Talking has one disadvantage—it cannot always be used. To practice it, you must either lock yourself up in your room, or sit alone in a forest or field, or walk along unfrequented streets and by-ways. You can by no means allow any one to hear or see you talking to yourself. If you are caught doing this some asinine idiot is sure to mistake you for one.
We are brought back again, then, to the necessity of occasionally thinking in silence. There is one other reason why we shall sometimes need to do this. Thoughts of certain kinds are so elusive that to attempt to articulate them is to scare them away, as a fish is scared by the slightest ripple. When these thoughts are in embryo, even the infinitesimal attention required for talking cannot be spared. But later, as they take more definite and coherent form, they can and should be put into words, for otherwise they will be incommunicable and useless.
No definite rule can be laid down, however, as to what should be spoken and what thought of silently. This depends to a large extent upon the individual thinker. Some will probably find that talking helps them in almost all their thinking, others that it is often an actual hindrance. The same is true of closing one’s eyes. If you do not know which is better for you, find out by experiment.
At those times when you suddenly catch yourself wandering, it would be a good plan to stop occasionally and trace back your train of thought to the point where it left its original direction. In this way you would get some valuable insight into the how and why of mind wandering; you would be helped in recognizing its appearance sooner the next time it occurred.
Whenever a person is left alone for a short time, with no one to talk to and no “reading matter”; when for instance, he is standing at a station waiting for his train, or sitting at a restaurant table waiting for his order, or hanging on a subway strap when he has forgotten to buy a newspaper, his “thoughts” tend to run along the tracks they have habitually taken. If a young man usually allows a popular tune to float through his head, that will be most likely to happen; if he usually thinks of that young lady, he will most likely think of her then; if he has often imagined himself as some great political orator making a speech amid the plaudits of the multitude, he is likely to see a mental picture of himself swinging his arms, waving flags and gulping water.
The only way a man can put a stop to such pleasant but uneducative roamings, is to snap off his train of day dreaming the first moment he becomes aware of it, and to address his mind to some useful serious subject. His thoughts will be almost sure to leak away again. They may do this as often as fifteen times in half an hour. But the second he becomes aware of it he should dam up the stream and send his thoughts along the channel he has laid out for them. If he has never done this he will find the effort great. But if he merely resolves now that the next time his mind wanders he will stop it in this manner, his resolve will tend to make itself felt. If he succeeds in following this practice once it will be much easier a second time. Every time he does this it will become increasingly easy, until he will have arrived at the point where his control over his thoughts will be almost absolute. Not only will it be increasingly easy for him to turn his mind to serious subjects. It will become constantly more pleasurable. Frivolous and petty trains of thought will become more and more intolerable.
This whole idea of forcing our thought has been questioned by no less a thinker than Herbert Spencer. Let us hear what he has to say regarding his own practice:
“It has never been my way to set before myself a problem and puzzle out an answer. The conclusions at which I have from time to time arrived, have not been arrived at as solutions of questions raised; but have been arrived at unawares—each as the ultimate outcome of a body of thoughts which slowly grew from a germ. Some direct observation, or some fact met with in reading, would dwell with me: apparently because I had a sense of its significance. It was not that there arose a distinct consciousness of its general meaning; but rather that there was a kind of instinctive interest in those facts which have general meanings. For example, the detailed structure of this or that species of mammal, though I might willingly read about it, would leave little impression; but when I met with the statement that, almost without exception, mammals, even as unlike as the whale and the giraffe, have seven cervical vertebræ, this would strike me and be remembered as suggestive. Apt as I thus was to lay hold of cardinal truths, it would happen occasionally that one, most likely brought to mind by an illustration, and gaining from the illustration fresh distinctiveness, would be contemplated by me for a while, and its bearings observed. A week afterwards, possibly, the matter would be remembered; and with further thought about it, might occur a recognition of some wider application than I had before perceived: new instances being aggregated with those already noted. Again after an interval, perhaps of a month, perhaps of half a year, something would remind me of that which I had before remarked; and mentally running over the facts might be followed by some further extension of the idea. When accumulation of instances had given body to a generalization, reflexion would reduce the vague conception at first framed to a more definite conception; and perhaps difficulties or anomalies passed over for a while, but eventually forcing themselves on attention, might cause a needful qualification and a truer shaping of the thought. Eventually the growing generalization, thus far inductive, might take a deductive form: being all at once recognized as a necessary consequence of some physical principle—some established law. And thus, little by little, in unobtrusive ways, without conscious intention or appreciable effort, there would grow up a coherent and organized theory. Habitually the process was one of slow unforced development, often extending over years; and the thinking done went on in this gradual, almost spontaneous way, without strain. . . .”[6]
But compare this method with that of John Stuart Mill; who speaks of “the mental habit to which I attribute all that I have ever done, or ever shall do, in speculation; that of never abandoning a puzzle, but again and again returning to it until it was cleared up; never allowing obscure corners of a subject to remain unexplored because they did not appear important; never thinking that I perfectly understood any part of a subject until I understood the whole.”[7] Mill’s method was, in short, “that of conscious and vehement effort directed towards the end he had in view. He solved his problems by laborious application and study.”[8]
William Minto writes of Adam Smith: “His intellectual proceedings were calm, patient, and regular: he mastered a subject slowly and circumspectly, and carried his principles with steady tenacity through multitudes of details that would have checked many men of greater mental vigor unendowed with the same invincible persistence.”