Intellectual exchange

“ The men that you meet with in all their variety of intellectual and moral nature, the political and social forces at work around you, the tendencies and aims of current speculation, will furnish to the well-trained mind, food for constant thought—for such thought as may elevate and brace the whole inner life by keeping it in perpetual contact with what is real and enduring beneath the shows of the fleeting hour. ”

“ 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 I 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 me of primary importance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed. ”

“ As a psychologist, I have the psychologist’s prejudice, that ideals, intellectual analysis, and education are the fundamental forces of progress, and that laws, conventions, and customs serve to consolidate and make secure the gains achieved through these forces. ”

“ Let us eliminate the intellectual and moral qualities characteristic of each group, which establish notable differences between them, and let us consider only their inventive capacity as applied to practical life. ”

“ There is a vast commerce of ideas; there are marts and exchanges for intellectual discoveries, and a wonderful fellowship of those individual intelligences which make up the mind and opinion of the age. 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. ”

“ Let the world see that with informed heads you have reformed hearts, and that your intellectual training has been no one-sided system which has done all that is possible to be done for the mind, while it has left untended and untrained the heart, whence are the very issues of moral life. Good example is a language all can understand. ”

“ If you began emphasizing interest instead of drudgery, you might find yourself calling into question the sincerity of those “impersonal intellectual interests.” If you emphasized efficiency instead of knowledge, you might make uncomfortably evident the unreality of much of what passes for culture in society to-day. ”

“ To understand, we have analyzed the intellectual world into two classes, good and evil; and to discover the members of each class, we fix their qualities, not by the hypothetick, but the practical mode of reasoning. ”

“ This belief in the moralizing effects of intellectual culture, flatly contradicted by facts, is absurd a priori. What imaginable connection is there between the learning that certain clusters of marks on paper stand for certain words and the getting a higher sense of duty? What possible effect can acquirement of facility in making written signs of sounds have in strengthening the desire to do right? How does knowledge of the multiplication-table, or quickness in adding and dividing, so increase the sympathies as to restrain the tendency to trespass against fellow-creatures? ”

“ The diffusion of knowledge, of artificial and intellectual equality, tends to level this distinction, and to confound that nice perception and high sense of honour, which arises from conspicuousness of situation, and a perpetual attention to personal propriety and the claims of personal respect. ”

“ For the intellectual power within a person, which operates with will, being one, will perform interchangeable actions. Through it, one acquires wisdom and skills, and with it, one tears, sews, conceals, builds, and many other such opposite or interchangeable actions. ”

“ If inquiry is made, In what do the ‘intellectual relations’ of Things consist?—then it would not suffice to look for them merely in the likeness or similarity, and different degrees of relationship and opposition, which belong to their natures. ”

“ The "simplifiers,"—whose aims were wholly moral and whose methods were purely pacific—felt that their ideas could be realized on any plane of civilization. Hence, what profiteth knowledge and science? ”

“ An assemblage of learned men, zealous for their own sciences, and rivals of each other, are brought, by familiar intercourse and for the sake of intellectual peace, to adjust together the claims and relations of their respective subjects of investigation. ”

“ Nor can any lack of final verbal correction much diminish the intellectual value which many of the more thoughtful passages of the present work derive from a long, keen, and practical study of political phenomena, guided by personal experience of public life, and enlightened by a large, instinctive knowledge of the human heart. ”

“ Some attitudes may be named, however, which are central in effective intellectual ways of dealing with subject matter. Among the most important are directness, open-mindedness, single-mindedness (or whole-heartedness) , and responsibility. ”

“ The science of human relationship, of individual and social psychology, of education and of economics, are not only more subtle and intricate in themselves but also bound up inextricably with much emotional matter. ”

“ Culture, we are told, is reading, but reading with a purpose to guide it and with system. The purpose, it is presumed, is attainment, but what is the system? We are to have knowledge, and not only knowledge but right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves by and with judgment. ”

“ And if this has been true in the past of those sciences upon which philosophy rests, how much more so in our own day, when these sciences have become the sources of knowledge that has transformed and reconstructed the very foundations of human thought! [2] VII. If we are not self-deceived, no scholars in the world are more sagacious than those in the United States about the subordination of all special knowledge to larger relations. ”

“ In old times, you see, a man who wanted to educate himself—a Frenchman, for instance—would have set to work to study all the classics and theologians and tragedians and historiaris and philosophers, and, you know, all the intellectual work that came in his way. But in our day he goes straight for the literature of negation, very quickly assimilates all the extracts of the science of negation, and he’s ready. ”

“ The moral of this experience is, that mental culture is not secured by pouring information into passive recipients; it comes from stimulating the mind to gather knowledge for itself.... If we would fit man properly to cultivate nature ... ”

“ And similarly during education, the change is towards the establishment of internal relations more perfectly corresponding to external ones—to exactness in calculations, to a better representation of objects drawn, to a more correct spelling, to a completer conformity to the rules of speech, to clearer ideas respecting the affairs of life. ”

“ The knowledge which he has acquired for society he must now actually apply to the uses of society; he must rouse men to the feeling of their true wants, and make them acquainted with the means of satisfying these. ”

“ There are, also, interior senses, apprehensive powers of the mind, which equally crave culture, and which depend for their precision and force on careful education and diligent use. Mere observation, experience, or study, cannot give knowledge that will be of any avail. ”

“ Ideas, then, bear three types of relations to organic life, relations socially incarnated in traditional art, religion, and philosophy. First of all they may be an expression of innate capacities, the very essence of the freedom of life. ”

“ We are superior to our savage ancestors, because our relations to society and the forces of Nature differ from theirs. What is knowledge but a mental accumulation of true relations? What is reason but the power to compare relations, and what is wisdom but the ability to perceive true relations, and direct our actions in accordance with them? ”

“ They are, for the same purpose, enabled to profit by experience in powers of association, of reasoning by analogy, and of willing according to their judgments; and they are governed by an habitual desire to associate in species, accompanied by moral feelings, resulting from obligations of mutual deference and convenience. Here again, humanly speaking, we have a series of natural miracles—a permanent connexion between external objects and the sensations, reasoning, and conduct of the organized being. ”

“ 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. ”

“ (The intellectual world is divided into two classes—dilettanti on the one hand, and pedants on the other.) ”

“ Now, the difference between these two schools of philosophy, that of Intuition, and that of Experience and Association, is not a mere matter of abstract speculation; it is full of practical consequences, and lies at the foundation of all the greatest differences of practical opinion in an age of progress. The practical reformer has continually to demand that changes be made in things which are supported by powerful and widely-spread feelings, or to question the apparent necessity and indefeasibleness of established facts ”

“ Having fixed the chief aim in the effort to influence and strengthen moral character, we find concentration to be the central principle in which all others unite. It is the focusing of life and school experiences in the unity of the personality. The worth and choice of studies is determined by this. Interest unites knowledge, feeling, and will. The culture epochs supply the nucleus of materials for moral-educative purposes. Apperception assimilates new ideas by bringing each into the bond of its kindred and friends, spinning threads of connection in every direction. ”

“ Science, too, aims at universal agreement (of classes, peoples, humanity) , but this agreement is to be secured solely by logical and educational methods; at an early date, modern philosophy became the philosophy of the enlightenment. ”

“ A few individuals, by extraordinary genius, or by the accidental acquisition of a good set of intellectual habits, may work without principles in the same way, or nearly the same way, in which they would have worked if they had been in possession of principles. But the bulk of mankind require either to understand the theory of what they are doing, or to have rules laid down for them by those who have understood the theory. ”

“ These studies require expensive books and teachers, and a greater amount of time than can be given by the majority of men and women; and moreover they cultivate the intellect without doing anything for the heart. Without in any degree questioning or undervaluing the great and varied benefit derived to the mind from these studies in added accuracy, strength, and richness, there is still room for wonder that Conversation, both as a science and an art, has no place in our systems of education ”

“ One of the peculiarities of modern times, the separation of theory from practice—of the studies of the closet, from the outward business of the world—has given a wrong bias to the ideas and feelings both of the student and of the man of business. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This distinction is one which, as shall soon be shown, is constantly made both by common sense and by common language—a consideration which throws the presumption of truth strongly in our favour. It is one which appears to us to constitute the great leading principle upon which the whole of psychology hinges—one without the strict observance of which any science of ourselves is altogether impossible or null. ”

“ The most universal of the forms in which this difference of method is accustomed to present itself, is the ancient feud between what is called theory, and what is called practice or experience. There are, on social and political questions, two kinds of reasoners: there is one portion who term themselves practical men, and call the others theorists ”

“ It is conversation of thoughts; it is dialogue—the mother of dialectic in more than the etymological sense. No process is more recurrent in history than the transfer of operations carried on between different persons into the arena of the individual's own consciousness. The discussion which at first took place by bringing ideas from different persons into contact, by introducing them into the forum of competition, and by subjecting them to critical comparison and selective decision, finally became a habit of the individual with himself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How is the conversion of common sense into philosophy to be brought about? We answer, by accepting completely and faithfully the facts and expressions of common sense as given in their primitive obscurity, and then by construing them without violence, without addition, and without diminution into clearer and more intelligible forms. ”

“ In this manner we have seen of late, almost every subject in morals, natural history, politics, œconomy, and commerce treated; subjects naturally proceeding on many principles; and some even opposite to each other, are all taught to proceed along the line of systematic simplicity, and continue like other agreeable falshoods extremely pleasing, till they are detected. ”

“ In that rude state of social life, in which languages had their origin, the inventor of a word probably thought of little more, than the temporary facility, which it might give to himself and his companions, in communicating their mutual wants, and concerting their mutual schemes of co-operation. ”