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p.3 How near are we to the creation of a 'scientific art' of thought? [JLJ - apparently not far along at all, in 1926 or in 2014]
p.6 The original sense-stimulus is recognized as part of a 'situation,' and a new message, representing a solution of that situation, may travel back through the lower brain to the nerves attached to the muscles. This cortical message may then give rise to an 'intelligent' muscular movement.
p.6-7 Professor MacDougall, in his Outline of Psychology (1923, p. 440 n.), says that 'it is the paradox of Intelligence that it directs forces or energies without being itself a force of energy.'
p.6 [footnote] See K. Koffka, The Growth of the Mind (1924), and Kohler, The Mentality of Apes (1925), for evidence indicating that intelligent mammalian action is stimulated not by a sensation as such but by a sensation as indicating a 'situation' calling for action. [JLJ - Vygotsky also cites Kohler...]
p.18-19 Every conscious event can have analogues beneath the level of consciousness... we either do not observe or soon forget all mental events outside the limits of full consciousness... one reason why we tend to ignore the mental events in our 'peripheral' consciousness is that we have a strong tendency to bring them into 'focal' consciousness as soon as they are interesting to us
p.20 The mental process of attention is, for instance, like the related bodily act of eye-focussing, very completely controllable by our will; and, indeed, the development of the will itself may, on its psychological side, have been closely related to the development of attention.
p.24 The art of thought... is an attempt to improve by conscious effort an already existing form of human behaviour.
p.25 The thinker, when he is trying to observe thought in its most natural form, is faced with... difficulties... Some of the most important steps in the process of thought are normally unconscious or half-conscious; and our unconscious or half-conscious thought, even if we succeed in observing it, is not necessarily 'natural.' The subject matter, again, even in our least conscious thought is mainly derived from past experience, and is deeply influenced by intellectual and emotional habits; and thought at all grades of consciousness makes large use of language with its innumerable acquired associations.
p.32 A very able and rapid financial thinker, who was trained as a mathematician, told me that even when his thought is most conscious and rational he thinks, like a chess-player, in terms of seen or felt wordless 'situations.' The wordless images of such a 'situation' may be purely 'kinetic,' with little or no visual element. The chess correspondent of the Observer (Feb. 8, 1925) writes that the great chess-player Alekhin said that 'he does not see the pieces in his mind, as pictures, but as force-symbols; that is as near as one can put it in words.'
p.37-38 Helmholtz... the great German physicist, speaking in 1891 at a banquet on his seventieth birthday, described the way in which his most important new thoughts had come to him. He said that after previous investigation of the problem 'in all directions ... happy ideas come unexpectedly without effort, like an inspiration. So far as I am concerned, they have never come to me when my mind was fatigued, or when I was at my working table. ... They came particularly readily during the slow ascent of wooded hills on a sunny day.' Helmholtz here gives us three stages in the formation of a new thought. The first in time I shall call Preparation, the stage during which the problem was 'investigated ... in all directions'; the second is the stage during which he was not consciously thinking about the problem, which I shall call Incubation; the third, consisting of the appearance of the 'happy idea' together with the psychological events which immediately preceded and accompanied that appearance, I shall call Illumination.
And I shall add a fourth stage, of Verification, which Helmholtz does not mention. Henri Poincare, for instance, in the book Science and Method... describes in vivid detail the successive stages of two of his great mathematical discoveries... Each was followed by a period of Verification, in which the validity of the idea was tested, and the idea itself was reduced to exact form... In the daily stream of thought these four different stages constantly overlap each other as we explore different problems.
p.39 If we accept this analysis, we are in position to ask to what degree, and by what means, we can bring conscious effort, and the habits which arise [from] conscious effort, to bear upon each of the four stages.
p.48 It is obvious that both Helmholtz and Poincare had either not noticed, or had forgotten any 'fringe-conscious' psychological events which may have preceded and have been connected with the 'sudden' and 'unexpected' appearance of their new ideas.
p.54 'How can I know what I think till I see what I say?' [JLJ - Karl Weick borrowed one of his pet phrases from here... Wallas might have borrowed this from another source or originated it - perhaps he read an advance copy of E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 1927. Note that: Aspects of the Novel (1927) was written when Forster was forty eight years old and after he completed his final novel, A Passage to India. It was first delivered as part of a series of Clark Lectures given at Trinity College, Cambridge. In it Forster reveals his own unique perspective on literary history, style and form from Defoe to Joyce including a criticism of Henry James’ The Ambassadors. Childs. 2001 Aspects of the Novel. We would need to find out when Foster's Clark lectures at Trinity college happened. From the Cambridge web page, the Clark lectures are on 1 January at 14:00, except for those in 2015. This would give Wallas priority as far as the date is concerned. Except, Forster would have to have prepared his lecture in 1926 in order to deliver it on 1 January 1927. So, the originator can only be guessed at]
p.54 A modern professed thinker must, however, sooner or later in the process of thought, make the conscious effort of expression, with all its risks.
p.76 The professed thinker should also be habitually on the look-out for the possibility that a fringe-thought may sometimes be recognized as more important than the main thought-train during whose course it arises, and that a temporary interruption of work may be desirable, during which the fringe-thought may be developed as a focal thought.
p.77 anyone who is living a life of intellectual production will do well to keep, as Darwin did, a rather considerable number of 'folders' or envelopes, labelled with the names of subjects to which he finds his mind recurring, even although he may not immediately contemplate writing, or lecturing, or acting, on them. [JLJ - you, the reader of this remark, are reading from within my personal "folder" of such notes]
p.77 The thinker should not, as Helmholtz found, confine the process of recording his fringe-thoughts to the moments in the day when he is accustomed to respond to a time-stimulus, or when he is sitting at his desk or laboratory bench. Hobbes's custom of keeping a little note-book where at any hour of the day one can unobtrusively enter the thoughts that 'dart' is extremely useful for this purpose. In modern life, the range of observation and memory which may start a new thought-train is so vast that it is almost incredibly easy to forget some thought and never again pick up the trail which led to it.
p.79 The special habits which each thinker should attempt to acquire in dealing with his accumulated material of notes of reading, recorded fringe-thoughts, and past writings, will vary, of course, with the nature of his material, the character of his work, and his own natural powers.
p.81 every thinker must remember always that if he is to get any advantage from the fact that he is a living organism and not a machine, he must be the master and not the slave of his habits.
p.84 The whole problem is complicated by the well-known phenomena of habit. Mental activities which were originally carried through with severe voluntary effort, inevitably become on repetition less effortful and less conscious; how, therefore, can a thinker, as his work becomes more habitual, prevent the resulting decline in effort from being accompanied by a decline in energy?
p.85 [Herbert Spencer, Autobiography, Vol. I, pp. 399-401] 'My mode of thinking... It has never been my way to set before myself a problem and puzzle out an answer. The conclusions at which I have from time to time arrived, have not been arrived at as solutions of questions raised; but have been arrived at unawares - each as the ultimate outcome of a body of thoughts which slowly grew from a germ. Some direct observation or some fact met with in reading, would dwell with me: apparently because I had a sense of its significance. ... And thus, little by little, in unobtrusive ways, without conscious intention or appreciable effort, there would grow up a coherent and organized theory. Habitually the process was one of slow unforced development, often extending over years; ... it may be that while an effort to arrive forthwith at some answer to a problem, acts as a distorting factor in consciousness and causes error, a quiet contemplation of the problem from time to time, allows those proclivities of thought which have probably been caused unawares by experiences, to make themselves felt, and to guide the mind to the right conclusion.' [JLJ - worth further exploration]
p.91 The young thinker, if he requires a general formula for the increase of mental energy, will find the phrase 'Power Through Action' more helpful than 'Power Through Repose.' Action, in subtle ways... brings all the factors of the organism into relation to each other, and in that region of full consciousness which is indicated by the word 'self' action, more than any other expedient, brings unity without loss of energy.
p.91-92 John Dewey says, 'All people at the outset, and the majority of people probably all their lives, attain ordering of thought through ordering of action.'
p.93 But if we are to use action as a means of stimulating the energy of our thought, we shall require a more detailed analysis of the term 'action'
p.98 we are finding the path to success by experiment, and we remain indifferent as to whether a logically perfect scheme will result.
p.98 'he lived by instinct - by a quick eye and a strong hand, a dexterous management of every crisis as it arose, a half-unconscious sense of the vital elements in a situation.'
p.100 Our English habit of thought leads us easily to change our minds when we find that we feel differently about a situation.
p.104 [British Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain, speaking of the Anglo-Saxon mind] '...human nature being what it is, logic plays but a small part in our everyday life... In the face of any great problem we are seldom really guided by the stern logic of the philosopher or the historian who, removed from all the turmoil of daily life, works in the studious calm of his surroundings.'
p.111 Sometimes, by a divine accident, an American thinker has learnt the 'stroke' which enables him to bring his whole force upon some form of creative work... by himself and for himself.
p.113 Change, when it comes, will be the slow result of many causes.
p.115 We do not despise the intellectual creator who gives us something that we ourselves really desire
p.117 There is, of course, no necessary presumption that the production of the hypnotic state cannot, because it is an interference with nature, be a helpful factor in the art of thought.
p.121 I believe that it is better to insist that the feeling or conviction, like the sensation of sight, is never [an] infallible guide, and that it only becomes the best guide that we have, when it is formed, as Aristotle would say, 'in the right way, and at the right time.'
p.121 James has just been describing in great detail (p. 387 et seq.) the fact that 'nitrous oxide gas when sufficiently diluted with air stimulates the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree ... and I know of more than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation.' [JLJ - yeah right...]
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