Thinking and learning to think

by Nathan Christ Schaeffer

Not less valuable is the power of imaging in the study of history. Many details are worthless and meaningless until the imagination weaves them into a fabric in which their relations and significance become apparent. So far as the trend of history is concerned, it would have mattered very little if the name of the ship in which the Pilgrim fathers sailed had been Aprilshower instead of Mayflower, if the number of passengers had been one hundred and one instead of exactly one hundred, if they had landed at some place other than Plymouth Rock. Their coming, their compact, their religious life and purposes were of chief importance. Details help to fill out the mental picture of their voyage, landing, and settlement. They throw a halo of interest around the central event, or germinal idea. Or, to change the figure, they furnish the scaffolding by means of which the teacher gradually raises the edifice of historical knowledge. After the edifice has been completed the scaffolding may be removed. After the essential or central idea has been grasped and fixed, details like the name of the ship, the number of emigrants, and the exact day of their arrival may be forgotten. The mind can often unload the luggage that is not absolutely needed, and move with more ease and speed into new fields of thought and investigation.

Geometry.

Arithmetic.

Geometry has been aptly styled eine Augenwissenschaft, “a science of the eye” (the last word being used not as the object with which the science deals, but as the means by which its ideas are acquired). The line drawn upon the black-board has breadth, and is not at all a mathematical line. Through the eye it serves to suggest the line which has length without breadth or thickness. Progress in solid geometry is impossible if the mind does not image or conceive the volumes of three dimensions indicated by the drawings on a surface which has but two dimensions. In arithmetic many of the business transactions upon which the problems are based have not come into the experience of the child, but must be evolved by appeals to the imagination if the solutions are to be brought within easy reach of the understanding. The power of combining images into new forms aids greatly in the construction of apparatus and in the making of experiments. It helps the scientist to evolve his theories and hypotheses. It is the faculty by which man becomes a creator in science, art, literature, and philosophy.

Creative imagination.

Productive thinking.

Knowledge uncommunicated.

Few suggestions for the exercise of the creative imagination can be given. Here rules are more of a hinderance than a help. The imagination is not creative in the sense of evolving something out of nothing,—this notion has misled many in their estimate of genius,—but in the sense of producing that which never existed, at least for the individual himself. Its activity has been denominated plastic from the fact that it moulds and fashions the materials or images into the forms which the new product is to assume. The influence of judgment is needed to keep the imagination from violating the laws and principles inherent in the things from which its materials are drawn. The understanding aids and is aided by this creative, plastic function of the imagination. The two should have free play in productive thinking. Let the student of science or art saturate himself with the theme on which he is working; let him keep health and energy of body and mind at their highest point; let him concentrate his best powers on what is to be accomplished, keeping clearly in mind the end to be reached and the materials to be used; the product for which he is working will spring into being in ways that he cannot explain. Like an unfathomable well which has been gathering its waters through hidden channels from mysterious sources, the stream of thought comes welling up from the depth of the soul into the conscious life of the thinker, giving him the living waters by which he can satisfy the thirst for knowledge felt by other souls. In expressing, formulating, and communicating the thoughts which thus come to him he cannot help feeling the “joy of creating.” “The history of literature,” says Shedd, “furnishes many examples of men whose knowledge only increased their sorrow, because it never found an efflux from their own minds into the world. Knowledge uncommunicated is something like remorse unconfessed. The mind, not being allowed to go out of itself, and to direct its energies towards an object and end greater and worthier than itself, turns back upon itself, and becomes morbidly self-reflecting and self-conscious. A studious and reflecting man of this class is characterized by excessive fastidiousness, which makes him dissatisfied with all that he does himself or sees done by others; which represses and finally suppresses all the buoyant and spirited activity of the intellect, leaving it sluggish as ‘the dull weed that rots by Lethe’s wharf.’”

Forms of creative effort.