he loves his study. It is not because he will not, as teachers so often claim. He can not.

Intellectual Honesty. While we must have sympathy as an asset to right thinking, we should at the same time be careful lest our sympathies stand in the way of intellectual honesty. How few fathers can judge fairly between the characters and deeds of their own darlings and those of the neighbors' "brats." If our own family, or party, or church, or nation makes a mistake, it is very venial, a mere bagatelle, not worth mentioning; while if the blunder belongs to the other side, it is a scandal, a crime, a sure indication that the whole institution is rotten.

Now, the cure isn't to have less sympathy, it is to have more, and more catholic sympathy. We should be less selfish, and that means not to love self less, but the other fellow more. A broader view, less provincial and more balanced, is the right prescription. We need perspective in our thinking. If we might stand away some distance from ourselves so as "to see oursel's as ithers see us; it wad frae monie a blunder free us.

"Original" Thought. Many teachers imagine that in "development" lessons and in the laboratory they make their pupils original, pioneer thinkers on a wide range of subjects. This is too high praise. They make them simply thinkers. The chances are that before the subject was developed, before he experimented, the pupil had no conception at all that was even passably satisfactory. The conception he gets now is not original by any means. It comes straight from the teacher, the text, and the experiment. But

then, most of our thought, our steady diet of thought, is copied thought. This following in the footsteps of another thinker is no mean art, and is one in which we should become experts. It is the most useful kind of thinking, so let us not despise it.

Original thinking is a dangerous and difficult art, and usually barren of useful results. Hence few attempt it. Still, as a bracing exercise, and as a moral stimulant, it should be encouraged.

SUMMARY OF STAGES OF MENTAL ACTIVITY

The stages of mental activity may be thus classified:

2. Judgment-explicit conception Judgment a union of two con

cepts to form a new concept

3. Reasoning explicit judgment Syllogism, Chain of Reasoning=a

=

union of judgments to form a new judgment

Exercises

What is wrong in each of the three following problems?

1. A certain gardener, ninety years of age, was congratulated on his birthday in May, and wished many returns of the day. He responded that he felt sure he would at least see another New Year, for," said he, "I have noticed in the garden that if anything lives over the month of March, it is sure to live the rest of the year."

2. No cat has four tails.

This dog is no cat.

Hence he has four tails. 3. All lions are animals. All lambs are animals.

Hence all lions are lambs.

4. A person who had never told a truth in his life said, "I never tell the truth." Was he then speaking the truth?

5. What is the best way of teaching what is meant by an object's being a good conductor of heat?

6. What is the best way of teaching what is meant by "the state legislature"?

7. In determining the botanical name and classification of a plant, what kind or kinds of reasoning do you use?

CHAPTER VIII

HOW WE THINK: ATTENTION

THREE PHASES OF THE KNOWLEDGE-MAKING ACTIVITY

WE may discuss the intellect both from the standpoint of the activity that produces knowledge and from the standpoint of the product.

In the previous discussion we have taken up the stages of knowledge. We are now ready to study the knowledge-making activity of the mind, or, as it might also appropriately be called, the art of thinking.

We shall find a surprising similarity in the activity of the mind in every stage of knowledge. Reduced to its elements, the behavior of the mind does not differ much when it reasons from its activity when it perceives. Here again we find that we cannot divide the subject into parts, but we can find distinct aspects of the intellectual activity. These are

Attention;

Analysis and Comparison;

Association, or Synthesis.

In this chapter, we will turn to that phase of the mind's activity which we call attention.

MEANING OF TERM "ATTENTION"

Earlier in this book we compared consciousness to the field of vision, which consists of a clear and distinct

center surrounded by a field which gradually decreases in clarity and definiteness, until it finally vanishes in a "fringe" of obscurity and confusion.

Consciousness, however, has a power which the eye has not. It can vary the degree of its concentration. When we so will we can withdraw the energy of consciousness from the periphery of the field of consciousness and center our mind narrowly on the focus. This renders the circle of distinct consciousness smaller, but it becomes in proportion more vivid. We call such an effort a concentration of attention.

Attention, then, is the centering of consciousness on a portion of its contents. As Professor James says, one of the elementary characteristics of consciousness is its partiality for certain parts of itself. The vaster portion of the mind is in the shadows of the twilight which ranges from nearly complete consciousness to a profound darkness that we cannot distinguish from the absolute night of unconsciousness. This twilight zone is called subconsciousness. When the mind is hard at work, attention sharpens to a fine point, and we think vividly of a small range of topics, and almost not at all of neighboring fields of thought. When the mind rests, it "flattens out," and spreads itself over a larger area, but as the light of thought is diffused over so wide a territory, the whole field is in an intellectual penumbra, and nothing distinct is before the mind. The diagrams on page 76 illustrate this.

The following diagrams also illustrate the difference between the idiot's mind and the genius' mind. The main difference among minds intellectually is difference in power of concentration. Carlyle's definition