"The insufficient elimination of the foul and

decaying products of digestion may plunge us into

a deep melancholy, whereas a few whiffs of nitrous
oxide may exalt us to the seventh heaven of
supernal knowledge and godlike complacency. And
vice versa, a sudden word or thought may cause
our heart to jump, check our breathing, or make our
knees as water. There is a whole new literature
growing up which studies the effects of our bodily
secretions and our muscular tensions and their
relation to our emotions and our thinking."
"The first thing that we notice is that our thought
moves with such incredible rapidity that it is almost
impossible to arrest any specimen of it long enough
to have a look at it. When we are offered a penny
for our thoughts we always find that we have
recently had so many things in mind that we can
easily make a selection which will not compromise
us too nakedly. On inspection, we shall find that
even if we are not downright ashamed of a great
part of our spontaneous thinking it is far too
intimate, personal, ignoble or trivial to permit us to
reveal more than a small part of it. I believe this
must be true of everyone. We do not, of course,
know what goes on in other people's heads. They
tell us very little and we tell them very little....We
find it hard to believe that other people's thoughts
are as silly as our own, but they probably are."
"[Reverie] is our spontaneous and favorite kind of
thinking. We allow our ideas to take their own
course and this course is determined by our hopes
and fears, our spontaneous desires, their fulfillment
or frustration; by our likes and dislikes, our loves
and hates and resentments. There is nothing else
anything like so interesting to ourselves as
ourselves....[T]here can be no doubt that our
reveries form the chief index to our fundamental
character. They are a reflection of our nature as
modified by often bidden and forgotten
experiences."
He contrasts reverie with practical thought, such as
making all those trivial decisions that come to us
constantly throughout our day, from writing a letter
or not writing it, deciding what to purchase, and
taking the subway or a bus. Decisions, he says,
"are a more difficult and laborious thing than the
reverie, and we resent having to 'make up our
mind' when we are tired, or absorbed in a
congenial reverie. Weighing a decision, it should be
noted, does not necessarily add anything to our
knowledge, although we may, of course, seek
further information before making it."
How Creative Thought Transforms The World
This brings us to another kind of thought which can
fairly easily be distinguished from the three kinds
described above. It has not the usual qualities of
the reverie, for it does not hover about our personal
complacencies and humiliations. It is not made up
of the homely decisions forced upon us by
everyday needs, when we review our little stock of
existing information, consult our conventional
preferences and obligations, and make a choice of
action. It is not the defense of our own cherished
beliefs and prejudices just because they are our
own--mere plausible excuses for remaining of the
same mind. On the contrary, it is that peculiar
species of thought which leads us to change our
mind.
It is this kind of thought that has raised man from
his pristine, subsavage ignorance and squalor to
the degree of knowledge and comfort which he
now possesses. On his capacity to continue and
greatly extend this kind of thinking depends his
chance of groping his way out of the plight in which
the most highly civilized peoples of the world now
find themselves. In the past this type of thinking
has been called Reason. But so many
misapprehensions have grown up around the word
that some of us have become very suspicious of it.
I suggest, therefore, that we substitute a recent
name and speak of "creative thought" rather than
of Reason. For this kind of meditation begets
knowledge, and knowledge is really creative
inasmuch as it makes things look different from
what they seemed before and may indeed work for
their reconstruction.
Formerly philosophers thought of mind as having to
do exclusively with conscious thought. It was that
within man which perceived, remembered, judged,
reasoned, understood, believed, willed.
The purpose of this essay is to set forth briefly the
way in which the notions of the herd have been
accumulated. This seems to me the best, easiest,
and least invidious58 educational device for
cultivating a proper distrust for the older notions on
which we still continue to rely.
[60]The “real” reasons, which explain how it is we
happen to hold a particular belief, are chiefly
historical. Our most important opinions — those, for
example, having to do with traditional, religious,
and moral convictions, property rights, patriotism,
national honor, the state, and indeed all the
assumed foundations of society — are, as I have
already suggested, rarely the result of reasoned
consideration, but of unthinking absorption from the
social environment in which we live.Consequently,
they have about them a quality of “elemental
certitude,” and we especially resent doubt or
criticism cast upon them. So long, however, as we
revere the whisperings of the herd, we are
obviously unable to examine them dispassionately
and to consider to what extent they are suited to
the novel conditions and social exigencies59 in
which we find ourselves to-day.
The “real” reasons for our beliefs, by making clear
their origins and history, can do much to dissipate
this emotional blockade and rid us of our prejudices
and preconceptions. Once this is done and we
come critically to examine our traditional beliefs, we
may well find some of them sustained by
experience and honest reasoning, while others
must be revised to meet new conditions and our
more extended knowledge. But only after we have
undertaken such a critical examination in the light
of experience and modern knowledge, freed from
any feeling of “primary certitude,” can we claim that
the “good” are also the “real” reasons for our
opinions.
I do not flatter myself that this general show-up of
man’s thought through the ages will cure myself or
others of carelessness in adopting ideas, or of
unseemly heat in defending them just because we
have adopted them. But if the considerations which
I propose to recall are really incorporated into our
thinking and are permitted to establish our general
outlook on human affairs, they will do much to
relieve the imaginary obligation we feel in regard to
traditional sentiments and ideals. Few of us are
capable of engaging in creative thought, but some
of us can at least come to distinguish it from other
and inferior kinds of thought and accord to it the
esteem that it merits as the greatest treasure of the
past and the only hope of the future.Q12
We don't ponder considering, and a lot of our
perplexity is the outcome of current mind flights as
for it. Allow us to disregard for the moment any
impressions we may have gotten from the
philosophers, and witness what appears to in
ourselves. The primary concern that we see is that
our thought moves with such extraordinary rate that
it is moderately hard to catch any case of it
adequately long to see it. When we are offered a
penny for our insights we for the most part find that
we have starting late had such gigantic quantities
of things as an essential worry that we can without
quite a bit of a stretch make an assurance which
won't exchange off us too in an uncovered manner.
On examination we will find that paying little mind
to whether we are not unmitigated humiliated
around a magnificent bit of our unconstrained
thinking it is nonsensically comfortable, individual,
dishonorable or immaterial to enable us to reveal
more than a little bit of it. I trust this must be
substantial for everyone. We don't, clearly, grasp
what proceeds in other people's heads. They unveil
to us no and we uncover to them for all intents and
purposes nothing. The nozzle of talk, every so
often totally opened, could never radiate more than
driblets of the ever revived hogshead of thought —
noch grosser wie's Heidelberger Fass ["even
greater than the Heidelberg tun"].We imagine that
its hard to assume that other people's insights are
as silly as our own, anyway they no doubt are.
We all in all appear to ourselves to think all the time
in the midst of our waking hours, and the larger
part of us realize that we keep considering while
we are napping, impressively more ridiculously
than when caution. Right when constant by some
rational issue we are involved with what is directly
known as a fantasy. This is our unconstrained and
most adored kind of thinking. We empower our
plans to take their own course and this course is
controlled by our desires and fears, our
unconstrained needs, their fulfillment or
dissatisfaction; by our inclinations, our loves and
severely dislikes and sentiments of abhor. There is
nothing else anything like so interesting to
ourselves as ourselves. All speculated that isn't
essentially exhaustingly controlled and composed
will drift about the venerated Ego. It is intriguing
and pitiable to watch this inclination in ourselves
and in others. We learn thoughtfully and
generously to slight this reality, yet if we set out to
think about it, it blasts forward like the noontide sun
The fantasy or "free relationship of considerations"
has as of late transformed into the subject of
intelligent research. While specialists are not yet
agreed on the results, or if nothing else on the right
illustration to be given to them, there can be in all
likelihood that our fantasies shape the principle
record to our fundamental character. They are an
impression of our inclination as balanced by
routinely bidden and neglected experiences. We
require not go into the issue progress here, for it is
only imperative to watch that the fantasy is reliably
an intense and a significant part of the time a
transcendent foe to each other kind of thinking.
It positively impacts each one of our theories in its
consistent tendency to self-intensification and self-
bolster, which are its focal diversions, yet it is the
correct inverse thing to make direct or roundaboutly
for genuine addition of data. Realists for the most
part talk as if such thinking did not exist or were by
one means or another unessential.
This is the thing that makes their speculations so
shocking and as often as possible futile.
[The dream, as any of us can witness firsthand, is
constantly broken and impeded by the need of a
second kind of thinking. We have to settle on
rational options. Will we create a letter or no? Will
we take the metro or a vehicle? Will we eat at
seven or half past? Will we buy U. S. Versatile or a
Liberty Bond?Decisions are easily unmistakable
from the free stream of the fantasy. From time to
time they ask for a tolerable course of action of
mindful considering and the memory of relevant
realities; consistently, in any case, they are made
unwisely. They are a more troublesome and steady
thing than the fantasy, and we disdain having to
"choose" when we are depleted, or ingested in a
harmonious dream.
Estimating a decision, it should be noted, does not
by any means include anything to the extent
anybody is worried, disregarding the way that we
may, clearly, search for extra information already
influencing it.Athird to kind of thinking is braced
when anyone questions our conviction and
assumptions. We from time to time end up
modifying our assessments with no block or
overpowering inclination, anyway if we are
educated that we are erroneous we loathe the
ascription and harden our hearts.
We are fantastically remiss in the improvement of
our feelings, yet wind up stacked with an illicit
excitement for them when anyone proposes to
preclude us from claiming their organization. It is
plainly not just the considerations that are life-
changing to us, yet our certainty, which is
undermined. We are by nature stubbornly
guaranteed to protect, our own specific from attack,
paying little respect to whether it be our individual,
our family, our property, or our assessment. A
United States Senator once remarked to a friend of
mine that God Almighty couldn't take off him
change his mind on our Latin America approach.
We may surrender, anyway rarely concede
ourselves vanquished. In the insightful world in any
occasion peace is without triumph.
Perhaps several us go to impressive lengths to
ponder the origin of our cherished emotions;
without a doubt, we have a trademark
offensiveness to so doing. We get a kick out of the
opportunity to continue accepting what we have
been accustomed with recognize as self-evident,
and the despise energized when question is
offered event to feel hesitations about any of our
suppositions drives us to search for every method
for explanation behind adhering to them. The result
is that most of our affirmed thinking includes in
finding conflicts for keeping tolerating as we
starting at now do.
I review a very long time earlier heading off to an
open dinner to which the Governor of the state was
bidden. The executive elucidated that His
Excellency couldn't be accessible for certain
"awesome" reasons; what the "bona fide" reasons
were the overseeing officer said he would desert us
to conjecture.20 This capability among "incredible"
and "certified" reasons is a champion among the
most clearing up and fundamental in the whole
area of thought. We can quickly give what appear
to us "awesome" clarifications behind being a
Catholic or a Mason, a Republican or a Democrat,
a devotee or opponent of the League of Nations.
Regardless, the "certified" reasons are generally on
a noteworthy unmistakable plane. Clearly the
essentialness of this refinement is broadly, if
reasonably vaguely, seen. The Baptist evangelist is
adequately arranged to see that the Buddhist isn't
such in light of the way that his lessons would bear
careful examination, however since he happened
to be considered in a Buddhist family in Tokyo.
However, it would be connivance to his certainty to
perceive that his own partiality for particular
standards is a direct result of how his mother was a
person from the First Baptist church of Oak Ridge.
A savage can give an extensive variety of
clarifications behind his conviction that it is
hazardous to wander on a man's shadow, and an
every day paper publication supervisor can impel a
great deal of disputes against the Bolsheviki.But
neither of them may comprehend why he happens
to ensure his particular supposition.
The "honest to goodness" clarifications behind our
feelings are escaped ourselves and moreover from
others. As we grow up we basically grasp the
contemplations showed to us as to such issues as
religion, family relations, property, business, our
country, and the state. We accidentally acclimatize
them from our condition. They are perseveringly
whispered in our ear by the social affair in which
we happen to live. Also, as Mr. Trotter has raised,
these judgments, being the consequence of
proposition and not of reasoning, have the idea of
faultless prominence, so that to address them
. . . is to the follower to pass on attentiveness to an
insane degree, and will be met by disdain,
complaint, or judgment, as demonstrated by the
possibility of the certainty being alluded to. At
whatever point, henceforth, we end up drawing in a
supposition about the introduce of which there is a
nature of feeling which reveals to us that to ask into
it would be insane, plainly inconsequential,
unbeneficial, appalling, improper conduct, or
shrewdness, we may understand that that notion is
a nonrational one, and likely, in this way, settled
upon inadequate proof.
Evaluations, on the other hand, which are the
outcome of experience or of authentic reasoning
don't have this nature of "fundamental certitude." I
review when as a youthful I heard a social event of
agents discussing the theme of the unending
length of time of the soul, I was stunned by the
estimation of vulnerability conveyed by one of the
get-together. As I recall now I see that I had at the
time no energy for the issue, and without a doubt
no smallest conflict to empower for the confidence
in which I had been raised. Notwithstanding,
neither my own absence of worry to the issue, nor
the way that I had previously given it no thought,
served to keep an enraged disdain when I heard
my contemplations addressed.