The acquisition of definiteness and of coherency (or constancy) of meanings is derived primarily from practical activities. By rolling an object, the child makes its roundness appreciable; by bouncing it, he singles out its elasticity; by throwing it, he makes weight its conspicuous distinctive factor. Not through the senses, but by means of the reaction, the responsive adjustment, is the impression made distinctive, and given a character marked off from other qualities that call out unlike reactions. Children, for example, are usually quite slow in apprehending differences of color. Differences from the standpoint of the adult so glaring that it is impossible not to note them are recognized and recalled with great difficulty. Doubtless they do not all feel alike, but there is no intellectual recognition of what makes the difference. The redness or greenness or blueness of the object does not tend to call out a reaction that is sufficiently peculiar to give prominence or distinction to the color trait. Gradually, however, certain characteristic habitual responses associate themselves with certain things; the white becomes the sign, say, of milk and sugar to which the child reacts favorably; blue becomes the sign of a dress that the child likes to wear, and so on, and the distinctive reactions tend to single out color qualities from other things in which they had been submerged.—John Dewey, “How We Think.”
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PRACTICAL, THE
According to Mr. Bliss Perry, the greatest idealists are the most practical workers:
Take those men of the transcendental epoch, whose individuality has been fortunately transmitted to us through our literature. They were in love with life, enraptured of its opportunities and possibilities. No matter to what task a man set his hand, he could gain a livelihood without loss of self-respect or the respect of the community. Let him try teaching school, Emerson would advise; let him farm it a while, drive a tin-pedler’s cart for a season or two, keep store, go to Congress, live the “experimental life.” Emerson himself could muse upon the oversoul, but he also raised the best Baldwin apples and Bartlett pears in Concord, and got the highest current prices for them in the Boston market. His friend Thoreau supported himself by making sandpaper or lead-pencils, by surveying farms or by hoeing that immortal patch of beans; his true vocation being steadily that of the philosopher, the seeker. (Text.)—Atlantic Monthly.
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PRACTISE
No man ever yet learned by having somebody else learn for him. A man learns arithmetic by blunder in and blunder out, but at last he gets it. A man learns to write through scrawling; a man learns to swim by going into the water, and a man learns to vote by voting.—Henry Ward Beecher.
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“Did you know this telephone business has resulted in a telephone ear?” said a clerk whose work called him constantly to the telephone, according to The Tribune, New York. “I don’t mean that our hearing is injured, but that the left ear becomes more keen than the right. If you’ll notice, all the telephones are left-handed. That is, the instruments are so placed that we hold the receiver with the left hand, so that we may have the right hand free to use in taking notes of messages, I presume. Of course, one naturally claps the receiver to his left ear, as it would be almost impossible to twist it around to his right ear. Consequently, the left ear gradually becomes much sharper in catching sounds than the right ear. If you don’t believe it, just try holding the receiver in your right hand some time and use your right ear. You’ll find that conversation which was perfectly distinct to the left ear sounds confused and muffled to the right, and there is a distinct effort to understand. It is simply that the left ear is a trained telephone ear, while the right ear is not.” (Text.)