How to Learn Easily; Practical Hints on Economical Study

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II OBSERVATION AND THE TAKING OF NOTES Our first more explicit discussion is on observation, (in the very broad and useful psychologic usage of the term) and then on the taking of notes. Most of our learning comes from this Cosmos, this environment, ? our surroundings, spiritual and material, finite and infinite. The relation between the Cosmos and our minds is dependent largely upon the process of observation, including the observing of our own minds. The term observation suggests an important element of learning; in fact, learning is unthinkable without it, especially perhaps in the natural sciences, of which there are now so many. Observation is obviously a form of note-taking; it is taking notes and writing them on the tablets of the memory, on brain instead of on paper. There are two kinds of observation. There is a primary knowledge of nature outdoors, and under somewhat artificial conditions in the laboratory;and then a secondary or mediate process, observation of books and of other, e.g., pictorial, descriptions of the original observations by others. Both of these forms of observation furnish material for note-taking. Direct observation requires a habit of the continually sensitive and accurate use of the sense- organs; organs of movement-sensation, of hearing, of touch, smell, heat and cold, sometimes singly but sometimes, too, all at once. Observation always should be explicit; in fact, unless it be explicit, it is not observation at all, but a form of wool-gathering. In many cases it must be minutely explicit in order to be of any value. Further details often lend things a wholly new aspect, details which have not before been noticed, and thus lead sometimes to important discoveries. All of this process of observation involves a fine adjustme...