266 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Take a child on your knee, and, turning over with him some engrav- 

 ings of landscapes, note what he observes. " I see a man in a boat," 

 says he, pointing. "Look at the cows coming down the hill." "And 

 see, there is a little boy playing with a dog." These and other such 

 remarks, mostly about the living objects in each view, are all you get 

 from him. Never by any chance does he utter a word respecting the 

 scene as a whole. There is an absolute unconsciousness of any thing 

 to be observed, or to be pleased with, in the combination of wood and 

 water and mountain. And, while the child is entirely without this 

 complex aesthetic consciousness, you see that he has not the remotest 

 idea that such a consciousness exists in others, but is wanting in him- 

 self. Take, now, a case in which a kindred defect is betrayed by an 

 adult. You have, perhaps, in the course of your life, had some musi- 

 cal culture, and can recall the stages through which you have passed. 

 In early days a symphony was a mystery, and you were somewhat 

 puzzled to find others applauding it. An unfolding of musical faculty, 

 that went on slowly through succeeding years, brought some apprecia- 

 tion, and now these complex musical combinations, which once gave 

 you little or no pleasure, give you more pleasure than any others. 

 Remembering all this, you begin to suspect that your indifference to 

 certain still more involved musical combinations may arise from inca- 

 pacity in you, and not from defects in them. See, on the other hand, 

 what happens with one who has undergone no such series of changes 

 say, an old naval officer, whose life at sea kept him out of the way 

 of concerts and operas. You hear him occasionally confess, or rather 

 boast, how much he enjoys the bagpipes. While the last cadences of 

 a sonata, which a young lady has just played, are still in your ears, he 

 goes up to her and asks whether she can play " Polly, put the kettle 

 on," or " Johnny comes marching home." And then, when concerts 

 are talked about at table, he seizes the occasion for expressing his dis- 

 like of classical music, and scarcely conceals his contempt for those 

 who go to hear it. On contemplating his mental state, you see that, 

 along with absence of the faculty for grasping complex musical combi- 

 nations, there goes no consciousness of the absence there is no suspi- 

 cion that such complex combinations exist, and that other persons 

 have faculties for appreciating them. 



And now for the application of this general truth to our subject. 

 The conceptions with which sociological science is concerned are 

 complex beyond all others. In the absence of faculty having a cor- 

 responding complexity, they cannot be grasped. Here, however, as in 

 other cases, the absence of an adequately complex faculty is not ac- 

 companied by any consciousness of incapacity. Rather do we find 

 that, in proportion to the deficiency in the required kind of mental 

 grasp, there is an extreme confidence of judgment on sociological ques- 

 tions, and a ridicule of those who, after long discipline, begin to per- 

 ceive what there is to be understood, and how difficult is the right un- 



