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 CONCEPTUALTHINKING 435

CONCEPTUAL THINKING'
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

By Dr. WALTER LIBBY

N the recent newspaper controversy concerning evolution, one
of Mr. Bryan's supporters displayed some impatience at the
emphasis placed by scientists on resemblances. He protested in
the name of logic against what seemed to him an undue insistence
on resemblance, resemblance, resemblance! But unless we take
account of the similarity among phenomena, how are we to ar-
range and classify the data of physics, chemistry, botany and
zoology, or arrive at the concepts of which the propositions and
syllogisms of the logician are composed? We can have no science
of distinct existences ununited by the bond of likeness. It is only
by virtue of resemblances that we are enabled to pass from the
observation of particulars to the consideration of universals. Bain
and other psychologists are so far from belittling the ability to
discover the bond of similarity among phenomena, often apparently
unlike, that they regard it as characteristic of the man of genius.
For James, genius is the possession of similar association to an
extreme degree. To the type of genius that notices the identity
underlying cognate thoughts belong the men of science, and it
is in the concept that the conscious identification takes place.
Conception, or the cognition of the universal aspects of phe-
nomena, can be illustrated from the history of the biological
sciences. For example, what Linnaeus called the "System of
Nature" was in reality a system of concepts. His classifi-
cation of plants, though it prepared the way for more natural
classifications, was crude, because based on superficial similarities.
He, as Harvey-Gibson says, "elaborated a complex and beautifully
arranged and catalogued set of pigeon-holes and forced the facts
that Nature presented to him into these pigeon-holes, whether they
fitted the receptacles or not." His zoological concepts were like-
wise inadequate. Suffice it to recall his vague use of the terms
Insecta, Vermes and Chaos. The likenesses revealed in animal
structure by the comparative anatomists from Hunter to Cuvier
and Owen led to a sharper definition of concepts and a more satis-
factory classification. Paleontology afforded new materials for
1 The second lecture in a series entitled "The Psychology and Logic of
Research" given before the Industrial Fellows of the Mellon Institute, Feb-
ruary 14 to May 2, 1922.
 436 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

comparison. Lamarck introduced the term Invertebrate. Embry-

ology and the use of the microscope led to fresh observations of
likeness and to the establishment of the natural affinities of species
and genera. Here might be mentioned particularly the discovery
of the notochord-the key, as it has been called, of vertebrate
anatomy-and the consequent use of the term Chordata. The
coming of evolution made possible a phylogenetic classification of
organisms and a subtler differentiation of biological concepts.
The dominance of conceptual thinking in the classificatory
aspects of science is fairly obvious. For example, in adopting the
terms Quercus albs, Q. rubra and Q. salicifolia, the seventeenth-
century taxonomist merely associated a definite nomenclature with
the distinct concepts of Virginian woodmen, who had observed the
likeness of American and British oaks. In other aspects of science,
where the importance of the concept is far less obvious, it is none
the less real. In the study of human anatomy by means of dis-
section it is generalized or conceptual knowledge that one seeks
and retains. Anomalous or exceptional structures-such as a
triceps muscle in place of a biceps, or an over-developed panniculus
carnosus-are either disregarded and forgotten, or remembered
as anomalies and exceptions. In any case, what the student retains,
after two years spent in the dissecting-room, is a generalized knowl-
edge of the structure of the human body and not a memory of the
particular cadavers that seemed to occupy the focus of his atten-
tion. The case is somewhat similar with your natural history mu-
seum. The biological collections consist wholly of dead symbols
of living things. Bones are frequently represented by masses of
limestone or silica. A single specimen may do duty for a species,
genus or order. The mere external surface-the shape-may alone
be preserved. Only one stage in an animal's development may be
exhibited, or only one posture-the Megatherium pulling down a
tree or a dinosaur in a more or less characteristic pose. Each speci-
men has value not as representing an individual but as symboliz-
ing a group. Each concrete object, like a word in a catalogue,
serves to recall a concept.
The importance of cultivating the habit of conceptual think-
ing has been definitely recognized since the time of Plato, and
Plato's master, Socrates. The majority of people, according to
the Platonic dialogues, are the slaves of their senses and never
attain to a system of clear concepts. They fail to translate their
perceptions into conceptions and to pass from the sensible world
to the supersensible or intelligible world. Plato valued the sciences
with which he was best acquainted-mathematics and astronomy-
because they tend to wean the mind from what is sensory and
transitory to what is conceptual and eternal. The concept triangle,
 CONCEPTUAL THINKING 437

the triangle of definition, is more real than any of its visible repre-
sentations. Discipline in conceptual thinking is perferable to
utility. "You amuse me," he writes, "by your evident alarm lest
the multitude should think that you insist upon useless studies.
Yet, indeeed, it is no easy matter, but, on the contrary, a very
difficult one, to believe that in the midst of these studies an organ
of our minds is being purged from the blindness, and quickened
from the deadness, occasioned by other pursuits-an organ whose
preservation is of more importance than a thousand eyes; because
only by it can truth be seen."
Plato's philosophy is interesting for us because modern science
is just such a system of clear concepts as he had in mind, and it is
a mistake to interpret his intelligible world as something invisible
to-day but accessible to the senses at some future time. The scien-
tist must turn away from the sensuous world of the artist and the
child to the intelligible world of mathematics, physics and biology;
from the eight or seven little boys seated on a fence to cube root
and prime numbers; from the panorama of many-colored nature
to the conceptual world of elements, atoms, ions and electrons.
The sciences are a sort of shorthand way of conceiving phenomena.
They do not give us nature in its richness and fullness. In the
words of Mephistopheles, "Gray, dear friend, is all theory, and
green the golden tree of life." Picturesqueness is sacrificed by
the scientist for the sake of clearness and economy of thought. He
casts his net now for one kind of fish, now for another. For an
artist like Monet, water may be a shimmering variegated surface;
for the child it may mean "to drink;" while for the chemist it
may be HO2, or, if he conceives it as an alcohol, H.OH.
Of course science has no monopoly of clear conceptions. In in-
sisting on the value of an education in conceptual thinking, Plato
had in mind the training of leaders in ethics and statesmanship,
and thus anticipated by a few centuries the publicists and phil-
osophers who to-day advocate, as a novelty, the application of the
intellect in social and political reform or proclaim the cultivation
of the scientific habit of mind as the sole means of maintaining and
advancing contemporary civilization. He would have recognized
Lincoln as a man of clear conceptions, gained through a unique
self-education, by living in close contact with man and nature,
by reading a few books with extraordinary care, by poring over
the statutes of Indiana, studying grammar, arithmetic and sur-
veying, conning the dictionary, passing in review the life of Wash-
ington and the history of the United States, following with a
frontiersman's imagination the exploits of Robinson Crusoe, ab-
sorbing the wisdom of Aesop's Fables, weighing the moral prin-
ciples of The Bible and The Pilgrim's Progress. Indeed,
438 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

clear conceptual thinking, the scientific habit of mind, was con-

sciously cultivated by the moral philosophers of Greece, notably
by Socrates, whose chief distinction is that he subjected to critical
examination such concepts as virtue, temperance and justice.
Speaking of this pioneer work, Stout says: "It is only at a late
stage of mental development that an attempt is made to distinguish
an identical or persistent element of meaning pervading the vary-
ing significations of a word. When the attempt is made, it con-
stitutes an epoch in the history of thought. It is the beginning of
definition and of the scientific concept."
Conception, or thinking the same in like circumstances, has
its complement in discrimination. Association by similarity is
offset by dissociation, integration by disintergration, synthesis by
analysis, and the observation of congruity by the observation of
incongruity. In this respect, there is a marked difference between
one individual- and another. Experiment shows that one student
may recognize readily ten shades of gray where his classmate has
the greatest difficulty in discerning any difference in shade what-
ever. Similarly, one mind is alive to shades of meaning that make
no impression on another. Aristotle, the greatest of all scientific
intellects, trained for twenty years in the school of Plato in con-
ceptual thinking, the most acute among the Greeks, as he has been
called, in noting differences and making distinctions, carried his
investigations into almost all the realms of knowledge. His suc-
cess was most marked in fields where his aptitude in the employ-
ment of general concepts was supported by a wealth of observa-
tional data. This is particularly remarkable in his researches in
biology. In the Historia Animaliurm, for example, one discovers
the trained thinker bringing order out of chaos by the application
of the intellect to the facts of experience, so called. It is the cus-
tom among historians of a conservative type to belittle the medieval
followers of Aristotle, and above all the scholastics. But even to
scholasticism modern science is deeply indebted for the develop-
ment of logic in general, and for the definition and differentiation
of concepts in particular.
The use of language is the indispensable concomitant of clear
conceptual thinking. We can not think of one of the lower ani-
mals advancing very far in logical thought. He is bound down
for the most part to the fleeting images of things, and lacks the
word (logos) by which they might be made permanent and inde-
pendent of the continuum of experience. The intellectual develop-
ment of the child proceeds as a rule pari passu with its command
of appropriate terms. "Out of hundreds of English-speaking
children," says Terman, "we have not found one testing signifi-
cantly above age who had a significantly low vocabulary;
 CONCEPTUAL THINKING 439

and, correspondingly, those who test much below age never

have a high vocabulary. Occasionally, however, a subject tests
somewhat higher or lower in vocabulary than the mental
age would lead us to expect. This is often the case with
dull children in cultured homes and with very intelligent children
whose home environment has not stimulated language develop-
ment. But even in these cases we are not seriously misled, for the
dull child of fortunate home surroundings shows his dullness in
the quality of his definitions, if not in their quantity; while the
bright child of illiterate parents shows his intelligence in the
aptness and accuracy of his definitions." Terman thus makes it
clear that intelligence is not to be gauged by the extent of one's
vocabulary, but by the exactness with which concepts are defined.
In the interests of the progress of both science and democracy,
it is important that training in the precise use of words-especially
the derivatives of those languages from which we draw our general
concepts-should not lag behind other conditions of the develop-
ment of the immature. As Walter Lippmann says, "Education
that shall make men masters of their vocabulary is one of the
central interests of liberty." Franklin's success, both as a states-
man and a scientist, was in no small measure owing to the severe
drill in the use of the English language to which he subjected
himself. Two other self-educated research men, namely, John
Hunter and Michael Faraday, who, on first thoughts, might seem
to bear witness against the view that language training is of im-
portance in scientific investigation, prove on examination to fur-
nish testimony in corroboration. John Hunter received little if
any schooling. He turned in contempt from the opportunity of
studying the classics at Oxford. Although, after reaching ma-
turity, he was brought, through the closest association with his
brother, William Hunter, in contact with scholarly traditions, he
never overcame the defects of his early education. We are in-
debted to him for such concepts as "arrested development" and
"secondary sexual characters," but his pages are strewn with
terms like "the stimulus of death," "the stimulus of imperfec-
tion," and "sympathy," to which he assigned a significance now
impossible to recover. The lack of language training, in spite of
Hunter's genius and vivid personality, was detrimental to his
influence as a lecturer and writer. Owing to this shortcoming,
science has not yet reaped the full harvest of his tireless energy
in research. For example, the recapitulation theory, as stated by
him, seems to-day little more than a literary curiosity, though it
may have influenced the progress of embryology through the inter-
pretation of the younger Meekel. The case of Faraday was some-
what different from that of Hunter. Having received an elemen-
440 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

tary education, Faraday became apprenticed to a book-binder.

For years he spent his leisure time in reading scientific works. At
the age of twenty-one he gained the favor of Sir Humphry Davy
by a lucid report of some lectures delivered by Davy at the Royal
Institution. Faraday became Davy's assistant, traveled on the
Continent with his patron, studied foreign languages, and made
definite efforts to acquire the oratorical arts of Davy, a recognized
master of scientific diction. Faraday's opportunities for language
training, however, came just a little too late. He sometimes con-
fessed his difficulty in formulating the ideas that occurred to him.
He sought aid at the University of Cambridge and was indebted
to Whewell for such terms as "electrolysis," "electrolyte," "ion,"
etc.
Language permits us to summarize nature, to express it
schematically, to seize upon certain aspects of it-that is, to analyze
phenomena with certain purposes in view. For Priestley the
part of the atmosphere that supports life was "pure dephlogisti-
cated air." Lavoisier substituted a new term and a new concep-
tion, viz., "oxygen." Davy spent a great deal of time proving
that Lavoisier had a false conception of the element discovered
by Priestley. We retain the name after having modified the con-
cept. This we do with the greater freedom, seeing that the classical
term "oxygen" is not self-explanatory, as is the analogous term
"Sauerstoff." Gases were known in the last quarter of the eight-
eenth century as "kinds of air," or "factitious airs." As late as
1766, Cavendish called hydrogen "inflammable air." In 1783
and 1785, he made experiments that justify the conceptions ex-
pressed by the terms "hydrogen" and "nitrogen." It was almost
impossible to think clearly concerning earth, air, fire, and water,
the so-called elements, without having the terms "oxygen," "nitro-
gen," "hydrogen," etc., as symbols of the concepts corresponding.
Counting, measuring, weighing-the application of mathe-
matics-must be regarded as among the best means of sharpening
up our conceptual thinking. One classical example is Lavoisier's
use of the balance in establishing the nature of combustion and
giving phlogiston the quietus. "About a week ago," he wrote on
November 1, 1772, "I discovered that sulphur in burning, so far
from losing weight, rather gains it; that is to say, that from a
pound of sulphur more than a pound of vitriolic acid may be ob-
tained, allowance being made for the moisture of the air. It is
the same in the case of phosphorus. The gain in weight comes
from the prodigious quantity of air which is fixed during the com-
bustion and combines with the vapors. This discovery, which I
have confirmed by experiments that seem to be decisive, has made
me believe that what is observed in the combustion of sulphur and
 CONCEPTUAL THINKING 441

phosphorus may equally well take place in the case of all those
bodies which gain weight on combustion or calcination. I am per-
suaded that the gain in weight of the metallic calces is owing to
the same cause." Lavoisier followed up this work by the calcina-
tion of tin in 1774, and in the same year-after Priestley's dis-
covery of "pure dephlogisticated air"-by the oxidation of mer-
cury. In 1777, Lavoisier stated: that in all cases of combustion
heat and light are evolved; that bodies burn only in oxygen (or air
eminement pur, as he at that time called it); that oxygen is used
up by the combustion, and the gain in weight of the substance
burned is equal to the loss of weight sustained by the air.
The differentiation of terms and concepts is so necessary an
accompaniment of the advance of science that no collection of
examples can be regarded as adequate or as even fairly repre-
sentative. Though Lavoisier in 1777 succeeded in giving to the
concept "combustion" a much more clearly defined meaning than
had attached to the "fire" of the ancient philosophers or the
"flame" of Francis Bacon, in 1789 he still included "caloric" and
"light" in his table of elements. In spite of the definition by
Robert Boyle of the concept "element," and the attempt of New-
ton to determine the meaning of "atom," these ideas, inherited
from the remote past, were at the close of the eighteenth century
about to enter on a new series of transformations. In the seven-
teenth century Boyle's contemporary, John Ray, ascribed to the
term "species" a definite, if not a final, significance, and Syden-
ham, seeking to establish by clinical observation distinct species of
disease, succeeded in differentiating measles from smallpox, in
defining chorea, in modifying the significance of the term
"hysteria," etc. Progress in science may involve lessening or in-
creasing the extension of a familiar term, determining anew the
distinction between familiar terms, and introducing new clearly
defined terms. Pasteur's studies in molecular asymmetry involved
a reconsideration of the terms "tartrate" and "racemate" and a
delimitation of the concepts which each of these terms expressed.
An advantage is gained by substituting the unfamiliar "neuras-
thenia" for the familiar "nervousness," partly because the new
term is unambiguous and partly because it is devoid of every popu-
lar connotation. In fact, our scientific terminology has become
so much a thing apart that one may overlook the relationship be-
tween a common term like "weight" and a more technical term
like " mass."
The researches of Schleiden and Schwann, which led up to the
statement of the cell theory, were affected and, to some extent,
vitiated by traditional conceptions concerning "cellular tissue"
and the "cell." Robert Hooke was the first to use the term "cell"
442 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

in describing organic structure. He had examined charcoal, cork,

and other vegetable tissues under the microscope and described
them in 1665 as "all perforated and porous, much like a honey-
comb." He could discover no passages between the minute cavities
or cells, though he took it for granted that the nutritive juices to
be seen in the cells of green vegetables had some means of egress.
Hooke's observations were verified by his contemporaries. Grew,
in describing the microscopic structure of plants, mentioned the
infinite mass of "little cells or bladders" of which certain parts
are composed, and Malpighi described the cuticle of the plant stem
as consisting of "utricles" arranged horizontally. Caspar Wolff
in his doctor's thesis (Theoria Generationis, 1759) reported the
observation of cells and "little bubbles" which developed in the
homogeneous layers of the embryo. In the works of Bichat, the
founder of histology, the term "cellular tissue" was used, as in-
deed it is to-day, to indicate a certain kind of connective tissue.
Treviranus and Link described the cells in vegetable tissues in
1804, the latter maintaining that they are closed vesicles incapable
of communicating with each other. Professor John H. Gerould
has recently pointed out, in the pages of The Scientific Monthly,
the important part taken by Lamarek, Mirbel (the disciple of
Caspar Wolff), and others in the development of the conception
of the "cell" and of "cellular tissue." After the appearance of
Moldenhawer's Contributions to the Anatomy of Plants (1812),
which demonstrated that the cavities of vegetable cells are separated
from each other by two walls, the attention of observers was di-
verted from the cell contents to the cell wall. The consequent
misconception of the nature of the cell was in part corrected by
Robert Brown's discovery of the cell nucleus and by the later dis-
covery of protoplasm. It was before the full significance of the
cell contents was realized that the cell theory was conceived by
Schleiden and Schwann.
It is evident that advances in scientific thinking imply the use
of clear concepts and clear terms. The term "neuron," employed
by the early Greeks in the sense of "thong" or "sinew," was ap-
plied by the anatomists of the fourth century B. C. to the tendon
as well as to the nerve. A considerable treatise alone would suffice
to trace its subsequent meanings and those of its derivatives and
at the same time to give an account of the investigations that from
the time of Herophilus and Erasistratus have contributed to the
elucidation of the concepts in question. The terms that represent
to-day the so-called chemical elements have no doubt undergone a
similar series of transformations in meaning. Distillation, crystalli-
zation, and other refining processes had to be brought into play
before the concept-the spirit, the essence, the thing in itself-
could be realized.