XIX
THINKING AND WILLING

Much thinking is spontaneous, in the sense that there is no conscious effort of the will to direct and control the activity of the mind. Under normal conditions the stream of thought flows onward, like the current of water in the bed of a river. When the onward movement is interrupted, an act of volition may be needed to bring the mind back to the regular channel. There are forms of intellectual activity called dreaming, reverie, and meditation, in which the ideas follow each other without any effort to regulate them. Often they are fanciful, incoherent, and illogical; they are suggested by passing objects, by musical sounds, perhaps by the stimulating influence of a drug or narcotic. Few can start a train of thought, winding up their minds as they would a clock, and then letting it run down until the discourse, lecture, or newspaper article is complete, no conscious effort of the will being required to keep the mind from wandering. This may be partly a gift of nature, but mostly it is the result of discipline.

What is discipline? We speak of mental discipline, of military discipline, of family discipline. What is the element which all these have in common? An army is under discipline when every soldier and every officer is subject to the will of his superior, so that the entire body of men can be moved against the foe at the will of the commanding general. A family is under discipline when the entire household is under the control of the head of the house. The school is under discipline when all the pupils are subject to the will of the teacher, and to the rules which he has laid down for the regulation of conduct. The mind is under discipline when its powers are under the control of the will, and its activities are in accord with the laws of thought. It is important to ascertain the laws of thought which underlie correct thinking. These are developed and discussed in treatises on logic,—a science that should be mastered not only by those who must meet others in the field of argument and controversy, but by all who seek to regulate the thinking of their own minds, or to aid others in the formation of correct habits of thought.

Fortunately, the law of habit here comes into play to lighten the conscious effort of the will. When the intellect, through the guidance of a conscious will, has acted according to the forms of thought in which the logician can find no fallacies, it tends to act again in that way, and the next time a less expenditure of conscious effort is required. The thinking of the teacher, if correct and logical, tends to beget correct and logical habits of thought on the part of the pupil. It is a piece of good fortune to fall under the dominating influence of a towering intellect. For a time the growing mind that is engaged in thinking the thoughts, and mastering the speculations, the reflections, the reasonings, of a master who is such not merely in name, but also in fact, may be in a subjection very like unto intellectual slavery. Sooner or later the day of emancipation arrives; and those who were not under the invigorating tuition of such an intellectual giant are surprised at the thought-power developed by the youth whose equal they hitherto fancied themselves to be.

Those who expect to spend their days in teaching, lecturing, preaching, pleading, or writing have great reason to strive after the discipline which results in placing all the powers of mind and heart under the control of the will. The feelings which interfere with reflection should be repressed and expelled by strenuous effort. The emotions which stimulate thinking should be cherished and fostered. The inner nexus, which binds ideas in logical trains of thought, should be followed until the habit becomes second nature.

Thinking which goes forward according to some established habit requires less effort than intellectual work that is accompanied with much volitional effort. This fact serves as a valuable indication to men who must do intellectual work for the press or the pulpit or the lecture-room. Perhaps no one is better qualified to speak on this point than Dr. Carpenter, who studied mental action from the physiological point of view, and whose publications show the quality, as well as the quantity, of his intellectual labor. He says,—

“To individuals of ordinary mental activity who have been trained in the habit of methodical and connected thinking, a very considerable amount of work is quite natural; and when such persons are in good bodily health, and the subject of their labor is congenial to them,—especially if it be one that has been chosen by themselves, as furnishing a centre of attraction around which their thoughts spontaneously tend to range themselves,—their intellectual operations require but little of the controlling or directing power of the will, and may be continued for long periods together without fatigue. But from the moment when an indisposition is experienced to keep the attention fixed upon the subject, and the thoughts wander from it unless coerced by the will, the mental activity loses its spontaneous or automatic character; and (as in the act of walking) more effort is required to maintain it volitionally during a brief period, and more fatigue is subsequently experienced from such exertion than would be involved in the continuance of an automatic operation through a period many times as long. Hence he has found it practically the greatest economy of mental labor to work vigorously when he feels disposed to do so, and to refrain from exertion, so far as possible, when it is felt to be an exertion. Of course, this rule is by no means universally applicable; for there are many individuals who would pass their whole time in listless inactivity if not actually spurred on by the feeling of necessity. But it holds good for those who are sufficiently attracted by objects of interest before them, or who have in their worldly position a sufficiently strong motive to exertion to make them feel that they must work; the question with them being, how they can attain their desired results with the least expenditure of mental effort.”[55]

There is a danger to which public speakers are exposed, against which the efforts of a resolute will are not too potent. To capture a crowd that is more easily moved by jokes than by argument, the speaker resorts to sallies of wit and humor and turns the laugh upon an opponent. The temptation to cultivate one’s gifts in this direction is very strong, and when yielded to, it destroys the powers of logical reflection and consecutive thought. Wit is illogical, because it introduces into the current of thought what is foreign to the subject in hand, the incongruity giving rise to the laughter. Wit and humor serve a useful purpose in acting as a safety-valve to let off the discontent which accumulates in the human breast, and may be used for that purpose with great effect. But they should never be allowed to divert the stream of thought from its logical channel. The reputation for wit and humor may dispose people to laugh at everything a man says. It destroys their respect for his judgment and impairs his power to follow a line of thought to its legitimate conclusion. The ability to discuss a theme in all its bearings and details implies the power to investigate a subject in its essence and relations, to resolve an idea into its elements, and to present these in the form most easily understood,—an object which is as far from the purposes of the funny man as the poles are from the equator.

All thinking tends towards the expression of thought. “Every expression of thought,” says Tracy, “whether it be word, or mark, or gesture, is the result of an active will, and as such may be classed among the movements.” Word, mark, and gesture do not exhaust the list of movements by which the mind expresses thought. Every handicraft is a form of expressing thought quite as important as writing and speaking and gesticulating. The fine arts and the useful arts are so many ways through which the will passes into thinking and issues in the expression of thought. Movements for reform are the intense expressions of great thoughts which have their origin in the heart. The men who spend their lives in the atmosphere of colleges and universities are apt to be satisfied if they have expressed their thoughts in a lecture or on the printed page. They live in books, and their thinking terminates in books. The thinking which issues in getting things done, in deeds, actions, achievements, is undervalued and too often ignored. University men are waking up to this defect in their thinking. They are throwing themselves into movements for reform and giving the world splendid examples of the translation of thought into vigorous action. The effort to carry theory into practice reacts powerfully upon the mind, forces the individual to see things as they are, and saves him from the habit of looking only for things which the schools have taught him to expect. When thinking issues in doing, the process promotes intellectual honesty. This remark is especially applicable to exercises in which the hand makes in wood, metal, marble, or clay what the mind has conceived. The execution cannot be accurate unless the thinking has been accurate and satisfactory. Drawing is a universal language. It imposes upon the mind a degree of accuracy which is wanting in the fleeting spoken word or even in the more permanent printed or written sentences.

The movements in manual training are an excellent preparation for the movements in the handicrafts and the daily occupations by which men gain the necessaries and the comforts of life. Ten thousand men are active in supplying our breakfast-table, and many thousand more in providing clothing, shelter, light, heat, and the manifold necessities and luxuries of modern society. All these involve thinking quite as useful, as logical, and as effective as the thinking which ends in talk or printer’s ink. The relation of thinking to doing and the reflex influence which the latter exerts upon the former is seen in the solution of problems and in all exercises involving the application of knowledge. Manual training is really and primarily a training in thinking, but it is the kind of thinking most closely related to thinking in things, and its value in education is so great that it has led to the formulation of the maxim, We learn to do by doing,—a maxim which deserves separate consideration, because, as usually applied, it is taken to mean that doing by the hand necessarily and inevitably leads to thinking and knowing.

Another aspect of the relation of thinking to willing claims our attention. Thinking is an important element in the growth of the will. The education of the will is coming to be recognized as a matter of supreme importance. The development of character is everywhere emphasized. No teacher in these days regards intellectual training as the sole or chief aim of the school. The philosopher is no longer regarded as the highest type of humanity. The age demands that thought shall pass into volition, and that volition shall manifest itself in action. The executive is not satisfied with the investigation of a subject in its essence and relations, with the elaboration of thought into a system; he must get things done. Mere thinking he despises. The philosopher he regards as a man troubled with ideas, the poet as a man troubled with fancies and rhymes; he hates men who let their minds “go astray into regions not peopled with real things, animate or inanimate, even idealized, but with personified shadows created by the illusions of metaphysics or by the mere entanglement of words, and think these shadows the proper objects of the highest, the most transcendental philosophy.” And the sympathies of the multitudes are on the side of the executive in his exaltation of the will as the chief element of utility and success.

The acts of the will should be guided by intelligence. The will is weak and vacillating if the ends to be accomplished are not clearly conceived, if the purposes to be accomplished are not definitely thought out. Thinking is the guide to willing. Thought gives direction to volition.

There are successive stages in the growth of the will as clearly defined as the activities of memory and imagination. In the first or lowest stage the aim is some form of happiness. In the second stage the will acts under the influence of some ethical idea, commonly finding expression in a maxim like the command, Thou shalt not steal, or in some fixed occupation like a trade or farm work. In the third the will acts under the inspiration of the good or its opposite, and from motives grounded in right or wrong. In all these stages of growth thinking is a most important factor. Let us go into details for purposes of illustration. The human will in its process of development starts on a physical rather than a spiritual basis. On the one hand a want is felt and on the other an impulse towards the satisfaction of that want. In course of time this impulse or appetence assumes the form of intelligent or conscious purpose looking towards the gratification of felt wants, and then the will begins to show itself in the form of clear, definite volitions and actions. The strength of the will depends largely upon these impulses or appetences; and their strength in turn depends upon the health, the temperament, the organization (physical and psychical) of the individual. If by careful diet, exercise, or otherwise, we invigorate these, we thereby furnish capital that will in after years bear compound interest in the form of strong will-power. If the diet, exercise, play, sleep, and work are not properly regulated, first by the parent, the nurse, and the teacher, and later by the individual himself, the appetences develop into appetites that enslave the will and seriously interfere with its further growth. As the power to think is developed, the will passes over into a higher stage of activity. The very longing for happiness leads the child to impose restrictions upon itself. It feels happy if it can secure the approbation of those with whom it associates. If we show our displeasure at something it has done, the little philosopher begins to practise self-denial in certain directions for the purpose of regaining and retaining our good will. The second stage is now reached in which self-gratification gives place to self-denial, the will acting under the influence of one or more ethical ideas. The child at school is lifted upon this loftier plane by the circumstances which surround him; it must practise the school virtues,—punctuality, industry, obedience, and the like; it accepts certain forms of self-restraint in keeping quiet, in abstaining from play, in observing the rules of the school. Where the discipline is rigid and the instruction lacks interest, it may even conceive of the school as a mere place of self-denial and self-restraint. “Why do you come here?” asked a director. The little boy replied, “We come here to sit and wait for school to let out.” The hours at school can be sweetened by exercises in thinking and expressing thought to such an extent that the school becomes the place to which children best like to go. Some full-grown men have not advanced very far beyond this second stage in the growth of the will. They follow some regular occupation as the boy does in going to school; they practise certain forms of virtue,—say honesty, so that you could intrust to them your pocket-book with perfect safety,—but they break the Sabbath, use God’s name in vain, and commit daily many other sins and transgressions. Occasionally one finds a school in which no pupil would dare to be caught telling a lie, and yet the moral tone is low, there being vices which, like a cankerworm, eat out the moral life of the school. The teacher should not feel satisfied until he has raised the pupil to the third stage, where the will is brought under the inspiration of the good, and right becomes the law of life.

Upon this highest plane different phases of development can be detected. The law of right may brandish the avenging rod of conscience and drive the individual into paths of rectitude. The idea of duty thus operating alone may reduce him to the subservience of a slave and prevent him from reaching the high stature of perfect human freedom. This kind of slavery is apt to be followed by a struggle in which the lower nature seeks to assert itself against the higher, and if the latter conquers, the person is apt to be elated with the feeling of victory. Whenever you hear a man boast of the sacrifices he has made in his devotion to duty, you can rest assured he has not yet reached that lofty elevation in will-culture upon which the person does right spontaneously and without effort, and never dreams of having made a sacrifice in the performance of the hardest duties.

Of course, the development from the first stage may move in the opposite direction. If the appetences are gratified beyond the requirements of self-preservation, or of the well-being of the child, they grow into uncontrollable desires and passions; the individual sinks deeper and deeper into selfishness. He may deny himself for the sake of some ambition, or vice, or wicked end which the soul cherishes; then, unless lifted up by the grace of God, he will ultimately land in a state bordering on that of Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, a character who found pleasure in human suffering, and whose will was constantly under the direction and inspiration of the principle of evil. He will at last become like Milton’s Satan, who exclaimed, “Evil, be thou my good.” College boys who delight in hazing innocent freshmen have gone far towards this loathsome stage of moral degradation, the lowest which the will can reach in its downward career.

Now, it is easy to see the relation of thinking to these several stages of will-development. Volition presupposes something to be done, an end to be sought and accomplished. If the will is to act steadily in the endeavor to realize this end, the end must be clearly thought and held before the soul in definite form. To do the right implies that the right be known as the result of right thinking. A soul ignorant of right cannot be expected to practise the virtues which are grounded in the law of right. On the other hand, many forms of evil are never conceived by young people unless suggested to them by their superiors.

Volition issues in doing, and doing is a powerful stimulus to thinking. Making things out of wood, metal, marble, wax, papier-machÉ, or even out of paper is genuine thinking in things. It is a species of doing which flows from thinking through willing and reacts upon the process of thinking. To see how a thing is made is better than to be told how, but to make it by our own effort, skill, and thought is vastly more educative than seeing and hearing. Manual training tends to make the pupil intellectually honest. He cannot get away from a thought expressed in wood or other material as he can from a thought expressed in language which may suffice to suggest his idea, but not to give it adequate expression. This influence of doing upon thinking has led to the formulation of the maxim, We learn to do by doing,—a maxim whose limitations and legitimate meaning it will be necessary to discuss in a separate lecture.