qualities which had never come into his experience in any context, such as perhaps the salty tang of the sea air, one with good command of language might enable him to construct imaginatively and realize vividly the entire experience. To do this, of course, depends on the ability to analyze intricately in detail, to use precise and vivid names for the qualities and relations thus separated, and to stimulate the proper imaginative recombination till a unified feeling of the whole is won. It is precisely here that the power of the poet and the story-teller lies, indeed all great art demands fundamentally the same genius. The social advantage of all this in enabling others to foresee difficulties and solve them in advance of direct experience, is too obvious to elaborate. ing Turning to the psychological motive involved in this interest- Place of ing evolution, the main point to bring out is that it demands curiosity from the very start the functioning of an interest in objects in learnapart from the immediate use to which they are being put. Such an impartial absorption in an object, detached from direct control by specific desires, is what we mean by curiosity, and in it, accordingly, we find the main motive required. Were observation and imagination controlled entirely by the immediate activity which is being pursued, their fruits would never be useful for any other activity. Their meaning would be realized in terms of that activity alone, and their inner distinctions could never appear, to say nothing of the distinction between the thing observed and the outcome which attention to it makes possible. In other words, analysis demands that while, under the play of the distance senses, muscular action is inhibited, qualities and elements in objects should absorb attention which have no direct value for the needed action, but which, in their relations and consequences, it may be of use to recall in some later perplexity. Only in this way could those abstract and highly general qualities of objects emerge which furnish the basis for the establishment of underlying principles or laws such as have just been discussed. The first tendency, in a new situation, is to respond in the way suggested by the superficial resemblances of the situation to ones previously Intellec tual curiosity experienced. Such responses often, of course, fail to work. If the animal has no curiosity he will learn a better response only by overt fumble and success; if he has, he will perhaps recall the way some other feature of the situation behaved in a past experience where it was of no particular moment—a rudimentary form of reflection. Response guided by this may solve the difficulty. If he then has a still larger measure of curiosity and a more vivid memory, he may seek to identify the common element between different successful responses to different situations, and the common element in the situations to which it corresponds, as, for example, in our method of opening doors, shutters, and windows. When this stage has been reached he is on the verge of the discovery of general laws, and the attainment of what we may call a genuinely intellectual curiosity. By this is meant that advance has been made from a curiosity which is weak, fitful, closely tied to and easily quenched by specific impulse and action, to the beginnings of a systematic curiosity in revealing the general principle which can be used in the solution of any problem of a certain type. This is the disinterested curiosity of pure science, and it is at this point that the rudiments of science first appear in history. The aim of science is to reveal and make socially available, through language and education, connections of objects so far detached from immediate and particular desires that they can be used by anybody, anywhere, for the attainment of any end to which they suggest a relevant means. Curiosity thus reaches its culmination in what we call the scientific interest. There the ideal is clearly glimpsed of establishing a system of beliefs (to revert to the language used in chapter one) which shall be as dependable as possible at any given time, and a method of procedure which shall continually make them still more dependable and yet more widely useful. The symbols of science thus compose the language which is the deposit of reflective experience where it has become fully conscious of its generalized aim and of the necessary procedure by which that aim is to be attained. So far as experimental evidence to date shows, man is the Man only creature who is able to learn by the method of reflective alone able to reflect thinking. There are ambiguous experiments, supported by wider anecdotal testimony, which suggest that some of the higher animals-monkeys, horses, dogs, raccoons-can under very favorable conditions solve problems in a manner which in the light of the above discussion we could only call reflective. But the weight of evidence so far tends the other way. Man is homo sapiens-the reflective animal. By a thoroughgoing use of the method of observation and imitation, he rapidly acquired preeminence over his animal relatives, and by developing the habit of analysis in observation and imagery, funding its results in language, and extending it gradually to the more abstract elements involved, he transformed his environment into a new world, rich with beauty and meaning, and containing possibilities of hitherto unexpected control. But it is important to remember that even in man the method of reflection has nowhere yet been realized to its fullest power; that except in a few richly endowed individuals it supervenes only fitfully upon habit and impulse and only then under the challenge of practical exigencies; that most men fail as yet to distinguish between beliefs secured by sound reflection and those due to imitation or tradition; and that man too must fall back upon the elementary method of overt fumble and success whenever he meets a situation which he cannot wholly analyze in terms of factors which have been reduced to general law. His reflective knowledge and adaptation are, therefore, never complete. The chemist experimenting with elements which he has never known combined, the boy facing a mechanical puzzle, the relations of whose parts he cannot entirely disentangle and hold in imagination, and for all of us the complex performances which involve coördinating various parts of the body, such as swimming, bicycling, dancing, etc., can never be learned merely by reflection, but demand overt doing for their mastery. As human beings we learn largely by doing and imitating, and it is only by the gradual advance of science and education that the method of fumble and success is more and more transferred from overt action to the quicker and more efficient play of reflective imagination. These characteristics of our human situation help to explain why our thinking often runs astray, and the satisfaction which we often take in unreflective and incorrect beliefs. To this theme we now turn. BIBLIOGRAPHY KOHLER, W., The Mentality of Apes. A report of recent experiments on the intelligence of chimpanzees, conducted in their native habitat. MILLER, I. E., The Psychology of Thinking. A systematic analysis of thinking from the point of view of its biological relations and conditions, guided throughout by the assumptions of the theory of evolution. THORNDIKE, E. L., Educational Psychology, vol. II. A standard treatment of the psychology of learning, in the lower animals and in man. WASHBURN, M. F., The Animal Mind (second edition). The best general summary and discussion of the results reached at the time the book appeared on the intelligence of animals. CHAPTER THREE IT HINDRANCES AND AIDS TO RIGHT THINKING tion to in stinct re flection T IS evident from the preceding chapter that in respect to the Emotion fundamentals of his nature man is an animal like the other and desire animals, living a life controlled in the main by the instincts in relawith which nature has equipped him and the learned habits by which he has succeeded in adapting himself to conditions which original instinct could not meet. His main, if not sole, claim and to superiority over them, in point of intelligence, lies in his habit capacity of abstract analysis and imaginative synthesis, by which the inevitable fumble and success element in meeting novel situations and establishing relevant habits is in varying degree. transferred from direct overt action to the realm of imagination. But why is such learning ever necessary? Why not simply neglect the novel aspects of situations we face, recognizing in them only those factors with which our original equipment is able to deal? To answer this question we need to take account of two other characteristics of human nature, something analogous to which doubtless exists in the lower animals also. These are emotion and desire. As the baby begins his life by responding to various features of his environment as his natural tendencies prompt him, he discovers that all these activities have an emotional coloring, varying from extreme pleasantness to its opposite. The pleasant situations he attempts to prolong, for that is what pleasantness means in terms of the overt behavior it stimulates, and if our original responses to all situations aroused pleasant feelings we should doubtless never be led to modify or replace them by learned responses. Instinct would rule the whole of life. But many situations in which our original reactions thus land us are painful rather than pleasant. The baby naturally |