Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/537

Rh distinction, after a long interval of years, have seldom much influence in concentrating the mind toward a particular study.

Let us now view the operation of pain. By the law of the will, pain repels us from the thing that causes it. A painful study repels us, just as an agreeable one attracts and detains us. The only way that pain can operate is when it is attached to neglect, or to the want of mental concentration in a given subject; we then find pleasure, by comparison, in sticking to our task. This is the theory of punishing the want of application. It is in every way inferior to the other motives; and this inferiority should be always kept in view in employing it, as every teacher often must with the generality of scholars. Pain is a waste of brain-power; while the work of the learner needs the very highest form of this power. Punishment works at a heavy percentage of deduction, which is still greater as it passes into the well-defined form of terror. Every one has experienced cases where severity has rendered a pupil utterly incapable of the work prescribed.

Discarding all a priori theories as to whether the human mind can be led on to study by an ingenious system of pleasurable attractions, we are safe in affirming that if the physical conditions are properly regarded, if the work is within the compass of the pupil's faculties, and if a fair amount of assistance is rendered in the way of intelligible direction, although some sort of pain will frequently be necessary, it ought not to be so great as to damp the spirits and waste the plastic energy.

The line of remark is exactly the same for pain in prospect, with allowance for the difference between reality and the idea. It is well when prospective pain has the power of a motive, because the future bad consequences of neglect are so various and so considerable as to save the resort to any other. But since the young mind in general is weak in the sense of futurity, whether for good or for evil, only very near, very intelligible, and very certain pains, can take the place of presently-acting deterrents.

In the study of the human mind, we need, for many purposes, to draw a subtile distinction between feeling as pleasure or pain, and feeling as excitement not necessarily pleasurable or painful. This subtilty cannot be dispensed with in our present subject. There is a form of mental concentration that is properly termed excitement, and is not properly termed pleasurable or painful excitement. A loud or sudden shock, a rapid whirling movement, stirs, wakens, or excites us; it may also give us pleasure or pain, but it may be perfectly neutral; and even when there is pleasure or pain, there is an influence apart from what would belong to pleasure or pain, as such. A state of excitement seizes hold of the mind for the time being and shuts out other mental occupations; we are engrossed with the subject that brought on the state, and are not amenable to extraneous influences, until that has subsided. Hence, excitement is preeminently a means