Thinking and learning to think

by Nathan Christ Schaeffer

The wishes of the heart and the conclusions of the intellect.

A student may take up geometry with a feeling of prejudice for or against the study, based upon what he has heard from others concerning its difficulties or the teacher who gives the instruction; but after he has mastered the demonstration of a theorem he does not lie awake at night wishing the opposite were true. In the realms of mathematics the wishes of the heart are not in conflict with the conclusions of the intellect. In the domain of ethical, social, historical, or religious truth the head often says one thing and the heart another. “We see plainly enough what we ought to think or do, but we feel an irresistible inclination to think or do something else.” In most of the instances in which the study of science has led to agnosticism the wish was father to the thought. When two men argue the same question, weighing the same arguments and reaching opposite conclusions, as did Stonewall Jackson and his father-in-law at the outbreak of the Civil War, the inclinations and wishes of the heart must have influenced their thinking.

Feeling an element in all mental activity.

Feeling is an element in all forms of mental activity. The intellect never acts without stirring the emotions. The teacher who reproved a pupil for showing signs of pleasure and delight over the reasoning of Euclid, saying, “Euclid knows no emotion,” must have been a novice in the art of introspection. Who cannot recall the thrill of delight with which he first finished the proof of the Pythagorean proposition? Mathematics is considered difficult; the emotions connected with victory and mastery sustain the student as he advances from conquest to conquest. The effort which some thinkers make to reduce the phenomena of the universe to a few universal principles is, without doubt, sustained and stimulated by a feeling that there must be unity in the midst of the most manifold diversity.

Descartes.

Scientists and philosophers are prone to imagine themselves free from the prejudices which warp the thinking of the common mind. Descartes started to divest himself of all preconceived notions; yet he could not divest himself of the notion that he was immensely superior to other men. “This French philosopher regarded himself as almost infallible, and had a scorn of all his contemporaries. He praised Harvey, but says he only learned a single point from him; Galileo was only good in music, and here he attributed to him the elder Galileo’s work; Pascal and Campanella are pooh-poohed. Here is an instance of how pride in one’s own work may beget a cheap cynicism with regard to the work of others; and how as a feeling it blinds the mind to excellences outside those we have agreed to call our own.” Of men in general Jevons, in his treatise on the “Physical Sciences,”[51] says,—

“It is difficult to find persons who can with perfect fairness register facts for and against their own peculiar views. Among uncultivated observers, the tendency to remark favorable and to forget unfavorable events is so great that no reliance can be placed upon their supposed observations. Thus arises the enduring fallacy that the changes of the weather coincide in some way with the changes of the moon, although exact and impartial registers give no countenance to the fact. The whole race of prophets and quacks live on the overwhelming effect of one success compared with hundreds of failures which are unmentioned or forgotten. As Bacon says, ‘Men mark when they hit, and never mark when they miss.’ And we should do well to bear in mind the ancient story, quoted by Bacon, of one who in Pagan times was shown a temple with a picture of all the persons who had been saved from shipwreck after paying their vows. When asked whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods, ‘Ay,’ he answered; ‘but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?’”

Sometimes the feeling that a given way of looking at things is undoubtedly correct prevents the mind from thinking at all. A lady claimed that she had been taught to accept the statements of the Bible in their literal sense, and that in this belief she was going to live and die. She was asked to read the twenty-third Psalm. At the end of the first verse she was asked whether she could be anything else than a sheep if the Lord was literally her Shepherd. When, a little farther on, she was asked in what green pastures she had been lying down, she burst into tears. Her condition, and that of hundreds of thousands of others, is correctly given in the opening pages of J. S. Mill’s “Subjection of Women.”[52]

J. S. Mill on the influence of feeling upon thinking.

“So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as the result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, the worse it fares in argumentative contest the more persuaded its adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to fill any breach made in the old.”