The Art of Thought by Wallas Graham

Author:Wallas, Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Solis Press
Published: 2014-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter VIII

Types of Thought

IN THE LAST TWO chapters I have discussed certain mental habits and expedients which may be deliberately acquired by individual thinkers for the purpose of increasing the fertility and energy of their thoughts. In this chapter, I shall discuss a few of those mental habits which are characteristic of nations, or professions, or other groups of men.

Some of these mental habits were in their origin half-conscious results of the conditions under which men earn their livelihood. No one, for instance, consciously invented the legal type of thought (with its tendency to treat words as identical with things), or the military, or clerical, or bureaucratic, or academic type; nor need one search for an inventor to explain why the Bradford type of thought is different from the Exeter type, or why a Roumanian peasant thinks differently from a Viennese merchant. On the other hand, a type of thought sometimes follows a pattern that was first created by the conscious effort of a single thinker, Anaxagoras, or Aquinas, or Descartes, or Hegel, and was afterwards spread by teaching and imitation. The prevalence of a type of thought is often due to a combination of conscious invention and the less-conscious influence of circumstances. Some one invents a new type of thought, and, either at the time or later, a new fact appears in a national or group environment which makes the new type widely acceptable. In that way, types of thought, like the words and word-meanings by which they are often indicated, may be invented and neglected or superseded in one country, and be afterwards enthusiastically adopted in another country whose environment suits them better.97 One can see why Rousseauism, for instance, as interpreted by Jefferson, ‘caught on’ in America after the Declaration of Independence; or why a crude ‘Darwinismus’ spread in Germany as the German Empire began to extend beyond Europe; or why, in the same decade, the Hegelian dialectic fitted the needs of troubled Oxford religious thinkers. The type of thought painfully worked out by Locke and his friends from 1670 to 1690 went to France in 1729 to justify the liberal opposition to Louis XV: Bentham’s a priori deduction of social machinery from primitive instinct suited the conditions of the South and Central American colonies after their separation from Spain: Herbert Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy suited Japan after her sudden adoption of western applied science. Sometimes, though with much hesitation, one may ascribe the spread of a particular type of thought to innate racial factors – the victory, for instance, of Mohammedanism over Christianity among the stronger African tribes, and possibly the greater success of Buddhism in the eastern than in the western half of the Eurasian continent.

In examining such types of thought we have constantly to remember that there never exists a body of people all of whom are equally possessed of any type-quality. In interpreting nineteenth-century English political history, we may usefully speak of Conservative or Liberal types of thought as dominant at this or that

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