218 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



classes are for " education ! " The village grocer's son goes to a 

 " theological college," and sits up by night over his " Evidences " with 

 green tea in his blood, and a wet cloth about his brows. The gar- 

 dener's daughter pulls roses no more, and has become a pupil-teacher ; 

 she is chlorotic at sixteen, and broken-spirited at twenty. The country 

 parson's son goes to a civil service or a navy " coach," is plucked in his 

 teens, and is left to begin life again with an exhausted brain and an 

 incurable megrim ; nay, even the sons of peers are putting on the ar- 

 mor of light, and are deserting the field for the counting-house. To 

 meet this demand, colleges of all kinds and degrees spring up middle- 

 class seminaries, theological colleges, colleges of science, university 

 boards even the old universities themselves are stirring from their 

 scholarly ease, are sending out missionaries in partibus, and are cram- 

 ming the youth of twenty counties in the art of making most show 

 with least learning. All this, in a way, no doubt, must be and should 

 be ; but so sudden a volte-face cannot be made without a wrench, and 

 it is my desire now to see where the strain will tell, and how to perform 

 our social evolution with the least injury to persons. 



Like the alderman of New York, who found it impossible to pro- 

 pose the paving of a street without allusion to the first lines of the 

 Constitution of the United States, so I must venture to preface my 

 essay by some reference to mental function as we find it. We may 

 see the more clearly how to direct and combine our means of culture 

 when we recognize its purposes. Mental philosophy is a subject in 

 which I am little versed, but I must try in some familiar fashion to 

 classify the aspects of nervous activity as they appear to ordinary ob- 

 servers. Without misleading error, and with much convenience, I may 

 regard these activities from the following five points of view, namely, 

 their Quality, their Quantity, their Tension, their Variety, and their 

 Control. 



By the higher quality of the brain, or of a part of it, I mean that 

 structure of cell and fibre which corresponds more widely or more inti- 

 mately with outer conditions, so that by virtue of such relation the in- 

 dividual more readily apprehends things and conceives them. This is 

 genius in the stricter sense. By quantity I mean the volume of nerve- 

 force given off by the brain or its parts, without regard to quality of 

 work done. By tension I mean the power in the nerve-action to over- 

 come inner or outer resistance " nervous energy," as it is colloquially 

 called. By variety I mean the congregation of different centres, and 

 the weaving of mediate strands which give the possessor, not higher 

 or wider, but a greater number of relations with outer things. In com- 

 mon life this is usually called versatility. By control I mean that sub- 

 ordination of one centre to another, whether inherited or acquired, 

 which if of the lower to the higher results in obedience to the more 

 permanent order of the universe. Thus a man may have a lofty, an 

 abundant, an intense, a versatile, and a well-ruled nervous system, or 



