Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/65

 54 J. JACOBS : NEED OF A SOCIETY, ETC. Care has to be taken in forming such test-words that the syllables do not fall into any marked rhythm which con- siderably lessens the trouble of repetition. Hence the ease with which one can retain the comic query Chrononhotontholo^os, Where left you Aldiborontephoscopliornio ? So too the test-words should be learnt as wholes and not bit by bit, or else the suspected law cannot apply. Thus by dividing we can conquer Shakespeare's longest word Honorificabilitudinitatibm (Love's Labour's Lost, v. i.). Any one can say honor and iftcd and so honorificd. Similarly bilitu and dinita easily combine into bilitudinitd, whence the road is direct to Honorifiedbilitudinitd to which we add tibus at our leisure. But add a few consonants to divert the rhythm, e.g., Hol-nop-rig-firn-can-bif-lim-tiLg-(lril-/i ing-taf-til- bus, and it will take a man of seven-threshold eighteen re- petitions to be able to repeat it without mistake. All this may seem trivial and worthy only of the Boys Own Book. But when it is remembered that upon a boy's verbal memory depends his possible success with a classical education, the determination of his threshold of memory and, if there is such a thing, his constant of repetition will immediately appear as eminently practical tests for determining such a point as whether he shall join the modern or the classical side of a school. And this leads me to conclude with a few words 011 the importance and need of psychological inquiry, especially when as in the last simple instance it leads to results boar- ing the true stamp of science in its capacity for measurement. Education can never be much more than a rule-of-thumb affair till it can apply psychological principles with a firm conviction of their validity. A .boy's progress can only be guessed at nowadays : if such tests as the above could be applied systematically, it could be measured. So too the dread question which is being asked more and more fre- quently, " Canst thou minister to a mind diseased ?" must wait for its answer on tho, progress of psychological science. And if the Art of Conduct is ever to be more than rough inductions of social convenience it must find a basis in a properly constituted Science of Mind. The final end of all the sciences represented this year in Aberdeen is to make the characters of men good. Yet we do not know at present what constitutes the ingredients of a man's character, still less what makes that character good.