The Work of the Mind

The Work of the Mind is a project to understand the psychological conditions that precede innovation. We have writings on the personal lives of the eminent thinkers of history, written either by themselves or by others, and some studies have been made into their personal psychological states, but these remain academic. My intention is to gather the primary source writings from history's eminent thinkers so that they may be examined with fresh eyes.

Namely I am trying to understand the great thinkers not through their technical writings but through their humanistic writings, which are their biographies, their poetry, their speeches, their retellings of stories from their youths, their dreams, and crucially, the stories of how they made their great discoveries. From what I've already read, these writings are gems of immense value for the young man trying to sharpen his intellect, by showing how the intellect moves or is cultivated.

We today have this idea that science and technology advance through pure rationality, incrementally, and that if our young scientists simply spend more hours in the lab or the library that eventually something of value will arise out of their efforts, but this unspoken conception is backwards. It reeks of an Oriental outlook on life, probably a cultural response to an idea of how the Soviets or the Chinese drilled information into their youth. In truth, the (Western) mind performs best when let out into the open air, when it is alternated through periods of intense, deep, obsessive study motivated by a great and genuine mental hunger, and periods of total relaxation, bodily exertion, movement, travel through space or over great heights during which the subconscious mind turns the problem over in the imagination until it understands some new aspect of it, which can later be proven of disproven. The thinkers themselves often ponder what exactly goes on in the subconscious mind in these periods of conscious relaxation.

Hopefully there are some Sensitive Young Men who will read these accounts and realize that these eminent thinkers, when stripped of their fame and altitude, were not so essentially different from themselves, and that by recreating the conditions required for great discovery, any of these young men may also tear a hole into the veil of man's ignorance. Most of these Thinkers formulated their best ideas young, when mental and bodily energy are at their highest, and only expressed them thoroughly many years later. Conversely if talented young men continue to feel alone, ignored, irrelevant, not able to emulate the old masters, then surely the beacon fire of scientific knowledge will extinguish. I believe a small amount of comaraderie with long-dead writers will be enough to offset this grey future.

The Great Thinkers is a small club: I am attempting to discern the entrance criteria.