Quotes from The Art of Thought

Thought, therefore, whether as the concentrated mental activity of the professed thinker, or as penetrating and guiding other activities, is now required more urgently than ever before in the history of mankind. Thought, if we are to escape disaster, is needed in many specialized fields; we must construct a more accurate and better-proportioned conception of the past; separate groups of students must explore biology and physics, politics and sociology, and must try to see the relation of their studies to each other, to the ancient problems of philosophy, and to that beauty of words and form and colour by which our thoughts are made more permanent and more significant; thousands of political and social expedients must be invented. But in this book I shall argue that we must also consider how far it is possible for us to improve those processes of thought itself which are used in all the specialized studies, how far, that is to say, we can produce a more effective art of thought.

The art of thought, like the art of running, or the actor’s art of significant gesture, is an attempt to improve by conscious effort an already existing form of human behaviour. Men ran for countless generations before they invented or handed down the few expedients which constitute the art of running as taught by professional athletic trainers; they revealed their feelings by gestures long before there were any schools of dramatic art; and they thought for thousands of years before they had a name for thinking. In all these cases, therefore, the rules of art must be based on the most exact knowledge which we can obtain of the behaviour which the art is to modify.

In the daily stream of thought these four different stages constantly overlap each other as we explore different problems. An economist reading a Blue Book, a physiologist watching an experiment, or a business man going through his morning’s letters, may at the same time be “incubating” on a problem which he proposed to himself a few days ago, be accumulating knowledge in “preparation” for a second problem, and be “verifying” his conclusions on a third problem. Even in exploring the same problem, the mind may be unconsciously incubating on one aspect of it, while it is consciously employed in preparing for or verifying another aspect. And it must always be remembered that much very important thinking, done for instance by a poet exploring his own memories, or by a man trying to see clearly his emotional relation to his country or his party, resembles musical composition in that the stages leading to success are not very easily fitted into a “problem and solution” scheme. Yet, even when success in thought means the creation of something felt to be beautiful and true rather than the solution of a prescribed problem, the four stages of Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and the Verification of the final result can generally be distinguished from each other.

Voluntary abstention from conscious thought on any particular problem may, itself, take two forms: the period of abstention may be spent either in conscious mental work on other problems, or in a relaxation from all conscious mental work. The first kind of Incubation economizes time, and is therefore often the better. We can often get more result in the same time by beginning several problems in succession, and voluntarily leaving them unfinished while we turn to others, than by finishing our work on each problem at one sitting. A well-known academic psychologist, for instance, who was also a preacher, told me that he found by experience that his Sunday sermon was much better if he posed the problem on Monday, than if he did so later in the week, although he might give the same number of hours of conscious work to it in each case.

I find it convenient to use the term “Intimation” for that moment in the Illumination stage when our fringe-consciousness of an association-train is in the state of rising consciousness which indicates that the fully conscious flash of success is coming. A high English civil servant described his experience of Intimation to me by saying that when he is working at a difficult problem, “I often know that the solution is coming, though I don’t know what the solution will be,” and a very able university student gave me a description of the same fact in his case almost in the same words.

In this respect, the most obvious danger against which the thinker has to guard is that the association-train which the feeling of Intimation shows to be going on may either drift away of itself, as most of our dreams and day-dreams do, into mere irrelevance and forgetfulness, or may be interrupted by the intrusion of other trains of association. All thinkers know the effect of the ringing of the telephone bell, or the entrance of some one with a practical question which must be answered, during a promising Intimation.

It is this emotional factor which constitutes a large part of the difficulty in choosing, when choice is possible, the language we should use in thought. One language, or nuance of language, may enable our problems to be more exactly stated, and our Verification to be more successful; but another may possess for us emotional associations which are more likely to lead to new and vivid thoughts. When I was giving, some months ago, a short course in London University based on the material of this book, a very intelligent American graduate student reproached me for attempting to state psychological problems in “vernacular” language. I could only answer that the enormous technical vocabulary used in many American psychological laboratories may (providing one recognizes that the vocabulary of one laboratory often differs from that of another) lead to greater exactness of thought; but that in this particular case, where my purpose was the exploring of a rather new problem, I believed that for me that advantage was less than the advantage of the more vernacular language, with its greater range of emotional, and, therefore, of intellectual associations. For in the “telephone-exchange” of our brain, just as an idea may call up an emotion, so an emotion may call up an idea.

In all this, however, we must be careful not to become the slaves of our habits. In writing a long book it may be best on five days out of six to begin work by picking up and developing the thoughts of the day before. But on the sixth day it may be better to begin by using our time-habit to surprise, at the moment of “warming up,” our mental activity at a new and deeper level, and so to capture some idea which mere industry and regularity might never have brought to the surface.

The special habits which each thinker should attempt to acquire in dealing with his accumulated material of notes of reading, recorded fringe-thoughts, and past writings, will vary, of course, with the nature of his material, the character of his work, and his own natural powers. Sir Walter Scott would browse for an hour over some of the old notes of his seventeenth-century reading, or some new anecdotes and descriptions sent him by Erskine or Ballantyne, and would then write a chapter of a novel without that preliminary outline which Henry James called a “scenario.” A man without Scott’s superb natural gifts, who is engaged in exploring some problem in the social sciences, will have again and again to re-think and rearrange his scattered records. If he is to induce many hundreds of ideas which originally occurred independently to connect themselves as a single and consistent argument, he may require to make a dozen scenarios in the writing of a single chapter. The question as to what habits it is best to acquire in this respect will, again, vary with a thinker’s age. A man of fifty or sixty will have as a rule a larger accumulated stock of ideas than a man of twenty-five, but he will also have a less rapid and elastic memory. He will not be able to sit back in his chair and sweep, without the help of notes, over the whole plan of the book that he is writing, and over all the ideas automatically suggested by every part of it. Charles Dickens, for instance, did not begin to keep a note-book of ideas and facts until he was forty-three years of age, and he made increasing use of it during the next ten years.*

But I end by repeating that every thinker must remember always that if he is to get any advantage from the fact that he is a living organism and not a machine, he must be the master and not the slave of his habits. He should watch for the least sign that his careful arrangements of time and method and material are making him “stuffy”; and if so, he should get as soon and as completely as possible into the physical and moral “open air.”

AN important hindrance to further development in the art of thought arises from a want of clearness in our conception of the facts behind our use of such words as “energy,” “effort,” or “ease,” in speaking either of conscious or of subconscious mental activity. Creative thinkers have noticed, not only that their best single ideas seemed to come to them by automatic Illumination, but that their more continuous work was often most successful when it was done without the strain of effort, and even without any conscious feeling of volition.

It is not the muscular movement of speaking genially to one’s grandmother that increases one’s love for her; an actor may, in the run of a successful play, speak genially a thousand times to an actress whom he detests, and may thereby increase his loathing for her; he will only increase affection if his whole organism takes part—if he “means what he says.”

In examining such types of thought we have constantly to remember that there never exists a body of people all of whom are equally possessed of any type-quality. In interpreting nineteenth-century English political history, we may usefully speak of Conservative or Liberal types of thought as dominant at this or that moment, and yet one must never forget, not only that a Liberal or Conservative Government may be supported by a bare majority, or even a minority of the voters, but that every Liberal or Conservative voter or minister differs from every other, and that no one can ever be truthfully described as being politically a Liberal or Conservative and nothing else.

Perhaps, however, the main hope for the future of American creative thought lies in an extension of the American sense of need. We do not despise the intellectual creator who gives us something that we ourselves really desire; and to an increasing extent the desires of the great average population of America, may turn towards values that cannot be expressed in terms of money. No one now makes money by looking at the glorious marble buildings in Washington, or the hall of the Union Railway Station in New York, or the painted corridors of the Boston Free Library, or the pictures and statues and biological collections that attract scores of thousands of eager visitors to the Metropolitan Museums of Fine Art and Science. And fifty years hence the great-grandsons of the American pioneers may feel not only moral sympathy but spontaneous gratitude for that kind of effort by which alone the weak and imperfect human brain can add to its scanty store of knowledge and beauty.

From the beginning, the public authority and its advisory committee would co-operate with the teaching staff in creating the “atmosphere” of the school. They would try to avoid the dangers of “institutionalism,” and to remember that the social value of the school as a corporate entity consists of its effect upon individual students, and that therefore the interest of a student should never be sacrificed to the interest of the school. Above all, they would aim at securing that the individuality of every student should be respected, as a wise editor respects the individuality of his young contributors.

Those who provided buildings and organization would aim at giving the school itself an individuality which could be loved and could stimulate. The clever sensitive boys and girls who came to the school, either as boarders or as day students, from dull homes, might find there something answering to their vague yearnings for beauty and significance in life. It might be placed in or around an abandoned seventeenth-century country house, which the suburbs of a manufacturing town had enclosed; or a public-spirited architect might welcome an opportunity of showing that a modern building could be beautiful without being too expensive. Some artists might be glad to send copies of their best prints, and some authors their best books to a place where they might help their future fellow-craftsmen. When the school was twenty years old, the students would begin to be aware of the achievements of their own predecessors. Care would be taken to preserve specimens of the school-work of those students who seemed likely to “make good” by later service to the community; so that when some former student died, after a life’s work as writer or administrator or scientist or teacher, the students could see in the school library his early exercises, and the teachers could realize that some of their own students though younger might be abler and more important than themselves.