spising those who restrain judgment till they investigate the matter further or wish to maintain an open and unprejudiced mind. The psychological causes of this have already been analyzed; the point here is that whenever it is clear that rapid judgment is not essential, and the matter of moment, it is desirable to have the habit of circumspection and delay. We should encourage ourselves to restrain too early suggestions from leading to action till the nature of the problem has been more fully clarified by more careful observation. The doctor who should allow himself to entertain seriously suggestions as to his patient's malady before his examination had been thorough and careful, would be a bad doctor and would soon lose the confidence of his patients. The principle applies everywhere. Suggested solutions will arise, even on a very meager observation, but it makes a vast difference whether or not they are restrained from leading to conclusions till the clarification has really been completed or not. Bad thinking is often made bad precisely in this way. An illustration of contemporary interest to be considered in detail later will help at this point. Suppose we note that the percentage of citizens who vote at elections is gradually decreasing, and become concerned about the matter. There are in general three ways in which we may react to the perplexity. We may at once insist that something drastic must be done about it, and with naïve confidence in the omnipotence of law to accomplish whatever is to be accomplished, pass a regulation making voting compulsory. Or we may attempt to deduce, from general principles in which we have confidence about the relative interests of people, the depreciated value of the suffrage, formulate in terms of this deduction what seem to us the main causes of nonvoting, and devise a plan to combat the further operation of those causes. Or finally, we may, in addition to deriving such light as seems to be justifiable from these general considerations, embark on a detailed investigation of the facts about nonvoting, endeavoring to secure in them not mere percentages, but clues that if followed up by still more facts may indicate genuinely dependable reasons for the existing state of affairs and ways in which they can be opposed without bringing on ourselves other evils. There can surely be no question as to which of these three modes of clarifying a problem is the one most likely to lead to a permanently satisfying solution. The first is the way of caprice, the second that of entire dependence on past ideas, the third alone reveals the open-minded readiness to refrain from conclusions for a while and engage in the most objective investigation that is possible. And since the matter is socially important and does not need to be settled on the moment, what justification is there for following any other method? The motto, "Take time to think," should be early and indelibly engraved on the mind of every child, and applied particularly to the moral, social, and religious problems on which we are most easily tempted to form hasty opinions on ill-clarified data. The discussion of the chapter may be briefly summed up by saying that every step in an act of thought is well performed when it furnishes the conditions for the most successful performance of the next step. The five conditions here named are those which experience recommends as the most reliable rules for securing this end. Since step two gives the atmosphere for the entire act of thought and lays down the limits within which it is to develop, these supply also the special conditions of good thinking at that step. BIBLIOGRAPHY COLUMBIA ASSOCIATES IN PHILOSOPHY, An Introduction to Reflective Thinking, chap. II. A brief statement of the main conditions of helpful clarification of problems through observation, with an extended illustration from the history of medicine. DARWIN, C., The Voyage of the Beagle. A classic autobiography from the history of science, revealing the method of observation of a great scientist. MCCLURE, M. T., An Introduction to the Logic of Reflection, chap. IV. This chapter is a systematic analysis of the process of observation, with special reference to scientific problems. CHAPTER SIX CONTROL OF SUGGESTIONS-THE NATURE OF HYPOTHESIS ence of on past Depend- THE third step in an act of thought consists in the occurrence to the mind of suggested solutions of the problem as clarisuggestion fied in step two. This is an exceedingly interesting part of the experience process, and at first sight it often seems such a mysterious affair that little if anything could be done to improve it. We shall see, however, that while there is an aspect of it which in our present state of knowledge seems quite accidental and uncontrollable, the problem as a whole is not at all hopeless. If we remember the way in which, in actual practice, the occurrence of suggestions is related to the clarification of the problem, we shall quickly see the most important factor in this process which is clearly within our control. Every idea accepted as helping to define the problem tends to bring with it other ideas that have been vividly associated with it, among them, through the part played by success and failure in fixing relations, ideas found effective in solving similar problems in the past. By a similar problem is meant, of course, a problem whose definition involved many of the same factors that we find in the present one. Suggested solutions being thus the resurrection of ideas from past experience, or a combination of such ideas guided by the manner in which familiar elements are combined in the problem at hand, it is obviously essential to good thinking at this step that we have at our command a large storehouse of ideas connected in varied and flexible ways. This is only possible through a rich and mature experience, well organized, and greatly enlarged by the assimilation of information from others. Mastery, in fact, of the best knowledge already available on any type of problem, is the main condition of the occurrence of relevant and promising suggestions for a solution of such problems. New suggestions, ideas not drawn from past experience, are possible only in the sense that the results of analysis of past experience may be recombined in imagination in novel ways. Thus the total conception may be new, as that of a centaur, a mermaid, or a golden mountain, to those who first pictured them. But the elements must already have entered experience. This dependence of step three on the possession of adequate and systematized knowledge has, however, already been discussed in the preceding chapter-as there shown, such knowledge is a fundamental condition of good thinking at all five steps. We shall here, therefore, merely note the way in which it functions in providing suggested solutions of problems, and turn successively to three other themes which are most profitably treated in the present chapter. able as pect of sugges The first of these concerns the seemingly uncontrollable ele- The unment in the task of improving step three as it occurs in our predictthinking. That it is to some extent at the mercy of accidents is clear when we note on how many perplexing occasions the suggestion which later, in a more leisurely moment of retrospect, tion pops up as the only sensible way out of the difficulty, fails to present itself till too late to be of help. "If I had only thought of that in time," we say to ourselves in sorrow or disgust. Evidently in practice we have to recognize that our thinking is limited not merely by the range of our knowledge, but by the range of whatever part of it proves available when we need it, and the fact that not all relevant knowledge does prove available, on occasion after occasion, indicates that there are mysterious barriers between ideas born in the past and present perplexities, which make it impossible for us to be sure that the best solution we know (in the sense of possessing it in memory) will be suggested at the time we need it. The man who could find a way to break down such barriers would be fortunate indeed; his thinking would gain an assurance that the rest of us quite lack. Variation of indi viduals in fertility and relevance of sugges tions Superiority in these re On It seems tolerably clear that people who are roughly equal with respect to their knowledge in a given field, vary very greatly in their ability to produce the appropriate suggestion at the right time. This variation is itself a complex matter in which at least two important and independent variables enter. the one hand the mere quantity of suggestions occurring within a given time may vary from almost zero to a very large number; the flow of ideas stimulated by a perplexity may be so slow as to seem a mere trickle, or it may be so rapid as to constitute a veritable flood. In general, of course, the more rapid the flow of suggestions, the more likely is the individual to reach a solution of his problem, though there may be times when a thinker is so overwhelmed by the fertility of his ideas that he is unable satisfactorily to develop and test any of them. Again, people vary very greatly in the degree to which the immediate problem steadily controls the rise of suggestions and insures their relevance. With some, attention wavers or quickly flags even in serious situations, so that ideas appear which are of no value for the difficulty in hand. With others, concentration is much more complete and persistent, so that only when the problem has continued to baffle for a long time, does its control over the course of ideas relax and further effort at a solution be abandoned. In which of these directions lies the condition of fruitful thinking is clear enough without specific statement, although there is perhaps here too a danger that problems of minor importance may in some cases engross too much attention at the expense of more vital ones. Variation in these important respects doubtless depends, at least in part, on physiological factors, at any rate it rests upon innate and very elusive differences, which at present seem quite beyond the reach of conscious improvement. What we refer to by the rather vague term "genius" is probably more intimately connected with superiority in these respects than with anything else. A scholar of the rather pedantic constitutes type is a very different person; he commands as much, perhaps more, information, but he can only reproduce it freely in situations similar to those in which it was gained; and even then spects genius |