How To Study and Teaching How To Study | Page 5

by much invention to secure food, clothing, and implements.
We ourselves, having a vastly greater variety of materials at hand, and
also vastly more ideas and ideals, are much more dependent upon
thinking and study. But, as in the case of the Eskimo, this thinking and
study arises out of actual conditions, and from specific wants. It may be
that we must contrive ways of earning more money; or that the
arguments for protective tariff seem too inconsistent for comfort; or
that the reports about some of our friends alarm us. The occasions that
call forth thought are infinite in number and kind. But the essential fact
is that study does not normally take place except under the stimulus or
spur of particular conditions, and of conditions, too, that are
unsatisfactory.
It does not take place even then unless we become conscious of the
strained situation, of the want of harmony between what is and what
might be. For ages malarial fever was accepted as a visitation by Divine
Providence, or as a natural inconvenience, like bad weather. People
were not disturbed by lack of harmony between what actually was and
what might be, because they did not conceive the possibility of
preventing the disease. Accordingly they took it as a matter of course,
and made no study of its cause. Very recently, on the other hand,
people have become conscious of the possibility of exterminating
malaria. The imagined state has made the real one more and more
intolerable; and, as this feeling of dissatisfaction has grown more acute,

study of the cause of the disease has grown more intense, until it has
finally been discovered. Thus a lively consciousness of the
unsatisfactoriness of a situation is the necessary prerequisite to its
investigation; it furnishes the motive for it.
It has ever been so in the history of evolution. Study has not taken
place without stimulus or motive. It has always had the practical task of
lifting us out of our difficulties, either material or spiritual, and placing
us on our feet. In this way it has been merely an instrument--though a
most important one--in securing our proper adjustment or adaptation to
our environment.[Footnote: For discussion of this subject, see Studies
in Logical Theory, by John Dewey. See, also, Systematic Study in
Elementary Schools, by Dr. Lida B. Earhart, Chapters 1 and 2.]
The variety of response to the demand for study
After we have become acutely conscious of a misfit somewhere in our
experience, the actual study done to right it varies indefinitely with the
individual. The savage follows a hit-and-miss method of investigation,
and really makes his advances by happy guesses rather than by close
application. Charles Lamb's Dissertation on Roast Pig furnishes a
typical example of such accidents.
The average civilized man of the present does only a little better. How
seldom, for instance, is the diet prescribed for a dyspeptic--whether by
himself or by a physician--the result of any intelligent study! The true
scientist, however, goes at his task in a careful and systematic way.
Recall, for instance, how the cause of yellow fever has been discovered.
For years people had attributed the disease to invisible particles which
they called "fomites." These were supposed to be given off by the sick,
and spread by means of their clothing and other articles used by them.
Investigation caused this theory to be abandoned. Then, since Dr. J. C.
Nott of Mobile had suggested, in 1848, that the fever might be carried
by the mosquito, and Dr. C. J. Finlay of Havana had declared, in 1881,
that a mosquito of a certain kind would carry the fever from one patient
to another, this variety of mosquito was assumed by Dr. Walter Reed,
in 1900, to be the source of the disease, and was subjected to very close
investigation by him. Several men voluntarily received its bite and

contracted the fever. Soon, enough cases were collected to establish the
probable correctness of the assumption. The remedy suggested--the
utter destruction of this particular kind of mosquito, including its eggs
and larvae--was so efficacious in combating the disease in Havana in
1901, and in New Orleans in 1905, that the theory is now considered
established. Thus systematic study has relieved us of one of the most
dreaded diseases to which mankind has been subject.
The principal factors in study
An extensive study, like this investigation, into the cause of yellow
fever employs induction very plainly. It also employs deduction
extensively, inasmuch as hypotheses that have been reached more or
less inductively have to be widely applied and tested, and further
conclusions have to be drawn from them. Such a study, therefore,
involving both induction and deduction and their numerous short cuts,
contains the essential factors common to the investigation of other
topics, or to