360 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



either by suggesting problems that appear to demand pure thinking 

 alone for their solution, or by imbuing the mind with an ambitious 

 tone, in which the ordinary events of e very-day experience are looked 

 upon as unworthy of notice. In the latter case it must be acting mis- 

 chievously ; in the former case it may be mischievous, though it is 

 not always so. If a problem is really of a purely abstract character, 

 it is inevitable that external observation should be lulled during the 

 investigation of it. Newton was in many respects an inobservant, 

 absent-minded man ; but without that inobservance he could not have 

 been the master of abstract thought that he was, or have made the 

 discoveries that have been so powerfully beneficial to the human race. 

 But there are many problems which have an appearance of being ab- 

 stract, and soluble by pure thought alone, in which this is by no means 

 really the case. Questions of ethics, of political economy, of art, are 

 of this nature ; they have a delusive appearance of abstraction from 

 the actual world in which we live ; and many an inquirer has gone 

 round and round in them in a profitless circle, without being aware 

 that the element needed to render him successful was not brain-power 

 at all, but experience of men and things. The danger, however, that 

 the faculties of observation may be blunted by an excess of abstract 

 thought is not very great in the popular education of the present day. 

 But the danger that they may be blunted by mistaken ambition is a 

 real one. The clever and educated poor will at times despise the com- 

 mon incidents of daily life, in comparison with that larger sphere to 

 which books give them an introduction in imagination, though not in 

 reality. Housekeepers find that servants neglect the pots and pans 

 and dishes, can not find anything when it is wanted, can not see cob- 

 webs in the corners or dust upon the shelves and tables, while their 

 attention is devoted to the pleasures of literature in some, very often 

 questionable, form. Farmers, we have been told, complain of the de- 

 generacy of plowboys from the same cause. True, farmers are a 

 complaining race, and their misfortunes of late years may have made 

 them more querulous than usual ; but their testimony should not be 

 quite disregarded. Some considerable application of the maxim that 

 people should do their duty in their own station will be found to give 

 no unneeded help to the observant faculties at a time of large gen- 

 eral progress, when hopes and ideas are apt to be extensive and 

 vague. 



But it is not enough that education should refrain from hindering 

 the faculties of observation ; it ought, if it is sound, actually to pro- 

 mote and enlarge those faculties. How this may be done is a problem 

 not without difficulty. While the fault of inobservance is simple and 

 single in its nature, the virtue of ready observation is complex, re- 

 lating to many different spheres ; he who possesses it in one sphere 

 may lack it in another. When Thales, looking at the stars, tumbled 

 into a well that lay before his feet, he was partly very inobservant, 



