354- THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



enable you to put your finger on your error, or by a demonstration 

 to convince you of it. But it will take months or years to modify 

 a feeling, an inclination, or a habit. Intelligence is, therefore, 

 more flexible, more movable, more progressive, than the rest of 

 our constitution, and for that reason we can act upon it with more 

 facility. Put over the eye of a near-sighted man glasses that will 

 make things visible to him, and he will be obliged to agree that he 

 sees them ; show an ignorant man a drop of water in the micro- 

 scopic field, and he will have to recognize that it is inhabited. 

 Intelligence is to the other faculties of our mind what the eyes are 

 to the organs of our body — a touch at a distance. Hence intellec- 

 tual activity has a superior power to direct and transform the 

 other kinds of activity. As it discovers new sides in things, it 

 thereby produces a double effect. It excites new feelings and 

 opens new ways to action. Every new idea tends thus to become 

 a sentiment and an impulse, and consequently an idea-force. The 

 intelligence is the great instrument of voluntary selection. It is a 

 shortening means of evolution ; it accelerates and accomplishes in a 

 few years selections that might otherwise have required centuries. 



If, instead of the individual, we regard the social organism, we 

 shall find that here, too, the diverse activities and the diverse 

 products of civilization are conditioned upon one another, while 

 the products of intelligence and knowledge stimulate or direct all 

 the social functions. Religious, moral, aesthetic, political, and 

 economical creations are determined by the progress made by 

 mankind, whether in the real knowledge of things or in the dis- 

 covery of new ideals. Instruction is a motor of prime importance 

 in the social mechanism ; but on condition that it is brought to 

 bear on truly directive and selective ideas, on those which, by 

 their intimate relation with feeling and will, conspicuously merit 

 the name of idea-forces. 



There is, therefore, a medium between prepossessions for and 

 against education. If education does not manifest all the power 

 of which it is capable, it is because it is rarely directed toward its 

 true end and by means adapted to that end. From this results a 

 loss of living forces by the mutual neutralization and disorder of 

 ideas. We sow ideas, as it were, at haphazard in the mind. They 

 germinate in like manner according to the chances of circum- 

 stances, of internal predispositions and of the external medium. 

 This is fortuitous selection, as in the domain of material forces. 

 It is not sufficient to instruct ; instruction itself must become an 

 education, a process of reflected and methodical selection between 

 ideas that tend to assume reality in acts. We say continually, 

 instruction ; other peoples say cultivation, and they are right. The 

 former word leads us to consider the material bearing of what is 

 acquired ; the latter the degree of fertility gained by the mind. 



