I discovered, though unconsciously and insensibly, that the pleasure of observing and reasoning was a much higher one than that of skill and sport.—Darwin’s Autobiography.

To know is one thing; to do another. To know the sci­ence of thinking is not to pos­sess the art of think­ing. Yet I doubt not that there are readers who having finished, would deem it sufficient that they had the knowledge, and would feel they had gotten all the good or harm out of this book that there is in it. They would put it aside. They would think no more of it.

The trouble with these good people (unfortunately I speak of the overwhelming majority) is that they expect information to apply itself. They expect that once they have learnt a thing they will act according to their knowledge. This is the very last thing a normal human being does.

The only way we can ever get ourselves to apply knowledge is to do so by what will at first be a conscious effort. We shall have to devote much attention to it. Old established custom will have to be broken. We do not act according to knowledge; we act according to habit. Even after we have decided, for instance, that we ought to give a little in­de­pen­dent thinking to a subject before reading about it, we shall very likely continue to read books without previous thought.

Some people may imagine that the reason we do not practice what we learn is that we do not remember what we learn. They are mistaken. When learning German, I had much difficulty in knowing what prepositions required the genitive, dative or accusative cases. I finally learnt all of them alphabetically in their respective groups, and could rattle them off at a rate which would make most native Germans blush for envy. The only trouble was that when I came to an actual sentence requiring one of these prepositions I continually forgot to apply my knowledge. Some one would have to point an error out to me before it would occur to me to do so. Even then I would have to think long before the proper case occurred.

But while it is not true that we fail to practice a thing merely because we fail to remember it, it is true that if we do not practice we are not very likely to remember it. The only way we could remember would be by constant re-reading, for knowledge unused tends to drop out of mind. Knowledge used does not need to be remembered; practice forms habits and habits make memory unnecessary. The rule is nothing; the application is everything.

Practice being the thing needful, it is essential that we put aside a certain amount of time for it. Unless you lay out a definite program, unless you put aside, say, one-half hour every day, for pure downright in­de­pen­dent thinking, you will probably neglect to practice at all. One-half hour out of every twenty-four seems little enough. You may think you can fit it in with no trouble. But no matter how shamelessly you have been putting in your time, you have been doing something with it. In order to get in your thirty minutes of thinking, you will have to put aside something which has been habitually taking up a half hour of your day. You cannot expect simply to add thinking to your other activities. Some other activity must be cut down or cut out.24

You may think me quite lenient in advising only one-half hour a day. You may even go so far as to say that one-half hour a day is not enough. Perhaps it isn’t. But I am par­tic­u­larly anxious to have some of the advice in this book followed. And I greatly fear that if I advised more than a half hour most readers would serenely neglect my advice altogether. After you have been able for a month to devote at least one-half hour a day to thinking, you may then, if you choose, extend the time. But if you attempt to do too much at once, you may find it so inconvenient, if not impracticable, that you may give up attempting altogether. Throughout the book I have constantly kept in mind that I wish my advice followed. I have therefore laid down rules which may reasonably be adhered to by an average human, rules which do not require a hardened asceticism to apply, and rules which have occasionally been followed by the author himself. In this last respect, I flatter myself, the present differs from most books of advice.

Above all I urge the reader to avoid falling into that habit so prevalent and at the same time so detrimental to character:—acquiescing in advice and not following it. You should view critically every sentence in this book. Wherever you find any advice which you think needless, or which requires unnecessary sacrifice to put into practice, or is wrong, you should so mark it. And you should think out for yourself what would be the best practice to follow. But when you agree with any advice you see here, you should make it your business to follow it. The fact that part of the advice may be wrong is no reason why you should not follow the part that is right.

Most people honestly intend to follow advice, and actually start to do it, but ... They try to practice everything at once. As a result they end by practicing nothing. The secret of practice is to learn thoroughly one thing at a time. As already stated, we act according to habit. The only way to break an old habit or to form a new one is to give our whole attention to the process. The new action will soon require less and less attention, until finally we shall do it automatically, without thought—in short, we shall have formed another habit. This accomplished we can turn to still others.

As an example let us take the different methods of looking at questions considered in the second chapter. Most readers will glance over these methods, and agree that they are very helpful—and the next problem which perplexes them will probably be solved by no method at all, or will be looked at from one standpoint only.

About the best, perhaps the only way by which the reader could get himself to use habitually every valuable method possible, would be to take one of the methods, say the evolutionary, and consciously apply it, or attempt to apply it, to a whole list of problems. In this way he could learn the possibilities and limits of that par­tic­u­lar method. Again, he could take an individual problem and consciously attempt to apply every possible method to its solution. He could continue such practice until he had so formed the habit of using method that it would be employed almost unconsciously. Con­cen­tra­tion, meth­od in book read­ing, and all the other prac­tices here ad­vocated should be learned in the same conscious, pain­staking way, one thing at a time, until thoroughly ingrained. It must be left to the reader’s own ingenuity to devise the best methods of acquiring each par­tic­u­lar habit.

Of course it is possible to do a thing well—it is possible to follow the rule for doing it—without knowing the rule. If a man take a live interest in a subject he will naturally tend to look at it from a number of different viewpoints. If he be eternally on the lookout for errors and fallacies in his own thinking he will gradually evolve a logic of his own. And this logic will be concrete, not abstract; it will be something built into, an integral part of, concrete thought, and he will be constantly strengthening the habit of using it. Compared with the logic of the books it may be crude, but it will not consist of mere rules, which can be recited but which are seldom applied.

So with grammar. Instance the writer’s experience with German. Few native Germans could recite offhand what prepositions govern the genitive, dative and accusative, even if they knew what was meant by these terms. But they would (most of them) use these cases correctly, and without the least thought. The educated Englishman or American flatters himself that his correct speech is due to his study of grammar. This is far from true. His speech is due to unconscious imitation of the language of the people with whom he comes into contact, and of the books he reads. And needless to say, the cultivated man comes into contact with other cultivated men and with good literature; the ignoramus does not.

Most of our thinking is influenced in this way. The great thinkers of the past improved their innate powers not by the study of rules for thinking, but by reading the works of other great thinkers, and unconsciously imitating their habitual method and caution.

The fact to remember is that a rule is something that has been formulated after the thing which it rules. It is merely an abstract of current practice or of good practice. Rules are needful because they teach in little time what would otherwise require much experience to learn, or which we might never discover for ourselves at all. They help us to learn things right in the beginning; they prevent us from falling into wrong habits. The trouble with unsupplemented imitation, conscious or unconscious, is that we tend to imitate another’s faults along with his virtues. Rules enable us to distinguish, especially if we have learned the reason for the rules.

But practice and rules should not be compared as if they were opposed. The true road is plenty of practice with conscientious regard to rule. It may be insisted that this has its limits; that there is a point beyond which a man cannot improve himself. I admit that practice has its limits. It may be true that there is a point beyond which a man cannot advance. But nobody knows those limits and no one can say when that point has come.

No two individuals profit in the same degree by the same practice. With a given amount one man will always improve faster than another. But the slower man may keep up with his more speedy brother by more practice. I shall not repeat here the fable of the hare and the tortoise. But any one who has discovered a flaw in his mental make-up, any one who believes that he cannot con­cen­trate, or that his memory is poor, and that therefore he can never become a thinker, should find consolation in the words of William James:

“Depend upon it, no one need be too much cast down by the discovery of his deficiency in any elementary faculty of the mind. ... The total mental ef­fi­ciency of a man is the resultant of all his facul­ties. He is too complex a being for any one of them to have the casting vote. If any one of them do have the casting vote, it is more likely to be the strength of his desire and pas­sion, the strength of the interest he takes in what is proposed. Con­cen­tra­tion, mem­o­ry, rea­son­ing power, in­ven­tive­ness, ex­cel­lence of the senses—all are sub­si­diary to this. No mat­ter how scatter-brained the type of a man’s successive fields of con­scious­ness may be, if he really care for a subject, he will return to it incessantly from his incessant wanderings, and first and last do more with it, and get more results from it, than another person whose attention may be more continuous during a given interval, but whose passion for the subject is of a more languid and less permanent sort.”25