First, in all these matters of type distinction, one of the essential things to observe is the be- haviour of the Attention. We have already seen that the attention is implicated to a remarkable degree — in what I called " fluid attention " above — in the motor scholar. The same implication of the attention occurs in all the sensory cases, but presents very different aspects; and the common fact that the attention is directly involved affords us one of the best rules of judgment and distinc- tion. We may say, generally, of the sensory children, that the attention is best, most facile, most interest-carrying for some one preferred sense, leading for this sense into preoccupation and ready distraction. This tendency manifests 192 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
itself, as we saw above, in the motor persons also, taking effect in action, speed, vivacity, hasty gen- eralization, etc.; but in the sensory one it takes on varying forms. This first aspect of our typical distinction of minds we may call " the relation of the ' favoured function ' to the attention."
Then, second, there is another and somewhat contrasted relation which also assumes importance when we come to consider individual cases; and that is the relation of the " favoured function " — say movement, vision, hearing, etc. — to Habit. It is a common enough observation, that habit renders functions easy, and that habits are hard to break; indeed, all treatment of habits is likely to degenerate into the commonplace. But, when looked at as related to the attention, certain truths emerge from the consideration of habit.
In general, we may say that habit bears a two- fold relation to attention: on the one hand, facile attention shows the reign of habit. The solid acqui- sitions are those with which attention is at home, and which are therefore more or less habitual. But, on the other hand, it is equally true that at- tention is in inverse ratio to habit. We need to at- tend least to these functions which are most habitual, and we have to attend most to those which are novel and only half acquired. We get new acquisitions mainly, indeed, by strained at- tention. So we have a contrast of possible in- terpretations in all cases of sharp and exclusive attention by the children: does the attention repre- sent a Habit in this particular action of the child? — or, does it represent the breaking up of a habit, an act of Accommodation? In each case these questions have to be intelligently considered. The motor person, usually, when uninstructed and not held THE TRAINING OF THE MIND. 193 back, uses his attention under the lead of habit. It is largely the teacher's business in his case, as we saw, to get him to hold, conserve, and direct his attention steadily to the novel and the com- plex. The sensory person, on the other hand, shows the attention obstructed by details, hin- dered by novelties, unable to pass smoothly over its acquisitions, and in general lacking the regu- lar influence of habit in leading him to summarize and utilize his mental store in general ways.
The third general aspect of the topic is this: the person of the sensory type is more likely to be the one in whom positive derangement occurs in the higher levels, and in response to the more re- fined social and personal influences. This, for the reason that this type represents brain pro- cesses of greater inertia and complexity, with greater liability to obstruction. They are slower, and proceed over larger brain areas.
With these general remarks, then, on the wider aspects of the distinction of types, we may now turn to one of the particular cases which occurs among sensory individuals. This is all that our space will allow.
The Visual Type. — The so-called " visuals," or "eye-minded " people among us, are numerically the largest class of the sensory population. They resort to visual imagery whenever possible, either because that is the prevailing tendency with them, or because, in the particular function in question in any special act, the visual material comes most readily to mind. The details of fact regarding the "visuals" are very interesting; but I shall not take space to dwell upon them. The sphere in which the facts regarding the pupil of this type are important to the teacher is that of language, 1^4 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
taken with the group of problems which arise about instruction in language. The question of his symbolism, and its relation to mathematics, logic, etc., is important. And finally, the sphere of the pupil's expression in all its forms. Then, from all his discoveries in these things, the teacher is called upon to make his method of teaching and his general treatment suitable to this student. The visual pupil usually shows himself to be so predominately in his speech and language functions; he learns best and fastest from copies which he sees. He delights in illustrations put in terms of vision, as when actually drawn out on the blackboard for him to see. He understands what he reads better than what he hears; and he uses his visual symbols as a sort of common coin into which to convert the images which come to him through his other senses. In regard to the movements of attention, we may say that this boy or girl illustrates both the aspects of the attention- function which I pointed out above; he attends best — that is, most effectively — to visual instruc- tion provided he exert himself; but, on the other hand, it is just here that the drift of habit tends to make him superficial. As attention to the vis- ual is the most easy for him, and as the details of his visual stock are most familiar, so he tends to pass too quickly over the new matters which are presented to him, assimilating the details to the old schemes of his habit. It is most important to observe this distinction, since it is analogous to the " fluid attention " of the motor scholar; and some of the very important questions regard- ing correlation of studies, the training of atten- tion, and the stimulation of interest depend upon its recognition. Acquisition best just where it is THE TRAINING OF THE MIND. 195 most likely to go wrong; that is the state of things. The voluntary use of the visual function' gives the best results; but the habitual, involuntary, slipshod use of it gives bad results, and tends to the formation of injurious habits.
For example, I set a strongly visual boy a "copy " to draw. Seeing this visual copy he will quickly recognise it, take it to be very easy, dash it off quickly, all under the lead of habit; but his result is poor, because his habit has taken the place of effort. Once get him to make effort upon it, however, and his will be the best result of all the scholars, perhaps, just because the task calls him out in the line of his favoured function. The same antithesis comes out in connection with other varieties of sensory scholars.
We may say, therefore, in regard to two of the general aspects of mental types — the relation of the favoured function to attention, on the one hand, and to habit, on the other — that they both find emphatic illustration in the pupil of the vis- ual type. -He is, more than any other sensory pupil, a special case. His mental processes set de- cidedly toward vision. He is the more important, also, because he is so common. Statistics are lack- ing, but possibly half of the entire human family in civilized life are visual in their type for most of the language functions. This is due, no doubt, to the emphasis that civilization puts upon sight as the means of social acquisition generally, and to our predominantly visual methods of instruction.
The third fact mentioned is also illustrated by this type; the fact that mental instruction and derangement may come easily, through the stress laid upon vision in the person's mental economy. I need not enlarge upon the different forms of 196 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
special defect which come through impairment of sight by central lesion or degeneration of the visual centers and connections. Suffice it to say that they are very common, and very difficult of recovery. The visual person is often so com- pletely a slave to his sight that when that fails either in itself or through weakness of attention he becomes a wreck off the shore of the ocean of intellect. When we consider the large proportion just mentioned of pupils of this type, the care which should be exercised by the school authori- ties in the matter -of favourable conditions of light, avoidance of visual fatigue, proper distance- adjustments in all visual application as regards focus, symmetry, size of objects, copies, prints, etc., becomes at once sufficiently evident to the thoughtful teacher, as it should be still earlier to the parent. There should be a medical examina- tion, by a competent oculist, before the child goes to school, and regular tests afterward. School examiners and boards should have quali- fications for reporting on the hygienic conditions of the school as regards lighting. The bright glare of a neighbouring wall before a window toward which children with weak eyes face when at their desks may result not only in common defects of vision but also in resulting mental and moral damage; and the results are worse to those who depend mainly on vision for the food, drink, and exercise, so to speak, of their growing minds. As to the methods of teaching these and also the other sensory pupils, the indications already given must suffice. The statement of some of these far-reaching problems of educational psy- chology, and of the directions in which their answers are to be sought, exhausts the purpose of THE TRAINING OF THE MIND. 197 this chapter. In general it may be said that the recommendations made for the treatment of sen- sory children at the earlier stage may be extended to later periods also, and that the treatment should be, for the most part, in intelligent con- trast to that which the motor pupils receive.
Language Study. — From this general considera- tion of the child's training it becomes evident that the great subjects which are most useful for disci- pline in the period of secondary education are the mathematical studies on the one hand, which exer- cise the faculty of abstraction, and the positive sciences, which train the power of observation and require truth to detail. If we should pursue the subject into the collegiate period, we should find mental and moral science, literature, and history coming to their rights. If this be in the main psychological, we see that language study, as such, should have no great place in secondary education. The study of grammar, as has been already said, is very useful in the early periods of development if taught vocally; it brings the child out in self-expression, and carries its own correctives, from the fact that its results are al- ways open to social control. These are, in my mind, the main functions of the study of language.
What, then, is the justification for devoting ten or twelve years of the youth's time to study of a dead language, as is commonly done in the case of Latin? The utility of expression does not enter into it, and the discipline of truth to elegant liter- ary copy can be even so well attained from the study of our own tongue, which is lamentably neglected. In all this dreary language study, the youth's interest is dried up at its source. He is fed on formulas and rules; he has no outlet for 198 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
invention or discovery; lists of exceptions to the rules destroy the remnant of his curiosity and incentive; even reasoning from analogy is strictly forbidden him; he is shut up from Nature as in a room with no windows; the dictionary is his authority as absolute and final as it is flat and sterile. His very industry, being forced rather than spontaneous, makes him mentally, no less than physically, stoop-shouldered and near-sight- ed. It seems to be one of those mistakes of the past still so well lodged in tradition and class rivalry that soundness of culture is artificially identified with its maintenance. Yet there is no reason that the spirit of classical culture and the durable elements of Greek and Roman life should not be as well acquired — nay, better — from the study of history, archaeology, and literature. For this language work is not study of literature. Not one in one hundred of the students who are forced through the periodical examinations in these languages ever gets any insight into their aesthet- ic quality or any inspiration from their form.
But more than this. At least one positively vicious effect follows from language study with grammar and lexicon, no matter what the language be. The habit of intellectual guessing grows with the need of continuous effort in putting together elements which go together for no particular rea- son. When a thing can not be reasoned out, it may just as well be guessed out. The guess is always easier than the dictionary, and, if suc- cessful, it answers just as well. Moreover, the teacher has no way of distinguishing the pupil's replies which are due to the guess from those due to honest work. I venture to say, from personal experience, that no one who has been through the THE TRAINING OF THE MIND. 199 usual classical course in college and before it has not more than once staked his all upon the happy guess at the stubborn author's meaning. This shallow device becomes a substitute for honest struggle. And it is more than shallow; to guess is dishonest. It is a servant to unworthy inertia; and worse, it is a cloak to mental unreadiness and to conscious moral cowardice. The guess is a bluff to fortune when the honest gauntlet of ig- norance should be thrown down to the issue.
The effects of this show themselves in a habit of mind tolerated in persons of a literary bent, which is a marked contrast to that demanded and exemplified by science. I think that much of our literary impressionism and sentimentalism reveal the guessing habit.
Yet why guess? Why be content with an im- pression? Why hint of a " certain this and a certain that" when the "certain," if it mean anything, commonly means the- uncertain? Things worth writing about should be formulated clearly enough to be understood. Why let the personal reaction of the individual's feeling suf- fice? Our youth need to be told that the guess is immoral, that hypothesis is the servant of re- search, that the private impression instructs no- body, that presentiment is usually wrong, that science is the best antidote to the fear of ghosts, and that the reply " I guess so " betrays itself, whether it arise from bravado, from cowardice, or from literary finesse! I think that the great need of our life is honesty, that the bulwark of honesty in education is exact knowledge with the scientific habit of mind, and, furthermore, that the greatest hindrance to these things is the train- ing which does not, with all the sanctions at its 200 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
command, distinguish the real, with its infallible tests, from the shadowy and vague, but which contents itself with the throw of the intellectual dice box. Any study which tends to make the difference between truth and error pass with the throwing of a die, and which leads the student to be content with a result he can not verify, has somewhat the function in his education of the puzzle in our society amusements or the game of sliced animals in the nursery.
CHAPTER IX.
THE INDIVIDUAL MIND AND SOCIETY SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY.
THE series of questions which arise when we consider the individual as a member of society fall together under the general theory of what has been called, in a figure, Social Heredity.
The treatment of this topic will show some- thing of the normal relation of the individual's mind to the social environment; and the chapter following will give some hints as to the nature and position of that exceptional man in whom we are commonly so much interested — the Genius.
The theory of social heredity has been worked up through the contributions, from different points of view, of several authors. What, then, is social heredity?
This is a very easy question to answer, since the group of facts which the phrase describes are extremely familiar — so much so that the reader may despair, from such a commonplace beginning, THE INDIVIDUAL MIND AND SOCIETY. 20 1 of getting any novelty from it. The social heri- tage is, of course, all that a man or woman gets from the accumulated wisdom of society. All that the ages have handed down — the literature, the art, the habits of social conformity, the experi- ence of social ills, the treatment of crime, the re- lief of distress, the education of the young, the provision for the old — all, in fact, however de- scribed, that we men owe to the ancestors whom we reverence, and to the parents whose presence with us perhaps we cherish still. Their struggles, the orator'has told us, have bought our freedom; we enter into the heritage of their thought and wisdom and heroism. All true; we do. We all breathe a social atmosphere; and our growth is by this breathing-in of the tradition and example of the past.
Now, if this be the social heritage, we may go on to ask: Who are to inherit it? To this we may again add the further question: How does the one who is born to such a heritage as this come into his inheritance? And with this yet again: How may he use his inheritance — to what end and under what limitations? These questions come so readily into the mind that we naturally wish the discussion to cover them.
Generally, then, who is eligible for the social inheritance? This heir to society we are, all of us. Society does not make a will, it is true; nor does society die intestate. To say that it is we who inherit the riches of the social past of the race, is to say that we are the children of the past in a sense which comes upon us with all the force that bears in upon the natural heir when he finds his name in will or law. But there are exceptions. And before we seek the marks of the legitimacy 202 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
of our claim to be the heirs of the hundreds of years of accumulated thought and action, it may be well to advise ourselves as to the poor creatures who do not enter into the inheritance with us. They are those who people our asylums, our re- formatories, our jails and penitentiaries; those who prey upon the body of our social life by de- mands for charitable support, or for the more radical treatment by isolation in institutions; in- deed, some who are born to fail in this inheritance are with us no more, even though they were of our generation; they have paid the penalty which their effort to wrest the inheritance from us has cost, and the grave of the murderer, the burglar, the suicide, the red-handed rebel against the law of social inheritance, is now their resting place. Society then is, when taken in the widest sense, made up of two classes of people — the heirs who possess and the delinquents by birth or conduct who have forfeited the inheritance.
We may get a clear idea of the way a man at- tains his social heritage by dropping figure for the present and speaking in the terms of plain natural science. Ever since Darwin propounded the law of Natural Selection the word Variation has been current in the sense explained on an earlier page.
The student in natural science has come to look for variations as the necessary preliminary to any new step of progress and adaptation in the sphere of organic life. Nature, we now know, is fruitful to an extraordinary degree. She pro- duces many specimens of everything. It is a general fact of reproduction that the offspring of plant or animal is quite out of proportion in num- bers to the parents that produce them, and often also to the means of living which await them.
THE INDIVIDUAL MIND AND SOCIETY. 203 One plant produces seeds which are carried far and near — to the ocean and to the desert rocks, no less than to the soil in which they may take root and grow. Insects multiply at a rate which is simply inconceivable to our limited capacity for thinking in figures. Animals also produce more abundantly, and man has children in numbers which allow him to bury half his offspring yearly and yet increase the adult population from year to year. This means, of course, that whatever the inheritance is, all do not inherit it; some must go without a portion whenever the resources of na- ture, or the family, are in any degree limited and when competition is sharp.
Now Nature solves the problem among the animals in the simplest of ways. All the young born in the same family are not exactly alike; " variations " occur. There are those that are better nourished, those that have larger muscles, those that breathe deeper and run faster. So the question who of these shall inherit the earth, the fields, the air, the water — this is left to itself. The best of all the variations live, and the others die. Those that do live have thus, to all intents and purposes, been " selected " for the inheritance, just as really as if the parents of the species had left a will and had been able to enforce it. This is the principle of " Natural Selection."
Now, this way of looking at problems which involve aggregates of individuals and their distri- bution is becoming a habit of the age. Wherever the application of the principles of probability do not explain a statistical result — that is, wherever there seem to be influences which favour particular individuals at the expense of others — men turn at once to the occurrence of Variations for the justifi- 204 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
cation of this seeming partiality of Nature. And what it means is that Nature is partial to individ- uals in making them, in their natural heredity, rather than after they are born.
The principle of heredity with variations is a safe assumption to make also in regard to man- kind; and we see at once that in order to come in for a part in the social heritage of our fathers we must be born fit for it. We must be born so en- dowed for the race of social life that we assimi- late, from our birth up, the spirit of the society into which we are reared. The unfittest, socially, are suppressed. In this there is a distinction be- tween this sphere of survival and that of the ani- mal world. In it the fittest survive, the others are lost; but in society the unfittest are lost, all the others survive. Social selection weeds out the unfit, the murderer, the most unsocial man, and says to him: "You must die"; natural selection seeks out the most fit and says: "You alone are to live." The difference is important, for it marks a prime series of distinctions, when the conceptions drawn from biology are applied to social phenomena; but for the understanding of variations we need not now pursue it further. The contrast may be put, however, in a sentence: in organic evolution we have the natural selection of the fit; in social progress we have the social suppression of the unfit.
Given social variations, therefore, differences among men, what becomes of this man or that? We see at once that if society is to live there must be limits set somewhere to the degree of variation which a given man may show from the standards of society. And we may find out something of these limits by looking at the evident, and marked differences which actually appear about us.
THE INDIVIDUAL MIND AND SOCIETY. 205 First, there is theydiot/ He is not available, from a social point of view, because he varies too much on the side of defect. He shows from in- fancy that he is unable to enter into the social heritage because he is unable to learn to do social things. His intelligence does not grow with his body. Society pities him if he be without natural protection, and puts him away in an institution, So of the insane, the pronounced lunatic; he varies too much to sustain in any way the wide system of social relationships which society re- quires of each individual. Either he is unable to take care of himself, or he attempts the life of some one else, or he is the harmless, unsocial thing that wanders among us like an animal or stands in his place like a plant. He is not a factor in social life; he has not come into the in- heritance.
Then there is the extraordinary class of peo- ple whom we may describe by a stronger term than those already emplo^fed. We find not only the unsocial, the negatively unfit, those whom society puts away with pity in its heart; there are also the antisocial, the class whom we usually designate as criminals. These persons, like the others, are variations; but they seem to be varia- tions in quite another way. They do not repre- sent lack on the intellectual side always or alone, but on the moral side, on the social side, as such. The least we can say of the criminals is that they tend, by heredity or by evil example, to violate the rules which society has seen fit to lay down for the general security of men living together in the enjoyment of the social heritage. So far, then, they are factors of disintegration, of de- struction; enemies of the social progress which 15 206 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
proceeds from generation to generation by just this process of social inheritance. So society says to the criminal also: " You must per- ish." We kill off the worst, imprison the bad for life, attempt to reform the rest. They, too, then, are excluded from the heritage of the past.
So our lines of eligibility get more and more narrowly drawn. The instances of exclusion now cited serve to give us some insight into the real qualities of the man who lives a social part, and the way he comes to live it.
Passing on to take up the second of the in- formal topics suggested, we have to find the best description that we can of the social man — the one who is fitted for the social life. This question concerns the process by which any one of us comes into the wealth of relationships which the social life represents. For to say that a man does this is in itself to say that he is the man society is looking for. Indeed, this is the only way to describe the man — to actually find him. Society is essen- tially a growing, shifting thing. It changes from age to age, from country to country. The Greeks had their social conditions, and the Romans theirs. Even the criminal lines are drawn dif- ferently, somewhat, here and there; and in a low stage of civilization a man may pass for normal who, in our time, would be described as weak in mind. This makes it necessary that the standards of judgment of a given society should be deter- mined by an actual examination of the society, and forbids us to say that the limits of varia- tion which society in general will tolerate must be this or that.
We may say, then, that the man who is fit for THE INDIVIDUAL MlND AND SOCIETY. 207 social life must be born to learn. The need of learn- ing is his essential need. It comes upon him from his birth. Speech is the first great social function which he must learn, and with it all the varieties of verbal accomplishment — reading and writing. This brings to the front the great method of all his learning — imitation. In order to be social he must be imitative, imitative, imitative. He must realize for himself by action the forms, conven- tions, requirements, co-operations of his social group. All is learning; and learning not by himself and at random, but under the leading of the social conditions which surround him. Plas- ticity is his safety and the means of his progress. So he grows into the social organization, takes his place as a Socius in the work of the world, and lays deep the sense of values, upon the basis of which his own contributions — if he be destined to make contributions — to the wealth of the world are to be wrought out. This great fact that he is open to the play of the personal influences which are about him is just the " suggestibleness " which we have already described in an earlier chapter; and the influences themselves are " suggestions " — social suggestions. These influences differ in different communities, as we so often remark.
The Turk learns to live in a very different system of relations of " give and take "from ours, and ours differ as much from those of the Chinese. All that is characteristic of the race or tribe or group or family — all this sinks into the child and youth by his simple presence there in it, with the capacity to learn by imitation. He is suggest- ible, and here are the suggestions; he is made to inherit and he inherits. So it makes no differ- ence what his tribe or kindred be; let him be a