Intellectual activity

“ A life of health, of sound morality, of disinterested intellectual activity, of freedom from petty cares, is higher than a life of disease, and vice, and stupidity, and sordid anxiety. I maintain that it is right and wise in a nation to set before itself the highest attainable ideal of human life as the existence of the complete gentleman, and that an envious democracy, instead of rendering a service to itself, does exactly the contrary when it cannot endure and will not tolerate the presence of high-spirited gentlemen in the State. ”

“ The moral faculties are generally esteemed, and with justice, as of higher value than the intellectual powers. But we should always bear in mind that the activity of the mind in vividly recalling past impressions is one of the fundamental though secondary bases of conscience. This fact affords the strongest argument for educating and stimulating in all possible ways the intellectual faculties of every human being. ”

“ Lists of questions are published, wonderful for their range and depth, variety and difficulty; treatises are written, which carry upon their very face the evidence of extensive reading or multifarious information; what then is wanting for mental culture to a person of large reading and scientific attainments? what is grasp of mind but acquirement? where shall philosophical repose be found, but in the consciousness and enjoyment of large intellectual possessions? ”

“ Here is the organic relation of theory and practice; the child not simply doing things, but getting also the idea of what he does; getting from the start some intellectual conception that enters into his practice and enriches it; while every idea finds, directly or indirectly, some application in experience and has some effect upon life. ”

“ In order, one is taught how to develop concentration, a stock of ideas, orderliness of mind, power and use of words, clear thinking, intellectual force, habit of analysis, sound opinions, the use of the will, imagination and feeling, a retentive memory, conscience, power of intuition, breadth of mind and spirituality. The whole subject of mental culture is presented in a clear, simple manner that can be readily followed by an intelligent student at odd moments. ”

“ The laws of psychology, or the capabilities and methods of mind-activity, are themselves the fundamental laws of teaching, which is the act of exciting normal and profitable mind-action. Beyond these fundamental laws, the principles of education are to be derived inductively. ”

“ Study is our motto, and the accumulation of knowledge our aim; and from our earliest childhood on we are being whipped with both moral and real rods in order to force our brains to a greater, unusual activity. And yet that wonderful gray matter of our brain can never be different in substance from what it actually is ”

“ He must study the nature of the effect that he is to produce, and of the materials upon which he is to work, and adopt, after mature deliberation, a plan to accomplish his purpose founded upon the principles which ought always to regulate the action of mind upon mind, and adapted to produce the intellectual effect which he wishes to accomplish. ”

“ The greatest contrast is between what belongs to intelligence, and what belongs to the feelings and the will. The more strictly intellectual department comprises Mechanical Art, Language, the Sensible World, the Sciences, Fine Art ”

“ In all these ways we should have been adding to the sum of knowledge. And in the greatest steps we made in our advancement we should have made use of our constructive imagination,—the highest intellectual power, according to recent psychologists. ”

“ Our modern reformers, in their books, write too exclusively of the earliest years of the pupil. These lend themselves better to explicit treatment; and I myself, in dwelling so much upon the native impulses, and object-teaching, and anecdotes, and all that, have paid my tribute to the line of least resistance in describing. Yet away back in childhood we find the beginnings of purely intellectual curiosity, and the intelligence of abstract terms. ”

“ And does the intelligence consist, in degree or in kind, in nothing but a repetition of the same experiences as those through which his progenitors were carried, or is there a something in him to which his individual experiences contribute the mental food by which the mind is nourished and by the assimilation of which its individual intellectual growth becomes possible? ”

“ The higher intellectual powers of man, such as those of ratiocination, abstraction, self-consciousness, etc., probably follow from the continued improvement and exercise of the other mental faculties. ”

“ Yet the creative and critical habit of thought, the scientific mind generated by this search, is destined to be of immense value, and long outlives the time when the eagerly sought triangular spot, having fulfilled its intellectual function, has become a familiar region, viewed with indifference, or at most a homely tenderness. ”

“ And as he aspires to exhibit models of education, possessing higher excellencies than mechanical dexterity or mere intellectual acuteness; his anxious aim will be to make instruction in art and science, the culture of the understanding, and of the physical powers, subservient to the nobler intention of fostering and maturing the virtues of the heart. ”

“ I have only wished to show you that that issue is what gives the real interest to all inquiries into what kinds of activity may be real. Are the forces that really act in the world more foreseeing or more blind? As between ‘our’ activities as ‘we’ experience them, and those of our ideas, or of our brain-cells, the issue is well-defined. ”

“ When we reflect, that from our infancy to the natural decline of our intellectual powers, we are employed, during our waking hours, in the exercise of language; [8] —by conversation, often desultory, where we range through a variety of topics, as the bird sports from branch to twig; to the more deliberate act of composition, where the mind enduringly broods on the subject;—or when we read, and attentively consider the thoughts of others:—these occupations contribute to augment our vocabulary, and fix the meaning of the words we employ. ”

“ Pursue this discipline carefully and conscientiously, and you may make sure that, however scanty may be the measure of information which you have poured into the boy's mind, you have created an intellectual habit of priceless value in practical life. ”

“ He should feel in some measure the power of that group of studies which have to do with mental and moral processes considered apart from the world of outward phenomena, psychology, ethics, philosophy, religion. He needs to relate his individual activity to the larger life of the whole by some genuine grasp of fundamentals in his thinking. ”

“ It is an effort of prime importance to trace exhaustively the inducements and allurements to intellectual exertion. What are the intrinsic charms of knowledge, whether in pursuit or in possession? The difficulty of the answer is increased rather than diminished by the flow of fifty years' rhetoric. ”

“ Here an opportunity presented for me to make a mark, and I determined to do it, and set myself to the arduous task of arousing and instilling intellectual life into the mentally dormant brain. I labored day and night to accomplish my purpose, i.e., to elevate my students to a higher standard of intellectual improvement. ”

“ His central thought appears more definitely through the philosophical principles in his famous Essay concerning the Human Understanding, and through the intellectual training suggested in his other educational work, Conduct of the Understanding, which was originally an additional book and application of the Essay. ”

“ Mental discipline had then the same relation to human activity that it has now. Until schools were created, all study was in the direction of real or apparent utility; all study outside of the schools is at present for knowledge or utility. ”

“ We are rather inclined to refer the fact in question to some peculiar structure of mind—possibly to its activity—perhaps occasioned by lack of early discipline—one fancy thrusting forth another, and occupying its place. ”

“ The special value of primitive apprehension, unweakened by any kind of abstraction, finds expression in the fact that the two divisions of human mental activity, which as complements to each other make up the chief value of human life, i.e. science and art, make real the two forms of thinking. ”

“ The first comprehends knowledge, purely intellectual, whether derived from observation, memory, reflection, books, or men, Aristotle, or Fleet-street. The second demands training, not only intellectual, but moral ”

“ The mind thinks with what it knows; and, if you alter the knowledge in any one whit, you alter the thinking instrumentality in proportion. Our whole practice of education is based on this idea, and yet somehow the idea is allowed to lurk. ”

“ We perceive in childhood and throughout life in the main what interests us, and what affects our total and organic activity. It is, that is to say, our motor activity, and its direction, that determine what we see and perceive and experience. And in the higher reaches of our life, on the levels of art and religion and philosophy, this determining power becomes what we call our reason and our will and our selective attention. ”

“ These two aspects, the intellectual, taken in its widest sense, and the moral, are not only of supreme importance, but, as experience shows, they in no wise run parallel courses. For an understanding of mental development in general, therefore, and of the relation of these its aspects, the early conditions of human culture are particularly significant. ”

“ If we define experience as self- constitutive practical activity, whose output is the ever-changing identity of the individual or individuals carrying out the experience, logic derives from it, as do all knowledge and language. ”

“ Every one of the faculties by which knowledge is accumulated and arranged or digested into new forms grows stronger by being employed upon its own appropriate objects." Mental activity is the means by which the material of knowledge is gathered, and all faculties strengthened for future gathering. ”

“ In order to open the eyes of the heart, in order to create an intellectual conscientiousness, the study of great literatures must be assigned a high place. Constant and complex needs to be such study. ”

“ That is a low and imperfect condition of mental development; and all that we call education tends to produce the habit of mind that shall enable us to distinguish the true from the false—actual facts from the creations of our imagination. I do not say that we ought to reject every thing that to us, in the first instance, may seem strange. I could tell you of a number of such things in science within your own experience. ”

“ Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered; and the diffusion of knowledge, so astonishing in the last half-century, has rendered innumerable minds, variously gifted by nature, competent to be competitors or fellow-workers on the theatre of intellectual operation. ”

“ It is through these occupations that the intellectual and emotional interpretation of nature has been developed. It is through what we do in and with the world that we read its meaning and measure its value. ”

“ But the formation of new intellectual habits in men liberally educated, appeared to promise, ultimately, those larger fruits in the advancement and culture of learning which, in 'the hour-glass' of that first movement, could be, as yet, only prophecy and anticipation. ”

“ As evidence of this, he undertakes to show that science, like language, trains the memory, and, in addition, exercises the understanding; that it is superior to language in cultivating judgment; that, by fostering independence, perseverance, and sincerity, it furnishes a moral discipline. ”

“ Some sixty scholars are more or less under my care, and many of them begin to walk in the new paths pointed out. General activity of mind, accuracy in processes, constant looking for principles, and search after the good and the beautiful, are the habits I strive to develop. ”

“ Thus psychology—properly interpreted as the study of the evolution of mental functions—at once appraises the value of mental traits, and in recovering the trade-routes of the past, points to the most profitable highways of the future. Psychology of this type and temper remains the supreme guide of education. ”

“ I never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both of individual and of social improvement But 1 thought that it had consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultivation with it. The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties now seemed to be of primary importance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed. ”

“ Passing on to object-lessons, which manifestly form a natural continuation of this primary culture of the senses, it is to be remarked, that the system commonly pursued is wholly at variance with the method of Nature, as exhibited alike in infancy, in adult life, and in the course of civilisation. ”

“ And the range of topics is very wide; it embraces science and art, history and philosophy; above all, the knowledge of human nature that teaches how the mind he addresses is to be convinced and persuaded, and how a willing ear is to be won to his discourse. ”

“ If it be true that the mind like the body has a predetermined course of evolution—if it unfolds spontaneously—if its successive desires for this or that kind of information arise when these are severally required for its nutrition—if there thus exists in itself a prompter to the right species of activity at the right time; why interfere in any way? Why not leave children wholly to the discipline of nature?—why not remain quite passive and let them get knowledge as they best can?—why not be consistent throughout? ”

“ We shall go farther than these men have gone and show you that the impellent energy of ideas is the means to all practical achievement and to all practical success.
Preceding books in this Course have taught that—
I. All human achievement comes about through some form of bodily activity.
II. All bodily activity is caused, controlled and directed by the mind.
III. The mind is the instrument you [Pg 5] must employ for the accomplishment of any purpose.
The Two Types of Thought
You have learned that the fundamental processes of the mind are the Sense-Perceptive Process and the Judicial Process. ”