How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process

Abstract

I. What Is the Concrete? The maxim enjoined upon teachers, “ proceed from the concrete to the abstract/' is familiar rather than wholly intelligible. Few who read and hear it gain a clear concep­ tion of the starting point, the concrete; of the nature of the goal, the abstract; and of the exact nature of the path to be traversed in going from one to the other. At times the in­ junction is positively misunderstood, being taken to mean that education should advance from things to thought — as if any dealing with things in which thinking is not involved could possibly be educative. So understood, the maxim en­ courages mechanical routine or sensuous excitation at one end of the educational scale — the lower — and academic and unapplied learning at the upper end. Actually, all dealing with things, even the child’s, is im­ mersed in inference; things are clothed with the suggestions they arouse. They are significant as challenges to inter­ pretation or as evidences to substantiate a belief. Nothing could be more unnatural than instruction in things without thought, in sense-perceptions without judgments connected with them. And if the abstract to which we are to proceed denotes thought apart from things, the goal is formal and empty, for effective thought always refers, more or less di­ rectly, to things. F R O M C O N C R E T E T O A B S T R A C T 221 Relation to Direct and Indirect Meaning Yet the maxim has a meaning which, understood and sup­ plemented, states the direction of logical development. What is this meaning? ‘ Concrete ’ denotes a meaning definitely marked off from other meanings so that it is readily appre­ hended by itself. When we hear the words, table, chair, stove, coat, we do not have to reflect in order to grasp what is meant.1 The terms convey meaning so directly that no effort at translation is needed. The meaning of some terms and things, however, is grasped only by first calling to mind more familiar things and then tracing out connections be­ tween them and what we do not understand. Roughly speak­ ing, the former kind of meaning is concrete; the latter is abstract. Dependence on the Intellectual Status of the Individual To one who is thoroughly at home in physics and chem­ istry, the notions of atom and molecule are fairly concrete. They are constantly used without involving any labor of thought in apprehending what they mean. But the layman and the beginner in science have to remind themselves of things with which they already are well acquainted, and then go through a process of slow translation. Moreover the terms atom and molecule lose their hard-won meaning only too easily if familiar things and the line of transition from them to the strange drop out of mind. The same difference is illus­ trated by any technical terms: coefficient and exponent in algebra, triangle and square in their geometric as distinct from their popular meanings; capital and value in political economy, and so on. The difference as noted is purely relative to the intellec­ tual progress of an individual; what is abstract at one pe-