thinking.
Child and Adult Thinking.—What constitutes the difference in the thinking of
the child and that of the sage? Let us see whether we can discover this
difference. In the first place the relations seen by the child are immediate
relations: they exist between simple percepts or images; the remote and the
general are beyond his reach. He has not had sufficient experience to enable him
to discover remote relations. He cannot think things which are absent from him,
or which he has never known. The child could by no possibility have seen in the
falling apple what Newton saw; for the child knew nothing of the planets in their
orbits, and hence could not see relations in which these formed one of the terms.
The sage, on the other hand, is not limited to his immediate percepts or their
images. He can see remote relations. He can go beyond individuals, and think in
classes. The falling apple is not a mere falling apple to him, but one of a class of
falling bodies. Besides a rich experience full of valuable facts, the trained thinker
has acquired also the habit of looking out for relations; he has learned that this is
the method par excellence of increasing his store of knowledge and of rendering
effective the knowledge he has. He has learned how to think.
The chief business of the child is the collection of the materials of thought,
seeing only the more necessary and obvious relations as he proceeds; his chief
business when older grown is to seek out the network of relations which unites
this mass of material, and through this process to systematize and give new
meanings to the whole.
3. THE MECHANISM OF THINKING
It is evident from the foregoing discussion that we may include under the term
thinking all sorts of mental processes by which relations are apprehended
between different objects of thought. Thus young children think as soon as they
begin to understand something of the meaning of the objects of their
environment. Even animals think by means of simple and direct associations.
Thinking may therefore go on in terms of the simplest and most immediate, or
the most complex and distant relationships.
Sensations and Percepts as Elements in Thinking.—Relations seen between
sensations would mean something, but not much; relations seen between objects
immediately present to the senses would mean much more; but our thinking
must go far beyond the present, and likewise far beyond individual objects. It