Thought and Habit

ALL the activities of a living organism produce, besides their immediate effects on the organism and its environment, later and more permanent effects on the future behaviour-pattern of the organism. Every one, for instance, of our mental activities in the stages of Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification, not only helps to produce an immediate output of successful thought, but leaves our organism more able and more inclined to repeat that activity in the future.

These later effects are called habits, and in discussing possible improvements of the art of thought, while it is sometimes more convenient to concentrate our attention on the original psychological activity and its immediate results, it is also sometimes convenient to concentrate our attention (as I shall do in this chapter), on the future habit as the end to be attained, and on the activity itself as a means of creating that habit.

I will begin with the simplest case—the formation, by voluntarily arranging the hours of intellectual work, of a habit of responding in the process of associative thought to a time-stimulus. If, for instance, a man is starting to write his first novel, it may seem very unimportant whether he sits down to write at 9 a.m., or 6 a.m., or 8 p.m. But if, day by day, he chooses 9 a.m., he will find that the gradual stimulation of his thinking into full activity which some writers call “warming up” will occur rather more easily and more quickly at that hour than at any other hour of the day; and in a few weeks he will find that “warming up” will tend to occur almost automatically. ‘Warming up” may then be preceded by an automatic Intimation of its coming; and, if he breakfasts at 8 a.m., he may at 8.45 a.m. begin to wander about the house with that vague and slightly idiotic expression on his face which is so irritating to those members of his household on whom the daily worries of housekeeping are just descending. In this respect, it is a real advantage to a professional brainworker to know, and to make part of his working consciousness, something of what I may call the physiology, as distinguished from the psychology of thought. No one, for instance, who is habitually aware of the process by which the activity of the brain is “warmed up” will be “fussed,” or angry, or despairing, if on any particular day that process is slower than usual. He will begin work on such a day patiently and quietly, and may find that the sense of vigour and reality in his thinking comes to him, as sleep comes to a healthy and tranquil boy, unobserved. In the same way, he will not be frightened at the first appearance of mental fatigue, but will plod on till his “second wind” appears, and will only abandon his work when it has lasted for what experience tells him is the right number of hours, or when he is sure that fatigue on this particular day will not pass off.

Sometimes the time-habit is combined with a habit of responding to a particular sensory stimulus. Charles Dickens found that he started work best if he had certain ornaments, arranged in a certain order, before him on his table.[1] Some men work better in the British Museum Library than elsewhere. I myself find that my newest, and therefore, most easily forgotten thoughts tend to present themselves under the stimulus of the first spongeful of water in my bath; but I have never had the courage to search in the stationers’ shops for a waterproof writing-tablet and pencil. A more complex habit results when some daily repeated muscular action stimulates the memory of the thought-train on which we were engaged when we broke off work the day before. A friend of mine, who is an exceptionally fertile thinker and writer, tells me that he gets started most easily if he begins by copying out the last few sentences of yesterday’s work. Many intellectual workers regularly begin work by rereading the whole of what they wrote the day before. Varendonck, for instance, says, “My first work in the morning is to reread what I wrote almost spontaneously the day before; I complete, correct, rearrange, reserve points for later consideration, etc., till the whole produces a logical impression” (Day Dreams, p. 138). Rereading often reveals the fact that the brain has been subconsciously exploring the material during the interval of Incubation and sleep; and that that fact has made the processes of arrangement, combination, and expression much easier than they were when the words were first written down. Rereading also often brings on an Intimation indicating an uncompleted brain-activity and the approach of a new thought; and we should form the habit of making, when this Intimation appears, a short voluntary extension of the interruption of mental effort which I called Incubation. “If,” says Varendonck, “the order in which I want to present the different parts of my argumentation does not come forward at once foreconsciously, while I am reading them over, I leave my desk for a moment to look after the fire, or to play a tune on the piano or something of the sort. And provided I have been all this time in a half-dreamy state, the order of presentation is usually ready in my mind’s eye, without any apparent effort” (Day Dreams, p. 138).

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. In administrative work a daily break of this kind is very often desirable. The administrative thinker has to deal in succession with many problems widely separated from each other. A rereading of the last memorandum which he wrote yesterday may actually prevent him from hitting on the problem which most needs to be thought out today. And the administrator is peculiarly liable to form slight emotional complexes which may half-consciously “head him off” from any path of thought diverging from office routine. I have been told by a colleague of Sir Warren Fisher how that great administrator used to begin his day’s work during the most critical months of the War. He used, I was told, to come into his room, and stand with his back to the fireplace, without looking at the pile of official “jackets” which lay, with green “urgency” slips sticking out of them, on his desk. Before him he would have a couple of the highest officials in his department. Then, rousing himself and them to the full vitality of imagination, he would say, “Now, you fellows, what is the most essential thing for us to get done today?” and only when that was settled and arranged for would he go to his desk. It might be extremely valuable if, before the evidence is lost, some of those who know would make a careful comparison between Sir Warren Fisher’s methods and those by which Lord Kitchener at the War Office earned the name of “Lord K. of Chaos.”

The President of Harvard once described to me a mental expedient not unlike Sir Warren Fisher’s. He said that he had tried to train himself to begin the day by doing what could be put off and leaving till later what could not be put off. That which “can be put off” means not only that which will not be mechanically brought forward by an interview already fixed or an urgent letter on the desk; it also often means some question which, without a special effort of volition, we should be inclined to put off, a problem with slightly uncomfortable associations, or an inchoate train of still vague and only partially conscious thought which will drift into forgetfulness unless the “salt-box” is used. Mr. Walter Lippmann found, after interviewing, as a journalist, many American statesmen, that he could extract from them, when they were off their guard and slightly excited, thoughts infinitely more fruitful than the ordinary commonplaces of politics. He asks (Yale Review, July, 1922, p. 675), “What if it were possible, taking men as they are, to liberate the possibilities that in moments of candour are revealed!’ He is referring not merely to the chance fact of such a liberation at any particular moment, but to the possibility of creating among American statesmen that subtle habit of overcoming obstructive mental complexes which we call “candour.”

There are writers and teachers the nature of whose work makes it necessary for them to regulate their intellectual life by strict routine, who must start, for instance, daily at 9 a.m., to write three thousand words of criticism or analysis of other men’s books, or to continue a long series of calculations, or to correct a daily stint of students’ essays. Each one, however, even of these men and women, is not a machine, but a living and imperfectly unified organism, whose thinking can be only partially controlled by order and forethought. As they work, their whole nervous system may be half-consciously quivering with old memories and new associations and vague emotional Intimations. They can, and, if they are to contribute to the thought of their time, they should acquire the habit of watching the unfocussed fringe of their consciousness for any significant mental events which may appear there, without diverting their main attention from their immediate task; just as the fencer watches in the periphery of his field of vision his opponent’s wrist for significant movements without withdrawing the central focus of his field of vision from his opponent’s eyes. They will often be wise to jot down these fringe-thoughts in their first rough form, and to leave them for future examination and elaboration.

And those, also, whose daily work requires a continuous effort of inventive thought, should form the same habit of watching and recording their fringe-thoughts. Mr. H. Hazlitt in his Thinking as a Science (1916) gives a description of this difficult process, ending with the statement: ‘Having written the idea you will have it off your mind” (p. 77)—i.e., you will be spared the effort of preventing yourself from forgetting it. The professed thinker should also be habitually on the lookout for the possibility that a fringe-thought may sometimes be recognized as more important than the main thought-train during whose course it arises, and that a temporary interruption of work may be desirable, during which the fringe-thought may be developed as a focal thought. I have done my best of late years to form the habit of writing down significant fringe-thoughts between “square brackets” on my writing-pad while ‘reading up” a subject in a library. They produce least interruption to the main course of attention when they are put down in the actual words, almost unintelligible to any one else, with which they come into my mind, and when even those words are economized by the use of a sort of shorthand of logical symbols. The fringe-thoughts will have no obvious connection with the chapter which one is writing; and, therefore, one should, perhaps once a week, run one’s eye over the notes of the week’s work, and collect and rearrange the bracketed entries. Sometimes the mere fact of writing the fringe-thought down seems to set the subconscious mind to work on it; and the thought reappears at the end of the week further developed, and accompanied by an indication of its place in the main problem on which one is engaged. Varendonck, describing such fringe-thoughts, says: ‘These ideas coming to the surface, I scribble them down as quickly as possible, trying to write automatically. . . . When I have come to the end of a section, I cast a glance over my list of foreconscious ideas, and I find that nearly all of them have automatically found their natural place in the text. ... (Day Dreams, pp. 137-8). Fringe-thoughts, though they will generally find their place in some chapter before or after that on which the thinker is working, sometimes will not; and any one who is living a life of intellectual production will do well to keep, as Darwin did, a rather considerable number of “folders” or envelopes, labelled with the names of subjects to which he finds his mind recurring, even although he may not immediately contemplate writing, or lecturing, or acting, on them. He will find, again, that thoughts which first appeared to be scattered and unconnected, will often tend to grow out toward each other, and to form new and unexpected connections. For this reason he should keep one large folder marked “Redistribute,” into which he puts all thoughts that are felt to be significant, but which do not seem to belong to any of the sections already labelled, and from time to time go carefully through it. It is just in such a collection that new ideas are most likely to be found, and the recorded thoughts will at least be connected with each other by the fact that they have all appeared significant to that partially unified organism which is the thinker’s self.

The thinker should not, as Helmholtz found, confine the process of recording his fringe-thoughts to the moments in the day when he is accustomed to respond to a time-stimulus, or when he is sitting at his desk or laboratory bench. Hobbes’s custom of keeping a little note-book where at any hour of the day one can unobtrusively enter the thoughts that “dart” is extremely useful for this purpose. In modern life, the range of observation and memory which may start a new thought-train is so vast that it is almost incredibly easy to forget some thought and never again pick up the trail which led to it. The story may be true which tells of a man who had so brilliant an idea that he went into his garden to thank God for it, found on rising from his knees that he had forgotten it, and never recalled it. And if a thinker is fortunate enough to be visited by some larger conception—a constructive theory, or a story, or poem—which carries with it from the first an Intimation of its complete form, he must break through all habits and duties till the impulse to develop and record it is exhausted.

A group of able teachers of philosophy in Columbia University, headed by Prof. J. J. Coss, published a year or two ago a volume of essays on Reflective Thinking, for the guidance of their students. It is a significant indication of the present conditions of intellectual work in New York that the writers assume that “real thought” never takes place except during the fixed “working” hours. ‘The occasion,” they say, “of reflective thought becomes clear when the activities of a day are reviewed. We rise, dress, breakfast, read headlines, go to business, but only when the morning’s mail brings up a question requiring a decision does real thought make its appearance. Thought comes when decisions or conclusions are necessary, when the usual succession of acts is interrupted, and consideration has to be given to the next step. A doctor thinks when he has to diagnose a new case—a student thinks when he applies his knowledge to the solution of an original problem in geometry—a city official thinks when he considers the best method of making a tax levy.” This passage helps to explain why Professor Carrel has to escape from the Rockefeller Institute to Brittany if he wishes to arrive at new physiological ideas. It is true that a Columbia student who strolled daily down Broadway in a “brown study” would not live long, but no worse service can be done to him than to encourage him to submit to his environment, and to ignore the weak Intimations of new ideas which now knock unavailingly at the door of his consciousness while, after a hurried breakfast, he “reads headlines,” or enters the roaring mellay of the rush-hour trains, or watches at night a high-speed comic opera or a flickering film.

To a modern thinker on man and society, the problem of recording fringe-thoughts is particularly important during those hours in each week which he spends in newspaper-reading. Newspaper-reading is for most of us a life-long training in the bad habit of mildly enjoying and completely forgetting an infinite series of disconnected ideas, of which the only useful result is the possibility that the worn path of our subconscious thought may in some future crisis make the way to the formation of a conscious conclusion rather more easy." If we mark all the articles in one or two daily papers which set us thinking, and at the end of a week or month cut out and file them, we may accumulate a mass of intractable material which it is a labour of Hercules, or of a sub-editor, or at least of a man with a highly skilled professional secretary, to use at all. It is, perhaps, a not wholly impossible counsel of perfection that we should train our minds to be equally strict in rejecting the second-rate ideas which come during newspaper-reading, and in retaining the few that seem really helpful; that we should so mark each cutting as to indicate at a glance the exact point which made it seem significant at the time of reading; that every cutting should as soon as possible be separated from its fellow cuttings, and take its place in a bundle of less repellent written notes and extracts; and that we should ruthlessly destroy all cuttings which, if glanced at later, seem no longer significant. A man whose literary output is not too large may find it useful once every three or four years to run quickly through his own already published books and occasional writings, to see if these do not suggest some inchoate thoughts which he may have left undeveloped at the time, but with which he can now proceed.

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.*

To some thinkers who are also teachers, the process of helping ideas to grow into relation with each other may be greatly eased by the habit of oral lecturing and seminar-teaching; if only they are fortunate enough to find a post in which lecturing and teaching are sufficiently limited to be a means towards thought and not a substitute for thought. The presence and emotional stimulus of an audience, and the fact that one necessarily approaches the subject from a somewhat different

1 John Forster, Life of Dickens (edition of 1911), Vol. I, pp. 332–3. 47. angle from that of a writer may in such cases be valuable. But to secure this result a lecturer should be careful never to read from a manuscript; to watch for new and significant ideas occurring during his lecture; to write down an indication of those ideas immediately after, or, if he can do it quickly and without being observed, during the lecture, and, if possible, to discuss the whole lecture afterwards with a body of students few enough and keen enough for real dialectic. On the other hand, many teacher-thinkers seem to feel that the effort of using two different methods, and of putting, in the broad style of the platform or the class-room, thoughts which they must afterwards try to express with scientific exactness, is for them rather worse than a waste of time.

It might appear that daily journalism would be a better means than daily teaching of increasing the fertility of thought. Experience, however, seems to contradict this; very few men who have, for any considerable part of their lives, been writers, as distinguished from occasional reviewers or contributors, on a daily newspaper, have produced important original work, and those few have generally been men who were fully aware of the intellectual dangers of their profession, and who took careful precautions, e.g., by giving certain hours of each day to more continuous work, against those dangers. I thought that I understood the reason for this when I heard a small group of English daily journalists discuss their intellectual methods. The daily journalist gets his subject two or three hours before his “copy” must go to press. He so trains his brain to answer to the stimulus of the daily need, that several of my journalist friends have told me that they find it almost impossible to write vigorously without that stimulus. But of necessity their thoughts are “first” and not “second” or “third” thoughts. A man who has to write the last sentences of an article in the intervals of correcting a proof of the opening sentences cannot train himself patiently to expect the shy feeling of Intimation and develop it into a new thought; and he would be a hero among daily journalists who should reread every morning the article which he wrote the night before, and strive to make it the starting point of a train of thought which it will now be too late to publish. Dean Wace, of Canterbury, was for twenty years a leader-writer on The Times, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, when preaching his funeral sermon, said that that experience “taught him to say with cogent terseness what he had to say.” But the readers of Dean Wace’s controversies with Huxley will regret that his experience did not in that field of thought teach him to say anything but what he had “had to say” since childhood. Weekly journalism, where a man has two or three or even four or five days between the choice of his subject and the completion of his article, is far less dangerous to thought, and monthly and quarterly journalism has often been one of the ways in which the most patient thinkers have discovered or published their results.

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.” For that purpose he may find it best to sacrifice some of the advantages of habit in order to strengthen the factor of stimulus; he may, for instance, temporarily begin working at dawn instead of 9 a.m. and go for a walk at 11 a.m., in order to work longer in the afternoon. He may cut down his newspaper-reading to five minutes a day, or read, for a day or two, nothing, or contemporary novels only. He may go for a voyage, leaving his files and card-catalogues at home, and try to follow up, while thinking hard all the time, with humility and sympathy the ideas which his neighbours in the steamer smoking-room will confidentially expound to him. If he is a writer, he may give a course of lectures, or if he is a lecturer, he may spend a Sabbatical term in writing an unacademic book. Descartes, who lived in a time when war was, for a gentleman, a comparatively safe occupation, got the most fruitful stimulus of his life by going on a short campaign. This antinomy between the stimulus of habit in time and place and circumstance, and the stimulus of breaking habit, is constantly reflected in the lives of those who are capable of serving mankind as creative thinkers. I have already discussed (p. 88) the fact that, though without industry great intellectual work cannot be done, yet mere industry may prevent creation. But that fact constitutes the simplest of the problems of conduct which torment and perplex those who believe themselves to feel the urge of genius. There have been Shakespeares who were useless to mankind because they stayed in Stratford with Anne Hathaway, Shelleys because they obeyed their father, or were faithful to Harriet Westbrook, and Mary Wollstonecrafts who died as respected and pensioned school-mistresses. But there may have been many more Wagners who were destroyed by gambling, Byrons by sex, and Marlowes by drink, before they had created anything, and Descartes who stayed too long in camp.

Notes

1 John Forster, Life of Dickens (edition of 1911), Vol. II, p. 236.

1 Sir William Beveridge, who has had great experience both of administrative work and of the process of scientific investigation, wrote in the Nation of May 1, 1924, advocating the appointment of an Economic General Staff at the Board of Trade, who should arrange their work and mental habits on scientific, rather than on administrative lines. He said that the present high official advisers of the Government “are one and all absorbed in daily administration—that deadly foe to continuous thought.” His proposal is a good one, but its adoption should not be allowed to prevent ordinary administrative officials from also forming as far as their work allows, “scientific” habits of thought.

1 See above, p. 73.

1 The Times, Jan. 14, 1924.