The Mind and Its Education

G >> George Herbert Betts >> The Mind and Its Education

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ASSIMILATIVE THINKING.--It is this type of thinking that occupies us
when we seek to appropriate new facts or ideas and understand them; that
is, relate them to knowledge already on hand. We think after this
fashion in much of our study in schools and textbooks. The problem for
our thought is not so much one of invention or discovery as of grasp and
assimilation. Our thinking is to apprehend meanings and relations, and
so unify and give coherence to our knowledge.

In the absence of this type of thinking one may commit to memory many
facts that he does not understand, gather much information that contains
little meaning to him, and even achieve very creditable scholastic
grades that stand for a small amount of education or development. For
all information, to become vital and usable, must be thought into
relation to our present active, functioning body of knowledge; therefore
assimilative thinking is fundamental to true mastery and learning.

DELIBERATIVE THINKING.--Deliberative thinking constitutes the highest
type of thought process. In order to do deliberative thinking there is
necessary, first of all, what Dewey calls a "split-road" situation. A
traveler going along a well-beaten highway, says Dr. Dewey, does not
deliberate; he simply keeps on going. But let the highway split into two
roads at a fork, only one of which leads to the desired destination, and
now a problem confronts him; he must take one road or the other, but
_which_? The intelligent traveler will at once go to _seeking for
evidence_ as to which road he should choose. He will balance this fact
against that fact, and this probability against that probability, in an
effort to arrive at a solution of his problem.

Before we can engage in deliberative thinking we must be confronted by
some problem, some such "_split-road_" situation in our mental
stream--we must have something to think about. It is this fact that
makes one writer say that the great purpose of one's education is not to
solve all his problems for him. It is rather to help him (1) to
_discover_ problems, or "_split-road_" situations, (2) to assist him in
gathering the facts necessary for their solution, and (3) to train him
in the weighing of his facts or evidence, that is, in deliberative
thinking. Only as we learn to recognize the true problems that confront
us in our own lives and in society about us can we become thinkers in
the best sense. Our own plans and projects, the questions of right and
wrong that are constantly arising, the social, political and religious
problems awaiting solution, all afford the opportunity and the necessity
for deliberative thinking. And unhappy is the pupil whose school work
does not set the problems and employ the methods which will insure
training in this as well as in the assimilative type of thinking. Every
school subject, besides supplying certain information to be "learned,"
should present its problems requiring true deliberative thinking within
the range of development and ability of the pupil, and no
subject--literature, history, science, language--is without many such
problems.

2. THE FUNCTION OF THINKING

All true thinking is for the purpose of discovering relations between
the things we think about. Imagine a world in which nothing is related
to anything else; in which every object perceived, remembered, or
imagined, stands absolutely by itself, independent and self-sufficient!
What a chaos it would be! We might perceive, remember, and imagine all
the various objects we please, but without the power to think them
together, they would all be totally unrelated, and hence have no
meaning.

MEANING DEPENDS ON RELATIONS.--To have a rational meaning for us, things
must always be defined in terms of other things, or in terms of their
uses. _Fuel_ is that which feeds _fire_. _Food_ is what is eaten for
_nourishment_. A _locomotive_ is a machine for _drawing a train_.
_Books_ are to _read_, _pianos_ to _play_, _balls_ to _throw_, _schools_
to _instruct_, _friends_ to _enjoy_, and so on through the whole list of
objects which we know or can define. Everything depends for its meaning
on its relation to other things; and the more of these relations we can
discover, the more fully do we see the meaning. Thus balls may have
other uses than to throw, schools other functions than to instruct, and
friends mean much more to us than mere enjoyment. And just in the degree
in which we have realized these different relations, have we defined the
object, or, in other words, have we seen its meaning.

THE FUNCTION OF THINKING IS TO DISCOVER RELATIONS.--Now it is by
_thinking_ that these relations are discovered. This is the function of
thinking. Thinking takes the various separate items of our experience
and discovers to us the relations existing among them, and builds them
together into a unified, related, and usable body of knowledge,
threading each little bit on the string of relationship which runs
through the whole. It was, no doubt, this thought which Tennyson had in
mind when he wrote:

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower--but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

Starting in with even so simple a thing as a little flower, if he could
discover all the relations which every part bears to every other part
and to all other things besides, he would finally reach the meaning of
God and man. For each separate thing, be it large or small, forms a link
in an unbroken chain of relationships which binds the universe into an
ordered whole.

NEAR AND REMOTE RELATIONS.--The relations discovered through our
thinking may be very close and simple ones, as when a child sees the
relation between his bottle and his dinner; or they may be very remote
ones, as when Newton saw the relation between the falling of an apple
and the motion of the planets in their orbits. But whether simple or
remote, the seeing of the relationships is in both cases alike thinking;
for thinking is nothing, in its last analysis, but the discovering of
the relationships which exist between the various objects in our mental
stream.

Thinking passes through all grades of complexity, from the first faint
dawnings in the mind of the babe when it sees the relation between the
mother and its feeding, on to the mighty grasp of the sage who is able
to "think God's thoughts after Him." But it all comes to the same end
finally--the bringing to light of new meanings through the discovery of
new relations. And whatever does this is thinking.

CHILD AND ADULT THINKING.--What constitutes the difference in the
thinking of the child and that of the sage? Let us see whether we can
discover this difference. In the first place the relations seen by the
child are _immediate_ relations: they exist between simple percepts or
images; the remote and the general are beyond his reach. He has not had
sufficient experience to enable him to discover remote relations. He
cannot think things which are absent from him, or which he has never
known. The child could by no possibility have seen in the falling apple
what Newton saw; for the child knew nothing of the planets in their
orbits, and hence could not see relations in which these formed one of
the terms. The sage, on the other hand, is not limited to his immediate
percepts or their images. He can see remote relations. He can go beyond
individuals, and think in classes. The falling apple is not a mere
falling apple to him, but one of a _class of falling bodies_. Besides a
rich experience full of valuable facts, the trained thinker has acquired
also the habit of looking out for relations; he has learned that this is
the method _par excellence_ of increasing his store of knowledge and of
rendering effective the knowledge he has. He has learned how to think.

The chief business of the child is the collection of the materials of
thought, seeing only the more necessary and obvious relations as he
proceeds; his chief business when older grown is to seek out the network
of relations which unites this mass of material, and through this
process to systematize and give new meanings to the whole.

3. THE MECHANISM OF THINKING

It is evident from the foregoing discussion that we may include under
the term thinking all sorts of mental processes by which relations are
apprehended between different objects of thought. Thus young children
think as soon as they begin to understand something of the meaning of
the objects of their environment. Even animals think by means of simple
and direct associations. Thinking may therefore go on in terms of the
simplest and most immediate, or the most complex and distant
relationships.

SENSATIONS AND PERCEPTS AS ELEMENTS IN THINKING.--Relations seen between
sensations would mean something, but not much; relations seen between
_objects_ immediately present to the senses would mean much more; but
our thinking must go far beyond the present, and likewise far beyond
individual objects. It must be able to annihilate both time and space,
and to deal with millions of individuals together in one group or class.
Only in this way can our thinking go beyond that of the lower animals;
for a wise rat, even, may come to see the relation between a trap and
danger, or a horse the relation between pulling with his teeth at the
piece of string on the gate latch, and securing his liberty.

But it takes the farther-reaching mind of man to _invent_ the trap and
the latch. Perception alone does not go far enough. It is limited to
immediately present objects and their most obvious relations. The
perceptual image is likewise subject to similar limitations. While it
enables us to dispense with the immediate presence of the object, yet it
deals with separate individuals; and the world is too full of individual
objects for us to deal with them separately. It is in _conception_,
_judgment_, and _reasoning_ that true thinking takes place. Our next
purpose will therefore be to study these somewhat more closely, and see
how they combine in our thinking.

4. THE CONCEPT

Fortunately for our thinking, the great external world, with its
millions upon millions of individual objects, is so ordered that these
objects can be grouped into comparatively few great classes; and for
many purposes we can deal with the class as a whole instead of with the
separate individuals of the class. Thus there are an infinite number of
individual objects in the world which are composed of _matter_. Yet all
these myriads of individuals may be classed under the two great heads of
_inanimate_ and _animate_. Taking one of these again: all animate forms
may be classed as either _plants_ or _animals_. And these classes may
again be subdivided indefinitely. Animals include mammals, birds,
reptiles, insects, mollusks, and many other classes besides, each class
of which may be still further separated into its _orders_, _families_,
_genera_, _species_, and _individuals_. This arrangement economizes our
thinking by allowing us to think in large terms.

THE CONCEPTS SERVE TO GROUP AND CLASSIFY.--But the somewhat complicated
form of classification just described did not come to man ready-made.
Someone had to _see_ the relationship existing among the myriads of
animals of a certain class, and group these together under the general
term _mammals_. Likewise with birds, reptiles, insects, and all the
rest. In order to accomplish this, many individuals of each class had to
be observed, the qualities common to all members of the class
discriminated from those not common, and the common qualities retained
as the measure by which to test the admission of other individuals into
this class. The process of classification is made possible by what the
psychologist calls the _concept_. The concept enables us to think
_birds_ as well as bluebirds, robins, and wrens; it enables us to think
_men_ as well as Tom, Dick, and Harry. In other words, _the concept lies
at the bottom of all thinking which rises above the seeing of the
simplest relations between immediately present objects_.

GROWTH OF A CONCEPT.--We can perhaps best understand the nature of the
concept if we watch its growth in the thinking of a child. Let us see
how the child forms the concept _dog_, under which he is able finally to
class the several hundred or the several thousand different dogs with
which his thinking requires him to deal. The child's first acquaintance
with a dog is, let us suppose, with a pet poodle, white in color, and
named _Gyp_. At this stage in the child's experience, _dog_ and _Gyp_
are entirely synonymous, including Gyp's color, size, and all other
qualities which the child has discovered. But now let him see another
pet poodle which is like Gyp except that it is black in color. Here
comes the first cleavage between _Gyp_ and _dog_ as synonyms: _dog_ no
longer means white, but may mean _black_. Next let the child see a brown
spaniel. Not only will white and black now no longer answer to _dog_,
but the roly-poly poodle form also has been lost; for the spaniel is
more slender. Let the child go on from this until he has seen many
different dogs of all varieties: poodles, bulldogs, setters, shepherds,
cockers, and a host of others. What has happened to his _dog_, which at
the beginning meant the one particular little individual with which he
played?

_Dog_ is no longer white or black or brown or gray: _color_ is not an
essential quality, so it has dropped out; _size_ is no longer essential
except within very broad limits; _shagginess_ or _smoothness_ of coat is
a very inconstant quality, so this is dropped; _form_ varies so much
from the fat pug to the slender hound that it is discarded, except
within broad limits; _good nature_, _playfulness_, _friendliness_, and a
dozen other qualities are likewise found not to belong in common to
_all_ dogs, and so have had to go; and all that is left to his _dog_ is
_four-footedness_, and a certain general _form_, and a few other dog
qualities of habit of life and disposition. As the term _dog_ has been
gaining in _extent_, that is, as more individuals have been observed and
classed under it, it has correspondingly been losing in _content_, or it
has been losing in the specific qualities which belong to it. Yet it
must not be thought that the process is altogether one of elimination;
for new qualities which are present in all the individuals of a class,
but at first overlooked, are continually being discovered as experience
grows, and built into the developing concept.

DEFINITION OF CONCEPT.--A concept, then, is _our general idea or notion
of a class of individual objects_. Its function is to enable us to
classify our knowledge, and thus deal with classes or universals in our
thinking. Often the basis of a concept consists of an _image_, as when
you get a hazy visual image of a mass of people when I suggest _mankind_
to you. Yet the core, or the vital, functioning part of a concept is its
_meaning_. Whether this meaning attaches to an image or a word or stands
relatively or completely independent of either, does not so much matter;
but our meanings must be right, else all our thinking is wrong.

LANGUAGE AND THE CONCEPT.--We think in words. None has failed to watch
the flow of his thought as it is carried along by words like so many
little boats moving along the mental stream, each with its freight of
meaning. And no one has escaped the temporary balking of his thought by
failure to find a suitable word to convey the intended meaning. What
the grammarian calls the _common nouns_ of our language are the words by
which we name our concepts and are able to speak of them to others. We
define a common noun as "the name of a class," and we define a concept
as the meaning or idea we have of a class. It is easy to see that when
we have named these class _ideas_ we have our list of common nouns. The
study of the language of a people may therefore reveal much of their
type of thought.

THE NECESSITY FOR GROWING CONCEPTS.--The development of our concepts
constitutes a large part of our education. For it is evident that, since
thinking rests so fundamentally on concepts, progress in our mental life
must depend on a constant growth in the number and character of our
concepts. Not only must we keep on adding new concepts, but the old must
not remain static. When our concepts stop growing, our minds have ceased
to grow--we no longer learn. This arrest of development is often seen in
persons who have settled into a life of narrow routine, where the
demands are few and of a simple nature. Unless they rise above their
routine, they early become "old fogies." Their concepts petrify from
lack of use and the constant reconstruction which growth necessitates.

On the other hand, the person who has upon him the constant demand to
meet new situations or do better in old ones will keep on enriching his
old concepts and forming new ones, or else, unable to do this, he will
fail in his position. And the person who keeps on steadily enriching his
concepts has discovered the secret of perpetual youth so far as his
mental life is concerned. For him there is no old age; his thought will
be always fresh, his experience always accumulating, and his knowledge
growing more valuable and usable.

5. JUDGMENT

But in the building up of percepts and concepts, as well as in making
use of them after they are formed, another process of thinking enters;
namely, the process of _judging_.

NATURE OF JUDGMENT.--Judging enters more or less into all our thinking,
from the simplest to the most complex. The babe lies staring at his
bottle, and finally it dawns on his sluggish mind that this is the
object from which he gets his dinner. He has performed a judgment. That
is, he has alternately directed his attention to the object before him
and to his image of former nursing, discovered the relation existing
between the two, and affirmed to himself, "This is what gives me my
dinner." "Bottle" and "what-gives-me-my-dinner" are essentially
identical to the child. _Judgment is, then, the affirmation of the
essential identity of meaning of two objects of thought._ Even if the
proposition in which we state our judgment has in it a negative, the
definition will still hold, for the mental process is the same in either
case. It is as much a judgment if we say, "The day is not-cold," as if
we say, "The day is cold."

JUDGMENT USED IN PERCEPTS AND CONCEPTS.--How judgment enters into the
forming of our percepts may be seen from the illustration just given.
The act by which the child perceived his bottle had in it a large
element of judging. He had to compare two objects of thought--the one
from past experience in the form of images, and the other from the
present object, in the form of sensations from the bottle--and then
affirm their essential identity. Of course it is not meant that what I
have described _consciously_ takes place in the mind of the child; but
some such process lies at the bottom of every perception, whether of
the child or anyone else.

Likewise it may be seen that the forming of concepts depends on
judgment. Every time that we meet a new object which has to be assigned
its place in our classification, judgment is required. Suppose the
child, with his immature concept _dog_, sees for the first time a
greyhound. He must compare this new specimen with his concept _dog_, and
decide that this is or is not a dog. If he discovers the identity of
meaning in the essentials of the two objects of thought, his judgment
will be affirmative, and his concept will be modified in whatever extent
_greyhound_ will affect it.

JUDGMENT LEADS TO GENERAL TRUTHS.--But judgment goes much farther than
to assist in building percepts and concepts. It takes our concepts after
they are formed and discovers and affirms relations between them, thus
enabling us finally to relate classes as well as individuals. It carries
our thinking over into the realm of the universal, where we are not
hampered by particulars. Let us see how this is done. Suppose we have
the concept _man_ and the concept _animal_, and that we think of these
two concepts in their relation to each other. The mind analyzes each
into its elements, compares them, and finds the essential identity of
meaning in a sufficient number to warrant the judgment, _man is an
animal_. This judgment has given a new bit of knowledge, in that it has
discovered to us a new relation between two great classes, and hence
given both, in so far, a new meaning and a wider definition. And as this
new relation does not pertain to any particular man or any particular
animal, but includes all individuals in each class, it has carried us
over into universals, so that we have a _general_ truth and will not
have to test each individual man henceforth to see whether he fits into
this relation.

Judgments also, as we will see later, constitute the material for our
reasoning. Hence upon their validity will depend the validity of our
reasoning.

THE VALIDITY OF JUDGMENTS.--Now, since every judgment is made up of an
affirmation of relation existing between two terms, it is evident that
the validity of the judgment will depend on the thoroughness of our
knowledge of the terms compared. If we know but few of the attributes of
either term of the judgment, the judgment is clearly unsafe. Imperfect
concepts lie at the basis of many of our wrong judgments. A young man
complained because his friend had been expelled from college for alleged
misbehavior. He said, "Mr. A---- was the best boy in the institution."
It is very evident that someone had made a mistake in judgment. Surely
no college would want to expel the best boy in the institution. Either
my complainant or the authorities of the college had failed to
understand one of the terms in the judgment. Either "Mr. A----" or "the
best boy in the institution" had been wrongly interpreted by someone.
Likewise, one person will say, "Jones is a good man," while another will
say, "Jones is a rascal." Such a discrepancy in judgment must come from
a lack of acquaintance with Jones or a lack of knowledge of what
constitutes a good man or a rascal.

No doubt most of us are prone to make judgments with too little
knowledge of the terms we are comparing, and it is usually those who
have the least reason for confidence in their judgments who are the most
certain that they cannot be mistaken. The remedy for faulty judgments
is, of course, in making ourselves more certain of the terms involved,
and this in turn sends us back for a review of our concepts or the
experience upon which the terms depend. It is evident that no two
persons can have just the same concepts, for all have not had the same
experience out of which their concepts came. The concepts may be named
the same, and may be nearly enough alike so that we can usually
understand each other; but, after all, I have mine and you have yours,
and if we could each see the other's in their true light, no doubt we
should save many misunderstandings and quarrels.

6. REASONING

All the mental processes which we have so far described find their
culmination and highest utility in _reasoning_. Not that reasoning comes
last in the list of mental activities, and cannot take place until all
the others have been completed, for reasoning is in some degree present
almost from the dawn of consciousness. The difference between the
reasoning of the child and that of the adult is largely one of
degree--of reach. Reasoning goes farther than any of the other processes
of cognition, for it takes the relations expressed in judgments and out
of these relations evolves still other and more ultimate relations.

NATURE OF REASONING.--It is hard to define reasoning so as to describe
the precise process which occurs; for it is so intermingled with
perception, conception, and judgment, that one can hardly separate them
even for purposes of analysis, much less to separate them functionally.
We may, however, define reasoning provisionally as _thinking by means of
a series of judgments with the purpose of arriving at some definite end
or conclusion_. What does this mean? Professor Angell has stated the
matter so clearly that I will quote his illustration of the case:

"Suppose that we are about to make a long journey which necessitates
the choice from among a number of possible routes. This is a case of the
genuinely problematic kind. It requires reflection, a weighing of the
_pros_ and _cons_, and giving of the final decision in favor of one or
other of several alternatives. In such a case the procedure of most of
us is after this order. We think of one route as being picturesque and
wholly novel, but also as being expensive. We think of another as less
interesting, but also as less expensive. A third is, we discover, the
most expedient, but also the most costly of the three. We find ourselves
confronted, then, with the necessity of choosing with regard to the
relative merits of cheapness, beauty, and speed. We proceed to consider
these points in the light of all our interests, and the decision more or
less makes itself. We find, for instance, that we must, under the
circumstances, select the cheapest route."

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