XIV The Stream of Thought in Listening and Reading
Reading is thinking along a prescribed line that lies goldenly beneath the flow of words.
Brumbaugh.
Whittier uses words as stepping-stones upon which with a light and joyous bound he crosses and recrosses at will the rapid and rushing stream of thought.
Longfellow.
To listen well is to think well,—the hearing ear must be attended by the alert mind, eager to seize upon incoming sensations and weave them into a garland of thought.
M. G. B.
Words, however well constructed originally, are always tending, like coins, to have their inscription worn off by passing from hand to hand; and the only possible mode of reviving it is to be ever stamping it afresh by living in the habitual contemplation of the phenomena themselves, and not resting in our familiarity with the words that express them.
J. S. Mill.
XIV — The Stream of Thought in Listening and Reading
A suggestive dialogue.
Two men engaged in speculative pursuits met after one had published a book. Let us speak of them as A and B.
A: I have just read your new book. Many things in it please me very much, but in it you say so and so, with which I do not find myself in full accord.
B: I say nothing of the kind in that book.
A: I surely read your book.
B: You never read a book in your life. You read some sentences or paragraphs; your mind begins to react upon what you have read; and ere long you imagine that your inferences are the conclusions of the author.
A: I have a notion to write a psychology, and to set forth my views in full.
B: Don’t you do it. You know no psychology. You have been of great service in stimulating others to think; you are a most delightful lecturer; but you have never mastered psychology.
Feeling.
Interest.
If a third party could have listened to the conversation, what stream of consciousness would have started in his mind? Possibly surprise at the frankness of B and the composure of A, mingled with thoughts of what they were discussing. In other words, a strong tinge of feeling would be perceptible in the stream of thought. In the minds of the two engaged in the dialogue, feeling must have greatly modified the current of thought. The greatest kindness that can be shown to some men is to oppose or criticise their views. Opposition and criticism stimulate their thinking, and rouse their mental powers to the highest possible tension and activity. In men of the opposite temperament, feeling beclouds their thinking, and makes the stream of thought more sluggish. The common prejudice against appeals to feeling are due to the abuse of the right which every orator has of addressing the feelings through the intellect, and of thereby moving the will. To move the will is the essence and aim of all eloquence. In listening or lecturing, in reading or composing, some form of emotion always accompanies the stream of thought. The orator may move the hearer to tears or to laughter; he is not untrue to his mission if he can thereby win a vote, secure a verdict, or move the hearer to action. A lecture is addressed primarily to the understanding. It is greatly improved if the stream of thought which it starts and supplies is accompanied by feelings of interest and the pleasurable emotions attendant upon novelty, curiosity, or admiring approval. The consciousness that we understand a lecture is accompanied by pleasurable emotions which help to sustain the attention.
Spurgeon.
The writer once paid a shilling to hear Spurgeon. It was his purpose to get a good seat, so that he might study this famous preacher’s gestures and delivery, the quality of his voice, and the secret of his eloquence. The text was hardly announced before every one in the audience, including the writer, forgot all about Spurgeon, and thought only of his message to the thousands before him. The secret of his oratory lay in his ability to make the audience forget everything except the gospel he was preaching. If people, after hearing a speaker, talk of his fine delivery, his flowery language and beautiful figures of speech, or his peculiarities of pronunciation and other eccentricities, it is proof positive that he has failed. Instead of holding the attention to what he was saying, the audience was thinking of his manner and delivery. A well-printed book has the advantage of keeping the author’s personal characteristics from interfering with the stream of thought. It has the disadvantage of losing all the helps to listening and thinking which come from the tones of the voice and eloquent delivery.
The accusation of B against A, referred to at the beginning of this chapter, is applicable to many readers. For several sentences the mind is riveted upon the author’s meaning. Presently a train of thought starts; the eye runs along the sentences to the bottom of the page. On turning the page, the reader wakes up to the consciousness that his mind does not retain, perhaps never had the slightest notion of the contents of said page. Often the train of thought leads to no goal; the thinking resembles the process of wool-gathering, the tufts of wool on bushes and hedges necessitating much wandering to little purpose.
The works of great thinkers.
For the sake of cultivating ability to think, students are advised to read the works of great thinkers, like Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel. Such reading is often a sham and a delusion. No one has done more to shape the critical thinking of the world than Kant; and yet how many young men waste time upon his pages because they are not prepared to think his thoughts. Schleiermacher stimulated and modified the thinking of theologians in every department of their science except Old Testament exegesis; and yet the celebrated Dr. Kahnis, of the University of Leipsic, used to say of Schleiermacher, “Er ist rein nicht zum studiren.” Nevertheless, students for the ministry have been known to waste hours in trying to read his writings, which they were not prepared to understand. Of the obscurer passages in Hegel an eminent authority says, “It is a fair question whether the rationality included in them be anything more than the fact that the words all belong to a common vocabulary, and are strung together on a scheme of predication and relation,—immediacy, self-relation, and what not,—which has habitually recurred. Yet there seems no reason to doubt that the subjective feeling of the rationality of these sentences was strong in the writer as he penned them, or even that some readers by straining may have reproduced it in themselves.”36
It may be worth an honest effort for students and teachers to try to grasp the meaning of such writers; but if after a fair trial the mind is left empty of meaning, it is wise to follow the advice of Locke with regard to obscure ancient authors:
“In reading of them, if they do not use their words with a due clearness and perspicuity, we may lay them aside, and, without any injury done them, resolve thus with ourselves:
“Si non vis intelligi, debes negligi.”37
Several months or years of study may be required to prepare the mind for grasping the ideas or phraseology of new departments of investigation. No one can comprehend the treatises on physiological psychology without devoting several weeks to the anatomy of the brain.
Reading.
Lewes’s view.
The words, phrases, and sentences of the printed or written page should call up in the mind of the reader that for which they stand in the mind of the author. What the stream of thought should be in reading a book is well worthy of careful consideration. G. H. Lewes, in “Problems of Life and Mind,” claims that “our thought is a constant interchange of ideas and images, some trains of thought being carried on mainly by images more or less vivid, others mainly by ideas with only a faint escort of images.” It should be said, by way of explanation, that he does not use the word “ideas” in the Platonic sense of patterns fixed in nature, of which the individual objects in any given class are but imperfect copies, and by participation in which they have their being; nor in the sense of a mental image or picture, which (in opposition to Sir William Hamilton), the Century Dictionary claims, has been the more common meaning of the term in English literature since the sixteenth century. In Lewes’s pages ideas never stand for images, nor for copies of sensations. Sully says that the term idea is used to include both images and concepts, marking off the whole region of the representative from the presentative, but that, like the term notion, it now tends to be confined to concepts. With Lewes all ideas are thoughts, but not all thoughts are ideas. He does not reject the popular usage of the word in phrases like the idea of Shakespeare’s Othello, of Bismarck’s policy. Take the following sentence from Justin McCarthy’s “History of Our Own Times:” “Unluckily, Lord Palmerston became possessed with the idea that the French minister in Greece was secretly setting the Greek government on to resist our claims.” In thinking the thought of this sentence the mind is not filled with any images of Greece or mental pictures of any other kind. Possibly the adjective Greek may bring to the minds of some persons the map symbol of Greece or even scenery and cities in Greece, especially if they have travelled or resided there; but such mental pictures really interfere with the current of thought in reading. In planning a route from New York to San Francisco one is apt to think it in the lines and dots of railway maps. That in the mind for which words stand may be styled their meaning, and Lewes claims that much of our reading does not translate the words into their full signification, but proceeds by a process of logical symbolism. He asserts that “the greater proportion of all men’s thinking goes forward with confident reliance on the correctness of the logical operations, and with only an occasional translation of symbols into images. The translation—verification—does, indeed, from time to time take place, and always in proportion to the novelty of the connections; but how easily and how fatally the mind glides along the path of logical operation without pausing to interpret more than the relation of the symbols is humorously illustrated in the common story of a physicist, whose claim to omniscience was the joke of his friends. Being asked earnestly whether he had ‘read Biot’s paper on the malleability of light?’ ‘No,’ he replied; ‘he sent it me, but I have not yet had time to read it.’”
An example.
Lewes’s meaning is made somewhat clearer by two examples which he uses. “Suppose you inform me that the blood rushed violently from the man’s heart, quickening his pulse, at the sight of his enemy. Of the many latent images in this phrase, how many were salient in your mind and in mine? Probably two,—the man and his enemy,—and these images were faint. Images of blood, heart, violent rushing, pulse, quickening, and sight were either not revived at all or were passing shadows. Had any such images arisen, they would have hampered thought, retarding the logical process of judgment by irrelevant connections. The symbols had substituted relations for these values,—the logical relations of inclusion and exclusion which constitute judgment. You were not anxious to inform me respecting the qualities of blood, heart, pulse, etc., but only of a certain effect produced on one man by sight of another; and this effect you expressed in the physiological terms which came first to hand; you might have expressed it equally well in very different psychological terms,—‘fierce anger seized the man’s soul, rousing all his energies at the sight of his enemy,’ when assuredly there would not have been present images of ‘anger,’ ‘seizing,’ ‘soul,’ ‘rousing,’ and ‘energies.’ These terms are symbols which stand for clusters of images, and can at will be translated into images, just as algebraic letters stand for values which can be assigned. But for purposes of thought and calculation such translation is unnecessary, is hampering; all that is necessary is that the terms should occupy their proper logical position.”38
Another example.
The other example is still more striking. “Suppose I read the phrase, ‘The ship which carried Nelson was appropriately named the Victory;’ unless the ship itself is the prominent interest, I have probably no image at all, or at least only a faint and fleeting shadow of some vague outline. I do not picture a man-of-war, I do not see the hull, masts, cordage, and cannon, though these, with the figure-head, fluttering flags, and pennons, may successfully emerge if I dwell on the ship. I perhaps do not see Nelson, or, at any rate, do not see his pale face, one eye, and one arm, but only some faint suggestion of a human form. The purpose of the phrase was not to raise images, but to communicate a fact respecting the name of the ship; and my intelligence has been occupied with this purpose. I must, it is true, have understood each word, or, at any rate, each clause of the sentence; but for this understanding it is not necessary that I should translate, nor even that I should be capable of translating, each word into an image or cluster of images; it is enough if I apprehend a series of logical relations. We all use occasional words with intelligent and intelligible propriety, the meaning of which as isolated terms we cannot translate. We read Shakespeare and Goethe without a suspicion of the many words which for us have no images. But if one of these words occurs in an unfamiliar connection we are at once arrested, as we are if any familiar word is placed in an unfamiliar position. Suppose we come upon the sentence, ‘The ship which carried Nelson was named Victory; the ship which carried Napoleon across the desert was named Akbar,’—we are at once arrested; the connection of ship and desert is unusual, and is seen, on reflection, to be contrary to experience; but when we learn that the camel is called the ’ship of the desert,’ we recognize the new value assigned to the term, and the logical correctness of the phrase is thereby recognized.”39
These examples, and others like them which Lewes gives, bring us face to face with the proposition that “much of our thinking is carried on by means of symbols without any images, which is the same thing as thinking being carried on by words without any meanings and with only the accompanying intuition of their logical relations.” Thus, after a century of exhortation against the blind use of words we are brought face to face with the question of using words in thinking without realizing the full meaning, an abuse of words for which reformers have shot their arrows at rote teaching from every possible point of view. What truth is there in the statement of Mr. Lewes? What can be his meaning?
Literature.
Imaging in poetry.
The correct plan.
It must be admitted that men in mature life skim newspapers, magazines, and books, especially books of fiction and books of reference, without realizing in their minds the import of all the words upon which the eye falls. The aim may be to get the plot of the story or a fact for some specific use, or a hurried view of the news and current events of the last twenty-four hours. But this is not the kind of thinking which the teacher aims to beget in the minds of his pupils. Nor does it ever lead to a just appreciation of literature. All literature which appeals to the imagination cannot be read and enjoyed in that way. No one can rightly read a choice selection without thinking what was in the author’s mind, reconstructing the images and scenes which were before his mental eye and following the movements depicted by his language. Movement is more easily conceived than scenery, and abounds in the stories which are most popular among children. Judicious exercises will soon enable the pupil to call up all kinds of imagery. In the Standard Fifth Reader it is suggested that the pupils sit with closed eyes and close attention while the teacher or one of the pupils reads a paragraph or stanza. For illustration, Kate Putnam Osgood’s poem, entitled “Driving Home the Cows,” is selected.
Out of the clover and blue-eyed grass
He turned them into the river lane;
One after another he let them pass,
Then fastened the meadow bars again.
Under the willows and over the hill
He patiently followed their sober pace;
The merry whistle for once was still,
And something shadowed the sunny face.
Only a boy! and his father had said
He never could let his youngest go;
Two already were lying dead
Under the feet of the trampling foe.
But after the evening’s work was done,
And the frogs were loud in the meadow-swamp,
Over his shoulder he slung his gun,
And stealthily followed the foot-path damp;
Across the clover and through the wheat,
With resolute heart and purpose grim;
Though the dew was on his hurrying feet
And the blind bat’s flitting startled him.
Thrice since then had the lanes been white,
And the orchard sweet with apple-bloom;
And now, when the cows came back at night,
The feeble father drove them home.
For news had come to the lonely farm
That three were lying where two had lain;
And the old man’s tremulous, palsied arm
Could never lean on a son’s again.
The summer days grew cool and late:
He went for the cows when the work was done;
But down the lane as he opened the gate
He saw them coming, one by one:
Brindle, Ebony, Speckle, and Bess,
Shaking their horns in the evening wind;
Cropping the buttercups out of the grass;
But who was it following close behind?
Loosely swung in the idle air
An empty sleeve of army blue;
And worn and pale, from the crisping hair,
Looked out a face that the father knew.
The great tears sprang to their meeting eyes
For the heart must speak when the lips are dumb;
And under the silent evening skies
Together they followed the cattle home.
Some thoughts are not images.
Who can fully appreciate these stanzas without picturing the landscape of clover, blue-eyed grass, meadow bars, river lane, cows moving homeward, and especially the boy with the shadow on his face, the two older brothers lying dead under the feet of the trampling foe? The subsequent parts of the poem lend themselves to the activity of the imagination, to a play of sympathy for the father seemingly bereft of all his sons, until on a summer day cool and late he sees fluttering in the wind an empty sleeve of army blue, beneath a face that he knew,—a scene which, if constructed by the imagination, cannot help stirring the emotional life of the reader and giving him proper tones and inflections in oral reading while more fully realizing the price paid in war for the saving of the nation. Very much of our thinking does not turn on images or mental pictures. We do not primarily think justice, law, kindness, mercy under the form of images, though by a secondary process we can throw these ideas into concrete examples and image them as occurring in life. Very many ideas cannot be made concrete in that way, as, for example, the ideas of infinity, eternity. Sometimes an indistinct or faded image does duty for the idea of horses in general, but in such cases the image is representative of the idea, and should not be confounded with the idea. Both are thoughts, but not all thoughts are ideas or images. Many thoughts are propositions and cannot be imaged at all.
Putting content into words.
The images which go with words grow in fulness as one’s experience enlarges. Take the word fire. The first idea was formed from fire in the stove and in the smithy. A fuller idea resulted from the sight of a distant mountain on fire. Then a distant conflagration resulting in the loss of a block of town property gave the word still fuller content. Finally, the destruction of the State Capitol, in which part of the manuscript of a book, other valuable papers and records were destroyed, and in which one or two friends almost lost their lives, gave a meaning to the word fire which it never had before. Without doubt it hampers the mind and impedes the logical processes of thought if the word invariably calls up the idea of these fires with the accompanying emotions.
Books on mathematics and other sciences.
We saw the value of the labor-saving devices introduced by the symbols and formulas of mathematics and other sciences. Analysts carry forward long trains of thought by means of symbols whose meaning can be, but is not always, called up with the successive links of the chain of reasoning. In adding a column of figures, in solving an algebraic equation, in reading a work on higher mathematics or logic, in thinking the formulas of chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc., and in dealing with objects, forces, and relations which have been accurately and definitely quantified, the thinking may be carried forward by the use of symbols which can be interpreted and applied whenever the occasion requires, but whose meaning is not always present to the mind. In reading of things which have not been quantified, the stream of thought often flows on without images, or mental pictures, or copies of sensations. Nevertheless, the examination of any school reader or book of selections from the best literature will show how our best writers and orators appeal to the imagination, and to what a large field the method of thinking in images or mental pictures is applicable for the purpose of securing due appreciation of good literature and proper expression in oral reading.
The simplest thinking is the comparison of objects when these are present to the senses. It prevails largely in the handicrafts and in the ordinary duties of life. More difficult is the comparison of images or mental pictures of things when these are not present to the senses, but must be recalled by the memory. This thinking is essential to the appreciation of poetry, to the vivid presentation of thought, and should not be neglected by those who wish to move the multitudes with tongue or pen. “Imaging,” says Dryden, “is in itself the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet paints.” Higher, from the scientist’s point of view, is the thinking in substitute symbols which stand for ideas definitely fixed or quantified. Higher still is the comparison of abstract and general ideas through expressive symbols, including their application to the problems of life; for this is the kind of thinking that characterizes the scientist and the philosopher, the engineer and the surgeon, the editor and the orator, and, in fact, all whose vocation has risen to the rank of a profession. But highest of all is the thinking which creates and invents, begetting progress in science and art, in literature and history, in government and civilization.