Thinking and learning to think

by Nathan Christ Schaeffer

Homer and Plato wrote good Greek, although neither of them had any knowledge of grammar as a science. Men used correct sentences long before there was a scientific treatment of the sentence.

The same remarks are applicable to the other studies of the trivium. Men’s minds obeyed the laws of thought and drew correct inferences long before the science of logic was formulated. He who studies logic in the hope that it will make him an original thinker is doomed to disappointment. Logic has a critical as well as a disciplinary value. Its influence upon the intellectual life is like that of mathematics. It furnishes a test for one’s own thinking and provides the means for detecting fallacies in the reasoning of others. Logic can be taught with advantage to those who have learned to think; it fails to make creative spirits who have the power of gathering thoughts, weaving them into a system, and reaching trustworthy conclusions.

Rhetoric possesses great disciplinary value for the understanding. It deserves careful study on the part of those who express their thoughts in public discourse. The moment it becomes an end, instead of means to an end, it defeats its own purpose. To draw the attention to the figures of speech and other rhetorical devices of an oration is to divert the mind from the line of thought and to defeat the purpose for which rhetoric is taught. The studies of the trivium are like the handicrafts in that they serve as means to an end. From one point of view they deserve to be classed with the useful arts; from another it is apparent that they furnish material for thinking quite as valuable as the multitudinous branches of study into which the quadrivium has been expanded.

Fine arts.

The arts are sometimes divided upon the basis of use and beauty. From one point of view, as already indicated, the liberal arts may be regarded as belonging to the category of the useful, and thus as forming part of a class distinct from the fine arts. Yet the idea of beauty enters into all that man does. Sooner or later he seeks to adorn his home, his language, everything that he employs in giving expression to his inner life.

The thinking which lies at the basis of the fine arts has distinguishing qualities and characteristics. The mind may be so completely absorbed in poetry, music, painting, sculpture, and in the other things which make life beautiful that it ceases to be a fit instrument for useful living or for engaging in more advanced thinking. The element of feeling predominates in the appreciation of the beautiful. The two factors which enter into the beautiful are the idea and the form. By casting into the alembic of the imagination the materials which the mind gathers from the external world, there is evolved the ideal; as soon as this ideal is found embodied in any form of nature or art the object is called beautiful. The power to see the idea in the form, the ideal in the work of art, is a function of thinking, and deserves attention from those who are teaching others to think.

Æsthetic and scientific studies differ.

Vast is the difference between the æsthetic and the scientific appreciation of nature. The scientist pulls the flower to pieces, analyzes its parts, imposes hard names, and destroys that about the flower which is most attractive to the child and the poet. The student of beauty admires it as it is in its original surroundings. He cultivates it to adorn the garden, the yard, the home, the school-room.

Very much, therefore, depends upon the way in which nature is studied. The study may be pursued to beget habits of observation or to cultivate a sense of the beautiful. It may be studied for the sake of ascertaining the laws which govern the growth of plants, the changes of the seasons, the movements of the heavenly bodies, the forces which give us light, heat, and all else we need for body and mind. When it is studied for the sake of truth and beauty, the effort lifts us into the domain of the higher life.

The higher life.