POWER WITHIN
Men and churches often wait for outside help to draw them along. They need the lesson taught in this anecdote:
When an engineer in Bolivia brought over
the Cordilleras the first locomotive ever
seen in these latitudes, the native Indians
came up from the Amazon basin to see this
sight, and sat on their haunches discussing
what this strange monster could be. They
said: "It is made to go; let's make it go";
and so they lassoed the buffers, and about
thirty of them began to pull, and drew the
locomotive a few yards. They exclaimed,
"Ay-ay-ay-ay Tatai Tatito." "The great and
little father hath enabled us to do something
wonderful!"
The next day the engineer got up steam and hitched a couple of cattle trucks to the locomotive and, when the Indians came again, put them into the trucks and locked them in. Then he stood on the fire-plate of the locomotive and opened the regulator, and let the steam into the cylinder, and it began to move the piston, and the piston the crank, and the crank the wheel, and the wheel the locomotive; and the locomotive carried the Indians along ten miles an hour! What did they not say to their "great and little father!" But they learned this great lesson—that locomotives are not made to be moved along by outside human power, but by means of a power within, and so to carry human beings along.
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Practicable and Impracticable—See Prediction, False. PRACTICAL RESPONSES CLARIFY CONFUSION The acquisition of definiteness and of coherency (or constancy) of meanings is derived primarily from practical activities. By rolling an object, the child makes its roundness appreciable; by bouncing it, he singles out its elasticity; by throwing it, he makes weight its conspicuous distinctive factor. Not through the senses, but by means of the reaction, the responsive adjustment, is the impression made distinctive, and given a character marked off from other qualities that call out unlike reactions. Children, for example, are usually quite slow in apprehending differences of color. Differences from the standpoint of the adult so glaring that it is impossible not to note them are recognized and recalled with great difficulty. Doubtless they do not all feel alike, but there is no intellectual recognition of what makes the difference. The redness or greenness or blueness of the object does not tend to call out a reaction that is sufficiently peculiar to give prominence or distinction to the color trait. Gradually, however, certain characteristic habitual responses associate themselves with certain things; the white becomes the sign, say, of milk and sugar to which the child reacts favorably; blue becomes the sign of a dress that the child likes to wear, and so on, and the distinctive reactions tend to single out color qualities from other things in which they had been submerged.—John Dewey, "How We Think."
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PRACTICAL, THE According to Mr. Bliss Perry, the greatest idealists are the most practical workers: Take those men of the transcendental epoch, whose individuality has been fortunately transmitted to us through our literature. They were in love with life, enraptured of its opportunities and possibilities. No matter to what task a man set his hand, he could gain a livelihood without loss of self-respect or the respect of the community. Let him try teaching school, Emerson would advise; let him farm it a while, drive a tin-*pedler's cart for a season or two, keep store, go to Congress, live the "experimental life." Emerson himself could muse upon the oversoul, but he also raised the best Baldwin apples and Bartlett pears in Concord, and got the highest current prices for them in the Boston market. His friend Thoreau supported himself by making sandpaper or lead-pencils, by surveying farms or by hoeing that immortal patch of beans; his true vocation being steadily that of the philosopher, the seeker. (Text.)—Atlantic Monthly.
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PRACTISE
No man ever yet learned by having somebody
else learn for him. A man learns
arithmetic by blunder in and blunder out,
but at last he gets it. A man learns to write
through scrawling; a man learns to swim
by going into the water, and a man learns
to vote by voting.—Henry Ward Beecher.
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