There is a danger to which public speakers are exposed, against which the efforts of a resolute will are not too potent. To capture a crowd that is more easily moved by jokes than by argument, the speaker resorts to sallies of wit and humor and turns the laugh upon an opponent. The temptation to cultivate one’s gifts in this direction is very strong, and when yielded to, it destroys the powers of logical reflection and consecutive thought. Wit is illogical, because it introduces into the current of thought what is foreign to the subject in hand, the incongruity giving rise to the laughter. Wit and humor serve a useful purpose in acting as a safety-valve to let off the discontent which accumulates in the human breast, and may be used for that purpose with great effect. But they should never be allowed to divert the stream of thought from its logical channel. The reputation for wit and humor may dispose people to laugh at everything a man says. It destroys their respect for his judgment and impairs his power to follow a line of thought to its legitimate conclusion. The ability to discuss a theme in all its bearings and details implies the power to investigate a subject in its essence and relations, to resolve an idea into its elements, and to present these in the form most easily understood,—an object which is as far from the purposes of the funny man as the poles are from the equator.
All thinking tends towards the expression of thought. “Every expression of thought,” says Tracy, “whether it be word, or mark, or gesture, is the result of an active will, and as such may be classed among the movements.” Word, mark, and gesture do not exhaust the list of movements by which the mind expresses thought. Every handicraft is a form of expressing thought quite as important as writing and speaking and gesticulating. The fine arts and the useful arts are so many ways through which the will passes into thinking and issues in the expression of thought. Movements for reform are the intense expressions of great thoughts which have their origin in the heart. The men who spend their lives in the atmosphere of colleges and universities are apt to be satisfied if they have expressed their thoughts in a lecture or on the printed page. They live in books, and their thinking terminates in books. The thinking which issues in getting things done, in deeds, actions, achievements, is undervalued and too often ignored. University men are waking up to this defect in their thinking. They are throwing themselves into movements for reform and giving the world splendid examples of the translation of thought into vigorous action. The effort to carry theory into practice reacts powerfully upon the mind, forces the individual to see things as they are, and saves him from the habit of looking only for things which the schools have taught him to expect. When thinking issues in doing, the process promotes intellectual honesty. This remark is especially applicable to exercises in which the hand makes in wood, metal, marble, or clay what the mind has conceived. The execution cannot be accurate unless the thinking has been accurate and satisfactory. Drawing is a universal language. It imposes upon the mind a degree of accuracy which is wanting in the fleeting spoken word or even in the more permanent printed or written sentences.