Читать книгу A New Era of Thought - Charles Howard Hinton - Страница 8

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Nature is that which is around us. But it is by no means easy to get to nature. The savage living we may say in the bosom of nature, is certainly unapprehensive of it, in fact it has needed the greatness of a Wordsworth and of generations of poets and painters to open our eyes even in a slight measure to the wonder of nature.

Thus it is clear that it is not by mere passivity that we can comprehend nature; it is the goal of an activity, not a free gift.

And there are many ways of apprehending nature. There are the sounds and sights of nature which delight the senses, and the involved harmonies and the secret affinities which poetry makes us feel; then, moreover, there is the definite knowledge of natural facts in which the memory and reason are employed.

Thus we may divide our means of coming into contact with nature into three main channels: the senses, the imagination, and the mind. The imagination is perhaps the highest faculty, but we leave it out of consideration here, and ask: How can we bring our minds into contact with nature?

Now when we see two people of diverse characters we sometimes say that they cannot understand one another—there is nothing in the one by which he can understand the other—he is shut out by a limitation of his own faculties.

And thus our power of understanding nature depends on our own possession; it is in virtue of some mental activity of our own that we can apprehend that outside activity which we call nature. And thus the training to enable us to approach nature with our minds will be some active process on our own part.

In the course of my experience as a teacher I have often been struck by the want of the power of reason displayed by pupils; they are not able to put two and two together, as the saying goes, and I have been at some pains to investigate wherein this curious deficiency lies, and how it can be supplied. And I have found that there is in the curriculum no direct cure for it—the discipline which supplies it is not one which comes into school methods, it is a something which most children obtain in the natural and unsupervised education of their first contact with the world, and lies before any recognised mode of distinction. They can only understand in virtue of an activity of their own, and they have not had sufficient exercise in this activity.

In the present state of education it is impossible to diverge from the ordinary routine. But it is always possible to experiment on children who are out of the common line of education. And I believe I am amply justified by the result of my experiments.

I have seen that the same activity which I have found makes that habit of mind which we call intelligence in a child, is the source of our common and everyday rational intellectual work, and that just as the faculties of a child can be called forth by it, so also the powers of a man are best prepared by the same means, but on an ampler scale.

A more detailed development of the practical work of Part II., would be the best training for the mind of a child. An extension of the work of that Part would be the training which, hand in hand with observation and recapitulation, would best develop a man’s thought power.

In order to tell what the activity is by the prosecution of which we can obtain mental contact with nature we should observe what it is which we say we “understand” in any phenomenon of nature which has become clear to us.

When we look at a bright object it seems very different from a dull one. A piece of bright steel hardly looks like the same substance as a piece of dull steel. But the difference of appearance in the two is easily accounted for by the different nature of the surface in the two cases; in the one all the irregularities are done away with, and the rays of light which fall on it are sent off again without being dispersed and broken up. In the case of the dull iron the rays of light are broken up and divided, so that they are not transmitted with intensity in any one direction, but flung off in all sorts of directions.

Here the difference between the bright object and the dull object lies in the arrangement of the particles on its surface and their influence on the rays of light.

Again, with light itself the differences of colour are explained as being the effect on us of rays of different rates of vibration. Now a vibration is essentially this, a series of arrangements of matter which follow each other in a closed order, so that when the set has been run through, the first arrangement follows again. The whole theory of light is an account of arrangements of the particles in the transmitting medium, only the arrangements alter—are not permanent in any one characteristic, but go through a complete cycle of varieties.

Again, when the movements of the heavenly bodies are deduced from the theory of universal gravitation, what we primarily do is to take account of arrangement; for the law of gravity connects the movements which the attracted bodies tend to make with their distances, that is, it shows how their movements depend on their arrangement. And if gravity as a force is to be explained itself, the suppositions which have been put forward resolve it into the effect of the movements of small bodies; that is to say, gravity, if explained at all, is explained as the result of the arrangement and altering arrangements of small particles.

Again, to take the idea which proceeding from Goethe casts such an influence on botanical observation. Goethe (and also Wolf) laid down that the parts of a flower were modified leaves—and traced the stages and intermediate states between the ordinary green leaf and the most gorgeous petal or stamen or carpel, so unlike a leaf in form and function.

Now the essential value in this conception is, that it enables us to look, upon these different organs of a plant as modifications of one and the same organ—it enables us to think about the different varieties of the flower head as modifications of one single plant form. We can trace correspondences between them, and are led to possible explanations of their growth. And all this is done by getting rid of pistil and stamen as separate entities, and looking on them as leaves, and their parts due to different arrangement of the leaf structure. We have reduced these diverse objects to a common element, we have found the unit by whose arrangements the whole is produced. And in this department of thought, as also to take another instance, in chemistry, to understand is practically this: we find units (leaves or atoms) combinations of which account for the results which we see. Thus we see that that which the mind essentially apprehends is arrangement.

And this holds over the whole range of mental work, from the simplest observation to the most complex theory. When the eye takes in the form of an external object there is something more than a sense impression, something more than a sensation of greenness and light and dark. The mind works as well as the sense, and these sense impressions are definitely grouped in what we call the shape of the object. The essential act of perceiving lies in the apprehension of a shape, and a shape is an arrangement of parts. It does not matter what these parts are; if we take meaningless dots of colour and arrange them we obtain a shape which represents the appearance of a stone or a leaf to a certain degree. If we want to make our representation still more like, we must treat each of the dots as in themselves arrangements, we must compose each of them by many strokes and dots of the brush. But even in this case we have not got anything else besides arrangement. The ultimate element, the small items of light and shade or of colour, are in themselves meaningless; it is in their arrangement that the likeness of the representation consists.

Thus, from a drawing to our notion of the planetary system, all our contact with nature lies in this, in an appreciation of arrangement.

Hence to prepare ourselves for the understanding of nature, we must “arrange.” In virtue of our activity in making arrangements we prepare ourselves to do what is called understand nature. Or we may say, that which we call understanding nature is to discern something similar in nature to that which we do when we arrange elements into compounded groups.

Now if we study arrangement in the active way, we must have something to arrange; and the things we work with may be either all alike, or each of them varying from every other.

If the elements are not alike then we are not studying pure arrangement; but our knowledge is affected by the compound nature of that with which we deal. If the elements are all alike, we have what we call units. Hence the discipline preparatory for the understanding of nature is the active arrangement of like units.

And this is very much the case with all educational processes; only the things chosen to arrange are in general words, which are so complicated and carry such a train of association that, unless the mind has already acquired a knowledge of arrangement, it is puzzled and hampered, and never gets a clear apprehension of what its work is.

Now what shall we choose for our units? Any unit would do; but it ought to be a real thing—it ought to be something which can be touched and seen, not something which no one has ever touched or seen, and which is even incapable of definition, like a “number.”

I would divide studies into two classes: those which create the faculty of arrangement, and those which use it and exercise it. Mathematics exercises it, but I do not think it creates it; and unfortunately, in mathematics as it is now often taught, the pupil is launched , into a vast system of symbols—the whole use and meaning of symbols (namely, as means to acquire a clear grasp of facts) is lost to him.

Of the possible units which will serve, I take the cube; and I have found that whenever I took any other unit I got wrong, puzzled and lost my way. With the cube one does not get along very fast, but everything is perfectly obvious and simple, and builds up into a whole of which every part is evident.

And I must ask the reader to absolutely erase from his mind all desire or wish to be able to predict or assert anything about nature, and he must please look with horror on any mental process by which he gets at a truth in an ingenious but obscure and inexplicable way. Let him take nothing which is not perfectly clear, patent and evident, demonstrable to his senses, a simple repetition of obvious fact.

Our work will then be this: a study, by means of cubes, of the facts of arrangement. And the process of learning will be an active one of actually putting up the cubes. In this way we do for the mind what Wordsworth does for the imagination—we bring it into contact with nature.