Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/146

136 possessed also by the lower animals, and are sufficient to explain all the particulars of their conduct.

It is manifest, therefore, that the education of a child may he conducted, in the direction, and to the extent, in which it is possible to educate a horse, a dog, or an elephant, without necessarily trenching upon or at all arousing any faculty that is distinctly human in its nature. The child, moreover, possesses an endowment, of a purely sensational or animal kind, in which brutes are deficient, namely, the power (subsidiary to the gift of language) to remember a great number of sounds, and to imitate them with facility; so that, just to the extent of this power, the sensational educability of the human race exceeds that of the lower animals.

It should be remembered, moreover, that the functional activity of the sensorial tract of the encephalon is an absolute necessity of animal existence; and that, in men and brutes alike, it is provided for by an energetic tendency to spontaneous development under the influence of its appropriate excitants. In what may be termed the natural life, a blind submission to the promptings of sensations, present or remembered, would in all ordinary cases supply the wants, or gratify the passions of man. It is only in life modified by human aggregation that these promptings require to be controlled by an exercise of will, guided by a prior exercise of judgment; and, therefore, while Divine Providence has endowed the human race with sensational faculties that are called into vigorous action by daily wants or by physical impressions from without, we may observe that the higher powers of the mind, in a great majority of instances, cannot be matured excepting by assiduous cultivation.

In this respect, however, there is probably a considerable original diversity between individuals; and we are much inclined to think that herein consists the chief cause of gradations of ability among persons who neither greatly surpass an average standard nor fall greatly short of it. Observation teaches that it is far more easy in some children than in others to carry instruction beyond the sense-perceptions, and to call the intellect into activity; but, it teaches, also, that the supposed difficulty often arises from an improper selection or application of the means employed, and is simply a failure to open a lock with a wrong key. The apparently dull child not unfrequently receives the necessary stimulus from a trivial circumstance, from a conversation, a book, or a pursuit, and may grow into a gifted man; while a parallel transformation may be accomplished much later in life, under the influence of some new opportunity for action. It is possible that, in minds of the highest order, the intellectual faculties may possess the character of spontaneity which is commonly limited to the sensorial tract; but, in all ordinary cases, these faculties require to be excited in the pupil by their presence and their activity in the teacher.

The sensational and intellectual functions of the human brain are