Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/536

518 goes with the pleasure-giving exercise. The harvest of immediate pleasure stimulates our most intense exertions, if exertion serves to prolong the blessing. So it is with the deepening of an impression, the confirming of a bent or bias, the associating of a couple or a sequence of acts; a coinciding burst of joy awakens the attention, and thus leads to an enduring stamp on the mental framework.

The ingraining efficiency of the pleasurable motive requires not only that we should not be carried off into an accustomed routine of voluntary activities, such as to give to the forces another direction, as when we pace to and fro in a flower-garden; but also that the pleasure should not be intense or tumultuous. The law of the mutual exclusion of great pleasure and great intellectual exertion forbids the employment of too much excitement of any kind, when we aim at the most exacting of all mental results—the forming of new adhesive growths. A gentle pleasure that for the time contents us, there being no great temptation at hand, is the best foster-mother of our efforts at learning. Still better, if it be a growing pleasure; a small beginning, with steady increase, never too absorbing, is the best of all stimulants to mental power. In order to have a yet wider compass of stimulation, without objectionable extremes, we might begin on the negative side, that is, in pain or privation, to be gradually remitted in the course of the studious exercise, giving place at last to the exhilaration of a waxing pleasure. All the great teachers, from Socrates downward, seem to recognize the necessity of putting the learner into a state of pain to begin with; a fact that we are by no means to exult over, although we may have to admit the stern truth that is in it. The influence of pain, however, takes a wider range than here supposed, as will be seen under our next head.

A moderate exhilaration and cheerfulness, growing out of the act of learning itself, is certainly the most genial, the most effectual means of cementing the unions that we desire to form in the mind. This is meant when we speak of the learner having a taste far his pursuit, having the heart in it, learning con amore. The fact is perfectly well known; the error, in connection with it, lies in dictating or enjoining this state of mind on everybody in every situation, as if it could be commanded by a wish, or as if it were not itself an expensive endowment. The brain cannot yield an exceptional pleasure without charging for it.

Next to pleasure in the actual, as a concentrating motive, is pleasure in prospect, as in learning what is to bring us some future gratification. The stimulus has the inferiority attaching to the idea of pleasure as compared with the reality. Still it may be of various degrees, and may rise to a considerable pitch of force. Parents often reward their children with coins for success in their lessons; the conception of the pleasure in this case is nearly equal to a present tremor of sense-delight. On the other hand, the promises of fortune and