We speak of people as original or as the reverse, with the
understanding that originality is the basis of the world's
progress. To be original in thought is to add new relationships
to those already accepted, or to substitute new ones for the old.
The original person is not easily credulous; he applies to
traditional teaching and procedure the acid test of results. Thus
the astronomers who rejected the theological idea that the earth
was the center of the universe observed that eclipses could not
be explained on such a basis, and Harvey, as he dissected
bullocks' hearts and tied tourniquets around his arms, could not
believe that Galen's teaching on circulation fitted what he saw
of the veins and valves of his arm. The original observer refuses
to slide over stubborn facts; authority has less influence with
him than has an apple dropping downward. In another way the
original thinker is constantly taking apart his experiences and
readjusting the pieces into new combinations of beauty,
usefulness and truth. This he does as artist, inventor and
scientist. Most originality lies in the rejection of old ideas
and methods as not consonant with results and experience; in the
taking apart and the isolation of the components of experience
(analysis) and in their reassemblage into new combinations
(synthesis). The organizing activity of the original mind is
high, and curiosity and interest are usually well maintained.
Unless there is with these traits the quality called good
judgment (i.e., good choice), the original is merely one of those
"pests" who launch half-baked reforms and projects upon a weary
world.
We have spoken of intelligence as controlling and directing
instinct and desire, as inhibiting emotion, as exhibiting itself
in handicraftsmanship, as the builder up of abstractions and the
principles of power and knowledge; we have omitted its
relationship to speech. Without speech and its derivatives, man
would still be a naked savage and not so well off in his struggle
for existence as most of the larger animals. It is possible that
we can think without words, but surely very little thinking is
possible under such circumstances. One might conduct a business
without definite records, but it would be a very small one.
Speech is a means not only of designating things but of the
manifest relations between things. It "short-cuts" thought so
that we may store up a thousand experiences in one word. But its
stupendous value and effects lie in this, that in words not only
do we store up ourselves (could we be self-conscious without
words?) and things, but we are able to interchange ourselves and
our things with any one else in the world who understands our
speech and writings. And we may truly converse with the dead and
be profoundly changed by them. If the germ plasm is the organ of
biological heredity, speech and its derivatives are the organs of
social heredity!
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