TRYING TO TELL TOO MUCH 71 



trouble to explain further ; it is for you to give your- 

 selves the trouble to find out what I mean." The second 

 fault is a real incapacity (which occurs in many learned 

 men) to realise the state of mind of the uninstructed 

 man, woman or child who eagerly desires to be instructed : 

 this is want of imagination and want of sympathy. 

 There is no cure for those who fail as teachers for either 

 of these two reasons. 



The third fault is much more widely at work, and the 

 most kindly sympathetic lecturers and writers but more 

 especially lecturers often suffer from it and could easily 

 amend their practice. It consists in the attempt to tell 

 the audience or reader too much vastly too much in 

 the limit of one hour, or within the space of a few lines 

 or pages. This failure is well-nigh universal. I have 

 heard a distinguished discoverer, an eloquent and able 

 man, try to tell a completely ignorant audience in one 

 hour the results of years of experiment and work by 

 many men on the electrical currents observed in nerves. 

 The audience did not know what is meant by an electrical 

 current, nor anything about nerves, nor a single one of 

 the technical terms necessarily used by the lecturer. The 

 task was an impossible one. In six lectures it might 

 have been accomplished, and great delight and increase 

 of understanding afforded to the listeners instead of 

 perplexity and a sense of their own incapacity and the 

 hopeless obscurity of science. That, I am convinced, is 

 the real trouble, viz., the attempt to tell too much in a 

 short time, the failure by the lecturer to arrange his 

 exposition in a series of well-considered, definite steps, 

 each exciting the desire to know more, and each given 

 sufficient time and experimental illustration or pictorial 

 demonstration to lodge its meaning and value safely and 

 soundly in the tender brain of the ignorant but willing 

 listener. I am convinced that there is in very many 

 lecturers a tendency to try to crowd and compress into 

 one lecture what should occupy ten if the willing and 



