CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT 171 



however, one must not forget Henri Poincare's assertion 

 that the sudden conceptual inspirations of the great creative 

 workers appear only when preceded and followed by pe- 

 riods of intensive study (learning). Poincare, one of the 

 foremost mathematicians of all time, once told an audience 

 of psychologists how the solutions to some of his theorems 

 had come to him. In one case he had worked for 1 5 days on 

 a problem of functions, working every day for an hour or 

 two trying out various combinations without result. Then 

 one evening he drank some black coffee, contrary to cus- 

 tom, and later, wide awake, ideas crowded into his conscious 

 mind literally colhdincr with each other. There was the solu- 

 tion; he had only to write it out. Another time while on a 

 trip he was taking after a period of intensive mathematical 

 work, the solution to a complex relationship came to him 

 quite suddenly as he was about to put foot on the step of an 

 omnibus at a time when he was not thinking of the problem 

 at all. The creative process he had started consciously had 

 gone on in his subconscious mind. 



The intrinsic nature of the mind and its relation to cere- 

 bral excitation, or how the brain works, is at once the most 

 baffling and the most important problem in all science. Until 

 there is better comprehension of the essence of the mind, 

 there will always be limitations to the progress of philoso- 

 phy and to our understanding of the nature of reality. One 

 cannot overestimate the value of even partial solutions of the 

 mind-brain problem to the concepts and knowledge of man. 

 Psychologists know now that, except for basic reflex reac- 

 tions of the nervous system, both human and subhuman ani- 

 mals must learn to think. As stressed earlier in this chapter, 

 the capacity for thought does not appear spontaneously but 

 is the result of a very long and complex learning process— 

 the accumulation of learning sets. In humans, language and 

 the cultural pattern play the decisive part in the thinking 

 process, and this complex is in no sense whatever inborn. 



The Oriental baby adopted by an English family learns 

 English and all the attitudes and patterns of the Western 



