XXI
THINKING IN THE ARTS

For centuries men have been disposed to look with disdain upon the occupations in which the hands and the body are more concerned than the mind. The arts in which thought predominates were honored above the handicrafts; and it is only in recent years that educators have begun to recognize the educative value of thinking through the hand as we find it exemplified in schools for manual training. A comparison of the various arts will serve to dignify this kind of training and to set it in a clearer light before teachers and boards of education.

MediÆval thinkers divided the arts into two classes, which they called the mechanic and the liberal arts, and enumerated seven arts in each class.

The seven mechanic arts were Agriculture, Propagation of Trees, Manufacture of Arms, Carpenter’s Work, Medicine, Weaving, and Ship-building. The primary operations were mechanical, as the name implies, and hence involved a genuine thinking in things. Their number has been greatly multiplied; the operations have grown wonderfully complex; thought upon the activities which they necessitate has led to the discovery of guiding principles, and some have risen to the rank of regular professions. The growth and the care of trees have given rise to forestry. Ship-building and the manufacture of arms involve science of the highest order. The practice of medicine and surgery requires skill based upon kinds of knowledge and thinking that are rigidly scientific. The thoughts which have been crystallized in modern inventions deserve equal rank with the thoughts which philosophers have woven into systems. The various trades of civilized society necessitate the expression of thought through the hand. Manufactures and commerce involve transactions, operations, and competition requiring the highest intelligence, the most accurate thinking, the most vigorous effort. Any youth whose training has fitted him to excel in these is sure of work and fair compensation.

Far too often the school has taught the pupil to undervalue and even to despise useful occupations. Scientific research, philosophic speculation, and literary productivity have been lauded as more honorable vocations. Any honest occupation that furnishes adequate exercise for man’s marvellous faculties is honorable in the sight of God. If two angels should be sent from heaven, one to rule a kingdom, the other to break stones upon the highway, each of them would be happy in the thought that he was fulfilling his divinely appointed mission, and each would receive, upon the completion of his task, the “well done” which will finally be spoken to every good and faithful servant.

In 1840 Harriet Martineau visited the United States and reported only seven occupations open to women,—teaching, needlework, keeping boarders, working in cotton factories, typesetting, bookbinding, and household service. The school has been blamed for causing the rising generation to underestimate the last named in comparison with the other occupations open to women. When anything goes wrong in American life the school is not only blamed, but also expected to supply the remedy. It must be admitted that there is much false thinking on the subject of household service in so-called polite society. A woman may cook for herself and her own household without losing caste. As soon as she becomes the cook in another woman’s kitchen she is banished from the parlor of fashionable society. She can stand in a store or work in a factory without losing her place in the social scale; but if she works for hire in the kitchen, she is thenceforth treated as belonging to a lower caste. Is thinking in the culinary art less valuable or less difficult than the thinking involved in selling ribbons and laces? Does the preparation of a palatable meal require less brains and less skill than the setting of type or the making of yarn? Does good cooking add less to the welfare of the race than playing on the piano or painting in oil- or water-colors? The teaching of domestic science is calculated to change public opinion and to add to the sum of human happiness by emancipating the home from the tyranny and the caprices of the servant girl and by securing to deserving help a juster appreciation of efficient thinking in household service.

America has been aptly named the paradise of woman. The American woman is not expected to break stones upon the highway, to carry market-baskets on the top of her head, to pull the milk-cart alongside of the dog, to do all kinds of rough manual labor, whilst strong-armed and able-bodied men have charge of the elementary schools. Fully two-thirds of the teachers in America are women. Her sphere of activity has been greatly enlarged in other directions. She may be the inferior of the stronger sex in original and creative work,—time will settle that question,—but in ability to carry college work and to do practical thinking she has shown herself the equal of her brother and in every respect deserving of the exalted position assigned to her in the New World. She has attained her standing in America through her ability to think and to apply thought in the useful arts.

The liberal arts were subdivided into the trivium and the quadrivium. The trivium, consisting of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, sought to teach the art of thinking correctly, of expressing thought in correct language, and of presenting it in forceful, persuasive discourse.

The quadrivium, consisting of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, was composed of thought-studies, and furnished material for the thinking of generations of the best men. The enlargement of the boundaries of human knowledge has increased the number of studies to such an extent that no student need weep like Alexander because there are no more worlds to conquer. Moreover, in many directions the human race is simply on the border-land of discovery. At the beginning of this century a professor lamented that the age of discovery had passed. The professor who quoted him in the middle of the century could point to the steam-engine, the electric telegraph, and the use of anÆsthetics. In the closing year of the century we can point to a record of inventions and discoveries unsurpassed in the thought-achievements of the race. Man has learned to put thought into machines that do work with a speed and accuracy impossible of attainment by the human hand. His thought is changing the face of the earth and developing a civilization based upon a degree of physical well-being and comfort of which the man of the last century had not the faintest conception. To follow in thought the achievements of a single year in the improvement of machinery and the resulting additions to our material wealth is to fill the soul with wonder at the marvellous powers of the race. All is due primarily to the exercise of the power of thought, and secondarily to the manifold ways of expressing and realizing thought. Never were there such magnificent opportunities for those who have learned to combine thought and action, intelligence and skill, brains and the handicrafts. The tradesman deserves honor and recognition with those who earn their bread by their wits. Both can live the higher life of thought and culture.

The relation of the trivium to the art of thinking is often misconceived. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric furnish valuable food for thought, excellent discipline for the mind, especially for the understanding; but they do not beget the power of thinking in new fields of investigation. Their function is corrective, not creative. Those who hope to learn the art of composition by the study of English grammar are sure to be disappointed. Grammar furnishes the tests and rules by which one may determine the correctness of sentences. It may furnish discipline for the understanding, and thus prove valuable as a means of culture. It utterly fails to produce thinkers beyond the thinking required in the interpretation of language. Parsing, analysis, and diagramming often become a mechanical iteration of set phrases, resulting in mental apathy. Questions in unexpected forms may then be needed to rouse the slumbering powers of the intellect.

Homer and Plato wrote good Greek, although neither of them had any knowledge of grammar as a science. Men used correct sentences long before there was a scientific treatment of the sentence.

The same remarks are applicable to the other studies of the trivium. Men’s minds obeyed the laws of thought and drew correct inferences long before the science of logic was formulated. He who studies logic in the hope that it will make him an original thinker is doomed to disappointment. Logic has a critical as well as a disciplinary value. Its influence upon the intellectual life is like that of mathematics. It furnishes a test for one’s own thinking and provides the means for detecting fallacies in the reasoning of others. Logic can be taught with advantage to those who have learned to think; it fails to make creative spirits who have the power of gathering thoughts, weaving them into a system, and reaching trustworthy conclusions.

Rhetoric possesses great disciplinary value for the understanding. It deserves careful study on the part of those who express their thoughts in public discourse. The moment it becomes an end, instead of means to an end, it defeats its own purpose. To draw the attention to the figures of speech and other rhetorical devices of an oration is to divert the mind from the line of thought and to defeat the purpose for which rhetoric is taught. The studies of the trivium are like the handicrafts in that they serve as means to an end. From one point of view they deserve to be classed with the useful arts; from another it is apparent that they furnish material for thinking quite as valuable as the multitudinous branches of study into which the quadrivium has been expanded.

The arts are sometimes divided upon the basis of use and beauty. From one point of view, as already indicated, the liberal arts may be regarded as belonging to the category of the useful, and thus as forming part of a class distinct from the fine arts. Yet the idea of beauty enters into all that man does. Sooner or later he seeks to adorn his home, his language, everything that he employs in giving expression to his inner life.

The thinking which lies at the basis of the fine arts has distinguishing qualities and characteristics. The mind may be so completely absorbed in poetry, music, painting, sculpture, and in the other things which make life beautiful that it ceases to be a fit instrument for useful living or for engaging in more advanced thinking. The element of feeling predominates in the appreciation of the beautiful. The two factors which enter into the beautiful are the idea and the form. By casting into the alembic of the imagination the materials which the mind gathers from the external world, there is evolved the ideal; as soon as this ideal is found embodied in any form of nature or art the object is called beautiful. The power to see the idea in the form, the ideal in the work of art, is a function of thinking, and deserves attention from those who are teaching others to think.

Vast is the difference between the Æsthetic and the scientific appreciation of nature. The scientist pulls the flower to pieces, analyzes its parts, imposes hard names, and destroys that about the flower which is most attractive to the child and the poet. The student of beauty admires it as it is in its original surroundings. He cultivates it to adorn the garden, the yard, the home, the school-room.

Very much, therefore, depends upon the way in which nature is studied. The study may be pursued to beget habits of observation or to cultivate a sense of the beautiful. It may be studied for the sake of ascertaining the laws which govern the growth of plants, the changes of the seasons, the movements of the heavenly bodies, the forces which give us light, heat, and all else we need for body and mind. When it is studied for the sake of truth and beauty, the effort lifts us into the domain of the higher life.

Why should any portion of our life, as compared with another, be styled the higher life? Because a man’s life may abound in some of the activities which are essential to his existence and still fail to realize the end of his existence. Take life on the farm with all its splendid opportunities for the study of nature and of all that is attractive in God’s universe. Which should be of most account in the education of the farmer’s sons and daughters,—mind or money, light or lucre, the soul or the soil, character or capacity for getting riches? The curse of wealth, fame, office, and the like is that, if they become the chief object of one’s ambition, they drag the soul into the dust of dishonor, if not the dust of the street.

“If the farmer boy has only been taught how to raise better stock, what will he do when that better stock ranges his farm? Will he be a happier father and a nobler citizen? Will his home life be any less coarse and dull? Will the possession of blooded stock make him any more honest than common stock? If that is all you have taught him, will he not still be a brute among his brutes? Indeed, just so far as you increase his money-making without increasing his true culture and manliness, you increase the probability that he will die a drunkard, his son a spendthrift, and his grandson a pauper. The supreme need is character to guide these resources.”[56]

Whilst it is worth while to dignify labor in all the handicrafts by showing the need for intelligent thought on the part of those who follow them, it is of vastly more importance to emphasize the things of the mind, and to show how the ability to think conditions the activities of the higher life and is essential to the full realization of man’s being. The relation of thinking to the higher life will claim our attention in the concluding chapter.