Very much of the sermonizing of our day gives rise to the same kind of thinking. The mind is borne along by the customary flow of words. The phrases used have an orthodox sound; perhaps they are biblical in the sense that they occur in the Bible. It is impossible to tell whether any clear idea or real religious experience is suggested to the hearer’s mind by the words used. The ideas excited in the hearer should be those for which the words stand in the mind of the speaker. If the ideas of the speaker are not clear, how can his words suggest anything definite to the audience? Huxley relates an amusing story of an after-dinner orator who was endowed with a voice of rare flexibility and power, and with a fine flow of words, and who was called upon to speak without much preparation. The applause was terrific. When Huxley asked a neighbor who was especially enthusiastic what the orator had said, the latter could not tell. Nothing was lacking in the post-prandial speech save sense and occasionally grammar.[35]
The fuller consideration of the stream of thought in listening and lecturing, in reading, speaking, and composing, is deserving of separate chapters. The mental attitude in listening resembles that in getting thought from the printed page. Silent reading is for the reader’s own benefit; it comprises by far the larger proportion of our reading. In oral reading, the stream of thought is somewhat different, the aim being similar to that of public speaking,—namely, to suggest or convey to the hearer thoughts from some other mind. In the act of composing, the aim is to evolve thought from the mind’s own resources and activities. The thought process is very much the same, no matter whether we dictate to a stenographer, or speak to an audience, or use the pen in giving to it form and abiding shape. It will be most convenient to treat together the stream of thought in listening and in silent reading, and to reserve for separate consideration the activity of the mind in writing, speaking, and oral reading.
Reading is thinking along a prescribed line that lies goldenly beneath the flow of words.
Brumbaugh.
Whittier uses words as stepping-stones upon which with a light and joyous bound he crosses and recrosses at will the rapid and rushing stream of thought.
Longfellow.
To listen well is to think well,—the hearing ear must be attended by the alert mind, eager to seize upon incoming sensations and weave them into a garland of thought.
M. G. B.
Words, however well constructed originally, are always tending, like coins, to have their inscription worn off by passing from hand to hand; and the only possible mode of reviving it is to be ever stamping it afresh by living in the habitual contemplation of the phenomena themselves, and not resting in our familiarity with the words that express them.
J. S. Mill.
Two men engaged in speculative pursuits met after one had published a book. Let us speak of them as A and B.
A: I have just read your new book. Many things in it please me very much, but in it you say so and so, with which I do not find myself in full accord.
B: I say nothing of the kind in that book.
A: I surely read your book.
B: You never read a book in your life. You read some sentences or paragraphs; your mind begins to react upon what you have read; and ere long you imagine that your inferences are the conclusions of the author.
A: I have a notion to write a psychology, and to set forth my views in full.
B: Don’t you do it. You know no psychology. You have been of great service in stimulating others to think; you are a most delightful lecturer; but you have never mastered psychology.
If a third party could have listened to the conversation, what stream of consciousness would have started in his mind? Possibly surprise at the frankness of B and the composure of A, mingled with thoughts of what they were discussing. In other words, a strong tinge of feeling would be perceptible in the stream of thought. In the minds of the two engaged in the dialogue, feeling must have greatly modified the current of thought. The greatest kindness that can be shown to some men is to oppose or criticise their views. Opposition and criticism stimulate their thinking, and rouse their mental powers to the highest possible tension and activity. In men of the opposite temperament, feeling beclouds their thinking, and makes the stream of thought more sluggish. The common prejudice against appeals to feeling are due to the abuse of the right which every orator has of addressing the feelings through the intellect, and of thereby moving the will. To move the will is the essence and aim of all eloquence. In listening or lecturing, in reading or composing, some form of emotion always accompanies the stream of thought. The orator may move the hearer to tears or to laughter; he is not untrue to his mission if he can thereby win a vote, secure a verdict, or move the hearer to action. A lecture is addressed primarily to the understanding. It is greatly improved if the stream of thought which it starts and supplies is accompanied by feelings of interest and the pleasurable emotions attendant upon novelty, curiosity, or admiring approval. The consciousness that we understand a lecture is accompanied by pleasurable emotions which help to sustain the attention.
The writer once paid a shilling to hear Spurgeon. It was his purpose to get a good seat, so that he might study this famous preacher’s gestures and delivery, the quality of his voice, and the secret of his eloquence. The text was hardly announced before every one in the audience, including the writer, forgot all about Spurgeon, and thought only of his message to the thousands before him. The secret of his oratory lay in his ability to make the audience forget everything except the gospel he was preaching. If people, after hearing a speaker, talk of his fine delivery, his flowery language and beautiful figures of speech, or his peculiarities of pronunciation and other eccentricities, it is proof positive that he has failed. Instead of holding the attention to what he was saying, the audience was thinking of his manner and delivery. A well-printed book has the advantage of keeping the author’s personal characteristics from interfering with the stream of thought. It has the disadvantage of losing all the helps to listening and thinking which come from the tones of the voice and eloquent delivery.
The accusation of B against A, referred to at the beginning of this chapter, is applicable to many readers. For several sentences the mind is riveted upon the author’s meaning. Presently a train of thought starts; the eye runs along the sentences to the bottom of the page. On turning the page, the reader wakes up to the consciousness that his mind does not retain, perhaps never had the slightest notion of the contents of said page. Often the train of thought leads to no goal; the thinking resembles the process of wool-gathering, the tufts of wool on bushes and hedges necessitating much wandering to little purpose.
For the sake of cultivating ability to think, students are advised to read the works of great thinkers, like Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel. Such reading is often a sham and a delusion. No one has done more to shape the critical thinking of the world than Kant; and yet how many young men waste time upon his pages because they are not prepared to think his thoughts. Schleiermacher stimulated and modified the thinking of theologians in every department of their science except Old Testament exegesis; and yet the celebrated Dr. Kahnis, of the University of Leipsic, used to say of Schleiermacher, “Er ist rein nicht zum studiren.” Nevertheless, students for the ministry have been known to waste hours in trying to read his writings, which they were not prepared to understand. Of the obscurer passages in Hegel an eminent authority says, “It is a fair question whether the rationality included in them be anything more than the fact that the words all belong to a common vocabulary, and are strung together on a scheme of predication and relation,—immediacy, self-relation, and what not,—which has habitually recurred. Yet there seems no reason to doubt that the subjective feeling of the rationality of these sentences was strong in the writer as he penned them, or even that some readers by straining may have reproduced it in themselves.”[36]
It may be worth an honest effort for students and teachers to try to grasp the meaning of such writers; but if after a fair trial the mind is left empty of meaning, it is wise to follow the advice of Locke with regard to obscure ancient authors:
“In reading of them, if they do not use their words with a due clearness and perspicuity, we may lay them aside, and, without any injury done them, resolve thus with ourselves:
“Si non vis intelligi, debes negligi.”[37]
Several months or years of study may be required to prepare the mind for grasping the ideas or phraseology of new departments of investigation. No one can comprehend the treatises on physiological psychology without devoting several weeks to the anatomy of the brain.
The words, phrases, and sentences of the printed or written page should call up in the mind of the reader that for which they stand in the mind of the author. What the stream of thought should be in reading a book is well worthy of careful consideration. G. H. Lewes, in “Problems of Life and Mind,” claims that “our thought is a constant interchange of ideas and images, some trains of thought being carried on mainly by images more or less vivid, others mainly by ideas with only a faint escort of images.” It should be said, by way of explanation, that he does not use the word “ideas” in the Platonic sense of patterns fixed in nature, of which the individual objects in any given class are but imperfect copies, and by participation in which they have their being; nor in the sense of a mental image or picture, which (in opposition to Sir William Hamilton), the Century Dictionary claims, has been the more common meaning of the term in English literature since the sixteenth century. In Lewes’s pages ideas never stand for images, nor for copies of sensations. Sully says that the term idea is used to include both images and concepts, marking off the whole region of the representative from the presentative, but that, like the term notion, it now tends to be confined to concepts. With Lewes all ideas are thoughts, but not all thoughts are ideas. He does not reject the popular usage of the word in phrases like the idea of Shakespeare’s Othello, of Bismarck’s policy. Take the following sentence from Justin McCarthy’s “History of Our Own Times:” “Unluckily, Lord Palmerston became possessed with the idea that the French minister in Greece was secretly setting the Greek government on to resist our claims.” In thinking the thought of this sentence the mind is not filled with any images of Greece or mental pictures of any other kind. Possibly the adjective Greek may bring to the minds of some persons the map symbol of Greece or even scenery and cities in Greece, especially if they have travelled or resided there; but such mental pictures really interfere with the current of thought in reading. In planning a route from New York to San Francisco one is apt to think it in the lines and dots of railway maps. That in the mind for which words stand may be styled their meaning, and Lewes claims that much of our reading does not translate the words into their full signification, but proceeds by a process of logical symbolism. He asserts that “the greater proportion of all men’s thinking goes forward with confident reliance on the correctness of the logical operations, and with only an occasional translation of symbols into images. The translation—verification—does, indeed, from time to time take place, and always in proportion to the novelty of the connections; but how easily and how fatally the mind glides along the path of logical operation without pausing to interpret more than the relation of the symbols is humorously illustrated in the common story of a physicist, whose claim to omniscience was the joke of his friends. Being asked earnestly whether he had ‘read Biot’s paper on the malleability of light?’ ‘No,’ he replied; ‘he sent it me, but I have not yet had time to read it.’”
Lewes’s meaning is made somewhat clearer by two examples which he uses. “Suppose you inform me that the blood rushed violently from the man’s heart, quickening his pulse, at the sight of his enemy. Of the many latent images in this phrase, how many were salient in your mind and in mine? Probably two,—the man and his enemy,—and these images were faint. Images of blood, heart, violent rushing, pulse, quickening, and sight were either not revived at all or were passing shadows. Had any such images arisen, they would have hampered thought, retarding the logical process of judgment by irrelevant connections. The symbols had substituted relations for these values,—the logical relations of inclusion and exclusion which constitute judgment. You were not anxious to inform me respecting the qualities of blood, heart, pulse, etc., but only of a certain effect produced on one man by sight of another; and this effect you expressed in the physiological terms which came first to hand; you might have expressed it equally well in very different psychological terms,—‘fierce anger seized the man’s soul, rousing all his energies at the sight of his enemy,’ when assuredly there would not have been present images of ‘anger,’ ‘seizing,’ ‘soul,’ ‘rousing,’ and ‘energies.’ These terms are symbols which stand for clusters of images, and can at will be translated into images, just as algebraic letters stand for values which can be assigned. But for purposes of thought and calculation such translation is unnecessary, is hampering; all that is necessary is that the terms should occupy their proper logical position.”[38]
The other example is still more striking. “Suppose I read the phrase, ‘The ship which carried Nelson was appropriately named the Victory;’ unless the ship itself is the prominent interest, I have probably no image at all, or at least only a faint and fleeting shadow of some vague outline. I do not picture a man-of-war, I do not see the hull, masts, cordage, and cannon, though these, with the figure-head, fluttering flags, and pennons, may successfully emerge if I dwell on the ship. I perhaps do not see Nelson, or, at any rate, do not see his pale face, one eye, and one arm, but only some faint suggestion of a human form. The purpose of the phrase was not to raise images, but to communicate a fact respecting the name of the ship; and my intelligence has been occupied with this purpose. I must, it is true, have understood each word, or, at any rate, each clause of the sentence; but for this understanding it is not necessary that I should translate, nor even that I should be capable of translating, each word into an image or cluster of images; it is enough if I apprehend a series of logical relations. We all use occasional words with intelligent and intelligible propriety, the meaning of which as isolated terms we cannot translate. We read Shakespeare and Goethe without a suspicion of the many words which for us have no images. But if one of these words occurs in an unfamiliar connection we are at once arrested, as we are if any familiar word is placed in an unfamiliar position. Suppose we come upon the sentence, ‘The ship which carried Nelson was named Victory; the ship which carried Napoleon across the desert was named Akbar,’—we are at once arrested; the connection of ship and desert is unusual, and is seen, on reflection, to be contrary to experience; but when we learn that the camel is called the ‘ship of the desert,’ we recognize the new value assigned to the term, and the logical correctness of the phrase is thereby recognized.”[39]
These examples, and others like them which Lewes gives, bring us face to face with the proposition that “much of our thinking is carried on by means of symbols without any images, which is the same thing as thinking being carried on by words without any meanings and with only the accompanying intuition of their logical relations.” Thus, after a century of exhortation against the blind use of words we are brought face to face with the question of using words in thinking without realizing the full meaning, an abuse of words for which reformers have shot their arrows at rote teaching from every possible point of view. What truth is there in the statement of Mr. Lewes? What can be his meaning?
It must be admitted that men in mature life skim newspapers, magazines, and books, especially books of fiction and books of reference, without realizing in their minds the import of all the words upon which the eye falls. The aim may be to get the plot of the story or a fact for some specific use, or a hurried view of the news and current events of the last twenty-four hours. But this is not the kind of thinking which the teacher aims to beget in the minds of his pupils. Nor does it ever lead to a just appreciation of literature. All literature which appeals to the imagination cannot be read and enjoyed in that way. No one can rightly read a choice selection without thinking what was in the author’s mind, reconstructing the images and scenes which were before his mental eye and following the movements depicted by his language. Movement is more easily conceived than scenery, and abounds in the stories which are most popular among children. Judicious exercises will soon enable the pupil to call up all kinds of imagery. In the Standard Fifth Reader it is suggested that the pupils sit with closed eyes and close attention while the teacher or one of the pupils reads a paragraph or stanza. For illustration, Kate Putnam Osgood’s poem, entitled “Driving Home the Cows,” is selected.
Who can fully appreciate these stanzas without picturing the landscape of clover, blue-eyed grass, meadow bars, river lane, cows moving homeward, and especially the boy with the shadow on his face, the two older brothers lying dead under the feet of the trampling foe? The subsequent parts of the poem lend themselves to the activity of the imagination, to a play of sympathy for the father seemingly bereft of all his sons, until on a summer day cool and late he sees fluttering in the wind an empty sleeve of army blue, beneath a face that he knew,—a scene which, if constructed by the imagination, cannot help stirring the emotional life of the reader and giving him proper tones and inflections in oral reading while more fully realizing the price paid in war for the saving of the nation. Very much of our thinking does not turn on images or mental pictures. We do not primarily think justice, law, kindness, mercy under the form of images, though by a secondary process we can throw these ideas into concrete examples and image them as occurring in life. Very many ideas cannot be made concrete in that way, as, for example, the ideas of infinity, eternity. Sometimes an indistinct or faded image does duty for the idea of horses in general, but in such cases the image is representative of the idea, and should not be confounded with the idea. Both are thoughts, but not all thoughts are ideas or images. Many thoughts are propositions and cannot be imaged at all.
The images which go with words grow in fulness as one’s experience enlarges. Take the word fire. The first idea was formed from fire in the stove and in the smithy. A fuller idea resulted from the sight of a distant mountain on fire. Then a distant conflagration resulting in the loss of a block of town property gave the word still fuller content. Finally, the destruction of the State Capitol, in which part of the manuscript of a book, other valuable papers and records were destroyed, and in which one or two friends almost lost their lives, gave a meaning to the word fire which it never had before. Without doubt it hampers the mind and impedes the logical processes of thought if the word invariably calls up the idea of these fires with the accompanying emotions.
We saw the value of the labor-saving devices introduced by the symbols and formulas of mathematics and other sciences. Analysts carry forward long trains of thought by means of symbols whose meaning can be, but is not always, called up with the successive links of the chain of reasoning. In adding a column of figures, in solving an algebraic equation, in reading a work on higher mathematics or logic, in thinking the formulas of chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc., and in dealing with objects, forces, and relations which have been accurately and definitely quantified, the thinking may be carried forward by the use of symbols which can be interpreted and applied whenever the occasion requires, but whose meaning is not always present to the mind. In reading of things which have not been quantified, the stream of thought often flows on without images, or mental pictures, or copies of sensations. Nevertheless, the examination of any school reader or book of selections from the best literature will show how our best writers and orators appeal to the imagination, and to what a large field the method of thinking in images or mental pictures is applicable for the purpose of securing due appreciation of good literature and proper expression in oral reading.
The simplest thinking is the comparison of objects when these are present to the senses. It prevails largely in the handicrafts and in the ordinary duties of life. More difficult is the comparison of images or mental pictures of things when these are not present to the senses, but must be recalled by the memory. This thinking is essential to the appreciation of poetry, to the vivid presentation of thought, and should not be neglected by those who wish to move the multitudes with tongue or pen. “Imaging,” says Dryden, “is in itself the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet paints.” Higher, from the scientist’s point of view, is the thinking in substitute symbols which stand for ideas definitely fixed or quantified. Higher still is the comparison of abstract and general ideas through expressive symbols, including their application to the problems of life; for this is the kind of thinking that characterizes the scientist and the philosopher, the engineer and the surgeon, the editor and the orator, and, in fact, all whose vocation has risen to the rank of a profession. But highest of all is the thinking which creates and invents, begetting progress in science and art, in literature and history, in government and civilization.
The highest joy is the freedom of the mind in the living play of all its powers.
Schiller.
The historian Niebuhr, speaking of the historian’s vocation, remarks that he who calls past ages into being enjoys a bliss analogous to that of creating. With still more truth may we say of that mind which is able, in the conscious awakening of all its powers, to give full and satisfactory utterance to its thick-coming thoughts, that it enjoys the joy of a creator. If there is one bright particular hour in the life of the educated man, in the career of the scholar, it is that hour for which all other hours of student-life were made,—that hour in which he gives original and full expression to what has been slowly gendering within him.
Shedd.
Unless a man can link his written thoughts with the everlasting wants of men so that they shall draw from them as from wells, there is no more immortality to the thoughts and feelings of the soul than to the muscles and bones.
Beecher.
Eventful in his career is the day on which a young person speaks in public for the first time. His hands and arms are in his way; his lower limbs quake; his lips and throat feel dry and parched; the vocal organs refuse to obey his bidding; he experiences other discomforts which he cannot explain and which are due to embarrassment and nervousness. What is worst of all, he cannot tell what has gone wrong in his mind. If his speech was committed, the memory fails to recall some word or sentence that seems absolutely essential to the sequence of thought. If he speaks extemporaneously, the stream of thought stops flowing, or turns back in eddies, or perhaps spreads out over all the land instead of moving towards the proper goal. In fact, all these annoyances have their fontal source in the mind, in a play of emotions in which stage-fright is the principal element. To this young man some trusted friend should whisper, “Take courage;” for if ever in his life a young man needs encouragement it is when he makes his first speech or preaches his first sermon.
Public speakers are made, not born. Native talent is helpful, but not all sufficient. Most of the obstacles to success disappear as soon as one has learned to think on his feet; that is, to control the stream of thought when facing an audience.
There are, of course, exceptions to all rules. Some young men possess an amount of self-confidence which is proof against embarrassment. Such youth are sometimes gifted with a flow of words that is fatal to ultimate success. It enables them to fill time without previous preparation. Bautain describes a “fatal facility a thousand times worse than hesitation or than silence, which drowns thought in floods of words, or in a torrent of copiousness, sweeping away good earth and leaving behind sand and stones alone. Heaven keep us from these interminable talkers, such as are often to be found in southern countries, who deluge you, relatively to anything and to nothing, with a shower of dissertation and a down-pouring of their eloquence. During nine-tenths of the time there is not one rational thought in the whole of this twaddle, carrying along in its course every kind of rubbish and platitude. The class of persons who produce a speech so easily and who are ready at the shortest moment to extemporize a speech, a dissertation, or a homily, know not how to compose a tolerable sentence; and I repeat that, with such exceptions as defy all rule, he who has not learned how to write will never know how to speak.”[40]
No one stands in greater need of the discipline derived from the use of the pen than those who overflow with words and sentences. Their dearth of ideas can be remedied in no other way. The sentence which escapes from the lips is fleeting and soon forgotten. The sentence in black and white, which stares you in the face from the written page, can be read and re-read until its lack of sense and its wealth of nonsense and absurdity grow too glaring to be endured. Paragraph after paragraph can thus be tested, condensed, and stuffed full of meaning. This discipline ultimately enables a fluent talker to speak with force and to the point, because it gradually transforms his habits of thinking, deepening the stream of thought and enabling it to carry craft too weighty to be borne by a shallow stream.
The person who is afflicted with hesitation and embarrassment also stands in sore need of the discipline of writing. In the solitude of the home one can take time to find and fix the right word, to weave it into sentences that stand the test of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and to arrange a line of thought from which everything irrelevant is excluded. Embarrassment vanishes with the advent of the feeling that one has something to say. The growth of language, which invariably accompanies the evolution and clarification of thought, corrects hesitation. Soon the hands drop to the side or obey the will in gesture, and the feeling of ease begins to color the delivery. Nothing more beneficial can happen to a young preacher than the call to preach the same discourse a number of times in succession, each time to a different audience. Repetition will make him a master of the train of ideas, improving his phraseology, and deeping the stream of thought. Who has not watched with delight the improvement in the presentation of a lecture heard from the same lips half a dozen times in succession? The change for the better was due to the deepening, straightening, and improvement of the channel in which the stream of thought seems to flow.
If a student several times each month during a college course writes out and fixes a line of argument for a debate, he can acquire the power to fix and retain the thoughts as fast as he writes. The habit of memorizing the words is, of course, pernicious, because it is apt to make him the slave of his manuscript, to destroy his freedom in meeting the blows of an antagonist, and to divest him of the glow of feeling and animation which gives force to the delivery while the mind is engaged in the elaboration of the argument. The sequence of ideas rather than of words should be fixed in the mind, very much as the student of Euclid fixes in his mind, not the words, but the ideas which constitute the chain of proof. This kind of practice gives a young speaker the sense of security without destroying his freedom in modifying the line of thought while standing upon his feet.
From this point of view the folly of much criticism in teaching is very apparent. The current of thought is frequently interrupted by drawing attention at the wrong time to mistakes in grammar and errors of pronunciation. The proper time for such criticism is after the movement of thought has reached the goal; and even then the critic should not call attention to too many defects at one time; otherwise the effect will be to discourage and bewilder the pupil.
The stream of thought is the most essential thing in writing, speaking, and oral reading. The management of face and hands and feet, the postures of the body, and the vocal utterance should, of course, not be neglected. The intelligent counsel of a good friend is needed to point out mannerisms and eccentricities. The practice prescribed by a wise teacher is helpful in pruning the delivery of defects and harmful habits which are sure to grow where attention to the thought sinks the delivery into the subconscious realm. Nevertheless, the main thing in writing and speaking is the stream of thought. A profound truth was stated by the Kentucky backwoodsman, who said that he would have it in him to become as great an orator as Henry Clay, were it not that he found himself lacking in two things: Whenever a favorable opportunity for a great speech presented itself he never knew what to say nor how to say it. The how is more easily acquired than the what. Both should receive attention, from the kindergarten to the university. The getting of something to say is invention. It is the one thing in which special teachers and special courses give least help. The power of invention is acquired by years of effort and discipline. Tributaries from many sources must pour into the stream of thought before it becomes full, copious, and capable of carrying great thoughts, or of supplying the motive power for great undertakings.
In writing nothing should be allowed to interfere with the stream of thought. Some can write in the midst of noise. Others must seek silence and solitude. Gifted men like Horace Greeley can write in the cars, upon the knee, anywhere. Habit has much to do with the art of composing. In any event, the stream of thought must be kept flowing. In so far as the rules of grammar, logic, rhetoric have become unconscious guiding principles, they do not interfere with the evolution of thought. In so far as they absorb the attention and hinder the flow of thought, they should be cast to the winds during the first glow of writing. Better think of these during the process of rewriting, polishing, and correcting.
So great a thinker and successful a writer as Charles Darwin makes the following suggestive statement concerning his own methods of composing:
“There seems to be a sort of fatality in my mind, leading me to put at first my statement or proposition in a wrong or awkward form. Formerly I used to think about my sentences before writing them down; but for several years I have found that it saves time to scribble in a vile hand whole pages as quickly as I possibly can, contracting half the words; and then correct deliberately. Sentences thus scribbled down are often better ones than I could have written deliberately.”[41]
No one should speak as he writes, nor should any one write as he speaks. Few men are satisfied with the stenographic report of a speech, exactly true to the language at the time of delivery. A reporter who cannot make a speech read better, without changing the line of thought, than if it were printed exactly as spoken is not a master of the art of reporting. Written discourse abounds in longer sentences, in more involved constructions, in forms of diction which please the eye, but are too cumbersome for the voice and the ear. The public speaker is prone to use short, simple sentences in which the subject of the sentence does not pass out of the mind before the predicate is reached. His style abounds in questions which arrest the attention of the hearer; if necessary, he indulges in colloquial expressions to which the ears of the hearer are accustomed, thereby bringing himself nearer the common people.
Upon a speech delivered in the British Parliament high praise was bestowed in the hearing of Mr. Fox. “Does it read well?” he inquired. “Yes, grandly,” was the reply. “Then,” said he, “it was not a good speech.” It may be difficult to point out exactly wherein speaking differs from writing so far as the stream of thought is concerned; yet one feels the difference. Austin Phelps shows the difference by using an extract from an essay on the “End of God in Creation:”
“What was the final cause of creation? The transition from the unconditioned to the conditioned is incomprehensible by the human faculties. What that transition is, and how it could take place, and how it became an actualized occurrence, it is confessed on all hands are absolutely incomprehensible enigmas. We cannot reasonably imagine, then, that, if we are thus ignorant of the nature and mode of this stupendous fact, we can nevertheless comprehend its primitive ground, can explore its ultimate reasons, can define its final motive. Nor can we think to unveil the infinite soul at that moment when, according to our conceptions, the eternal uniformity was interrupted and a new mode of being, absolutely unintelligible to us, was first introduced. We cannot think to grasp all the views which were present to that soul, extending from the unbeginning past to the unending future, and to fathom all its purposes, and to analyze all its motives. If anywhere, we must here repel everything like dogmatic interpretation of the phenomena, and admit whatever is put forth only as conjectural in its nature, or, at all events, partial, and belonging far more to the surface than to the interior of the subject.”
One can easily see how ill adapted to oral delivery these sentences are. Phelps throws the same leading thoughts and succession of thoughts into a form adapted for public speaking:
“Why did God create the universe? Creation is incomprehensible to man. What is creation? How was it possible? How did it ever come to be? I cannot answer. Can you? Every man of common sense confesses his ignorance here. But if we are ignorant of what creation is, and how it is, can we imagine that we understand why it is? Shall we think to unveil the mind of God in the stupendous act? That moment when God said ‘Let there be light’ was a moment of which we can know nothing but that ‘there was light.’ Shall we think to see all that God saw? Can we look through the past without beginning, and the future without end, and fathom all His purposes and all His motives? Can we, by searching, find out God? If we must repel assertion anywhere, we must do so here. Whatever we may think, it is but little more than guess-work. At the best it can be but knowing in part. The most we can know must be on the surface. It cannot penetrate to the heart of the matter.”[42]
The plan of writing down a line of discussion helps to clarify the thought. Casting aside the manuscript as soon as the sequence of ideas is fixed in the mind emancipates the speaker from the written page. Several years of practice develop two kinds of style, one adapted for writing, the other for speaking. After this stage of development is reached, it may be no longer necessary to formulate on paper every line of argument. Nevertheless, the pen cannot be laid aside entirely without detriment to the quality of the thought and the effectiveness of oral discourse.
Everything calculated to interfere with the stream of thought should, so far as possible, be eliminated from the act of composing. Some men find the pen an irksome drain upon their energy and vitality. Their thought moves faster than they can write. The employment of a stenographer aids them in the work of composing. The danger against which they must guard is a growing dislike to the use of the pen, and a deterioration of their style resulting in the obliteration of the difference which distinguishes effective speaking from successful writing.
There is a radical difference between a lecture and an oration. Public speaking which partakes of the nature of the lecture, aiming primarily at instruction or the communication of knowledge, may be assisted by experiments, by maps, charts, and pictures upon the screen, by specimens and models designed to throw light upon the theme under discussion. Public speaking which partakes of the nature of oratory, its aim being to move the will to action, is generally limited in the appliances it can utilize, and in the way it must appeal to the hearer. It must not exhaust the attention of the hearer by consuming his time in the establishment of principles, and in showing, by lengthy details, how results are obtained. Far better is it to cite authorities, to quote their language if necessary, and to make the application to the case in hand. In referring to recognized standards, like a dictionary, a treatise on law, or the Sacred Scriptures, it is always best to quote the exact words. This is also more appropriate on the written page than a reproduction of the thought in inferior forms of statement. In public speaking, however, the original statement may be too involved, and a breaking up into shorter, simpler sentences may aid the forward movement of the stream of thought. The first aim of the speaker is to be understood. If he fails to reach the understanding, he can neither persuade nor convince, nor spur the will to action.