I would pick out these elements: exhibiting wide curiosity; assimilating and remembering mounds of facts and figures; raising questions but also attending carefully to answers, whether obtained from books, nature, mechanical experimentation, other persons, or one’s own imagination; putting together these preliminary answers (in a nondisciplinary though not undisciplined manner) and seeing how they work—or don’t work; and importantly, setting the answers down in some kind of symbolic system.
