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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



The practical question which underlies Dr. 

 Carpenter's work, and to which this work to some 

 extent furnishes a reply, may, perhaps, be most 

 clearly put by asking how far our knowledge of 

 the organs which are subservient to the mental 

 operations, and of the conditions under which 

 these organs act, will enable us to modify the 

 nature of the operations themselves ; how far 

 they will assist us in guiding the moral and intel- 

 lectual faculties of man, and in making each suc- 

 cessive generation wiser and better than those 

 which have preceded it. Until now it must be 

 confessed that education, whether intellectual or 

 moral, has been an empirical art, chiefly prac- 

 tised by persons who have despised and avoided 

 the knowledge of the simplest rudiments of phys- 

 iology. The late Dr. Arnold stood almost alone, 

 for a long period, in his endeavors systematically 

 to influence moral character by scholastic dis- 

 cipline ; and even he, although he displayed a 

 clear perception of some of the means to be used, 

 and of the ends which might be compassed by 

 using them, could have had little or no knowl- 

 edge, certainly no precise knowledge, of the mo- 

 dus operandi of his method. Dr. Carpenter tells 

 us, on the other hand, that the scientific educator 

 should possess a very great degree of control 

 over both the moral feelings and the purely in- 

 tellectual acts of his pupils ; and that education, 

 using the word in the sense given to it by Daley, 

 to express every preparation which is made in 

 our youth for the sequel of our lives, should not 

 only exert a potent sway over the thoughts and 

 acts of those who have been trained by proper 

 means, but that also, besides producing a decent 

 conformity to accepted social standards, it should 

 produce, in every successive generation, a dis- 

 tinct elevation of the race. In each individual it 

 may be admitted that the capacity for improve- 

 ment is confined within comparatively narrow 

 limits, imposed by the physical condition of the 

 brain-substance; but it may fairly be doubted 

 whether these limits are reached as a general 

 rule; and the readiness of the brain to "grow 

 to " habitual methods of activity, and to transmit 

 its thus acquired capacities to posterity, would 

 sufficiently provide for a progressive increase in 

 the powers of each generation to acquire and to 

 apply knowledge. 



Regarded by the light of physiology, we ought 

 to begin to sec our way toward a great educa- 

 tional reform. It ought to be within the power 

 of the educator, if the principles now enunciated 

 by physiologists are well founded, to determine, 

 in the first place, the nature of the responses 



made by the nervous system to external impres- 

 sions, and, in the next place, the nature of the 

 ideas which should be kept most prominent- 

 ly before the consciousness, and which, there- 

 fore, should become the " motives " by which 

 the general course of conduct will be gov. 

 erned. 



With regard to the first of these points, it is 

 necessary to revert to the account already given- 

 of the difference between sensori-motor and ideo- 

 motor action, and to show that, as it is the natu- 

 ral tendency of an undeveloped nervous system 

 to perform the humbler rather than the higher 

 function, to allow impressions made upon the 

 sensorium to expend themselves in sensori-motor 

 action rather than to pass on through the sen- 

 sorium and to excite ideas, it should be the con- 

 stant endeavor of the educator to overcome this 

 tendency, and so to direct and reiterate the im- 

 pressions made by teaching that ideas should in 

 time become their habitual results. There are 

 probably few teachers who have not heard some- 

 thing about the possibility of " learning by rote " 

 (which is one form of merely sensorial activity in 

 which certain sounds have become associated 

 with the sight of certain written or printed sym- 

 bols, and are uttered when these symbols are 

 seen or remembered), but there probably is not 

 one in a thousand who understands what " learn- 

 ing by rote " is — how it is accomplished by the 

 nervous centres, how it differs from learning with 

 the intelligence, and how it may be detected and 

 exposed under whatever guise it may be con- 

 cealed. The great majority of teachers think 

 that they have banished learning by rcte when 

 their pupils are able to " explain " their first an- 

 swer to a question by a second one ; the second, 

 in most cases, being as purely sensorial a symbol 

 as the first, and the original sight-symbol, with 

 its two vocal equivalents, being really, as far as 

 " ideation " is concerned, an unknown quantity 

 for which either of two other unknown quantities 

 may be substituted. One of the most familiar 

 illustrations of sensorial action is that which was 

 recorded by the late Mr. Brookfield, in which two 

 children, aged about eleven years, who did their 

 arithmetic and reading tolerably well, who wrote 

 something pretty legible, intelligible, and sensi- 

 ble, about an omnibus and about a steamboat, 

 were called upou to write down the answers of 

 the Church Catechism to two questions. The 

 children had been accustomed to repeat the Cate- 

 chism during half an hour of each day, in day- 

 school and Sunday-school, for four or five years, 

 and this is what they wrote: 



