Note 38 — Chapter III · THE ART OF THINKING

James Hinton, a pioneer in so many fields, clearly saw that thinking is really an art fifty years ago. “Thinking is no mere mechanical process,” he wrote (Chapters on the Art of Thinking, pp. 43 et seq.), “it is a great Art, the chief of all the Arts.... Those only can be called thinkers who have a native gift, a special endowment for the work, and have been trained, besides, by assiduous culture. And though we continually assume that every one is capable of thinking, do we not all feel that there is somehow a fallacy in this assumption? Do we not feel that what people set up as their ‘reasons’ for disbelieving or believing are often nothing of the sort?... The Art faculty is Imagination, the power of seeing the unseen, the power also of putting ourselves out of the centre, of reducing ourselves to our true proportions, of truly using our own impressions. And is not this in reality the chief element in the work of the thinker?... Science is poetry.”