DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 509 



is true, rather of conceptual tlian of perceptive discrimi- 

 nation, wrote, wittily enough: 



"The great bulk of the illogical part of the educated community— 

 whether majority or minority I know not ; perhaps six of one and half 

 a dozen of the other— have not power to make a distinction, and of 

 course cannot be made to take a distinction, and of course never at- 

 tempt to shake a distinction. With them all such things are evasions, 

 subterfuges, come-offs, loop-holes, etc. They would hang a man for 

 horse-stealing under a statute against sheep-stealing ; and would laugh 

 at you if you quibbled about the distinction between a horse and a 

 sheep." * 



Any personal or practical interest, however, in the re- 

 sults to be obtained by distinguishing, makes one's wits 

 amazingly sharp to detect diflferences. The culprit himself 

 is not likely to overlook the difference between a horse and 

 a sheep. And long training and practice in distinguishing 

 has the same effect as personal interest. Both of these 

 agencies give to small amounts of objective difference the 

 same effectiveness upon the mind that, under other circum- 

 stances, only large ones would have. Let us seek to pene- 

 trate the modus ope^^andi of their influence — beginning wdth 

 that of practice and habit. 



That ' practice makes perfect ' is notorious in the field 

 of motor accomplishments. But motor accomplishments 

 depend in part on sensory discrimination. Billiard-play- 

 ing, rifle-shooting, tight-rope-dancing, demand the most 

 delicate a23preciation of minute disparities of sensation, as 

 well as the power to make accurately graduated muscular 

 response thereto. In the purely sensorial field we have 

 the well-known virtuosity displayed by the professional 

 buyers and testers of various kinds of goods. One man 

 will distinguish bj- taste between the upper and the lower 

 half of a bottle of old Madeira, Another will recognize, 

 by feeling the flour in a barrel, whether the wheat was 

 grown in Iowa or Tennessee. The blind deaf-mute, Laura 

 Bridgman, had so improved her touch as to recognize, 

 after a year's interval, the hand of a person who once had 

 shaken hers ; and her sister in misfortune, Julia Brace, is 

 said to have been employed in the Hartford Asylum to sort 



* A Budget of Paradoxes, p. 380. 



