every man knows there are evils in the world which need setting right. every man has pretty definite ideas as to what these evils are. but to most men one in par-tic-u-lar stands out vividly. to some, in fact, this stands out with such startling vividness that they lose sight of other evils, or look upon them as the natural consequences of their own par-tic-u-lar evil-in-chief.
to the socialist this evil is the capitalistic sys-tem; to the pro-hi-bi-tion-ist it is in-tem-per-ance; to the feminist it is the sub-jec-tion of women; to the clergyman it is the decline of religion; to andrew carnegie it is war; to the staunch re-pub-li-can it is the demo-cratic party, and so on, ad infinitum.
i, too, have a pet little evil, to which in more passionate moments i am apt to attribute all the others. this evil is the neglect of thinking. and when i say thinking i mean real thinking, in-de-pen-dent thinking, hard thinking.
you protest. you say men are thinking more now than they ever were. you bring out the almanac to prove by statistics that illiteracy is declining. you point to our magnificent libraries. you point to the multiplication of books. you show beyond a doubt that people are reading more now than ever before in all history. . . .
very well, exactly. that is just the trouble. most people, when confronted with a problem, immediately acquire an inordinate desire to “read-up” on it. when they get stuck mentally, the first thing such people do is to run to a book. confess it, have you not often been in a waiting room or a pullman, noticed people all about you reading, and finding yourself without any reading matter, have you not wished that you had some?—something to “occupy your mind”? and did it ever occur to you that you had within you the power to occupy your mind, and do it more profitably than all those assiduous readers? briefly, did it ever occur to you to think?
of course you “thought”—in a sense. thinking means a variety of things. you may have looked out of your train window while passing a field, and it may have occurred to you that that field would make an excellent baseball diamond. then you “thought” of the time when you played baseball, “thought” of some par-tic-u-lar game perhaps, “thought” how you had made a grand stand play or a bad muff, and how one day it began to rain in the middle of the game, and the team took refuge in the carriage shed. then you “thought” of other rainy days rendered par-tic-u-larly vivid for some reason or other, or perhaps your mind came back to considering the present weather, and how long it was going to last. . . . and of course, in one sense you were “thinking.” but when i use the word thinking, i mean thinking with a purpose, with an end in view, thinking to solve a problem. i mean the kind of thinking that is forced on us when we are deciding on a course to pursue, on a life work to take up perhaps; the kind of thinking that was forced on us in our younger days when we had to find a solution to a problem in mathematics, or when we tackled psychology in college. i do not mean “thinking” in snatches, or holding petty opinions on this subject and on that. i mean thought on significant questions which lie outside the bounds of your narrow personal welfare. this is the kind of thinking which is now so rare—so sadly needed!
of course before this can be revived we must arouse a desire for it. we must arouse a desire for thinking for its own sake; solving problems for the mere sake of solving problems. but a mere desire for thinking, praiseworthy as it is, is not enough. we must know how to think, and to that end we must search for those rules and methods of procedure which will most help us in thinking creatively, originally, and not least of all surely, correctly.
when they think at all, the last thing men think about is their own thoughts. every sensible man realizes that the perfection of a mechanical instrument depends to some extent upon the perfection of the tools with which it is made. no carpenter would expect a perfectly smooth board after using a dented or chipped plane. no gasolene engine manufacturer would expect to produce a good motor unless he had the best lathes obtainable to help him turn out his product. no watchmaker would expect to construct a perfectly accurate timepiece unless he had the most delicate and accurate tools to turn out the cogs and screws. before any specialist produces an instrument he thinks of the tools with which he is to produce it. but men reflect continually on the most complex problems—problems of vital importance to them—and expect to obtain satisfactory solutions, without once giving a thought to the manner in which they go about obtaining those solutions; without a thought to their own mind, the tool which produces those solutions. surely this deserves at least some sys-tem-at-ic con-si-der-a-tion.
some remarks of ella wheeler wilcox under this head will bear quoting: “human thinking is still in as great a state of disorder and jumble as language was before the alphabet, music before the scale was discovered, printing before gutenberg, or mathematics before pythagoras formulated its laws.” “this sys-tem-a-ti-za-tion of all thought,” she tells us, would be “a more far reaching improvement than all the others, for it will do for education, health, economics, government, etc., what the alphabet did for language, movable type for printing and literature, the scale for music, and the rules of arithmetic for calculation. being the exact counterpart of these in its par-tic-u-lar field, its mission, like theirs, will be to bring order out of chaos.”
i believe miss wilcox exaggerates mat-ters. incidentally i for one do not pretend to have dis-covered anything rev-o-lu-tionary. but the im-portance of the subject warrants its formulation into as near scientific form as we can bring it.
i beg no one to get frightened. science does not necessarily mean test tubes and telescopes. i mean science in its broadest sense; and in this sense it means nothing more than organized knowledge. if we are to find rules and methods of procedure, these methods must come from somewhere—must be based on certain prin-ci-ples—and these prin-ci-ples can come only from close, sys-tem-at-ic investigation.
it may indeed be urged that we can think best by disregarding all “rules,” by not paying any attention to method. but the man who maintains this must give reasons; and once he attempts this he himself is bordering closely on the science of the matter. in short, the settlement of even this question is part of the science of thinking.
and what is to be the nature of this science?
for our purposes, all sciences may be divided into two kinds: positive and normative. a positive science investigates the nature of things as they are. it deals simply with matters of fact. such a science is physics, chemistry, psychology. a normative science is one which studies things as they ought to be. as the name implies, it seeks to establish a norm or pattern which ought to be adhered to. it studies means of reaching desired ends. to this class belong such sciences as ethics, education, agriculture.
now these normative sciences, with the exception of ethics, are nearly always referred to either as “arts” or “applied sciences.” to both of these terms i technically but strenuously object. i object to the term “art” to designate any set of organized rules for doing a thing, because “art” also means the actual doing of that thing. and this thing may be done, and often is done, in total ignorance of the rules governing it. a man may possess the art of swimming—he may be able to swim—without any previous instruction, without any knowledge of how he ought to hold his body, arms and legs; just as a dog may do the same thing.
i object also to the term “applied science,” because to me this term implies that the science it refers to is based on one positive science only. i can think of no so-called applied science which is so based. hygiene, not alone dependent on physiology, must derive some of its rules from the chemistry of foods, as well as from the sciences of sanitation and ventilation, themselves normative. agriculture is based not only on biology and botany, but on chemistry and meteorology.
the science of thinking, then, if such a science there be, is normative. its purpose is to find those methods which will help us to think constructively and correctly.
one more distinction and our preliminaries are over. there are two other sciences with which the science of thinking is liable to become confused; one positive, the other normative.
the positive science is that branch of psychology which deals with the reasoning process and examines the basis of belief. we shall make frequent use of this science in trying to find rules for thinking, but it will not be the only science we shall use, nor will that science be the subject of this book.
the normative science with which the science of thinking may become confused is logic. indeed, logic has sometimes been called the science of thinking. now for our purposes logic is a part of the science of thinking, but it is not the part which we are primarily to consider. its function is merely negative; it consists in leading us from error. the part of the science of thinking in which we are interested deals with those positive rules which will help to make us creative thinkers. . . .
our ship is headed for the port truth. our mind is the engine, the science of thinking the propeller, and logic the rudder. without our engine, the mind, the propeller of the science of thinking, which transforms our mental energy most effectively into motion, would be useless. without the propeller, which gives motion, the rudder of logic would be useless. but all three are needed to reach our goal.
and now i must bespeak a little patience. the next chapter, and the one following it, are going to deal very largely with method and methods. they will touch on clas-si-fi-ca-tion, and a lot of other things to which the plain man has an aversion; to which, at least, he usually evinces no very active interest. but it is necessary to consider these things in order to make our study complete.
