EDUCATION AS' A SCIENCE. 425 



Bearings of Psychology. The largest chapter in the science of 

 education must be the following out of all the psychological laws 

 that bear directly or indirectly upon the process of mental acquire- 

 ment. Every branch of psychology will be found available ; but 

 more especially the psychology of the intellect. Of the three great 

 functions of the intellect, in the ultimate analysis discrimination,- 

 agreement, retentiveness the last is the most completely identified 

 with the education process ; but the others enter in as constituents in 

 a way peculiar to each. I will select for my present paper, Discrimi- 

 nation and Retentiveness ; and will endeavor to extract, from the 

 discussion of these great intellectual functions, everything that they 

 appear to yield for the ends of the educator. Although I can impart 

 no novelty to the general statement of these functions, it is possi- 

 ble to make some unhackneyed remarks on their educational conse- 

 quences. 



Discrimination. Mind starts from discrimination. The conscious- 

 ness of difference is the beginning of every intellectual exercise. To 

 encounter a new impression is to be aware of change : if the heat of 

 a room increases ten degrees, we are awakened to the circumstance 

 by a change of feeling ; if we have no change of feeling, no altered 

 consciousness, the outward fact is lost upon us ; we take no notice of 

 it, we are said not to know it. 



Our intelligence is, therefore, absolutely limited by our power of 

 discrimination. The other functions of intellect, the retentive power, 

 for example, are not called into play, until w T e have first discrimi- 

 nated a number of things. If we did not originally feel the difference 

 between light and dark, black and white, red and yellow, there would 

 be no visible scenes for us to remember : with the amplest endowment 

 of retentiveness, the outer world could not enter into our recollection; 

 the blank of sensation is a blank of memory. 



Yet further. The minuteness or delicacy of the feeling of differ- 

 ence is the measure of the variety and multitude of our primary 

 impressions, and therefore of our stirred-up recollections. He that 

 hears only twelve discriminated notes 011 the musical scale has his 

 remembrances of sounds bounded by these; he that feels a. hundred 

 sensible differences has his ideas or recollections of sounds multiplied 

 in the same proportion. The retentive power works up to the height 

 of the discriminative power ; it can do no more. Things are not re- 

 membered if they have not first been discriminated. 



We have by nature a certain power of discrimination in each de- 

 partment of our sensibility. "We can from the outset discriminate, 

 more or less delicately, sights, sounds, touches, smells, tastes; and, in 

 each sense, some persons much more than others. This is the deepest 

 foundation of disparity of intellectual character, as well as of variety 

 in likings and pursuits. If, from the beginning, one man can interpo- 

 late five shades of discrimination of color where another can feel but 



