Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/178

172 To attain the best results of study one must become a docile pupil, learning with precision and thoroughness exactly that which the words and language present to him. Taking statements exactly as they are formulated and using words exactly as others have used them before us—only so may be laid the solid foundation on which genuine research can be securely built.

Investigation Distinct from Study.—Investigation is distinctly another mental process from pure study. Its results are different from learning, as different as digestion is from eating, and for its best exercise a difference should be made in the training process, and in the objects to which the attention is given.

Learning has to do with words and language. Investigation deals with meaning, ideas and conceptions. One of the first acts of the investigator, after he has learned to know the thing or phenomenon by its description, consists in transforming the description into new terms. It is like taking a crystal and turning it into a new light in one's hand to see the new reflections due to changed position.

The attempt to express the conception in different language leads to a fuller realization of that which is contained in the description, as distinguished from the description itself. This result is more easily gained when an actual physical object before the investigator is impressing his senses, than when words alone are used. In the field of philosophy and in mathematics, the process of investigation may be carried on without a physical object being present, except in imagination. In this case the discipline of the mental faculties is more direct, and for discipline alone it may possibly be better than the laboratory-method. The rudiments of investigation are found in the classical mode of education, as in translating Greek or Latin into English. But investigation methods may be exercised and trained, certainly more easily and with greater pleasure to young minds, when the visible object is before one, as in the laboratory, where it remains constant and can be tested over and over again, while the terms of expressing one's own view of it are gradually perfected. The laboratory is the special place of investigation.

Pure investigation deals with knowledge already attained; as with study the acquisition of the investigator is an acquirement of facts of common knowledge and is not yet research. Experiments are made not to advance knowledge, only to advance the knowledge of the experimenter in fields already familiar to the teacher. In the fields of science, with which I am particularly concerned in this discussion, there is this difference between study and investigation, that investigation deals with the objective things as distinguished from the words describing them. Phenomena are but phases of things, and are included within the general term things, as being together experienced by our senses,