OP THE BRAIN AND MIND. 239 



approaches ; and, in like manner, if we arrange our 

 studies in accordance with this law, and take up 

 each regularly in the same order, a natural aptitude 

 is soon produced, which renders application more 

 easy than by taking up the subjects as accident may 

 direct. Nay, the tendency to periodical and asso- 

 ciated activity occasionally becomes so great, in the 

 course of time, that the faculties seem to go through 

 their operations almost without conscious effort, 

 while their facility of action becomes so prodigi- 

 ously increased, as to give unerring certainty where 

 at first difficulty and doubt were the only results.* 



In thus acquiring readiness and forming habits, we 

 merely turn to account that organic law which asso- 

 ciates increased aptitude, animation, and vigour with 

 regular exercise. It is not the soul or abstract 

 principle of mind which is thus changed, but simply 

 the organic medium through which it is destined to 

 act; and, when we compare the rapid and easy elo- 

 quence of the practised orator with the slow and 

 embarrassed utterance which distinguished him at 

 the outset of his career, we have merely a counter- 

 part, in the organ of mind, of what is effected in the 

 organs of motion, when the easy and graceful move- 

 ments of the practised dancer, writer, or piano-forte 

 player take the place of his earliest and rudest at- 

 tempts. 



The necessity of judicious repetition in mental and 

 moral education is in fact too little adverted to, be- 

 cause the principle on which it is effectual has not 



* These remarks are curiously confirmed by an anecdote of 

 Sildo Pellico, which I read in the Foreign Quarterly Review 

 (No. xxii. p. 478), when this sheet was passing through the 

 press. When first imprisoned, Pellico was " allowed the use of 

 a copy of Dante and the Bible. Of the former, he used to com- 

 mit a canto to memory every day, till a last the exercise became 

 to mechanical that it ceased to afford any interruption to the train of 

 melancholy thought." I need scarcely point out the coincidence 

 between this and the remarks in the text. 



