242 Selective Thinking 



Stout — ' gives to one of our apperceptive systems a new 

 determination.' On the contrary, we succeed in thinking 

 well by thinking hard ; we get the valuable thought-varia- 

 tions by concentrating attention upon the body of related 

 knowledge which we already have ; we discover new rela- 

 tions among the data of experience by running over and 

 over the links and couplings of the apperceptive systems 

 with which our minds are already filled ; and our best prep- 

 aration for effective progress in this line or in that comes 

 by occupying our minds with all the riches of the world's 

 information just upon the specific topics of our interest. 



All this would lead us to a negative position first — a posi- 

 tion which discards the view that the material of selective 

 thinking is found among the richly varied but chaotic and 

 indeterminate creatures of the imaging faculty. Yet it 

 would leave the positive answer to the question of the source 

 of fruitful thought-variations still unanswered. 



There are two alternatives still open after the view just 

 mentioned has been discarded ; one holding that it is the 

 function of the mind to do its own determining, to think 

 its own apt thoughts, to discover the relations which are 

 true, to bring to the manifold of sense and imagination 

 its own forms, schemata, arrangements of parts, and so to 

 construct its systems of knowledge by the rules of its own 

 inventive power. This theory, it is plain, is analogous to the 

 theory of vitalism, with a self-directing impulse, in biology ; 

 and it comes up also rather as an answer to the question 

 as to the forms and categories of mental determination than 

 to that as to the material. For even though the mind has 

 its 'synthetic judgments a priori,' as we may say in the 

 phraseology of Kantian philosophy, still the question arises 

 both as to the sources and as to the criteria — the local. 



