Contents

• Title page
• Imprint
• Preface
• THE ART OF THINKING
  • Part One: On Thinking
    • Chapter 1: On Thinking
    • Chapter 2: How to Estimate Thought
    • Chapter 3: Real Thinking
    • Chapter 4: Possibility of an Art of Thinking
  • Part Two: Obstacles to Thought
    • Introductory
    • Chapter 1: Obsessions or Inferiority Complexes
      • How Mental Parasites Are Produced
    • a) Imitation and gregariousness
    • b) Education
    • Chapter 2: Thought Weakened by Life
    • a) The Thinker’s Life
    • b) Non-thinking Lives
    • c) The Great Waste
  • Part Three: Helps to Thought
    • Chapter 1: Living One’s Life
    • a) Exterior Solitude
    • b) Interior Solitude
    • c) Making time
    • Chapter 2: Living One’s Life on a Higher Plane
    • a) Thought-producing images
    • b) Moral elevation a condition of high thinking
    • c) Higher thoughts from books
    • d) How to read in order to think
    • e) Comprehending and Critical Reading
    • f) How to read the Newspaper
    • Chapter 3: Elaboration of Data in the Mind
    • a) Going over our knowledge
    • b) Reflection
    • c) Writing as a help to thought.
    • d) Preserving one’s thoughts
    • e) Type of mind produced by this intellectual discipline.
    • f) Further approximation to original thought.
  • Part Four: Creative Thought
    • Introductory Note
    • Chapter 1 Creation
    • Chapter 2 The Root of Creation. Ideas.
    • Chapter 3 How We Can Get at Our Own Ideas
    • Chapter 4 “Be Yourself”
    • Chapter 5 “Find Yourself”
    • Chapter 6 Literary Production Possible to All
    • Conclusion
    • Endnotes
• Endnotes

Preface

What writer would dare to appropriate Voltaire’s verse in Le Pauvre Diable, and would dare to say of his reader:

Il me choisit pour l’aider à penser?

Yet, it is a fact that millions of men and women are anxious to take lessons in the Art of Thinking and that some other men and women have to take the risk of seeming presumptuous in offering those lessons.

Anybody who does it need not be a genius. Genius has never been supposed to be a particularly good teacher of any art. It is better that the teacher of the Art of Thinking should not be a person who knows no difficulty in thinking, or produces such brilliant thoughts that they will be disheartening to the tyro. A delicate physician does not give the example of health—any woodsman can do that—he only gives the example of a small capital of health intelligently increased: yet, we know he can be more useful from his comprehension of indifferent health and from his appreciation of hygiene, and we often prefer him. The author of this book is certainly not prepared to say that he has acted, or even is now acting, up to his own principles; still he is not bragging in saying that he has probably felt their value more than many people nearer to genius than he is. Is not this enough? And is not a keen desire to be of use a sufficient claim to give modest advice?

The reader will soon find that this book, whatever its shortcomings, has been written for him. Its effort at being lucid and brief, its aversion to philosophical jargon, its antipathy for a discouraging and generally useless bibliographical display, all come from a wish to help instead of dazzle. Most books are composed with the more or less avowed object of being works of art, that is to say of being an end in themselves and ultimately rousing admiration. Egotism, in writing of any art, especially of an Art of Thinking, would be criminal, and it can be honestly said it has had as little a share as possible in the preparation of this work.

It will be enough if the reader is conscious of sympathy to which he has a right, and of a continuous striving to help him in his effort to think his best and live his noblest.

Part One
On Thinking

Chapter 1
On Thinking

A familiar scene. Five o’clock late in October. The sunset over the reddening garden. You are standing near the doorsill, looking, and not looking, thinking. Somebody steals by and you hear the words whispered “a penny for your thoughts.” What is your answer?

Later in the day you are deep, or seem to be deep, in a book. But your face does not look as it usually does when you are happy in your reading: your contracted brow reveals intense concentration, too intense for mere reading. In fact, you are miles away, and to the questions: “What are you thinking? What book is that?” you answer very much as you did when caught in that reverie, during the afternoon: “Oh! Thinking of nothing”; or, “Thinking of all sorts of things.” Indeed, you were thinking of so many things that it was as if you had been thinking of nothing. Once more you were conscious of something experienced many times before: our mind is not like a brilliantly lit and perfectly ordered room; it is much more like an encumbered garret inhabited by moths born and grown up in half lights: our thoughts; the moment we open the door to see them better the drab little butterflies vanish.

The consciousness of this phenomenon is discouraging, of course. This accounts for the fact that, when offered a penny for our thoughts, we generally look, not only puzzled, but embarrassed, and anxious to be let alone not only by the questioner but by the question as well. We are like the puppy who is willing to bark once at his own image in the mirror and to snap eagerly behind it, but who, after the second trial, looks away in disgust. Yet, with some curiosity and some practice, it is not impossible to have, at least, a peep at one’s mind. It should not be attempted when we are too abstracted, that is to say, when our consciousness is completely off its guard but there are favorable occasions. When we are reading the newspaper and the quickly changing subjects begin to tire, without quite exhausting us; when the motion of the train or of the car sets our thoughts to a certain rhythm which may soon become abstraction or drowsiness, but still is only a slackening of the mental processes; when the lecture we hear is neither good enough to rivet our attention, nor bad enough to irritate us; then, and every time we are in a mental lull, is our chance to get a glimpse of our mind as it really works and as it reveals our innermost nature. By a sudden stiffening of our consciousness, a quick face-about inwards, we can, as it were, solidify a section of mental stream which, during three or four seconds, will lie ready for our inspection. If one succeeds in doing it once, one will certainly feel like doing it again, for no examination of conscience is so strikingly illuminating as that one, and the more frequent it will be, the easier, at least during certain periods, it will also become.

Why not do it now? A penny for your thoughts! What are you thinking of?...

You look up, surprised at what you regard as an exhibition of very poor taste in a writer.

—“Thinking? Why, I am thinking of your book. You may not be as interested in writing, as I am in reading it. I love this subject.”

—“Yes, I saw you were remarkably attentive; that’s why I interrupted you. Had you been wandering, it would have been useless. So you love this subject?”

—“I do indeed, and wish you would go on. Books should not talk.”

—“When you say you love this subject, you mean it interests you, it excites something in you; in short, it makes you think.”

—“Quite.”

—“Of course, these thoughts which occur to you as you read are your own, they are no mere reflections of what I am saying, and that is the chief reason for which you enjoy them as they rise from behind my sentences. Is it not so?”

—“Very likely, Sir. I begin to like this conversation.”

—“Yes, it is about you; I knew you would like it. So, these thoughts which are your own and not mine are exterior to this book. Don’t you think they could be called a sort of distraction?”

—“It would be rather unfair, Sir. I assure you I am following you closely; yet, I must admit that I am not trying to memorize what you say: it would spoil all the pleasure I find in this. I am even willing to admit that my pleasure is my own and therefore might be called, as you say, a sort of distraction. In fact, I was thinking...”

—“Ah! here we are! You were thinking... ?”

—“Well, I was thinking of a farm, up in Maine, where there used to be a garret like the one you spoke of. In summer, when we were there, the smell of winter apples was still in it, and I loved it. I would sit there for hours, as a boy, thinking. You see, after all, I was thinking of thinking. As a matter of fact, often when I see the picture which gives me the deepest impression of happy thinking—the portrait of Erasmus writing—I think of the old garret. I have no doubt that I thought of Erasmus, a few minutes ago, for I was positively annoyed, for a moment, at the recollection of a man who once stood before that picture and asked me: who is this old fellow looking down his long nose? I hate a fool. The memory of this one actually made me fidget in my chair, and I had to make an effort to think of something else.”

—“You see that I was not far wrong; you have been thinking of a number of things which were not in this book.”

—“Yes, but they came because of the book, and I should not be surprised if I were to think of your book, remember whole passages of it, I mean, to-morrow while doing important work at my office.”

—“Thank you. Have you been thinking of that too?”

—“Why, it would be difficult not to. What I shall be signing to-morrow involves a sum I might take five years to make. However, I am almost sure that everything will go well and I can buy poor Jim the partnership he wants.”

—“In the meantime here’s the penny I owe you. For I begin to know your thoughts pretty well. Naturally they are, every one of them, about you, and that is as it should be. There are, of course, in your mind, thoughts hidden so deep that no amount of digging up could reveal them, but there is no doubt that they would be even nearer your ego than those you have discovered in the course of our conversation. Sometimes, very unexpectedly, we become aware of the tingling of our arteries in our heads, even of the fact that we are alive; this consciousness is of no use whatever to us, unless it somehow concurs in keeping us alive, but we are lavish when our Self is at stake. Do not imagine that I am reproaching you.”

—“You would be ungrateful, for let me repeat that I have seldom read anything so attentively as this book.”

—“Certainly. Yet, you must also admit that while you were interested in this book you were interested in something else. It is so with everybody. Have you ever heard that Sir Walter Scott, when he had found the nucleus of a new novel by which his imagination would naturally be engrossed, would, however, read volume after volume that had no reference to his subject, merely because reading intensified the working of his brain? These books did for his power of invention what the crowds in the city did for Dickens’s. When you say that you were reading this book attentively, you mean that your intellect was expending some share of your consciousness—let us say one fifth or, at best, one third of it—on the book. But your intellect is only a sort of superior clerk doing outside jobs for you. You, yourself, did not cease for all that, doing the work of your Self, infinitely more important to you than any theory. What is important to you is the garret in which you used to muse away hours with the smell of apples floating around you, the picture of Erasmus which you love, your undying indignation at the man who did not appreciate that picture, your son’s future and an exceptional chance of improving it. All the time you were imagining that the Art of Thinking was making you think, you were thinking of Jim, Erasmus, the fool, the garret and business, undoubtedly too, of dozens of other things we have not been able to trace back to your consciousness. Those thoughts, which you are tempted to call distractions, are what your Self is thinking, in spite of the book, and, to tell the truth, the book is your distraction. Even writing can be the same thing.—Shall I tell you what my Self thinks while the superior clerk holds my pen? It thinks that I should do my work with perfect happiness if, two hours ago, I had not seen a poor stray cat wandering in the drizzle with two frightened kittens at her side. I love cats as much as you hate fools.”

***

Introspection, as it is called, looking inwards, while the mind is active, will always disclose similar things. Psychologists speak of the “mental stream,” and this expression alone has meant an immense progress in the domain of interior observation as compared with the misleading division of the soul into separate faculties. In reality, the flux in our brain carries along images—remembered or modified—feelings, resolves, and intellectual, or partly intellectual conclusions, in vague or seething confusion. And this process never stops, not even in our sleep, any more than a river ever stops in its course. But the mental stream is more like a mountain brook, constantly hindered in its course, and whirling as often as it flows. When we look in we are conscious of the perpetual motion, but, if we do more than merely peep and at once look away, we promptly notice the circular displacement and reappearance of whole psychological trains.

These trains are invariably produced by some image in whose wake they follow. The gentleman with whom I just had such an enlightening conversation had his mind full of a multitude of images—inconsiderable reflections, as swift and also as broken and impossible to arrest as the wavelets in a stream—but he was conscious, or semi-conscious of only a few. What were they? A room in a country-house, the picture of Erasmus by Holbein, a fool, Jim. To change our simile—the more we use, the nearer we shall be to the endlessly changing reality—these representations were like the larger and brighter fragments in a kaleidoscope. To these the mind of the gentleman would every few minutes revert.

It is hardly necessary to say that these images acted upon him as all images act upon us. We are attracted by some and repelled by others. The old apple-room was altogether satisfactory; so would Erasmus have been, had it not been for that silly man, and, in time, even the silly man would have been tolerable because he produced not only irritation but a pleasant sense of superiority. As for Jim, it was delightful to see his not very good-looking face transformed by joy as he heard his father begin: “Well, old man, it’s all right”; but it was the reverse to imagine him, a year from now, taking the same 8:17 train to do the same inferior work. Probably when the gentleman imagined he was smelling the shrivelled-up apples, happy Jim was behind the door, but when the fool’s unforgettable six words were heard in that satisfied oily voice, Pelham station and the silent slaves streaming in with poor Jim were not far. I say probably, for who knows? Quite possibly, relief from an unpleasant picture was sought in a pleasanter one. The stream runs fast and so deep between its brambly sides that it is impossible to see anything clearly in it.

All we can say is: 1. That most of our mental operations are inseparable from images, or are produced by images. We do not differ in this from the dear animals near us. (If anybody does not realise that a dog’s brain registers an encyclopedia of images, sounds and odors as large as a dictionary and far better remembered, the dog’s behavior will be entirely unintelligible.) 2. That those images closely correspond to wishes or repulsions, to things we want or do not want, so that this wanting or not wanting seems to be the ultimate motive power in our psychology, probably in connection with elementary conditions in our being. 3. That inevitably, people will reveal in their thoughts and speeches, in their outlook on life and in their lives themselves, the quality of the images filling their minds. Investigation and estimation of these images, together with investigation and estimation of our likes and dislikes, will tell us what we are worth morally more accurately than even our actions, for they are the roots of action. But to this we shall revert later.

***

Surely, you say, what you have described so far is not thought. Our brain must be free sometimes from images, from likes or dislikes, from wants and repulsions. There must be a superior kind of mental operation, something immaterial resulting in abstractions. How are mathematical and philosophical systems evolved? What is logic?

Yes, there are languages abbreviating billions of experiences, and there are formulas filling whole libraries. The one of our savage ancestors, who, wrestling with onomatopoeia and almost in despair at seeing a shade of meaning which he could not express, for the first time invented the future tense by conglobing “to-morrow,” or “sun-rise,” or “morning hunger” with a crude verb-noun, was a genius; and intellectual work has produced libraries which, in their turn, keep the noblest minds occupied; and all this tends to abstraction. But the study of it belongs to the Science of Thought, while we are here concerned only with the Art of Thinking. Yet, it is useful, even for our purpose, to say a word about this less practical aspect of the subject.

We have an idea that thought—as diamonds are wrongly supposed to do—can exist in a pure state, and is elaborated without images. We feel sure that we are not infrequently conscious of conclusions, practical or speculative, arrived at without the help of images. What are those?

Ah! What are they? But, first of all, are there any? How can we be sure that there are any? Every time we really succeed in watching our mental process we discover the presence of images. You say “thoughts,” “pure thought,” and you are persuaded that you say this without any accompanying image, but are you right or wrong? While you say “thought,” is it, or is it not possible that you see a man’s head, or his brow, or the inside of his head visualized, not as a horrible brain jelly, but perhaps as a more or less complicated wire frame destined to classify and keep in place the results arrived at, or as an infinitely delicate clockwork?

The names of mental operations which are now abstract were not so originally. To see and to know are the same word in Greek; to ponder, which sounds so intellectual, obviously means to weigh; to think is the ghostlike descendant of a much rougher word meaning to seem; logic and speech are the same word; so, in fine—as if to protest against too much intellectual pride—are idea and image!

Images can be subconscious and harder to detect than people who have not tried suppose. We can be conscious of one reel unrolling itself—with many crazy interruptions—in our inward cinema, and not be quite conscious of another fixed image, visible, but not easily visible, through the film. Nothing is more frequent than this superposition of two sets of images progressing with variable speeds. They account for the unexpected conclusions at which we arrive while apparently attentive to entirely different matters. A gentleman whose mind is occupied, while reading, with the tiny photographs his memory once took of a house up in Maine, may suddenly hear an inward voice say clearly to him: “It is very bad to read when you need not,” and may shut up the book at once. Why? The process of solidification mentioned above would disclose under the Maine film the image of Dr. Wilmer looking rather grave, at the last visit, and since then hardly absent one instant from the subconscious. There would be three strata (perhaps more, of course) perceptible in the same consciousness:

Sometimes we are aware of a succession of images driving, in fact, telescoping, one another toward a worded conclusion with extraordinary rapidity. The same gentleman whom I am sorry to have now made pathetic (but he will never go blind) may come to the unexpected conclusion: “I will buy that house in New Jersey!” Incredible! Not at all. The succession of telescoping images may be seen perfectly clearly:

a) House in Maine + slow trains + two changes + cold winters + Joneses near = not wanted.

b) House in Lakewood (recommended by agent) + good trains = near + no mosquitoes = sleep. Sleep + nearness + pine trees + sandy soil = attractive = smile = buy.

All these images may succeed one another with the rapidity of lightning, and, as we generally think of rapidity as a quality of thought, the concatenation will be called thought, but in reality it will only be a sequence of images, as usual.

Pretty often, we are conscious of isolated words vaguely obtruding while our mind is thus busy: they are like labels on the silks in a lady’s work-box. More exceptionally, we see or hear a whole scroll of eight or ten words, as the gentleman did, and we are tempted to imagine we think in words, which would be superior to thinking in images. But we do not. The words and the scrolls are there from the habit which most of us have of sometimes audibly whispering: “plus seventy-five” while counting money, or “this must not happen again” when admonishing ourselves. The inner words are only an anticipation.

So, we are confronted with images, images, and more images. Abstractions, being the product of images, inevitably recall them. It is difficult to think of history without visualizing great men or some great period, and I doubt if we can mention science without remembering famous experiments. Few words, surely, are as spiritual as the word Truth, but when we hear it mentioned, we associate it either with some instance of devotion to truth, or with some particular search which makes us realise the beauty of truth, and, once more, definite contingencies reappear. Needless to point out how closely associated with figures even geometry is. As for logic, it means nothing if it is not pronouncing on congruousness or incongruity. Why should it not be the congruousness or incongruity of two images or clusters of images, accompanied by an abstract statement? In fact, we are constantly conscious that it is so.

It will be urged: but is there not in our mind something which is its very nature, and without which there would be no mind at all?

I see. You have heard of the principles of pure reason. Well, read the philosophers, and tell me if you are much excited, much enlightened, or much impelled to thought by being told that when you see a billiard ball send another rolling, your intellect registers that nothing happens without a cause or without sufficient reason. What Kant, or even a more practically inclined metaphysician, like Sir William Hamilton, tells us about the nature of the intellect may represent a powerful mental effort, but the results are not commensurate with it. We can catch a glimpse of the working of our mind, vague and not much more satisfactory than was the X-ray screen twenty years ago, but its nature must remain a mystery among many other mysteries. This idea, added to the fact that we are dealing with a practical art, and not with philosophy proper, should reconcile us to our ignorance.