The Thinker at School

So far in this book I have conceived myself to be addressing readers who desire to improve their own intellectual methods and thereby help to diminish the dangers which threaten our civilization. But the discipline of the art of thought, if it is to be effective, should begin at an age when the choice of intellectual methods will be made, for the most part, not by the student himself, but by his teachers, and by the politicians and administrators who appoint, pay, and to some extent control his teachers. In this chapter, therefore, I shall discuss the art of education as a section of the art of thought, that is to say, I shall ask how far a teacher can hope to increase the future output of creative thought by those thinkers who as students pass through his hands. For that purpose it will be best to start with a mental picture, not of an educational system or a series of statistical curves, but of some supernormal human being who has actually added to the intellectual heritage of mankind—Goethe, Plato, Descartes, Kelvin, or William James. We can then consider what, if such a man were born under our present conditions, his elders could do for him or to him, at the successive periods of his mental growth, which would increase his efficiency as a thinker.

If Plato were born now, he would be, as his namesake in Athens was, a living organism which had grown by the repeated subdivision of a single fertilized cell. If he had grown into a plant, or a marine invertebrate, or a member of all but a few of the species of fish, and had had the luck to be a survivor of ten thousand contemporaries, his “behaviour-pattern”—his “hormé” or “urge”—which grew with the growth of his body, and perhaps in the last analysis was his body, would, after modifications due to experience, have enabled him, without help from his elders, to feed himself, and ultimately reproduce his species. If he had grown into an ant or a bee, his hormé would have been helped out by the behaviour of his elders in putting food and shelter within his reach. If he had been one of the higher non-human animals, his elders would have had impulses to offer him, not only food and shelter, but opportunities of acquiring skill in a number of elaborate processes, jumping, or hiding, or hunting, or obeying summoning or warning calls; and he would himself have felt rather fitful impulses both to make use of those opportunities, and also to think out with some degree of independence his own solution of the difficult “situations’ which roused his interest. Being a human baby, our modern Plato would be born with a behaviour-pattern much of which he shared with plants and with other animals. He would seek his mother’s breast as a seedling plant seeks moist earth, or a young limpet seeks a rock. As the months went on, he would crawl and chatter, and pick things to pieces, like a young ape. But as he grew towards childhood, his chatter would turn into vivid talk, his curiosity into conscious wonder and delight, and the tendency to recognize a situation and imagine a solution of it which he had shared with Köhler’s chimpanzees, would turn into prolonged dreamy explorations of the mathematical and metaphysical problems which attract a clever little boy.

How then, two thousand years ago, did the elders of Plato of Athens help him to develop from a clever little boy into a great philosopher? The Greek word “school” indicates that their first service was to secure him the “leisure” of a young Athenian freeman. He was not, as soon as he could walk, set to pick up stones in the fields or card wool like a slave boy. Nor was he subjected to that professional Spartan military training which Plato himself admired when he had become a conservative statesman. He played naked for part of every day in the sunlight of the house-court with his brothers and cousins, till he was old enough to be taken to the gymnasium for exercise under the eye of a skilled instructor. By that time he was also attending a school, learning to read and write and draw geometrical figures, and to accompany on a little harp his own singing. In summer, when war allowed, he went to Mount Hymettus, and picked flowers, and listened to the bees, and watched where the Ægean showed itself beyond Phalerum. On great occasions he climbed the steps of the Acropolis, and saw the sacred processions, and heard solemn speeches from priests and statesmen. And one day, after his public admission as a citizen, he was free to sit with shining eyes at the feet of Socrates in a corner of the Agora, to argue with friends during walks up the Ilyssus Valley as to the nature of man and God and the State, or to stay up for half the night writing the stilted love-poems and discourses at which in later years he would laugh; and so, after many travels, and with no clear division between his life as student, and teacher, and statesman, he became the most influential thinker in all history.

If Plato were born to-day in America or England or Germany, he would neither be the son of a slave-master nor the son of a slave. He would be a member of a community whose educational policy was guided by at least a half-hearted desire that every citizen should have the opportunity of developing all his powers; but he would also be a unit in that type of social organization which has resulted from the development of mechanical industry, and which I have called the Great Society. Unless he belonged to the tiny section of his nation whose members own sufficient accumulated wealth to be “independent,” he would probably live in one of the meanly uniform houses of a city street, and be the child of parents with few traditions of culture. Nothing in his daily surroundings would stimulate in him the passion for truth and beauty which the Athenian temples and porticoes, and the eager talkers and traders and poets and orators, and the valleys and hills and coast of Attica stimulated in the earlier Plato. It would be only occasionally, as the result of preliminary arrangement, and perhaps at moments that did not suit his mood, that he would see the fields in spring time, or be taken to an intellectually or esthetically stimulating cinema or picture-gallery, or hear a few words on the wireless from an interesting man. He might never, throughout his boyhood, be able to spend three consecutive hours away from the noisy livingroom and the noisier street, with a boy of his own age and tastes. Most of that which Plato of Athens learnt at first hand from nature and mankind, Plato of London or New York must learn, if at all, at second hand, from books and machines.

The great industrial nations may perhaps in the next hundred years rebuild their cities, and scatter electrically-driven industries over the country-side. But, for good or evil, we shall never return to the “natural” short-range environment of Plato’s Athens. Alexander of Macedon, the pupil of Plato’s pupil, destroyed the short-range life of the Greek city-state, because he had learnt from his master to think in terms of maps and unseen continents. The modern thinker, if he is to help to control the forces which now bring human society to order or confusion, must read during his life a library of books and a pyramid of newspapers, and must learn from science to live at a point of time that is continuous with a million years of the past, and at a point in space which is continuous with astronomical distances. He must co-operate intellectually with scores of foreign specialists in handling a body of accumulated knowledge a thousand times too great for the memory even of Aristotle to retain, and must profit by artificial means of observation a thousand times more accurate than anything which Aristotle could have imagined.

How can we, his elders, help him? Even the Prince Consort could not invent a machine capable of forcing his eldest son through all the intellectual processes of a Prussian “state-scientist.” If we are to help our new Plato to think, we must have on our side his own hormé, with all its imperceptible gradations from spontaneous “urge” to conscious will. And among every generation of modern educationalists, from Rousseau and Froebel to the present day, there have always been men and women passionately convinced that the free “urge” of a child is enough to secure his full development, that a child sent to wander in a Thuringian pine-wood will become a biologist, and a child left with a balance and a few test tubes in the laboratory of a “heuristic school” will repeat the discoveries of Archimedes and Kepler. Their experiments have failed, partly because human beings do not live for ever, and therefore must practise economy of time, partly because, in the art of thought, as in other arts, that which experience shows to be the best way of doing things is not the way which is most likely to occur to one unaided mind. And yet, especially in America, the heuristic idea is still continually rediscovered and continually welcomed. An article, for instance, in the New York New Republic of April 9, 1924, contains a description of an experimental school carried on by the New York Department of Education in connection with the Public Education Association, and including a section for ‘specially gifted children.” The Head Mistress is described as believing that “There is no need of hurrying along the teaching of symbols—any normal child will learn to read before he is ten, if he is exposed to books by those who value them. There is no use in torturing an imaginative child of six or seven with a dull reading routine.’ Among the “gifted children” in this school may be a potential Alexander Hamilton, or Louis Agassiz, or Baruch Spinoza, whom the Public Education Association desire to assist in his preparation for a life of creative thought. I would seriously ask that Association whether it is wise to postpone his learning to read till the age of ten, or to leave to mere accident the question whether he reads for the rest of his life easily or clumsily, whether his “ideograms” are letters or phrases, and whether his brain interprets slight actual movements of his mouth-muscles, or audible or visual images, or the meaning of more directly apprehended ideas and situations.’ If the school contains a potential Kreisler, would it be wise to arrange that he should first learn to play the violin by being “exposed to violins by those who value them’? One has, indeed, a recurrent feeling that some American educational reformers have not sufficient respect for the future work of the human beings whom they are training in the most difficult of all arts. One would like to say, in Napoleon’s words, to those who would keep great talents as long as possible in that atmosphere of childishness which looks so charming to an enthusiastic adult, ‘Respect the burden.”

If, however, we accept responsibility for showing the child what we believe to be the best way to develop his powers of thought, we must try ourselves to be clear as to what we mean by “best.” A way of using nerves and sense-organs and muscles may be best for a young man of twenty, but not best for a child of six. And a way of practising thought which would be best for the child of six, if all human beings died at ten years old, may not be best for a child of six who will live and work as a thinker till he is seventy. In that respect, the teacher of any art must make a delicate compromise between the powers and needs of the child and those of the future adult. On the one hand we do harm if we try to teach a baby of six months old to walk, instead of waiting until, a few months later, he has developed both the power and the inclination to walk, or to teach algebra to a child of three, or if we expect a child of eight to feel as an adult feels in the presence of certain kinds of great literature. But, on the other hand, the future violinist should learn as a child to handle his bow, not simply in the way which is then easiest to him, but in the way which, while allowing for his muscular and nervous immaturity, will also allow for the needs of the adult executant; the future historian should learn to read at an age and in a way which will not unduly strain his immature eyes, but also at an age and in a way which will enable him to read both accurately and rapidly in after life; and the future mathematician should be taught to use, in reasoning, methods based on the recognition not only that a child can play an easy game with Froebel’s geometrical “gifts,” but also that the habit of expressing all quantitative conceptions in terms of solid geometry may be inconvenient in the performance of the important duties of an adult mathematician.

One of the most difficult elements in this compromise is the question how far and at what age the teacher should aim at teaching the pupil to stimulate his mental energy by conscious and voluntary effort; and how far mental energy should be left to grow out of the pupil’s own spontaneous “urge.” Perhaps the best result of modern educational psychology is the present rapid advance in methods of recognizing and using spontaneous impulse. But I myself believe that the teacher should also attempt to find ways of bringing the conscious will of a clever child to bear upon his thought at least as soon as school attendance begins. The modern urban environment has so little that is automatically stimulating to the higher intellectual impulses that I am sure that many great talents both in England and in America have been prevented from fruition because the experience of full mental energy has either never come to them at all, or has only come, too late, in the process of adult money-making. This loss is partly due to the mistake of most educationalists after, say, 1780, in exaggerating, by reaction from the educational methods invented in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the physiological difference between the adult and the child. We have hardly yet realized that after infancy is over intellectual growth is in many respects quantitative rather than qualitative, and shows itself not by the sudden appearance of the power to carry out a particular intellectual function, but by a gradual extension of the time during which that function can be carried out continuously. This is particularly the case with intellectual growth after thirteen; a healthy clever man of thirty differs (if we ignore his greater accumulation of knowledge and habits) from an equally healthy and clever boy of fourteen, rather in his power to go on solving new intellectual problems for eight hours a day, than in his power to solve a single new problem in a few minutes. The Binet and other “tests” have, indeed, failed to detect any increase in momentary “general ability” after sixteen. Because the boy will tire sooner than the man he should rest from work sooner and longer; but for the healthy boy, as for the healthy man, the feeling of fatigue, though it is valuable evidence as to the desirability of continuing intellectual effort, is not conclusive evidence that the effort should be at once discontinued. Every one who has played games knows the difference between the primary fatigue, which a healthy youth acquires the habit of enduring until it is succeeded by the stage of “second wind,” and the “staleness” which, if it is ignored, leads to the pathological condition of overstrain. And any one who is to do efficient intellectual work, either as boy or man, should be helped to make the same distinction.

After taking my degree, I was for two or three years employed in preparing boys for the “scholarship” competitions of the great English “public schools.” My conclusion, based mainly on that experience, is that a healthy and intelligent child should, before the age of ten, be familiar with the experience of concentrated attention in the “problem-attitude” of continuous thought, started, and, if necessary, maintained by voluntary effort, for a spell of perhaps twenty minutes. A healthy and intelligent boy of thirteen is, I believe, all the better for the occasional experience of mental endurance carried to the point of primary fatigue, in perhaps a four hours’ spell, and a boy of sixteen should know, once in a while, the glorious “second wind” which may come when mental energy is maintained far beyond the point of primary fatigue. The examination system, as practised in England, has many obvious dangers; examination-passing is apt to become an end in itself, both for teacher and for student; and the nervous strain which follows from the realization that the opportunities of one’s whole future life may depend on the effort of a few days is often harmful. But a student may, during his preparation for an important examination, learn for the first time what work which is fully up to his powers feels like, and may see for the first time, as an intellectual and emotional whole, a book or subject which he has hitherto seen only in his daily “assignments.” Among the most vivid experiences of my boyhood was a spell of seven or eight hours which I once went through about the age of sixteen. I was revising some neglected work ‘for an examination next day, and I sat through most of one night, reading by the light of an illegal dark-lantern and with a tear occasionally sliding down my nose, Sophocles’ tragedy of Ajax. This question of prolonged effort is, I believe, of special importance for secondary and college education in America. Mr. H. D. Kitson in his How to Use Your Mind, (1916), p. 171, says of the American high schools and colleges : “we indulgently succumb to the first symptoms of fatigue, before we have more than scratched the surface of our real potentialities.” During a discussion, a couple of years ago, with some of the staff of an exceptionally good American college, I raised the question of “second wind.” One of the group said, with perhaps some degree of exaggeration, ‘I don’t believe that there is a boy here with any experience even of primary mental fatigue.”

But as soon as a student knows what it is to maintain intellectual energy by an effort of will, he should be taught to realize that mental effort, and the mental energy which may be stimulated by it, vary in intensity as well as in duration. This point is also, I believe, specially important for the future of American secondary and college education. When Mr. McLoughlin came from California to the Eastern States of America, he set a new standard of intensity in the service-stroke at lawn-tennis; the eastern players were made to feel that they had hitherto played “pat-ball,” and they themselves afterwards crossed the Atlantic to produce the same effect upon our British players. Since lawn-tennis is a pastime, of which the purpose is recreation, Mr. McLoughlin may have conferred a somewhat doubtful benefit on the world. Thought, however, is not a pastime, but an art, the successful performance of which is of enormous importance to mankind; and I am convinced that hardly any good fortune could come to American education as great as the appearance of an educational McLoughlin, who should abolish “pat-ball” among all adolescent practitioners of that art. A distinguished young American writer, who had been educated at the best of those “preparatory” schools which correspond to the English “public” schools, told me: “At — we worked hard, but we didn’t really know what hard work was.” Mr. H. D. Kitson seems almost to assume that intensity of mental energy cannot be expected from a clever boy at the age of seventeen. Speaking of the difference between college work and high school work, he says, “No longer will you have time to dawdle sleepily through the pages of easy texts” (l.c., p. 15). A student who has carried the habit of “dawdling sleepily” through his work till, at seventeen or eighteen, he leaves the high school, is only too likely to continue that habit after eighteen. Another American writer (New Republic, April 2, 1924) says, “The essential problem of education, ‘how to get from every pupil hard work but willing,’ is still unsolved.” Some American observers believe, indeed, that in that respect their country is moving backwards rather than forward. The great American, Dr. Charles W. Eliot, ex-President of Harvard, had published at the age of ninety, in his book A Late Harvest (1924), the statement that “I began as a boy to use my mind intently several hours a day”; and the New Republic writer commented, “Probably the mental inertness of the average American, college-bred or not, is outside the range of his comprehension.” The “intent use of the mind” to which Dr. Eliot refers may be aroused by an external stimulus, but should not be dependent on it; I shall always remember an American graduate student, who said to me: “Professor Wallas, I came to the London School of Economics to be stimulated, and I have not been stimulated.’ And the apprentice thinker should learn to distinguish between the effort which may be painful because it is ‘against the grain,” and the fortunate energy into which his effort may imperceptibly transform itself, and which, though it involves a full concentration of will, is felt as an unhindered harmony of the whole organism. In the changes and chances of a thinker’s life he, like Shelley, will have experience of both.

Intense intellectual energy, however, carried to the point of fatigue, requires that the Incubation period before a new thought appears shall be one of real rest, varying, perhaps, from an hour or two to a month. For this problem, neither the “public school” nor the municipal school traditions of secondary education in England seem to me to have found a solution. The discipline, indeed, since the days of Thomas Arnold, of the English Public Schools may almost be said to have taken the prevention of leisure as its chief object, The Times reviewer of a history of Marlborough School, obviously writing with inside knowledge, contrasts the first years of the school (when in the 1850's William Morris used to wander in the woods round Marlborough) with the present days “when few moments are left unallotted.” On December 20, 1923, The Times announced that Mr. J. H. M. Hare had retired, after thirty-nine years’ service as assistant master at Eton. A list follows of his distinctions in football, cricket, and fives, and a poem by the Head Master of Eton, beginning:

“Note how each famous man

Hastes to declare

How life for him began

With Mr. Hare!

Why does he rule the land?

How rise to high command?

Because he learnt it from

Wise Mr. Hare.”

Mr. Hare himself said in an interview with The Times representative, “I have always taught the younger boys—the last thirty boys or so to enter the school . . . I find that boys are more ready to learn than they used to be, and much more ready to do what is expected of them. Three things I have always tried to impress on boys. I have asked them never to be doing nothing, but either to work, play, or sleep.” In some English “public schools” Mr. Hare’s function in the prevention of leisure is assigned to a professional “games-master,” into whose power the boys are given as soon as lessons are over, and who is likely to think that the school hours are chiefly valuable as providing an opportunity for his boys to rest, and so recover the energy necessary for victory in their next contest. The dangers of sexual perversion, against which the system of leaving “few moments unallotted” is mainly aimed, are real, so real that they may ultimately lead to the abandonment of the whole experiment of keeping boys in unisexual “preparatory” or “public” (in the English sense) schools for an unbroken boarding-school life from ten to nineteen. But I believe that a careful inquiry would show that the prevention of leisure, the attempt to secure that for all his waking hours except meal-times a boy should either be sitting in class-room or chapel, or engaged in severely professionalized games, or working at some allotted task, is not an effective method of guarding against sexual dangers. And even if it were more effective than it is, the general application of the system involves an injury to the intellectual culture of the nation too serious to allow one to accept it as the wisest way of dealing with the sexual problem.

In the new municipal secondary schools of Great Britain or the Dominions the danger from absence of leisure is apt to arise in a somewhat different form. The whole future of a clever boy or girl depends on the results of a series of Junior, Intermediate, and Senior “Scholarships.” My university students have sometimes complained to me that in the preparation for each successive examination they become “stale” and overstrained, and that they have no opportunity for such a comparatively prolonged rest as will enable them to recover nervous elasticity, or to recognize, collect, and systematize any new thoughts which may be waiting for the moment of Illumination. The danger in this respect is greater because the period of severest strain is apt in both sexes to coincide with the coming of puberty.

The effort and energy, again, of a student thinker vary not only quantitatively in duration and intensity, but also qualitatively in respect of the kind of mental process which is consciously attempted. This is a point which educational tradition has in the main left to the pupil’s own “trial and error.” He “does lessons” on certain “subjects.” Most of these subjects are chosen mainly in order that his memory may be stored with a body of knowledge—history, science, language, etc.— that will be useful to him in his own future thinking and in his intercourse with others. Some are mainly chosen in order that he may acquire skill in certain simple mental processes, mathematical, grammatical, etc. Some are chosen—literature, religion, music, etc.—in the hope that he will experience certain emotions, and desire certain forms of conduct. The teacher’s time is spent, partly in oral instruction followed or accompanied by questioning, partly in the reading, correcting, and marking of written work, and to a much less extent, when teaching drawing, music, experimental science, and gymnastics, in the watching and correction of the pupil’s muscular movements. ‘The teacher, that is to say, observes and marks the more obvious results of thought-processes and not the processes themselves. It is therefore almost inevitable that his methods should tend to encourage the simpler mental processes, and especially that of memorizing. Professor F. M. McMurry, of Columbia University, says, indeed, in his How to Study (1909), p. 9, that he obtained “from students in college, as well as from teachers, brief statements of their idea of study. Fully nine out of every ten have given memorizing as its nearest synonym.” Even if we add to the process of memorizing the processes of understanding, and applying to particular instances the arguments and principles of the teacher and the text-book, it still remains, I am told, that the thought-processes used by students in nearly all American secondary schools, and during the collegiate years of nearly all American universities, as well as in many of the English publicly-supported secondary schools, belong mainly to the stages of thought which I have called Preparation and Verification, and that in these institutions a clever boy may go without reproach through his whole course, with little or no fully conscious experience of the more vitally important processes of Illumination and Intimation.

There have been recently introduced, both in America and in England, certain forms of school organization which are intended to offer the thoughtful pupil opportunities and motives for discovering and practising the more difficult methods of thought. Of these the best known are Daltonism, Garyism, the Project Method, the Science Method of Professor H. Armstrong, and the methods used at Oundle by Sanderson, and interpreted by Mr. H. G. Wells. The common factor of them all is an arrangement by which the students, as individuals or in small groups, undertake, with occasional suggestions from their teachers, pieces of intellectual work prolonged over weeks or even months; the analysis, for example, of the causes of some historical event, the solution of a small engineering problem, the writing and staging of a play, etc. I believe that these experiments—which can, of course, be looked on as extensions and modifications of the traditional plan in some of the older English secondary schools of setting long literary compositions and long pieces of mathematical “book-work”—may lead ultimately to important educational progress. But in these experiments the discovery and choice of intellectual methods are still left, in the main, to the students, who do not often succeed in finding for themselves the best “mental attitudes” and methods. Mr. Abraham Flexner’s Report, in 1918, on the “Gary Schools” seems to prove that, in the schools which he visited, the pupils had not made the elementary discovery of the difference between work carried out with a full concentration of will and the mental attitude which Mr. Kitson calls “dawdling sleepily,” or the “low-flash” interest of a not very exciting game. Still less had they discovered the difference between a passive waiting for thought and that intense expectant energy which enables the creative thinker at the moment of Intimation to give “a local habitation and a name” to the elusive phantom of a hovering idea. The founders of those experimental schools sometimes suggest to their students by their own infectious enthusiasm the necessary form of intellectual effort. In such cases, the experiment may work excellently as long as the school is controlled by an inventor who is also an omnipotent head teacher. But the same school-methods applied by average teachers to three or four hundred average irreverent boys or girls, quick to detect pretence, and ingenious in escaping the effort of thought, may produce unexpected results,

In schools of a more traditional type, a clever teacher, interested in the mental development of his pupils, is occasionally able to infer some of the subtler points in their thought-processes from the character of their written work, and even from their muscular attitude and facial expression in class, and to invent words and phrases which will convey to his pupils the conception of better thought-processes. Sometimes his phrases are handed down to his less inventive successors; I can remember, during my school days at Shrewsbury, the useful effect of the phrase “fatal facility” as indicating a bad intellectual habit revealed in the Latin and Greek compositions of certain boys who had hitherto been unaware of it. At Shrewsbury, also, a traditional saying of Dr. Kennedy’s: “Boy! There is a great deal of Horace in this copy of verses, and a great deal of Vergil, but nothing horatian and nothing vergilian,” produced among us in the Sixth Form an occasional mild desire to discover how one should set about thinking vergilianly. When, in 1885, I was for a short time a public school form-master, Mr. G. T. Atkinson, the ablest and most stimulating of my colleagues, once invented another useful phrase. A small, very intelligent, and very industrious boy had come rapidly up the school, and had reached the Fifth Form, which Atkinson then took. His Latin compositions in the lower forms had consisted of the blameless application of known rules. He now had to do for Atkinson a “prose,” in which a passage of idiomatic English was to be turned into idiomatic Latin. He sat, I was told, pink with pleasure, while my colleague praised his composition, and then received a shock which may have changed in some degree his habits of thought, when the little panegyric ended with the words, “Yes, a really excellent piece of Fourth Form prose.” It would be interesting if some old Wykehamist would collect the phrases and stories of this kind which make up part of the trade secret of Winchester College. Innumerable stories of the same kind have gathered round the names of the best-known Oxford “Great” tutors. The late Mr. Richard Lewis Nettleship is said, for instance, in a story which may be apocryphal, to have listened with every appearance of admiration and gratitude to an essay in which a Balliol exhibitioner who had been the glory of a North Country grammar school, and the hope of a Nonconformist congregation, demonstrated by somewhat “pat-ball” arguments that virtuous conduct necessarily leads to happiness. “You really do think so?” said Nettleship ecstatically. “I am so glad. You know that the question has been discussed for some time.” And “The Nettler” remained smiling sweetly, until the student experienced a sudden spasm of the abdomen, and a sudden conversion to the possibility of a new type of energy in thought.

But the efficacy of such hints is local and individual; they are not easy to transfer from the “atmosphere” of one school or college, or even of one teacher, to that of another. Their application always arises from the individual failures of a single student, and they are most helpful when given by a tutor to a student who is sitting alone with him. When given in a class, they sound so sarcastic as to produce on a sensitive boy or girl little effect except humiliation and resentment—and they may also, like other uses of sarcasm, be bad for the teacher himself. I hope, therefore, that, in the course of the next generation, awareness of the less obvious stages in the thought-processes may come to be produced, not by individual hints, but by a more general study, throughout the educational course and in the impersonal mental attitude of science, of the psychology of thought.

I am well aware of the difficulties involved in such a proposal. There is still a lamentable want of agreement among professed psychologists as to some of their most fundamental problems; and the preaching, for instance, by an extreme “behaviourist” of the doctrine that consciousness and will and thought are “epiphenomena,” which, though they unfortunately occur, have no relation of cause and effect with human conduct, or by an extreme Freudian of the doctrine that every non-sexual idea is a symbol of a sexual “wish” would not be helpful. But a few simple lessons on the physiology of the central nervous system in man and other animals might be given to children of nine or ten years of age, and those lessons might be illustrated day by day in the ordinary work of the class. A short talk drawn from a lecture which I once heard by Sir John Adams on the psychological causes of mistakes in spelling’ might make a dictation exercise less dull and much more useful than such lessons are at present. There is much American statistical evidence as to the measurable effect on the simpler processes of thought of securing the early interest of pupils in their own psychology. A number, for instance, of American text-books have been recently published on “How to Study,” with the intention of making young students aware of their intellectual processes, and Mr. C. W. Stone says that by a series of quantitative school experiments, he found that interest in “How to Study” increased the rate of reading and the degree of comprehension 180 per cent., as shown by comparison with a control group of high school students.”

At a somewhat later educational stage, the teacher, in explaining how one should approach a geometrical problem, might add to the mathematical rules of Verification a few illustrations, drawn from the psychology lesson, of the psychological conditions of invention. A literature lesson to able students of fifteen would cease to be a mere catalogue of biographical facts, or a mere series of exhortations to admire or despise, if it sometimes followed the psychological lines of such a book as Mr. J. M. Murry’s Problem of Style (1922). A science class might be made to realize, by facts from the mental history of Descartes or Darwin, that they themselves are experimenting in the use not only of microscopes, micrometers and balances, but also of their own brains. And a clever student could learn before he is sixteen to see the processes of his own mind as part of the larger and infinitely more stimulating problem of mind in general. Sir Henry Cockburn (Lord Cockburn) attended, about 1800, as a young student, the lectures of James Finlayson, Professor of Logic in Edinburgh University, on what we should now call psychology, and says that “until we heard him, few of us knew that we had minds; and still fewer were aware that our intellectual operations had been analysed, and formed the subject of a science the facts of which our own consciousness delighted to verify. Neither he nor his class were logical, in any proper sense of the word. But no exposition of the mere rules of reasoning could have been half so useful as the course which he adopted, which was first to classify and explain the nature of the different faculties, and then to point out the proper modes of using and improving them. This, though not logic, was the first thing that wakened our dormant powers.”

On the question of the effect of psychological awareness in education I have myself gathered some amount of experimental evidence. For the last ten years of my life as a London professor of political science I deliberately used what I was able to learn about the psychology of the thought-processes as a means of helping my university students to capture and record thoughts which would otherwise never have come into full consciousness. I gave my students class-lectures in psychology outside their political science course, and in personal work with my graduate students tried to help them to acquire that power of observing the emotional and intellectual “fringe” of their thoughts with which I have dealt in this book. I have before me letters from four such graduate students. They were all cases of men who had taken university degrees, after courses (in a Colonial university, an English training college, one of the newer English universities, and an Indian university), consisting predominantly of memorizing and reproducing other men’s thoughts. I had ex- plained to them my conception of the process of associative thought, and of its relation in the primitive thought-cycle to emotion, and had constantly urged them to look out for “thoughts of their own,” and for the appearance of “an emotional stimulus.” In one case, I found that a student whose written work was at first singularly wooden, could talk about his subject with humour and freshness, and urged him to listen to himself as he talked. In another case I found that freshness of thought was closely connected with literary expression, and urged the student to grip any telling phrase that came to him. In both these cases, the students and myself were amused and interested by a kind of discussion which, if we had not been psychologizing, would have sounded sarcastic. One of them refers to the fact that his early work was “shown to be a collection of snippets from various authorities,” and to my urgence that he should “bring what personality he had into the work of research.” Another, the student whom I told to strive for originality by developing his naturally considerable sense of literary form, writes of “the coining of phrases and the shaping of sentences ‘which would not be woolly lambs for your sharp knife.” The third wrote, “I feel that ...I have acquired a ‘something’—served an apprenticeship as it were.” But the most interesting of the four letters came from the Indian student. He had passed through an extremely successful course at his Indian university; and had obtained high honours in a professional examination during his stay in England. His education, carried on as it had been entirely in English, a language which had for him very slight emotional associations, would not have been different if it had been intended as a training in intellectual sterility. All his thoughts, or rather all the phrases and words which he selected from the books of the recognized authorities, apparently came to him as visual images of paragraphs in an examination answer. For months I despaired of producing any result with him; but he was a young man of very unusual morale, and he submitted himself to a course so severe that, unless he had been supported by a genuine scientific interest in his own mental processes, he could not, I think, have endured it. I first made him take up a social-political problem on which very few books had been written. I then forbade him to read anything in literary form, and told him to get his material from newspapers, official reports, and conversation with persons to whom I gave him introductions. I told him to look at the people in the London streets from the top of an omnibus, and to imagine their lives and thoughts; and always to watch for the appearance of thoughts and feelings of his own. All this time, he says in his letter, ‘I was studying hard, but I felt no emotional stimulus in my work.” I then told him to read psychology, and with magnificent industry he read during several months a series of books on psychology, ethnology, and anthropology. I also advised him to write long letters in his own vernacular to a favourite brother in India. “At last,” he says, “I began to feel my way a bit. My teacher had been all this time dinning in my ears, ‘I want to know what you have got to say of your own.’ I told him this time that I could not express what I had to say, but I felt that I might say something in time. . . . The difficulty of experiencing what my teacher calls ‘sharp doubts’ is that they make a havoc in one’s own mental world. . . . My equipment is not adequate . . . and I experience mental agony as I feel the hammer of these rough shocks. . . . I was reading my Thesis only yesterday, and I doubt many statements of my own, and I feel that if I were to write again I should begin de novo. I do not know what will be the result. . . . But now I feel one thing which I never experienced before—an emotional stimulus.” If my Indian student had, from the age of twelve, been familiar with the elements of thought-psychology, he need neither have waited so long for thoughts of his own, nor suffered so severely during their birth.

Notes

1See Köhler, W., The Mentality of Apes (trans.), 1925.

1 But while the extreme Froebelian conception of the educational sufficiency of self-activity is now more common in America than elsewhere, there is also to be found in American educational literature a more conscious and definite reaction against it. See e.g., an abstract, in the Psychological Bulletin (New York), Feb., 1922, p. 73, of a paper by Grace E. Bird, on “The Devious Path of Slow Work,” in which she pleads for “the direct route of the rapid reader,” as against the “reproduction of the by-paths of eye and throat tensions, inner speech, and imagery of the slow reader.”

1See my Our Social Heritage (1921), Chapter II.

1See also Teachers Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, pp. 1-34: John Adams on Child Psychology. 2C. W. Stone, quoted in the Psychological Bulletin, Jan., 1922, p. 43. It is interesting to notice that even the best of these books, and even when they are dealing with students who have entered a university course, seem to assume that their readers will use the easier rather than the more effective intellectual methods. Prof. Kitson, for instance, in his book How to use your Mind, which I have already quoted, and which is intended for students during their first college years, says, when dealing with the method of language learning, “As you look up the

words of a foreign language in the lexicon, trying to memorize their English equivalents, take plenty of time” (p. 72). But rapidity and pleasure in learning a foreign language, and its usefulness in increasing fertility of association, is enormously increased if the student from the beginning memorizes the foreign word itself, with its direct intellectual and emotional meaning, instead of compelling himself afterwards to wait for that meaning until he has first recalled some inadequate English equivalent.

1 Henry Cockburn, Memorials (edition of 1909), pp. 19,20.