Another aspect of the relation of thinking to willing claims our attention. Thinking is an important element in the growth of the will. The education of the will is coming to be recognized as a matter of supreme importance. The development of character is everywhere emphasized. No teacher in these days regards intellectual training as the sole or chief aim of the school. The philosopher is no longer regarded as the highest type of humanity. The age demands that thought shall pass into volition, and that volition shall manifest itself in action. The executive is not satisfied with the investigation of a subject in its essence and relations, with the elaboration of thought into a system; he must get things done. Mere thinking he despises. The philosopher he regards as a man troubled with ideas, the poet as a man troubled with fancies and rhymes; he hates men who let their minds “go astray into regions not peopled with real things, animate or inanimate, even idealized, but with personified shadows created by the illusions of metaphysics or by the mere entanglement of words, and think these shadows the proper objects of the highest, the most transcendental philosophy.” And the sympathies of the multitudes are on the side of the executive in his exaltation of the will as the chief element of utility and success.

The acts of the will should be guided by intelligence. The will is weak and vacillating if the ends to be accomplished are not clearly conceived, if the purposes to be accomplished are not definitely thought out. Thinking is the guide to willing. Thought gives direction to volition.

There are successive stages in the growth of the will as clearly defined as the activities of memory and imagination. In the first or lowest stage the aim is some form of happiness. In the second stage the will acts under the influence of some ethical idea, commonly finding expression in a maxim like the command, Thou shalt not steal, or in some fixed occupation like a trade or farm work. In the third the will acts under the inspiration of the good or its opposite, and from motives grounded in right or wrong. In all these stages of growth thinking is a most important factor. Let us go into details for purposes of illustration. The human will in its process of development starts on a physical rather than a spiritual basis. On the one hand a want is felt and on the other an impulse towards the satisfaction of that want. In course of time this impulse or appetence assumes the form of intelligent or conscious purpose looking towards the gratification of felt wants, and then the will begins to show itself in the form of clear, definite volitions and actions. The strength of the will depends largely upon these impulses or appetences; and their strength in turn depends upon the health, the temperament, the organization (physical and psychical) of the individual. If by careful diet, exercise, or otherwise, we invigorate these, we thereby furnish capital that will in after years bear compound interest in the form of strong will-power. If the diet, exercise, play, sleep, and work are not properly regulated, first by the parent, the nurse, and the teacher, and later by the individual himself, the appetences develop into appetites that enslave the will and seriously interfere with its further growth. As the power to think is developed, the will passes over into a higher stage of activity. The very longing for happiness leads the child to impose restrictions upon itself. It feels happy if it can secure the approbation of those with whom it associates. If we show our displeasure at something it has done, the little philosopher begins to practise self-denial in certain directions for the purpose of regaining and retaining our good will. The second stage is now reached in which self-gratification gives place to self-denial, the will acting under the influence of one or more ethical ideas. The child at school is lifted upon this loftier plane by the circumstances which surround him; it must practise the school virtues,—punctuality, industry, obedience, and the like; it accepts certain forms of self-restraint in keeping quiet, in abstaining from play, in observing the rules of the school. Where the discipline is rigid and the instruction lacks interest, it may even conceive of the school as a mere place of self-denial and self-restraint. “Why do you come here?” asked a director. The little boy replied, “We come here to sit and wait for school to let out.” The hours at school can be sweetened by exercises in thinking and expressing thought to such an extent that the school becomes the place to which children best like to go. Some full-grown men have not advanced very far beyond this second stage in the growth of the will. They follow some regular occupation as the boy does in going to school; they practise certain forms of virtue,—say honesty, so that you could intrust to them your pocket-book with perfect safety,—but they break the Sabbath, use God’s name in vain, and commit daily many other sins and transgressions. Occasionally one finds a school in which no pupil would dare to be caught telling a lie, and yet the moral tone is low, there being vices which, like a cankerworm, eat out the moral life of the school. The teacher should not feel satisfied until he has raised the pupil to the third stage, where the will is brought under the inspiration of the good, and right becomes the law of life.

Upon this highest plane different phases of development can be detected. The law of right may brandish the avenging rod of conscience and drive the individual into paths of rectitude. The idea of duty thus operating alone may reduce him to the subservience of a slave and prevent him from reaching the high stature of perfect human freedom. This kind of slavery is apt to be followed by a struggle in which the lower nature seeks to assert itself against the higher, and if the latter conquers, the person is apt to be elated with the feeling of victory. Whenever you hear a man boast of the sacrifices he has made in his devotion to duty, you can rest assured he has not yet reached that lofty elevation in will-culture upon which the person does right spontaneously and without effort, and never dreams of having made a sacrifice in the performance of the hardest duties.

Of course, the development from the first stage may move in the opposite direction. If the appetences are gratified beyond the requirements of self-preservation, or of the well-being of the child, they grow into uncontrollable desires and passions; the individual sinks deeper and deeper into selfishness. He may deny himself for the sake of some ambition, or vice, or wicked end which the soul cherishes; then, unless lifted up by the grace of God, he will ultimately land in a state bordering on that of Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, a character who found pleasure in human suffering, and whose will was constantly under the direction and inspiration of the principle of evil. He will at last become like Milton’s Satan, who exclaimed, “Evil, be thou my good.” College boys who delight in hazing innocent freshmen have gone far towards this loathsome stage of moral degradation, the lowest which the will can reach in its downward career.

Now, it is easy to see the relation of thinking to these several stages of will-development. Volition presupposes something to be done, an end to be sought and accomplished. If the will is to act steadily in the endeavor to realize this end, the end must be clearly thought and held before the soul in definite form. To do the right implies that the right be known as the result of right thinking. A soul ignorant of right cannot be expected to practise the virtues which are grounded in the law of right. On the other hand, many forms of evil are never conceived by young people unless suggested to them by their superiors.

Volition issues in doing, and doing is a powerful stimulus to thinking. Making things out of wood, metal, marble, wax, papier-maché, or even out of paper is genuine thinking in things. It is a species of doing which flows from thinking through willing and reacts upon the process of thinking. To see how a thing is made is better than to be told how, but to make it by our own effort, skill, and thought is vastly more educative than seeing and hearing. Manual training tends to make the pupil intellectually honest. He cannot get away from a thought expressed in wood or other material as he can from a thought expressed in language which may suffice to suggest his idea, but not to give it adequate expression. This influence of doing upon thinking has led to the formulation of the maxim, We learn to do by doing,—a maxim whose limitations and legitimate meaning it will be necessary to discuss in a separate lecture.

XX

THINKING AND DOING

When we turn to modern pedagogics, we see how enormously the field of reactive conduct has been extended by the introduction of all those methods of concrete object-teaching which are the glory of our contemporary schools. Verbal reactions, useful as they are, are insufficient. The pupil’s words may be right, but the concepts corresponding to them are often direfully wrong. In a modern school, therefore, they form only a small part of what the pupil is required to do. He must keep note-books, make drawings, plans, and maps, take measurements, enter the laboratory and perform experiments, consult authorities, and write essays. He must do, in his fashion, what is often laughed at by outsiders when it appears in prospectuses under the title of original work; but what is really the only possible training for the doing of original work thereafter. The most colossal improvement which recent years have seen in secondary education lies in the introduction of manual-training schools; not because they will give us a people more handy and practical for domestic life, and better skill in trades, but because they will give us citizens with an entirely different intellectual life. Laboratory work and shop work engender a habit of observation, a knowledge of the difference between accuracy and vagueness, and an insight into nature’s complexity and into the inadequacy of all abstract verbal accounts of real phenomena, which once brought into the mind remain there as life-long possessions. They confer precision; because, if you are doing a thing, you must do it definitely right or definitely wrong. They give honesty; for, when you express yourself by making things, and not by using words, it becomes impossible to dissimulate your vagueness or ignorance by ambiguity. They beget a habit of self-reliance; they keep the interest and attention always cheerfully engaged, and reduce the teacher’s disciplinary function to a minimum.

WILLIAM JAMES.

XX

THINKING AND DOING

The best methods of instruction in the ordinary school aim at the expression of thought in language. If a thing has been well said, the teacher and the examiner are apt to make no further inquiries. Although the expression of thought in written or spoken language is a species of doing, there is often a wide chasm between getting a thing said and having it done. Many of the reforms and revolutions thought out by university professors never get beyond the room in which they lecture or the page on which they formulate their ideas. The freedom of speech in the universities never troubles a despotic government until the ideas of the professors and students show signs of passing into the life of the nation. The difference between speech and action, between the man of words and the man of deeds, has long been felt and emphasized. The favorite method of teaching by lectures, and requiring the pupil to take notes, fails utterly if it stops with mere telling how a thing is to be done, and is not followed by actual doing on the part of the learner. Work in the shop, in the field, and in the factory often proves more effective in fitting a boy to earn a living than the theoretical instruction of the schools. The advantage of doing over telling as a means of learning has led to the formulation of the maxim, “We learn to do by doing,” and some educational reformers have announced the maxim as a principle of education universal in its application. Hence it is worth while to clarify its meaning and to ascertain its limitations. In so doing, we shall get a glimpse of the true relation between thinking and doing.

A young man possessed of unbounded faith in this maxim came to town for the purpose of practising medicine and surgery. He announced that if any persons got sick he proposed to give them medicine in the hope of learning the physiological and therapeutic effects of the various drugs. If any limbs were to be amputated, he was willing to try his hand, in the hope of ultimately learning how to perform surgical operations. He was too simple to succeed as a quack. He did not get a single patient; the people wisely gave him no opportunity of learning to do by doing.

Equally foolish were it thus to apply the maxim to any of the other professions. Would you, with life or property at stake, allow a novice to plead your cause at court in order that he might learn to plead by pleading? Who would waste the golden Sabbath hours in listening to one who was trying to learn to preach by preaching? The civilized world regards knowledge, which is the product of the act of learning, as the indispensable guide of those who offer their services at the bar, from the pulpit, or in the sick-room. When a Yale professor was asked whether study was required of those divinely called to preach, he replied that he had read of but one instance in which the Lord condescended to speak through the mouth of an ass.