CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE & Other Works on the Human Thought Process. Джон Дьюи
mental enterprise illustrates another aspect of the same principle. Teachers who have tried object-lessons of the conventional type have usually found that when the lessons were new, pupils were attracted to them as a diversion, but as soon as they became matters of course they were as dull and wearisome as was ever the most mechanical study of mere symbols. Imagination could not play about the objects so as to enrich them. The feeling that instruction in "facts, facts" produces a narrow Gradgrind is justified not because facts in themselves are limiting, but because facts are dealt out as such hard and fast ready-made articles as to leave no room to imagination. Let the facts be presented so as to stimulate imagination, and culture ensues naturally enough. The converse is equally true. The imaginative is not necessarily the imaginary; that is, the unreal. The proper function of imagination is vision of realities that cannot be exhibited under existing conditions of sense-perception. Clear insight into the remote, the absent, the obscure is its aim. History, literature, and geography, the principles of science, nay, even geometry and arithmetic, are full of matters that must be imaginatively realized if they are realized at all. Imagination supplements and deepens observation; only when it turns into the fanciful does it become a substitute for observation and lose logical force.
Experience through communication of others' experience
A final exemplification of the required balance between near and far is found in the relation that obtains between the narrower field of experience realized in an individual's own contact with persons and things, and the wider experience of the race that may become his through communication. Instruction always runs the risk of swamping the pupil's own vital, though narrow, experience under masses of communicated material. The instructor ceases and the teacher begins at the point where communicated matter stimulates into fuller and more significant life that which has entered by the strait and narrow gate of sense-perception and motor activity. Genuine communication involves contagion; its name should not be taken in vain by terming communication that which produces no community of thought and purpose between the child and the race of which he is the heir.
FOOTNOTES:
1. This mode of thinking in its contrast with thoughtful inquiry receives special notice in the next chapter.
2. Implies is more often used when a principle or general truth brings about belief in some other truth; the other phrases are more frequently used to denote the cases in which one fact or event leads us to believe in something else.
3. Mill, System of Logic, Introduction, § 5.
4. Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, first paragraph.
5. In another place he says: "Men's prejudices and inclinations impose often upon themselves.... Inclination suggests and slides into discourse favorable terms, which introduce favorable ideas; till at last by this means that is concluded clear and evident, thus dressed up, which, taken in its native state, by making use of none but precise determined ideas, would find no admittance at all."
6. The Conduct of the Understanding, § 3.
7. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. IV, ch. XX, "Of Wrong Assent or Error."
8. Hobhouse, Mind in Evolution, p. 195.
9. A child of four or five who had been repeatedly called to the house by his mother with no apparent response on his own part, was asked if he did not hear her. He replied quite judicially, "Oh, yes, but she doesn't call very mad yet."
10. People who have number-forms—i.e. project number series into space and see them arranged in certain shapes—when asked why they have not mentioned the fact before, often reply that it never occurred to them; they supposed that everybody had the same power.
11. Of course, any one subject has all three aspects: e.g. in arithmetic, counting, writing, and reading numbers, rapid adding, etc., are cases of skill in doing; the tables of weights and measures are a matter of information, etc.
12. Denoting whatever has to do with the natural constitution and functions of an individual.
13. These are taken, almost verbatim, from the class papers of students.
14. This term is sometimes extended to denote the entire reflective process—just as inference (which in the sense of test is best reserved for the third step) is sometimes used in the same broad sense. But reasoning (or ratiocination) seems to be peculiarly adapted to express what the older writers called the "notional" or "dialectic" process of developing the meaning of a given idea.
15. See Vailati, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. V, No. 12.
16. In terms of the phrases used in logical treatises, the so-called "methods of agreement" (comparison) and "difference" (contrast) must accompany each other or constitute a "joint method" in order to be of logical use.
17. These processes are further discussed in Chapter IX.
18. Compare what was said about analysis.
19. The term idea is also used popularly to denote (a) a mere fancy, (b) an accepted belief, and also (c) judgment itself. But logically it denotes a certain factor in judgment, as explained in the text.
20. See Ward, Psychic Factors of Civilization, p. 153.
21. Thus arise all those falsely analytic methods in geography, reading, writing, drawing, botany, arithmetic, which we have already considered in another connection. (See p. 59.)
22. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. I, p. 221. To know and to know that are perhaps more precise equivalents; compare "I know him" and "I know that he has gone home." The former expresses a fact simply; for the latter, evidence might be demanded and supplied.
23. Principles of Psychology, vol. I, p. 488.
24. The next two paragraphs repeat, for purposes of the present discussion, what we have already noted in a different context. See p. 88 and p. 99.