BOOKS OF THE MONTH

...If we could envisage the widespread penalization for failures in thought as vividly as we can the individual sufferings from cancer, we should feel as Mr...

...He has the great teacher's inevitable reverence for the inviolability of each individual's own mysterious laws of growth, though a teacher by profession^ Mr...

...And this technique would make it possible for public schools to provide special facilities and opportunities for the potential creative thinkers of the future if such a project became generally accepted as a wise public policy...

...The problem of the what and the how of this mysterious "something" has puzzled creative thinkers from Plato to Poincare...

...Tawney that every year many youths who might become creative thinkers of distinct value to the community are now swallowed up in the industrial whirlpool...

...It should be particularly suggestive to teachers, educators, creative artists and scientists, and would prove salutary reading even for statesmen, golfers, and the general public...

...Wallas draws increasingly applicable to all people...

...The complexity and interdependence of human lives under modern industrial development makes the following picture which Mr...

...Wallas does that on man's capacity to control through thought the powers he has acquired over nature depends the fate of our present civilization...

...no simple recipes on how to achieve social or business success through the development of your memory...

...It offers no panacea for individual or world salvation...

...Almost everyone has at some time been troubled by a work problem, or a difficulty of human relationship which has defied prolonged and conscientiously directed efforts at solution...

...Some of the factors which prevent this are of course economic, but by far the most important and the most powerful are psychological...

...But innumerable racial and class prejudices, traditional biases, outworn slogans which we substitute for intelligent and original consideration, all militate against the concrete execution of a project for public education which most people would accept as desirable in the abstract...

...Thought * * * whether as the concentrated activity of the professed thinker, or as penetrating and guiding other activities, is now required more urgently than ever before in the history of mankind...

...All men," says Mr...

...This is the fascinating query which has interested Graham Wallas for over twenty years...

...Behind the use by thinkers of rules and materials drawn from the sciences there has always been," says Mr...

...Though written for the layman, Mr, Wallas' book is, in this day of hasty and ill considered popular publications, a refreshingly' scholarly, sane, and balanced consideration of what help modern psychological research can offer the ^individual in the understanding and volitional direction of his own creative thought processes...

...He agrees with Mr...

...Though there has been much exaggeration on the subject, the discovery and improvement of a technique for testing inherent intellectual capacities has undoubtedly contributed greatly toward facilitating the recognition of subnormal and supernormal endowment in children...

...The subject is so illusive, and any clear discussion of it depends to such an extent on careful definition of terms in describing transitions from one phase of thought to another, that it would be doing violence to the author's views to attempt to give a summary of his analysis of the thought process...

...Wallas, "since the dawn of civilization, an unformulated 'mystery' of thought which has been 'explained' by no science, and has been independently discovered, jpst, and rediscovered, by successive creative thinkers...

...But Mr...

...Wallas believes that innate intellectual power tends to be distributed fairly evenly among the different social classes...

...but that, owing to home conditions incident to a low family income, a smaller percentage of innately supernormal working class children develop into creative thinkers than correspondingly supernormal children from middle class homes...

...The author maintains a critical and inquiring attitude toward all the data...

...Indeed, there is scarcely anyone who might not glean some constructive suggestion from a careful study of its content...

...Wallas himself is apparently of the opinion that though the individual cannot change his inherent capacities for thought, he can do much toward improving the use of the capacities he already possesses...

...And it is not only in dealing with the master-problem of war that we show this inability to control, by taking thought, our new powers...

...The nations of Europe seem unable, even after the Locarno Pact, either to amend the Peace of Versailles, or if it is not amended, to provide against the danger of a new world-struggle which may be succeeded by such a Dark Age as succeeded the break-up of the Roman Empire...

...no easy formulas on how to become a successful short etory writer or an Einstein overnight...

...but when French and British statesmen meet to prevent those plans from being put into operation, they find it no easier than would the leaders of two Stone Age tribes to form a common purpose, and they generally part with nothing better than a vague hope that war may be avoided by accident and inertia...

...he is neither the partisan nor the enemy of any school of psychology or thought...

...Must these creative processes of thought remain forever mysterious, incomprehensible, and incommunicable individual experiences, or is there a possibility of discovering and directing their ways of functioning...

...This unformulated mystery of thought he further describes as "something which was neither logic nor accumulated knowledge...

...Wallas' speculations, in this particular book the author is primarily concerned with the question of how far we can improve the thought processes themselves...

...However, something which partakes of the mysterious quality of inspiration _has been experienced by many individuals...

...We should bear in mind that "education is only a means of attaining human excellence, and compulsion only a very crude means of attaining education," and we should "remember that the social value of the school as a corporate entity consists of its effect upon individual students, and that therefore the interests of a student should never be sacrificed to the interests of a school...

...Certainly in a country with the resources of the United States, when there is a common vision and a united desire the necessary money for a public enterprise can always he found...

...Though the reader is constantly aware of the important social implications of Mr...

...In fact he goes so far as to say that "Neither England,* * * nor any other country possessing a system of public education, has progressed far toward developing the full powers of each generation of potential thinkers...

...Wallas speaks of "Thought" he makes that word include many subtle processes which other writers have sought more or less unsuccessfully to subdivide by such designations as intuition, imagination, feeling, reason, etc...

...and then after hopelessly abandoning or temporarily renouncing the problem, has had the complete solution suddenly flash into his mind while idling, or when engaged on some unrelated task...

...He presents the extreme pessimistic view of many eminent psychologists when he quotes one of them as rendering this verdict on present knoweldge of the subject: "No rules can be given for making an unfertile brain fertile, nor for the better use of the fertile brain...

...Wallas, "welcome improvements in the prevention of cancer, or the growth of wheat, but not all men are prepared to welcome improvements in the art of unbiased thought...

...It has been variously designated by different individuals at different periods...

...If there is thought in you this book will etir it to active speculation in various directions...

...When the author approaches the difficult question of the exact role of education in the development of an art of thought his attitude is tentative and experimental...

...Probably our most current term for this ineffable quality of thought is "inspiration," and we associate it chiefly with genius...

...In its full intensity, and as a constantly recurring way of functioning, it is perhaps what most distinguishes the great creative genius from ordinarily'intelligent mortals...

...He has sought the answer in the written records of the past, he has explored the findings of modern psychology, and as a teacher and administrator has made extensive personal observations of the mysterious and illusive thought processes of students, poets, scientists and fellow creative workers...

...Wallas envisages as an ideal a school where the conditions would be such that "the teachers could tealize that some of their own students, though younger, might be abler and more important than themselves...

...In other words, is it possible to develop an art of thought, and if so, how can it be done...

...and countries: "In the sphere of international and interracial relations, our chemists and engineers are now contriving by technical methods whose subtlety would have been inconceivable to our grandfathers, plans for the destruction of London and Paris...

...He thinks that there Is danger of regarding the education problem as ever-simple, and accepting as final solutions such easy formulas as raising the age for compulsory attendance at schools...

...Some believe, indeed, that it is the Divinity without us that intervenes, and others that it is the divine in man himself that suddenly and for a brief instant functions mysi teriously at a new, and rationally incomprehensible, high level, Certain it is, that when man surpasses his habitual self there is always something of this mysterious quality in what transpires...

...Suffice it is to say that when Mr...

...This flash comes with so little conscious effort at the moment that it seems as if the solution must have been given from without...