Thinking and learning to think

by Nathan Christ Schaeffer

The thinking of savages.

The untutored savage is guided by sense impressions; he thinks in mental pictures; he is incapable of a chain of reasoning like the demonstration of a theorem in geometry. Tribes have been found who could not count beyond three; any number in excess of two was called many or a multitude. Whilst their powers of observation were developed to a remarkable degree, they lacked the power of abstruse thought. Their descendants, who are now at school, make rapid progress in knowledge which appeals to the senses; they find more than the usual difficulty in studies requiring demonstrative reasoning or sustained effort in scientific thought. Music is their delight; they can be taught to sing like birds in the air; their bands give sighs to brass itself. As in the eighteenth century the Iroquois, who would not submit to the doctrines of Christianity, were overcome by concerts, so, in the nineteenth, the missionaries of British Columbia appeal to the red man’s ear for music in winning him for the Christian religion.

Popular audiences.

Language is full of faded metaphors which show how the things of the mind are conceived in images formed through the senses. Those who address popular audiences clothe their thoughts in figures of speech based upon the mental pictures in which the common people carry on their thinking. The ability to think in the language of science and philosophy is a later development, and those who by disuse or neglect impair their power to think in sense-images pay a penalty in losing, or never acquiring, the power to move the multitudes.

Mental pictures.

The power to think in mental pictures, or through the sense-impressions which memory recalls, varies in different persons. Occasionally the sense of touch is very active; the child in such cases manifests a desire to handle everything within reach, and undoubtedly gains impressions of peculiar strength answering its desire to know. A limited number of children in every school get their best impressions through the ear, and hence are said to be ear-minded; but the far larger proportion are eye-minded to the extent of connecting their most accurate knowledge with images obtained through vision. Similar peculiarities exist among older persons. A friend claims that he hears the voices of speakers while reading the proof-sheets of their speeches. Another friend claims that he cannot bring up a mental picture of the faces of his children and his friends, but he writes out strains of music which he thinks and hears while seated on railway cars. The power of bringing up a vivid picture of the breakfast-table, or of some scene of special interest, is possessed by many persons. They live over again in memory the delights of travel, and enjoy scenery through the vivid mental pictures stored away in the treasure-house of memory. The ability to appreciate the best literature in prose and poetry depends largely upon the power of visualizing the realities at the basis of the descriptions and figures of speech. Francis Galton thinks that the perspicuous style of French literature and the wonderful manual skill of the French people is due to their power of thinking in visual images. He says,—

The French.

“The French appear to possess the visualizing faculty in a high degree. The peculiar ability they show in prearranging ceremonials and fêtes of all kinds and their undoubted genius for tactics and strategy show that they are able to foresee effects with unusual clearness. Their ingenuity in all technical contrivances is an additional testimony in the same direction, and so is their singular clearness of expression. Their phrase ‘figurez-vous,’ or ‘picture to yourself,’ seems to express their dominant mode of perception. Our equivalent of ‘imagine’ is ambiguous.”[29]

Galton’s investigations.

The profession of teaching owes Mr. Galton a special debt of gratitude for the light which his investigations throw upon the process of thinking. These investigations were published in a volume entitled “Inquiries into Human Faculty.” When he began to inquire among his friends as to their power to call up mental pictures of the breakfast-table, those engaged in scientific pursuits were inclined to consider him fanciful and fantastic in supposing that the words mental imagery really expressed what he thought everybody supposed them to mean. He says they had no more notion of its true nature than a color-blind man who has not discerned his defect has of the nature of color. When he spoke to persons in general society, he got very different replies. Among other curious things which he discovered, he found that the power of thinking in sense-images, or mental pictures, may be partly inherited, partly developed by practice, and that it may be impaired by disuse or by the habit of hard thinking peculiar to men engaged in scientific pursuits. Scientific men, as a class, have feeble powers of visual representation. He reached the conclusion that “an over-ready perception of sharp mental pictures is antagonistic to the acquirement of highly generalized and abstract thought, especially when the steps of reasoning are carried on by words as symbols, and that if the faculty of seeing the pictures was ever possessed by men who think hard, it is very apt to be lost by disuse.”