THOUGHT CULTURE/PART 1
CHAPTER I.
THE POWER OF THOUGHT
In other
volumes of this series we have considered the operations of the human mind
known as Will, Memory, etc. We now approach the consideration of those mental
activities which are concerned with the phenomena of thought—those
activities which we generally speak of as the operation of the intellect or
reason.
What is
thought? The answer is not an easy one, although we use the term familiarly
almost every hour of our waking existence. The dictionaries define the term
"Thought" as follows: "The act of thinking; the exercise of the
mind in any way except sense and perception; serious consideration; deliberation;
reflection; the power or faculty of thinking; the mental faculty of the mind;
etc." This drives us back upon the term, "to think" which is
defined as follows: "To occupy the mind on some subject; to have ideas; to
revolve ideas in the mind; to cogitate; to reason; to exercise the power of
thought; to have a succession of ideas or mental states; to perform any mental
operation, whether of apprehension, judgment, or illation; to judge; to form a
conclusion, to determine; etc."
Thought is
an operation of the intellect. The intellect is: "that faculty of the
human soul or mind by which it receives or comprehends the ideas communicated
to it by the senses or by perception, or other means, as distinguished from the
power to feel and to will; the power or faculty to perceive objects in their
relations; the power to judge and comprehend; also the capacity for higher
forms of knowledge as distinguished from the power to perceive and
imagine."
When we
say what we "think," we mean that we exercise the faculties whereby
we compare and contrast certain things with other things, observing and noting
their points of difference and agreement, then classifying them in accordance
with these observed agreements and differences. In thinking we
tend to classify the multitude of impressions received from the outside
world, arranging thousands of objects into one general class, and other
thousands into other general classes, and then sub-dividing these classes,
until finally we have found mental pigeon-holes for every conceivable idea or
impression. We then begin to make inferences and deductions regarding these
ideas or impressions, working from the known to the unknown, from particulars
to generalities, or from generalities to particulars, as the case may be.
It is this
faculty or power of thought—this use of the intellect, that has brought man to
his present high position in the world of living things. In his early days, man
was a much weaker animal than those with whom he was brought into contact. The
tigers, lions, bears, mammoths, and other ferocious beasts were much stronger,
fiercer, and fleeter than man, and he was placed in a position so lacking of
apparent equal chance of survival, that an observer would have unhesitatingly
advanced the opinion that this weak, feeble, slow animal must soon surely
perish in the struggle for existence, and that the "survival of the
fittest" would soon cause him to vanish from the scene of the world's
activities. And, so it would have been had he possessed no equipment other than
those of the other animals; viz., strength, natural weapons and speed. And yet
man not only survived in spite of these disadvantages, but he has actually
conquered, mastered and enslaved these other animals which seemed likely to
work his destruction. Why? How?
This
feeble animal called man had within him the elements of a new
power—a power manifested in but a slight degree in the other animals. He
possessed an intellect by which he was able to deduce, compare, infer—reason.
His lack
of natural weapons he overcame by borrowing the idea of the tooth and claw of
the other animals, imitating them in flint and shaping them into spears;
borrowing the trunk of the elephant and the paw of the tiger, and reproducing
their blow-striking qualities in his wooden club. Not only this but he took
lessons from the supple limbs and branches of the trees, and copied the
principle in his bow, in order to project its minature spear, his arrow. He
sheltered himself, his mate and his young, from the fury of the storm,
first by caves and afterwards by rude houses, built in inaccessible places,
reached only by means of crude ladders, bridges, or climbing poles. He built
doors for his habitations, to protect himself from the attacks of these wild
enemies—he heaped stones at the mouth of his caves to keep them out. He placed
great boulders on cliffs that he might topple them down on the approaching foe.
He learned to hurl rocks with sure aim with his strong arm. He copied the
floating log, and built his first rude rafts, and then evolved the hollowed
canoe. He used the skins of animals to keep him warm—their tendons for his
bowstrings. He learned the advantages of cooperation and combined effort, and
thus formed the first rudiments of society and social life. And finally—man's
first great discovery—he found the art of fire making.
As a
writer has said: "For some hundreds of years, upon the general plane of
self-consciousness, an ascent, to the human eye gradual but from the point of
view of cosmic evolution rapid, has been made. In a race large-brained, walking-erect,
gregarious, brutal, but king of all other brutes, man in appearance but
not in fact, was from the highest simple-consciousness born the basic human
faculty, self-consciousness and its twin, language. From these and what went
with these, through suffering, toil and war; through bestiality, savagery,
barbarism; through slavery, greed, effort, through conquests infinite, through
defeats overwhelming, through struggle unending; through ages of aimless
semi-brutal existence, through subsistence on berries and roots; through the
use of the casually found stone or stick; through life in deep forests, with
nuts and seeds, and on the shores of waters with mollusks, crustaceans and fish
for food; through that greatest, perhaps, of human victories, the domestication
and subjugation of fire; through the invention and art of bow and arrow;
through the training of animals and the breaking of them to labor; through the
long learning which led to the cultivation of the soil; through the adobe brick
and the building of houses therefrom; through the smelting of metals and the
slow birth of the arts which rest upon these; through the slow making
of alphabets and the evolution of the written work; in short, through
thousands of centuries of human life, of human aspiration, of human growth,
sprang the world of men and women as it stands before us and within us today
with all its achievements and possessions."
The great
difference between thought as we find it in man, and its forms among the lower
animals lies in what psychologists have called "progressive thought."
The animals advance but little in their thinking processes but rest content
with those of their ancestors—their thought seems to have become set or
crystallized during the process of their evolution. The birds, mammals and the
insects vary but little in their mental processes from their ancestors of many
thousand years ago. They build their nests, or dens, in almost precisely the
same manner as did their progenitors in the stone-age. But man has slowly but
steadily progressed, in spite of temporary set-backs and failures. He has
endeavored to progress and improve. Those tribes which fell back in regard to
mental progress and advancement, have been left behind in the race, and in
many cases have become extinct. The great natural law of the "survival of
the fittest" has steadily operated in the life of the race. The
"fittest" were those best adapted to grapple with and overcome the
obstacles of their environment, and these obstacles were best overcome by the
use of the intellect. Those tribes and those individuals whose intellect was
active, tended to survive where others perished, and consequently they were
able to transmit their intellectual quality to their descendants.
Halleck
says: "Nature is constantly using her power to kill off the thoughtless,
or to cripple them in life's race. She is determined that only the fittest and
the descendants of the fittest shall survive. By the 'fittest' she means those
who have thought and whose ancestors have thought and profited thereby.
Geologists tell us that ages ago there lived in England bears, tigers,
elephants, lions and many other powerful and fierce animals. There was living
contemporaneous with them a much weaker animal, that had neither the claws, the
strength, nor the speed of the tiger. In fact this human being was almost
defenceless. Had a being from another planet been asked to prophesy, he would
undoubtedly have said that this helpless animal would be the first to be
exterminated. And yet every one of those fierce creatures succumbed either to
the change of climate, or to man's inferior strength. The reason was that man
had one resource denied to the animals—the power of progressive thought. The
land sank, the sea cut off England from the mainland, the climate changed, and
even the strongest animals were helpless. But man changed his clothing with the
changing climate. He made fires; he built a retreat to keep off death by cold.
He thought out means to kill or to subdue the strongest animals. Had the lions,
tigers or bears the power of progressive thought, they could have combined, and
it would have been possible for them to exterminate man before he reached the
civilized stage.... Man no longer sleeps in caves. The smoke no longer fills
his home or finds its way out through the chinks in the walls or a hole in the
roof. In traveling, he is no longer restricted to his feet or even to horses.
For all this improvement man is indebted to thought. That has
harnessed the very vibrations of the ether to do his bidding."
And thus
we see that man owes his present place on earth to his Thought-Culture. And, it
certainly behooves us to closely consider and study the methods and processes
whereby each and every man may cultivate and develop the wondrous faculties of
the mind which are employed in the processes of Thought. The faculties of the
Mind, like the muscles of the body, may be developed, trained and cultivated.
The process of such mental development is called "Thought-Culture," and forms
the subject of this book.
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