a waste of time. In the
training of observation the question of end and motive is all-important.
Scientific observations are linked to problems
"Object-lessons" rarely supply problems
III. The further, more intellectual or scientific, development of observation follows the line of
the growth of practical into theoretical reflection already traced (ante, Chapter Ten). As
problems emerge and are dwelt upon, observation is directed less to the facts that bear upon a
practical aim and more upon what bears upon a problem as such. What makes observations in
schools often intellectually ineffective is (more than anything else) that they are carried on
independently of a sense of a problem that they serve to define or help to solve. The evil of this
isolation is seen through the entire educational system, from the kindergarten, through the
elementary and high schools, to the college. Almost everywhere may be found, at some time,
recourse to observations as if they were of complete and final value in themselves, instead of the
means[Pg 192] of getting material that bears upon some difficulty and its solution. In the
kindergarten are heaped up observations regarding geometrical forms, lines, surfaces, cubes,
colors, and so on. In the elementary school, under the name of "object-lessons," the form and
properties of objects,—apple, orange, chalk,—selected almost at random, are minutely noted,
while under the name of "nature study" similar observations are directed upon leaves, stones,
insects, selected in almost equally arbitrary fashion. In high school and college, laboratory and
microscopic observations are carried on as if the accumulation of observed facts and the
acquisition of skill in manipulation were educational ends in themselves.
Compare with these methods of isolated observations the statement of Jevons that observation as
conducted by scientific men is effective "only when excited and guided by hope of verifying a
theory"; and again, "the number of things which can be observed and experimented upon are
infinite, and if we merely set to work to record facts without any distinct purpose, our records
will have no value." Strictly speaking, the first statement of Jevons is too narrow. Scientific men
institute observations not merely to test an idea (or suggested explanatory meaning), but also to
locate the nature of a problem and thereby guide the formation of a hypothesis. But the principle
of his remark, namely, that scientific men never make the accumulation of observations an end
in itself, but always a means to a general intellectual conclusion, is absolutely sound. Until the
fo
rce of this principle is adequately recognized in education, observation will be largely a matter
of uninteresting dead work or of acquiring forms of technical skill that are not available as
intellectual resources.[Pg 193]
§ 2. Methods and Materials of Observation in the Schools The best methods in use in our
schools furnish many suggestions for giving observation its right place in mental training.
Observation should involve discovery
I. They rest upon the sound assumption that observation is an active process. Observation is
exploration, inquiry for the sake of discovering something previously hidden and unknown, this
something being needed in order to reach some end, practical or theoretical. Observation is to be
discriminated from recognition, or perception of what is familiar. The identification of
something already understood is, indeed, an indispensable function of further investigation (ante,
p. 119); but it is relatively automatic and passive, while observation proper is searching and
deliberate. Recognition refers to the already mastered; observation is concerned with mastering
the unknown. The common notions that perception is like writing on a blank piece of paper, or
like impressing an image on the mind as a seal is imprinted on wax or as a picture is formed on a
photographic plate (notions that have played a disastrous rôle in educational methods), arise
from a failure to distinguish between automatic recognition and the searching attitude of genuine
observation.
and suspense during an unfolding change
II. Much assistance in the selection of appropriate material for observation may be derived from
considering the eagerness and closeness of observation that attend the following of a story or
drama. Alertness of observation is at its height wherever there is "plot interest." Why? Because
of the balanced combination of the old and the new, of the familiar and the unexpected. We hang
on the lips of the story-teller because of the element of mental suspense. Alternatives are
suggested,[Pg 194] but are left ambiguous, so that our whole being questions: What befell next?
Which way did things turn out? Contrast the ease and fullness with which a child notes all the
salient traits of a story, with the labor and inadequacy of his observation of some dead and static
thing where nothing raises a question or suggests alternative outcomes.
This "plot interest" manifested in activity,
When an individual is engaged in doing or making something (the activity not being of such a
mechanical and habitual character that its outcome is assured), there is an analogous situation.
Something is going to come of what is present to the sense, but just what is doubtful. The plot is
unfolding toward success or failure, but just when or how is uncertain. Hence the keen and tense
observation of conditions and results that attends constructive manual operations. Where the
subject-matter is of a more impersonal sort, the same principle of movement toward a
dénouement may apply. It is a commonplace that what is moving attracts notice when that which
is at rest escapes it. Yet too often it would almost seem as if pains had been taken to deprive the
material of school observations of all life and dramatic quality, to reduce it to a dead and inert
fo
rm
. Mere change is not enough, however. Vicissitude, alteration, motion, excite observation;
but if they merely excite it, there is no thought. The changes must (like the incidents of a wellarranged story or plot) take place in a certain cumulative order; each successive change must at
once remind us of its predecessor and arouse interest in its successor if observations of change
are to be logically fruitful.
and in cycles of growth
Living beings, plants, and animals, fulfill the twofold requirement to an extraordinary degree.
Where there[Pg 195] is growth, there is motion, change, process; and there is also arrangement of
the changes in a cycle. The first arouses, the second organizes, observation. Much of the
extraordinary interest that children take in planting seeds and watching the stages of their growth
is due to the fact that a drama is enacting before their eyes; there is something doing, each step
of which is important in the destiny of the plant. The great practical improvements that have
occurred of late years in the teaching of botany and zoölogy will be found, upon inspection, to
involve treating plants and animals as beings that act, that do something, instead of as mere inert
specimens having static properties to be inventoried, named, and registered. Treated in the latter
fa
shion, observation is inevitably reduced to the falsely "analytic" (ante, p. 112),—to mere
dissection and enumeration.
Observation of structure grows out of noting function
There is, of course, a place, and an important place, for observation of the mere static qualities of
objects. When, however, the primary interest is in function, in what the object does, there is a
motive for more minute analytic study, for the observation of structure. Interest in noting an
activity passes insensibly into noting how the activity is carried on; the interest in what is
accomplished passes over into an interest in the organs of its accomplishing. But when the
beginning is made with the morphological, the anatomical, the noting of peculiarities of form,
size, color, and distribution of parts, the material is so cut off from significance as to be dead and
du
ll. It is as natural for children to look intently for the stomata of a plant after they have become
interested in its function of breathing, as it is repulsive to attend minutely to them when they are
considered as isolated peculiarities of structure.[Pg 196]
Scientific observation
III. As the center of interest of observations becomes less personal, less a matter of means for
effecting one's own ends, and less æsthetic, less a matter of contribution of parts to a total
emotional effect, observation becomes more consciously intellectual in quality. Pupils learn to
observe for the sake (i) of finding out what sort of perplexity confronts them; (ii) of inferring
hypothetical explanations for the puzzling features that observation reveals; and (iii) of testing
the ideas thus suggested.
should be extensive
and intensive
In short, observation becomes scientific in nature. Of such observations it may be said that they
should follow a rhythm between the extensive and the intensive. Problems become definite, and
suggested explanations significant by a certain alternation between a wide and somewhat loose
soaking in of relevant facts and a minutely accurate study of a few selected facts. The wider, less
exact observation is necessary to give the student a feeling for the reality of the field of inquiry, a
sense of its bearings and possibilities, and to store his mind with materials that imagination may
transform into suggestions. The intensive study is necessary for limiting the problem, and for
securing the conditions of experimental testing. As the latter by itself is too specialized and
technical to arouse intellectual growth, the former by itself is too superficial and scattering for
control of intellectual development. In the sciences of life, field study, excursions, acquaintance
with living things in their natural habitats, may alternate with microscopic and laboratory
observation. In the physical sciences, phenomena of light, of heat, of electricity, of moisture, of
gravity, in their broad setting in nature—their physiographic setting—should prepare for an
exact study of selected facts under conditions of laboratory[Pg 197] control. In this way, the student
gets the benefit of technical scientific methods of discovery and testing, while he retains his
sense of the identity of the laboratory modes of energy with large out-of-door realities, thereby
avoiding the impression (that so often accrues) that the facts studied are peculiar to the
laboratory.
§ 3. Communication of Information
Importance of hearsay acquaintance
When all is said and done the field of fact open to any one observer by himself is narrow. Into
every one of our beliefs, even those that we have worked out under the conditions of utmost
personal, first-hand acquaintance, much has insensibly entered from what we have heard or read
of the observations and conclusions of others. In spite of the great extension of direct
observation in our schools, the vast bulk of educational subject-matter is derived from other
sources—from text-book, lecture, and viva-voce interchange. No educational question is of
greater import than how to get the most logical good out of learning through transmission from
others.
Logically, this ranks only as evidence or testimony
Doubtless the chief meaning associated with the word instruction is this conveying and instilling
of the results of the observations and inferences of others. Doubtless the undue prominence in
education of the ideal of amassing information (ante, p. 52) has its source in the prominence of
the learning of other persons. The problem then is how to convert it into an intellectual asset. In
logical terms, the material supplied from the experience of others is testimony: that is to say,
evidence submitted by others to be employed by one's own judgment in reaching a conclusion.
How shall we treat the subject-matter supplied by text-book and teacher so that it shall rank as
material for reflec[Pg 198]tive inquiry, not as ready-made intellectual pabulum to be accepted and
swallowed just as supplied by the store?
Communication by others should not encroach on observation,
In reply to this question, we may say (i) that the communication of material should be needed.
That is to say, it should be such as cannot readily be attained by personal observation. For
teacher or book to cram pupils with facts which, with little more trouble, they could discover by
direct inquiry is to violate their intellectual integrity by cultivating mental servility. This does not
mean that the material supplied through communication of others should be meager or scanty.
With the utmost range of the senses, the world of nature and history stretches out almost
infinitely beyond. But the fields within which direct observation is feasible should be carefully
chosen and sacredly protected.
should not be dogmatic in tone,
(ii) Material should be supplied by way of stimulus, not with dogmatic finality and rigidity.
When pupils get the notion that any field of study has been definitely surveyed, that knowledge
ab
out it is exhaustive and final, they may continue docile pupils, but they cease to be students.
All thinking whatsoever—so be it is thinking—contains a phase of originality. This originality
does not imply that the student's conclusion varies from the conclusions of others, much less that
it is a radically novel conclusion. His originality is not incompatible with large use of materials
and suggestions contributed by others. Originality means personal interest in the question,
personal initiative in turning over the suggestions furnished by others, and sincerity in following
them out to a tested conclusion. Literally, the phrase "Think for yourself" is tautological; any
thinking is thinking for one's self.[Pg 199]
should have relation to a personal problem,
(iii) The material furnished by way of information should be relevant to a question that is vital in
the student's own experience. What has been said about the evil of observations that begin and
end in themselves may be transferred without change to communicated learning. Instruction in
subject-matter that does not fit into any problem already stirring in the student's own experience,
or that is not presented in such a way as to arouse a problem, is worse than useless for
intellectual purposes. In that it fails to enter into any process of reflection, it is useless; in that it
remains in the mind as so much lumber and débris, it is a barrier, an obstruction in the way of
effective thinking when a problem arises.
and to prior systems of experience
Another way of stating the same principle is that material furnished by communication must be
such as to enter into some existing system or organization of experience. All students of
psychology are familiar with the principle of apperception—that we assimilate new material
with what we have digested and retained from prior experiences. Now the "apperceptive basis"
of material furnished by teacher and text-book should be found, as far as possible, in what the
learner has derived from more direct forms of his own experience. There is a tendency to
connect material of the schoolroom simply with the material of prior school lessons, instead of
linking it to what the pupil has acquired in his out-of-school experience. The teacher says, "Do
you not remember what we learned from the book last week?"—instead of saying, "Do you not
recall such and such a thing that you have seen or heard?" As a result, there are built up detached
and independent systems of school knowledge that inertly overlay the[Pg 200] ordinary systems of
experience instead of reacting to enlarge and refine them. Pupils are taught to live in two
separate worlds, one the world of out-of-school experience, the other the world of books and
lessons.[Pg 201]
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE RECITATION AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
Importance of the recitation
In the recitation the teacher comes into his closest contact with the pupil. In the recitation focus
the possibilities of guiding children's activities, influencing their language habits, and directing
their observations. In discussing the significance of the recitation as an instrumentality of
education, we are accordingly bringing to a head the points considered in the last three chapters,
rather than introducing a new topic. The method in which the recitation is carried on is a crucial
test of a teacher's skill in diagnosing the intellectual state of his pupils and in supplying the
conditions that will arouse serviceable mental responses: in short, of his art as a teacher.
Re-citing versus reflecting
The use of the word recitation to designate the period of most intimate intellectual contact of
teacher with pupil and pupil with pupil is a fateful fact. To re-cite is to cite again, to repeat, to
tell over and over. If we were to call this period reiteration, the designation would hardly bring
out more clearly than does the word recitation, the complete domination of instruction by
rehearsing of secondhand information, by memorizing for the sake of producing correct replies
at the proper time. Everything that is said in this chapter is insignificant in comparison with the
primary truth that the recitation is a place and time for stimulating and directing reflection, and
that reproducing memorized[Pg 202] matter is only an incident—even though an indispensable
incident—in the process of cultivating a thoughtful attitude.
§ 1. The Formal Steps of Instruction
Herbart's analysis of method of teaching
But few attempts have been made to formulate a method, resting on general principles, of
conducting a recitation. One of these is of great importance and has probably had more and
better influence upon the "hearing of lessons" than all others put together; namely, the analysis
by Herbart of a recitation into five successive steps. The steps are commonly known as "the
fo
rm
al steps of instruction." The underlying notion is that no matter how subjects vary in scope
and detail there is one and only one best way of mastering them, since there is a single "general
method" uniformly followed by the mind in effective attack upon any subject. Whether it be a
first-grade child mastering the rudiments of number, a grammar-school pupil studying history, or
a college student dealing with philology, in each case the first step is preparation, the second
presentation, followed in turn by comparison and generalization, ending in the application of the
generalizations to specific and new instances.
Illustration of method
By preparation is meant asking questions to remind pupils of familiar experiences of their own
that will be useful in acquiring the new topic. What one already knows supplies the means with
which one apprehends the unknown. Hence the process of learning the new will be made easier
if related ideas in the pupil's mind are aroused to activity—are brought to the foreground of
consciousness. When pupils take up the study of rivers, they are first questioned about streams or
brooks[Pg 203] with which they are already acquainted; if they have never seen any, they may be
asked about water running in gutters. Somehow "apperceptive masses" are stirred that will assist
in getting hold of the new subject. The step of preparation ends with statement of the aim of the
lesson. Old knowledge having been made active, new material is then "presented" to the pupils.
Pictures and relief models of rivers are shown; vivid oral descriptions are given; if possible, the
children are taken to see an actual river. These two steps terminate the acquisition of particular
fa
cts.
The next two steps are directed toward getting a general principle or conception. The local river
is compared with, perhaps, the Amazon, the St. Lawrence, the Rhine; by this comparison
accidental and unessential features are eliminated and the river concept is formed: the elements
involved in the river-meaning are gathered together and formulated. This done, the resulting
principle is fixed in mind and is clarified by being applied to other streams, say to the Thames,
the Po, the Connecticut.
Comparison with our prior analysis of reflection
If we compare this account of the methods of instruction with our own analysis of a complete
operation of thinking, we are struck by obvious resemblances. In our statement (compare
Chapter Six) the "steps" are the occurrence of a problem or a puzzling phenomenon; then
observation, inspection of facts, to locate and clear up the problem; then the formation of a
hypothesis or the suggestion of a possible solution together with its elaboration by reasoning;
then the testing of the elaborated idea by using it as a guide to new observations and
experimentations. In each account, there is the sequence of (i) specific facts and[Pg 204] events, (ii)
ideas and reasonings, and (iii) application of their result to specific facts. In each case, the
movement is inductive-deductive. We are struck also by one difference: the Herbartian method
makes no reference to a difficulty, a discrepancy requiring explanation, as the origin and
stimulus of the whole process. As a consequence, it often seems as if the Herbartian method
deals with thought simply as an incident in the process of acquiring information, instead of
treating the latter as an incident in the process of developing thought.
The formal steps concern the teacher's preparation rather than the recitation itself
Before following up this comparison in more detail, we may raise the question whether the
recitation should, in any case, follow a uniform prescribed series of steps—even if it be admitted
that this series expresses the normal logical order. In reply, it may be said that just because the
order is logical, it represents the survey of subject-matter made by one who already understands
it, not the path of progress followed by a mind that is learning. The former may describe a
uniform straight-way course, the latter must be a series of tacks, of zigzag movements back and
fo
rt
h. In short, the formal steps indicate the points that should be covered by the teacher in
preparing to conduct a recitation, but should not prescribe the actual course of teaching.
The teacher's problem
Lack of any preparation on the part of a teacher leads, of course, to a random, haphazard
recitation, its success depending on the inspiration of the moment, which may or may not come.
Preparation in simply the subject-matter conduces to a rigid order, the teacher examining pupils
on their exact knowledge of their text. But the teacher's problem—as a teacher—does not reside
in mastering a subject-matter, but in adjusting a subject-matter to the nurture of thought. Now
the[Pg 205] formal steps indicate excellently well the questions a teacher should ask in working out
the problem of teaching a topic. What preparation have my pupils for attacking this subject?
What familiar experiences of theirs are available? What have they already learned that will come
to their assistance? How shall I present the matter so as to fit economically and effectively into
their present equipment? What pictures shall I show? To what objects shall I call their attention?
What incidents shall I relate? What comparisons shall I lead them to draw, what similarities to
recognize? What is the general principle toward which the whole discussion should point as its
conclusion? By what applications shall I try to fix, to clear up, and to make real their grasp of
this general principle? What activities of their own may bring it home to them as a genuinely
significant principle?
Only flexibility of procedure gives a recitation vitality
Any step may come first
No teacher can fail to teach better if he has considered such questions somewhat systematically.
But the more the teacher has reflected upon pupils' probable intellectual response to a topic from
the various stand-points indicated by the five formal steps, the more he will be prepared to
conduct the recitation in a flexible and free way, and yet not let the subject go to pieces and the
pupils' attention drift in all directions; the less necessary will he find it, in order to preserve a
semblance of intellectual order, to follow some one uniform scheme. He will be ready to take
advantage of any sign of vital response that shows itself from any direction. One pupil may
already have some inkling—probably erroneous—of a general principle. Application may then
come at the very beginning in order to show that the principle will not work, and thereby[Pg 206]
induce search for new facts and a new generalization. Or the abrupt presentation of some fact or
object may so stimulate the minds of pupils as to render quite superfluous any preliminary
preparation. If pupils' minds are at work at all, it is quite impossible that they should wait until
the teacher has conscientiously taken them through the steps of preparation, presentation, and
comparison before they form at least a working hypothesis or generalization. Moreover, unless
comparison of the familiar and the unfamiliar is introduced at the beginning, both preparation
and presentation will be aimless and without logical motive, isolated, and in so far meaningless.
The student's mind cannot be prepared at large, but only for something in particular, and
presentation is usually the best way of evoking associations. The emphasis may fall now on the
fa
miliar concept that will help grasp the new, now on the new facts that frame the problem; but
in either case it is comparison and contrast with the other term of the pair which gives either its
fo
rce. In short, to transfer the logical steps from the points that the teacher needs to consider to
uniform successive steps in the conduct of a recitation, is to impose the logical review of a mind
that already understands the subject, upon the mind that is struggling to comprehend it, and
thereby to obstruct the logic of the student's own mind.
§ 2. The Factors in the Recitation
Bearing in mind that the formal steps represent intertwined factors of a student's progress and
not mileposts on a beaten highway, we may consider each by itself. In so doing, it will be
convenient to follow the example of many of the Herbartians and reduce the steps to[Pg 207] three:
first, the apprehension of specific or particular facts; second, rational generalization; third,
ap
plication and verification.
Preparation is getting the sense of a problem
I. The processes having to do with particular facts are preparation and presentation. The best,
indeed the only preparation is arousal to a perception of something that needs explanation,
something unexpected, puzzling, peculiar. When the feeling of a genuine perplexity lays hold of
any mind (no matter how the feeling arises), that mind is alert and inquiring, because stimulated
from within. The shock, the bite, of a question will force the mind to go wherever it is capable of
going, better than will the most ingenious pedagogical devices unaccompanied by this mental
ardor. It is the sense of a problem that forces the mind to a survey and recall of the past to
discover what the question means and how it may be dealt with.
Pitfalls in preparation
The teacher in his more deliberate attempts to call into play the familiar elements in a student's
experience, must guard against certain dangers. (i) The step of preparation must not be too long
continued or too exhaustive, or it defeats its own end. The pupil loses interest and is bored, when
a plunge in medias res might have braced him to his work. The preparation part of the recitation
period of some conscientious teachers reminds one of the boy who takes so long a run in order to
gain headway for a jump that when he reaches the line, he is too tired to jump far. (ii) The organs
by which we apprehend new material are our habits. To insist too minutely upon turning over
habitual dispositions into conscious ideas is to interfere with their best workings. Some factors of
fa
miliar experience must indeed be brought to conscious recognition, just as trans[Pg 208]planting
is necessary for the best growth of some plants. But it is fatal to be forever digging up either
experiences or plants to see how they are getting along. Constraint, self-consciousness,
embarrassment, are the consequence of too much conscious refurbishing of familiar experiences.
Statement of aim of lesson
Strict Herbartians generally lay it down that statement—by the teacher—of the aim of a lesson is
an indispensable part of preparation. This preliminary statement of the aim of the lesson hardly
seems more intellectual in character, however, than tapping a bell or giving any other signal for
attention and transfer of thoughts from diverting subjects. To the teacher the statement of an end
is significant, because he has already been at the end; from a pupil's standpoint the statement of
what he is going to learn is something of an Irish bull. If the statement of the aim is taken too
seriously by the instructor, as meaning more than a signal to attention, its probable result is
fo
restalling the pupil's own reaction, relieving him of the responsibility of developing a problem
and thus arresting his mental initiative.
How much the teacher should tell or show
It is unnecessary to discuss at length presentation as a factor in the recitation, because our last
chapter covered the topic under the captions of observation and communication. The function of
presentation is to supply materials that force home the nature of a problem and furnish
suggestions for dealing with it. The practical problem of the teacher is to preserve a balance
between so little showing and telling as to fail to stimulate reflection and so much as to choke
thought. Provided the student is genuinely engaged upon a topic, and provided the teacher is
willing to give the student a good deal of leeway as to what he assimilates and retains (not
requiring rigidly that everything be grasped or repro[Pg 209]duced), there is comparatively little
danger that one who is himself enthusiastic will communicate too much concerning a topic.
The pupil's responsibility for making out a reasonable case
II. The distinctively rational phase of reflective inquiry consists, as we have already seen, in the
elaboration of an idea, or working hypothesis, through conjoint comparison and contrast,
terminating in definition or formulation. (i) So far as the recitation is concerned, the primary
requirement is that the student be held responsible for working out mentally every suggested
principle so as to show what he means by it, how it bears upon the facts at hand, and how the
fa
cts bear upon it. Unless the pupil is made responsible for developing on his own account the
reasonableness of the guess he puts forth, the recitation counts for practically nothing in the
training of reasoning power. A clever teacher easily acquires great skill in dropping out the inept
and senseless contributions of pupils, and in selecting and emphasizing those in line with the
result he wishes to reach. But this method (sometimes called "suggestive questioning") relieves
the pupils of intellectual responsibility, save for acrobatic agility in following the teacher's lead.
The necessity for mental leisure
(ii) The working over of a vague and more or less casual idea into coherent and definite form is
impossible without a pause, without freedom from distraction. We say "Stop and think"; well, all
reflection involves, at some point, stopping external observations and reactions so that an idea
may mature. Meditation, withdrawal or abstraction from clamorous assailants of the senses and
from demands for overt action, is as necessary at the reasoning stage, as are observation and
experiment at other periods. The metaphors of digestion and[Pg 210] assimilation, that so readily
occur to mind in connection with rational elaboration, are highly instructive. A silent,
uninterrupted working-over of considerations by comparing and weighing alternative
suggestions, is indispensable for the development of coherent and compact conclusions.
Reasoning is no more akin to disputing or arguing, or to the abrupt seizing and dropping of
suggestions, than digestion is to a noisy champing of the jaws. The teacher must secure
opportunity for leisurely mental digestion.
A typical central object necessary
(iii) In the process of comparison, the teacher must avert the distraction that ensues from putting
before the mind a number of facts on the same level of importance. Since attention is selective,
some one object normally claims thought and furnishes the center of departure and reference.
This fact is fatal to the success of the pedagogical methods that endeavor to conduct comparison
on the basis of putting before the mind a row of objects of equal importance. In comparing, the
mind does not naturally begin with objects a, b, c, d, and try to find the respect in which they
agree. It begins with a single object or situation more or less vague and inchoate in meaning, and
makes excursions to other objects in order to render understanding of the central object
consistent and clear. The mere multiplication of objects of comparison is adverse to successful
reasoning. Each fact brought within the field of comparison should clear up some obscure
fe
ature or extend some fragmentary trait of the primary object.
Importance of types
In short, pains should be taken to see that the object on which thought centers is typical: material
being typical when, although individual or specific, it is such as readily and fruitfully suggests
the principles of an en[Pg 211]tire class of facts. No sane person begins to think about rivers
wholesale or at large. He begins with the one river that has presented some puzzling trait. Then
he studies other rivers to get light upon the baffling features of this one, and at the same time he
employs the characteristic traits of his original object to reduce to order the multifarious details
that appear in connection with other rivers. This working back and forth preserves unity of
meaning, while protecting it from monotony and narrowness. Contrast, unlikeness, throws
significant features into relief, and these become instruments for binding together into an
organized or coherent meaning dissimilar characters. The mind is defended against the
deadening influence of many isolated particulars and also against the barrenness of a merely
fo
rm
al principle. Particular cases and properties supply emphasis and concreteness; general
principles convert the particulars into a single system.
All insight into meaning effects generalization
(iv) Hence generalization is not a separate and single act; it is rather a constant tendency and
fu
nction of the entire discussion or recitation. Every step forward toward an idea that
comprehends, that explains, that unites what was isolated and therefore puzzling, generalizes.
The little child generalizes as truly as the adolescent or adult, even though he does not arrive at
the same generalities. If he is studying a river basin, his knowledge is generalized in so far as the
various details that he apprehends are found to be the effects of a single force, as that of water
pushing downward from gravity, or are seen to be successive stages of a single history of
fo
rm
ation. Even if there were acquaintance with only one river, knowledge of it under such
conditions would be generalized knowledge.[Pg 212]
Insight into meaning requires formulation
The factor of formulation, of conscious stating, involved in generalization, should also be a
constant function, not a single formal act. Definition means essentially the growth of a meaning
out of vagueness into definiteness. Such final verbal definition as takes place should be only the
culmination of a steady growth in distinctness. In the reaction against ready-made verbal
definitions and rules, the pendulum should never swing to the opposite extreme, that of
neglecting to summarize the net meaning that emerges from dealing with particular facts. Only
as general summaries are made from time to time does the mind reach a conclusion or a resting
place; and only as conclusions are reached is there an intellectual deposit available in future
understanding.
Generalization means capacity for application to the new
III. As the last words indicate, application and generalization lie close together. Mechanical skill
fo
r further use may be achieved without any explicit recognition of a principle; nay, in routine
and narrow technical matters, conscious formulation may be a hindrance. But without
recognition of a principle, without generalization, the power gained cannot be transferred to new
and dissimilar matters. The inherent significance of generalization is that it frees a meaning from
local restrictions; rather, generalization is meaning so freed; it is meaning emancipated from
accidental features so as to be available in new cases. The surest test for detecting a spurious
generalization (a statement general in verbal form but not accompanied by discernment of
meaning), is the failure of the so-called principle spontaneously to extend itself. The essence of
the general is application. (Ante, p. 29.)
Fossilized versus flexible principles
The true purpose of exercises that apply rules and principles is, then, not so much to drive or
drill them[Pg 213] in as to give adequate insight into an idea or principle. To treat application as a
separate final step is disastrous. In every judgment some meaning is employed as a basis for
estimating and interpreting some fact; by this application the meaning is itself enlarged and
tested. When the general meaning is regarded as complete in itself, application is treated as an
external, non-intellectual use to which, for practical purposes alone, it is advisable to put the
meaning. The principle is one self-contained thing; its use is another and independent thing.
When this divorce occurs, principles become fossilized and rigid; they lose their inherent
vitality, their self-impelling power.
Self-application a mark of genuine principles
A true conception is a moving idea, and it seeks outlet, or application to the interpretation of
particulars and the guidance of action, as naturally as water runs downhill. In fine, just as
reflective thought requires particular facts of observation and events of action for its origination,
so it also requires particular facts and deeds for its own consummation. "Glittering generalities"
are inert because they are spurious. Application is as much an intrinsic part of genuine reflective
inquiry as is alert observation or reasoning itself. Truly general principles tend to apply
themselves. The teacher needs, indeed, to supply conditions favorable to use and exercise; but
something is wrong when artificial tasks have arbitrarily to be invented in order to secure
ap
plication for principles.[Pg 214]
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SOME GENERAL CONCLUSIONS
We shall conclude our survey of how we think and how we should think by presenting some
fa
ctors of thinking which should balance each other, but which constantly tend to become so
isolated that they work against each other instead of cooperating to make reflective inquiry
efficient.
§ 1. The Unconscious and the Conscious
The understood as the unconsciously assumed
It is significant that one meaning of the term understood is something so thoroughly mastered, so
completely agreed upon, as to be assumed; that is to say, taken as a matter of course without
explicit statement. The familiar "goes without saying" means "it is understood." If two persons
can converse intelligently with each other, it is because a common experience supplies a
background of mutual understanding upon which their respective remarks are projected. To dig
up and to formulate this common background would be imbecile; it is "understood"; that is, it is
silently supplied and implied as the taken-for-granted medium of intelligent exchange of ideas.
Inquiry as conscious formulation
If, however, the two persons find themselves at cross-purposes, it is necessary to dig up and
compare the presuppositions, the implied context, on the basis of which each is speaking. The
implicit is made explicit; what was unconsciously assumed is exposed to the light of conscious
day. In this way, the root of the misunder[Pg 215]standing is removed. Some such rhythm of the
unconscious and the conscious is involved in all fruitful thinking. A person in pursuing a
consecutive train of thoughts takes some system of ideas for granted (which accordingly he
leaves unexpressed, "unconscious") as surely as he does in conversing with others. Some
context, some situation, some controlling purpose dominates his explicit ideas so thoroughly that
it does not need to be consciously formulated and expounded. Explicit thinking goes on within
the limits of what is implied or understood. Yet the fact that reflection originates in a problem
makes it necessary at some points consciously to inspect and examine this familiar background.
We have to turn upon some unconscious assumption and make it explicit.
Rules cannot be given for attaining a balance
No rules can be laid down for attaining the due balance and rhythm of these two phases of
mental life. No ordinance can prescribe at just what point the spontaneous working of some
unconscious attitude and habit is to be checked till we have made explicit what is implied in it.
No one can tell in detail just how far the analytic inspection and formulation are to be carried.
We can say that they must be carried far enough so that the individual will know what he is
ab
out and be able to guide his thinking; but in a given case just how far is that? We can say that
they must be carried far enough to detect and guard against the source of some false perception
or reasoning, and to get a leverage on the investigation; but such statements only restate the
original difficulty. Since our reliance must be upon the disposition and tact of the individual in
the particular case, there is no test of the success of an education more important than the extent
to which it nurtures a type of mind competent to[Pg 216] maintain an economical balance of the
unconscious and the conscious.
The over-analytic to be avoided
The ways of teaching criticised in the foregoing pages as false "analytic" methods of instruction
(ante, p. 112), all reduce themselves to the mistake of directing explicit attention and formulation
to what would work better if left an unconscious attitude and working assumption. To pry into
the familiar, the usual, the automatic, simply for the sake of making it conscious, simply for the
sake of formulating it, is both an impertinent interference, and a source of boredom. To be forced
to dwell consciously upon the accustomed is the essence of ennui; to pursue methods of
instruction that have that tendency is deliberately to cultivate lack of interest.
The detection of error, the clinching of truth, demand conscious statement
On the other hand, what has been said in criticism of merely routine forms of skill, what has
been said about the importance of having a genuine problem, of introducing the novel, and of
reaching a deposit of general meaning weighs on the other side of the scales. It is as fatal to good
thinking to fail to make conscious the standing source of some error or failure as it is to pry
needlessly into what works smoothly. To over-simplify, to exclude the novel for the sake of
prompt skill, to avoid obstacles for the sake of averting errors, is as detrimental as to try to get
pupils to formulate everything they know and to state every step of the process employed in
getting a result. Where the shoe pinches, analytic examination is indicated. When a topic is to be
clinched so that knowledge of it will carry over into an effective resource in further topics,
conscious condensation and summarizing are imperative. In the early stage of acquaintance with
a subject, a good deal of unconstrained unconscious mental play about it may be[Pg 217] permitted,
even at the risk of some random experimenting; in the later stages, conscious formulation and
review may be encouraged. Projection and reflection, going directly ahead and turning back in
scrutiny, should alternate. Unconsciousness gives spontaneity and freshness; consciousness,
conviction and control.
§ 2. Process and Product
Play and work again
A like balance in mental life characterizes process and product. We met one important phase of
this adjustment in considering play and work. In play, interest centers in activity, without much
reference to its outcome. The sequence of deeds, images, emotions, suffices on its own account.
In work, the end holds attention and controls the notice given to means. Since the difference is
one of direction of interest, the contrast is one of emphasis, not of cleavage. When comparative
prominence in consciousness of activity or outcome is transformed into isolation of one from the
other, play degenerates into fooling, and work into drudgery.
Play should not be fooling,
By "fooling" we understand a series of disconnected temporary overflows of energy dependent
upon whim and accident. When all reference to outcome is eliminated from the sequence of
ideas and acts that make play, each member of the sequence is cut loose from every other and
becomes fantastic, arbitrary, aimless; mere fooling follows. There is some inveterate tendency to
fo
ol in children as well as in animals; nor is the tendency wholly evil, for at least it militates
against falling into ruts. But when it is excessive in amount, dissipation and disintegration
fo
llow; and the only way of preventing this consequence is to make regard for results enter into
even the freest play activity.[Pg 218]
nor work, drudgery
Exclusive interest in the result alters work to drudgery. For by drudgery is meant those activities
in which the interest in the outcome does not suffuse the means of getting the result. Whenever a
piece of work becomes drudgery, the process of doing loses all value for the doer; he cares
solely for what is to be had at the end of it. The work itself, the putting forth of energy, is
hateful; it is just a necessary evil, since without it some important end would be missed. Now it
is a commonplace that in the work of the world many things have to be done the doing of which
is not intrinsically very interesting. However, the argument that children should be kept doing
drudgery-tasks because thereby they acquire power to be faithful to distasteful duties, is wholly
fa
llacious. Repulsion, shirking, and evasion are the consequences of having the repulsive
imposed—not loyal love of duty. Willingness to work for ends by means of acts not naturally
attractive is best attained by securing such an appreciation of the value of the end that a sense of
its value is transferred to its means of accomplishment. Not interesting in themselves, they
borrow interest from the result with which they are associated.
Balance of playfulness and seriousness the intellectual ideal
Free play of mind
is normal in childhood
The intellectual harm accruing from divorce of work and play, product and process, is evidenced
in the proverb, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." That the obverse is true is perhaps
sufficiently signalized in the fact that fooling is so near to foolishness. To be playful and serious
at the same time is possible, and it defines the ideal mental condition. Absence of dogmatism
and prejudice, presence of intellectual curiosity and flexibility, are manifest in the free play of
the mind upon a topic. To give the mind this[Pg 219] free play is not to encourage toying with a
subject, but is to be interested in the unfolding of the subject on its own account, apart from its
subservience to a preconceived belief or habitual aim. Mental play is open-mindedness, faith in
the power of thought to preserve its own integrity without external supports and arbitrary
restrictions. Hence free mental play involves seriousness, the earnest following of the
development of subject-matter. It is incompatible with carelessness or flippancy, for it exacts
accurate noting of every result reached in order that every conclusion may be put to further use.
What is termed the interest in truth for its own sake is certainly a serious matter, yet this pure
interest in truth coincides with love of the free play of thought.
In spite of many appearances to the contrary—usually due to social conditions of either undue
superfluity that induces idle fooling or undue economic pressure that compels drudgery—
childhood normally realizes the ideal of conjoint free mental play and thoughtfulness. Successful
portrayals of children have always made their wistful intentness at least as obvious as their lack
of worry for the morrow. To live in the present is compatible with condensation of far-reaching
meanings in the present. Such enrichment of the present for its own sake is the just heritage of
childhood and the best insurer of future growth. The child forced into premature concern with
economic remote results may develop a surprising sharpening of wits in a particular direction,
but this precocious specialization is always paid for by later apathy and dullness.
The attitude of the artist
That art originated in play is a common saying. Whether or not the saying is historically correct,
it[Pg 220] suggests that harmony of mental playfulness and seriousness describes the artistic ideal.
When the artist is preoccupied overmuch with means and materials, he may achieve wonderful
technique, but not the artistic spirit par excellence. When the animating idea is in excess of the
command of method, æsthetic feeling may be indicated, but the art of presentation is too
defective to express the feeling thoroughly. When the thought of the end becomes so adequate
that it compels translation into the means that embody it, or when attention to means is inspired
by recognition of the end they serve, we have the attitude typical of the artist, an attitude that
may be displayed in all activities, even though not conventionally designated arts.
The art of the teacher culminates in nurturing this attitude
That teaching is an art and the true teacher an artist is a familiar saying. Now the teacher's own
claim to rank as an artist is measured by his ability to foster the attitude of the artist in those who
study with him, whether they be youth or little children. Some succeed in arousing enthusiasm,
in communicating large ideas, in evoking energy. So far, well; but the final test is whether the
stimulus thus given to wider aims succeeds in transforming itself into power, that is to say, into
the attention to detail that ensures mastery over means of execution. If not, the zeal flags, the
interest dies out, the ideal becomes a clouded memory. Other teachers succeed in training
fa
cility, skill, mastery of the technique of subjects. Again it is well—so far. But unless
enlargement of mental vision, power of increased discrimination of final values, a sense for
ideas—for principles—accompanies this training, forms of skill ready to be put indifferently to
any end may be the result. Such modes of technical skill may display themselves, accord[Pg
221]ing to circumstances, as cleverness in serving self-interest, as docility in carrying out the
purposes of others, or as unimaginative plodding in ruts. To nurture inspiring aim and executive
means into harmony with each other is at once the difficulty and the reward of the teacher.
§ 3. The Far and the Near
"Familiarity breeds contempt,"
Teachers who have heard that they should avoid matters foreign to pupils' experience, are
frequently surprised to find pupils wake up when something beyond their ken is introduced,
while they remain apathetic in considering the familiar. In geography, the child upon the plains
seems perversely irresponsive to the intellectual charms of his local environment, and fascinated
by whatever concerns mountains or the sea. Teachers who have struggled with little avail to
extract from pupils essays describing the details of things with which they are well acquainted,
sometimes find them eager to write on lofty or imaginary themes. A woman of education, who
has recorded her experience as a factory worker, tried retelling Little Women to some factory
girls during their working hours. They cared little for it, saying, "Those girls had no more
interesting experience than we have," and demanded stories of millionaires and society leaders.
A man interested in the mental condition of those engaged in routine labor asked a Scotch girl in
a cotton factory what she thought about all day. She replied that as soon as her mind was free
from starting the machinery, she married a duke, and their fortunes occupied her for the
remainder of the day.
since only the novel demands attention,
Naturally, these incidents are not told in order to encourage methods of teaching that appeal to
the sensa[Pg 222]tional, the extraordinary, or the incomprehensible. They are told, however, to
enforce the point that the familiar and the near do not excite or repay thought on their own
account, but only as they are adjusted to mastering the strange and remote. It is a commonplace
of psychology that we do not attend to the old, nor consciously mind that to which we are
thoroughly accustomed. For this, there is good reason: to devote attention to the old, when new
circumstances are constantly arising to which we should adjust ourselves, would be wasteful and
dangerous. Thought must be reserved for the new, the precarious, the problematic. Hence the
mental constraint, the sense of being lost, that comes to pupils when they are invited to turn their
thoughts upon that with which they are already familiar. The old, the near, the accustomed, is not
that to which but that with which we attend; it does not furnish the material of a problem, but of
its solution.
which, in turn, can be given only through the old
The last sentence has brought us to the balancing of new and old, of the far and that close by,
involved in reflection. The more remote supplies the stimulus and the motive; the nearer at hand
fu
rn
ishes the point of approach and the available resources. This principle may also be stated in
this form: the best thinking occurs when the easy and the difficult are duly proportioned to each
other. The easy and the familiar are equivalents, as are the strange and the difficult. Too much
that is easy gives no ground for inquiry; too much of the hard renders inquiry hopeless.
The given and the suggested
The necessity of the interaction of the near and the far follows directly from the nature of
thinking. Where there is thought, something present suggests and indicates something absent.
Accordingly unless the familiar[Pg 223] is presented under conditions that are in some respect
unusual, it gives no jog to thinking, it makes no demand upon what is not present in order to be
understood. And if the subject presented is totally strange, there is no basis upon which it may
suggest anything serviceable for its comprehension. When a person first has to do with fractions,
fo
r example, they will be wholly baffling so far as they do not signify to him some relation that
he has already mastered in dealing with whole numbers. When fractions have become
thoroughly familiar, his perception of them acts simply as a signal to do certain things; they are a
"substitute sign," to which he can react without thinking. (Ante, p. 178.) If, nevertheless, the
situation as a whole presents something novel and hence uncertain, the entire response is not
mechanical, because this mechanical operation is put to use in solving a problem. There is no
end to this spiral process: foreign subject-matter transformed through thinking into a familiar
possession becomes a resource for judging and assimilating additional foreign subject-matter.
Observation supplies the near, imagination the remote
The need for both imagination and observation in every mental enterprise illustrates another
aspect of the same principle. Teachers who have tried object-lessons of the conventional type
have usually found that when the lessons were new, pupils were attracted to them as a diversion,
but as soon as they became matters of course they were as dull and wearisome as was ever the
most mechanical study of mere symbols. Imagination could not play about the objects so as to
enrich them. The feeling that instruction in "facts, facts" produces a narrow Gradgrind is justified
not because facts in themselves are limiting, but because facts are dealt out[Pg 224] as such hard
and fast ready-made articles as to leave no room to imagination. Let the facts be presented so as
to stimulate imagination, and culture ensues naturally enough. The converse is equally true. The
imaginative is not necessarily the imaginary; that is, the unreal. The proper function of
imagination is vision of realities that cannot be exhibited under existing conditions of senseperception. Clear insight into the remote, the absent, the obscure is its aim. History, literature,
and geography, the principles of science, nay, even geometry and arithmetic, are full of matters
that must be imaginatively realized if they are realized at all. Imagination supplements and
deepens observation; only when it turns into the fanciful does it become a substitute for
observation and lose logical force.
Experience through communication of others' experience
A final exemplification of the required balance between near and far is found in the relation that
obtains between the narrower field of experience realized in an individual's own contact with
persons and things, and the wider experience of the race that may become his through
communication. Instruction always runs the risk of swamping the pupil's own vital, though
narrow, experience under masses of communicated material. The instructor ceases and the
teacher begins at the point where communicated matter stimulates into fuller and more
significant life that which has entered by the strait and narrow gate of sense-perception and
motor activity. Genuine communication involves contagion; its name should not be taken in vain
by terming communication that which produces no community of thought and purpose between
the child and the race of which he is the heir.
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