Synopsis of Chapters

Psychology and Thought

Men have recently increased their power over Nature, without increasing the control of that power by thought. We can make war more efficiently, but cannot prevent war; we can explore the world, but cannot contrive an interracial world-policy; and the same want of intellectual control exists, within each nation, in politics, philosophy and art. We require, therefore, both more effective thinking on particular problems, and an improved art of thought, in which scientific explanation may overtake and guide empirical rules. But in thought, as in cookery, science lags behind empiricism, and the study of modern psychological text-books may even hinder effective thinking. This fact is largely due to the use by psychologists of the “mechanist” conception of instinct as “power,” and of reason as “machine.” Some of the best modern physiologists and psychologists are, however, opposed to that conception, and substitute for it the “hormist” conception of the human organism as an imperfectly integrated combination of living elements, each of which retains some initiative of its own, while co-operating with the rest in securing the good of the whole organism. The aim of the art of thought is an improved coordination of these elements in the process of thought.

Consciousness and Will

The thinker must also fight against his own “common-sense” conception of consciousness and will as simple and absolute unities. Consciousness varies from “full” consciousness to unconsciousness, and from comparatively unified consciousness to “co-consciousness”; and the thinker must train himself to observe his less conscious as well as his more conscious psychological experiences. Will, also, varies, from full volition to non-volition, and from comparatively unified volition to “co-volition.” The distribution of volitional control over the various factors in our organism is, indeed, curiously incomplete and arbitrary; so that Plato and others have found difficulty in relating conscious purpose to creative thought. The similarity of the characteristics and limitations of consciousness, will, and organic life has led many thinkers to believe that they may be three different aspects of the same fact.

Thought Before Art

The art of thought is a modification by conscious effort of a “natural” form of human behaviour. In a civilized adult, it is very difficult to observe mental behaviour apart from acquired habit; but if we make a necessarily rough distinction between nature and acquirement, we find that the main “natural” process which the art of thought attempts to modify is the “association of ideas,’ which Aristotle and Hobbes observed by examining the memory of past association-trains, and Varendonck and others by the more difficult but more fruitful method of examining association-trains during their occurrence. Varendonck emphasizes the risings and fallings of consciousness which accompany the “natural” association-trains, and describes the “dialogue form” which results from automatic mental attempts to solve psychological situations. He correlates rising and falling consciousness with rising and falling rationality; and, less successfully, with the use of verbal and visual imagery. Varendonck’s evidence is influenced by the fact that all his observations took place while he was falling asleep, and also, like that of H. Poincaré, by an oversimplified “mechanist” theory of the relation between thought and instinctive emotion. But the thinker, from the record of such observations, and from his own introspection, can make for himself a working conception of that natural association-process which his art is to modify.

Stages of Control

At what stages in the association-process should the thinker bring the conscious effort of his art to bear? If we examine a single achievement of thought we can distinguish four stages— Preparation, Incubation, Illumination (and its accompaniments), and Verification. At the Preparation stage we can consciously accumulate knowledge, divide up by logical rules the field of inquiry, and adopt a definite “problem attitude.” In Verification we can consciously follow out rules like those used in Preparation. At the Incubation stage we can consciously arrange, either to think on other subjects than the proposed problem, or to rest from any form of conscious thought. This second form of Incubation is often necessary for the severer types of intellectual production, which would be hindered either by interruption or by continuous passive reading. If we are consciously to control the Illumination stage we must include in it the “fringe-conscious” psychological events which precede and accompany the “flash” of Illumination, and which may be called Intimation. We can to some degree control Illumination by making ourselves conscious (as many poets are conscious) of Intimation; and by both encouraging the psychological processes which Intimation shows to be occurring, and protecting them from interruption.

Thought and Emotion

A difficulty in the voluntary control of thought arises from the elusive character of “emotion” or “affect.” Sensation and imagery are less elusive than emotion; and poets and artists have attempted to retain their emotions by associating them with images of sensation. On the other hand, emotions can call up ideas, and nations have sometimes to choose between a vernacular language whose emotional associations may provide intellectual stimulus, and a more exact literary language with fewer emotional associations. The intellectual influence of certain emotions, such as humour and sympathy, can best be appreciated by considering them separately. In poetic creation, one of the strongest intellectual influences comes from the emotion of “significance.” A century ago, the problem of the relation between thought and emotional association was discussed by using the terms “reason” and “imagination” ; Shelley described his personal intellectual development from “reason,” which attempted to inhibit emotion, to “imagination,” which used the whole content of consciousness as a guide both to truth and to human values.

Thought and Habit

All mental activities, beside their immediate effects in the production of thought, have later effects in the production of mental habits; and it is sometimes convenient to consider the activity as means, and the habit as end. A regular time-stimulus is useful as producing the habit of “warming up,” and may be combined with the stimulus of place or circumstance, or of the muscular movements of fingers or lips. But we should not become the slaves of habit; the best administrators often attempt to get a fresh point of intellectual departure by breaking their own mental habits; and those who have to work to a time-table should systematically watch and record their unhabitual “fringe-thoughts.” Such thoughts will often come at moments outside the working day, and it is specially important for the social thinker to observe and select them during newspaper reading. Mental habits should vary with the natural powers, the age, and the subjects of study, of the thinker; and the management of habit is specially important for thinkers who are teachers or journalists. The daily conflict between the stimulus of habit-keeping and that of habit-breaking, is only part of the larger problem of regularity and adventure in the life of a creative thinker.

Effort and Energy

Further analysis is required of the facts behind our use in psychology of such words as “effort,” “energy,” and “ease.” Creative artists often describe their moments of greatest intellectual energy as being without effort, but the artist himself cannot always tell whether the absence of effort means an increase or a decline of energy, especially in those cases where a mental activity which originally required severe effort has become habitual. Spencer describes a habit of relaxed mental energy, and Mill a habit by which he constantly renewed his mental energy. But efforts vary not only in intensity, but also in the character of their “stroke,” and many men have wasted their efforts because they never discovered the right stroke for their work. Sometimes the effective stimulation of mental energy depends on the relation between thought and “emotion”; extreme emotion may, however, weaken thought; or the emotional factors in our organism may fail to respond to an intellectual call for energy. Some thinkers have advocated the production of organic harmony by the general organic relaxation of “power through repose”; but the purpose of thought is not organic harmony but truth, and the seeker for truth must always be prepared to sacrifice harmony. The harmony resulting from action is more effective for the production of energy than the harmony of repose; but action, if it is to heighten intellectual energy, must be relevant to our purpose, and to those conditions outside ourselves on which the fulfilment of our purpose depends. The “energy” of which the psychologist speaks is an empirical fact of introspection; it may some day be related to the measurable “energy” of the physicist and the physiologist.

Types of Thought

Certain ways of using the mind are characteristic of nations, professions and other human groups. Some of these are the unconscious results of environment; others have been consciously invented ; and others are due to a combination of invention and environment. The French and English nations have acquired different mental habits and ideals which they indicate respectively by the word “logic” and the phrase “muddling through.” Each habit has advantages and dangers, and it may be hoped that a new habit will some day be developed which will combine both advantages and avoid both dangers. It is less easy to detect an American type of thought. There are indications that a more elastic and effective mental habit may be developing in America than is found elsewhere, but that habit cannot yet be called the national type. The “pioneer” habit of mind is perhaps more prevalent in America than any other single type; but it seems to be rapidly dissolving under the influence of industrial development, religious change, and the spread of popular interest in psychology. A new standard of intellectual energy may ultimately come to be accepted in America, accompanied by a new moral standard in the conduct of the mind, and a new popular appreciation of the more difficult forms of intellectual effort.

Dissociation of Consciousness

The history of the art of thought has been greatly influenced by the invention of methods of producing the phenomena of “dissociated consciousness.” ‘The simplest and most ancient of these are the methods of producing a hypnotic trance by the monotonous repetition of nervous stimuli. Such methods have important and sometimes beneficial effects on the functions of the lower nervous system; and a slight degree of dissociation may assist some of the higher thought-processes; but the evidence seems to indicate that the best intellectual and artistic work is not done in a condition of serious dissociation. Dissociation, however, often produces intense intellectual conviction; and the future of religion and philosophy, in both the West and the East depends largely on the conditions under which that conviction is accepted as valid. In Western Christianity, methods of “meditation” have been invented, especially by Saint Ignatius, which are intended to avoid the dangers of mere dissociation; but the process of direction of the association-trains of ideas and emotions by an effort of will is so difficult that it constantly results in the production of the same state of dissociation as that produced by the earlier and more direct expedient of self-hypnotism. And, since dissociation remains the most effective means of producing intellectual conviction by an act of will, those who now desire to practise the “will to believe,” are still thrown back on the old problem of the validity of conviction produced by dissociative methods.

The Thinker at School

The discipline of the art of thought should begin at an age when the choice of intellectual methods must be mainly made, not by the student, but by teachers and administrators. If Plato were born in London or New York, how could we help him to become a thinker? He would be a self-active organism, living and growing in an environment far less stimulating than that of ancient Athens, and unable to discover for himself the best ways of using his mind. His education should involve a compromise between his powers as a child and his needs as a future adult; he should acquire steadily increasing experience of mental effort and fatigue, and of the energy which results from the right kind of effort; he will need periodical leisure, with its opportunities and dangers. The present experimental schools in which students are left to acquire thought-methods by their own “trial and error” have not always been successful, and the individual hints of a clever teacher as to mental method often fail. It may, therefore, be hoped that a knowledge of the outlines of the psychology of thought may become a recognized part of the school and college curriculum; experimental evidence already exists as to the effect of such knowledge in improving the mental technique of a student.

Public Education

In the case of four-fifths of the inhabitants of a modern industrial community, inventions of educational method will only increase the output of thought, in so far as they are actually brought to bear on the potential thinker by the administrative machinery of public education. That machinery is everywhere new, and was originally based on an over-simple conception of the problem. In England, we are slowly realizing the necessity, (a) of making more complex provision for the “average” student, and (b) of providing special treatment for the subnormal or supernormal student. Differential public education for the supernormal working-class child had to wait for the invention of a technique of mental diagnosis, and only began in England at the end of the nineteenth century; the system is still insufficiently developed, and there is a serious danger that an extension of the age of compulsion in its present form may lessen the productivity of the most supernormal minds. If this danger is to be avoided, we must reconsider our present compulsory system, with a presumption in favour of liberty and variety; American experience shows the intellectual disadvantages involved in the compulsory enforcement of anything like a uniform system of secondary education.

Teaching and Doing

The proposal to raise the age of educational compulsion is often combined, in England, with a scheme to make teaching, like law and medicine, a close “self-governing” profession, with a monopoly of public service. That scheme involves serious dangers to the intellectual life of the community, and especially to the training of potential thinkers; it ignores not only the possible opposition of interest between the consumers and the producers of education, but also the “demarcation” problem between the producers of education and the producers of thought. This over-simplification of the problem is partly due to the fact that those engaged in the more general forms of intellectual production are not organized, and do not claim, as other professions claim, a part in the training for their profession. Experience shows that the teaching of any function is sterilized if it is separated from “doing”; but are the English-speaking democracies prepared to offer special and expensive educational opportunities to a small minority of future professional thinkers? Perhaps some local authority might be induced (if legislation closing the teaching profession did not, meanwhile, make it impossible) to start an experimental school for students from all social classes who belong to the highest one per cent. in respect of intellectual supernormality, and who ask to be prepared for a career of professed thought. The staff of such a school would be so chosen as to keep in touch with intellectual work outside the school; the students would be encouraged both to develop their own individual talents, and to realize the social significance of their work; and the success of the school might influence the development of a new intellectual standard in other schools. But such an expenditure of public funds would run counter both to professional interests and to many of the traditions of democratic equality, and it may have to wait for a widespread change in popular world-outlook.