A New Era of Thought

by Charles Howard Hinton

Thus we may divide our means of coming into contact with nature into three main channels: the senses, the imagination, and the mind. The imagination is perhaps the highest faculty, but we leave it out of consideration here, and ask: How can we bring our minds into contact with nature?

Now when we see two people of diverse characters we sometimes say that they cannot understand one another—there is nothing in the one by which he can understand the other—he is shut out by a limitation of his own faculties.

And thus our power of understanding nature depends on our own possession; it is in virtue of some mental activity of our own that we can apprehend that outside activity which we call nature. And thus the training to enable us to approach nature with our minds will be some active process on our own part.

In the course of my experience as a teacher I have often been struck by the want of the power of reason displayed by pupils; they are not able to put two and two together, as the saying goes, and I have been at some pains to investigate wherein this curious deficiency lies, and how it can be supplied. And I have found that there is in the curriculum no direct cure for it—the discipline which supplies it is not one which comes into school methods, it is a something which most children obtain in the natural and unsupervised education of their first contact with the world, and lies before any recognised mode of distinction. They can only understand in virtue of an activity of their own, and they have not had sufficient exercise in this activity.

In the present state of education it is impossible to diverge from the ordinary routine. But it is always possible to experiment on children who are out of the common line of education. And I believe I am amply justified by the result of my experiments.

I have seen that the same activity which I have found makes that habit of mind which we call intelligence in a child, is the source of our common and everyday rational intellectual work, and that just as the faculties of a child can be called forth by it, so also the powers of a man are best prepared by the same means, but on an ampler scale.

A more detailed development of the practical work of Part II., would be the best training for the mind of a child. An extension of the work of that Part would be the training which, hand in hand with observation and recapitulation, would best develop a man’s thought power.

In order to tell what the activity is by the prosecution of which we can obtain mental contact with nature we should observe what it is which we say we “understand” in any phenomenon of nature which has become clear to us.

When we look at a bright object it seems very different from a dull one. A piece of bright steel hardly looks like the same substance as a piece of dull steel. But the difference of appearance in the two is easily accounted for by the different nature of the surface in the two cases; in the one all the irregularities are done away with, and the rays of light which fall on it are sent off again without being dispersed and broken up. In the case of the dull iron the rays of light are broken up and divided, so that they are not transmitted with intensity in any one direction, but flung off in all sorts of directions.

Here the difference between the bright object and the dull object lies in the arrangement of the particles on its surface and their influence on the rays of light.