THE FLOW OF THOUGHT ■ 1 27rewarding he found the practice of thinking to be: “It is godlike ever
to think on something beautiful and on something new”; “Happiness
does not reside in strength or money; it lies in rightness and many-
sidedness”; “I would rather discover one true cause than gain the king
dom of Persia.” Not surprisingly, some of his more enlightened contem
poraries concluded that Democritus had a cheerful disposition, and said
that he “called Cheerfulness, and often Confidence, that is a mind
devoid of fear, the highest good.” In other words, he enjoyed life because
he had learned to control his consciousness.
Democritus was neither the first nor the last thinker to be lost in
the flow of the mind. Philosophers have frequently been regarded as
being “absentminded,” which of course means not that their minds
were lost, but that they had temporarily tuned out of everyday reality
to dwell among the symbolic forms of their favorite domain of knowl
edge. When Kant supposedly placed his watch in a pot of boiling water
while holding an egg in his hand to time its cooking, all his psychic
energy was probably invested in bringing abstract thoughts into har
mony, leaving no attention free to meet the incidental demands of the
concrete world.
The point is that playing with ideas is extremely exhilarating. Not
only philosophy but the emergence of new scientific ideas is fueled by
the enjoyment one obtains from creating a new way to describe reality.
The tools that make the flow of thought possible are common property,
and consist of the knowledge recorded in books available in schools and
libraries. A person who becomes familiar with the conventions of po
etry, or the rules of calculus, can subsequently grow independent of
external stimulation. She can generate ordered trains of thought regard
less of what is happening in external reality. When a person has learned
a symbolic system well enough to use it, she has established a portable,
self-contained world within the mind.
Sometimes having control over such an internalized symbol sys
tem can save one’s life. It has been claimed, for instance, that the reason
there are more poets per capita in Iceland than in any other country of
the world is that reciting the sagas became a way for the Icelanders to
keep their consciousness ordered in an environment exceedingly hostile
to human existence. For centuries the Icelanders have not only pre
served in memory but also added new verses to the epics chronicling the
deeds of their ancestors. Isolated in the freezing night, they used to
chant their poems huddled around fires in precarious huts, while outside
the winds of the interminable arctic winters howled. If the Icelanders
had spent all those nights in silence listening to the mocking wind, their