Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/538

520 of making an impression, of stamping an idea in the mind; it is strictly an intellectual stimulus. There is still the proviso (under the general law of incompatibility of the two opposite moods) that the excitement must not be violent and wasting. In well-understood moderation, excitement is identical with attention, mental engrossment, the concentration of the forces upon the plastic or cementing operation, the rendering permanent as a recollection what lies in the focus of the blaze. Excitement, so defined, is worthless as an end, but is valuable as a means; and that means is the furtherance of our mental improvement by driving home some useful concatenation of ideas.

Another subtilty remains—a distinction within a distinction. After contrasting feeling as excitement with feeling as pleasure or pain, we must separate the useful from the useless or even pernicious modes of excitement. The useful excitement is what is narrowed and confined to the subject to be impressed; the useless, and worse than useless, excitement is what spreads far and wide, and embraces nothing in particular. It is easy to get up the last species of excitement—the vague, scattered, and tumultuous mode—but this is not of avail for any set purpose; it may be counted rather as a distracting agency than as a means of calling forth and concentrating the attention upon an exercise.

The true excitement for the purpose in view is what grows out of the very subject itself, surrounding and adhering to that subject. Now, for this kind of excitement, the recipe is continuous application of the mind in perfect surrounding stillness. Restrain all other solicitation of the senses; keep the attention upon the one act to be learned; and, by the law of nervous and mental persistence, the currents of the brain will become gradually stronger and stronger, until they have reached the point when they do no more good for the time. This is the ideal of concentration by neutral excitement.

The enemy of such happy neutrality is pleasure from without; and the youthful mind cannot resist the distraction of a present pleasure, or even the scent of a far-off pleasure. The schoolroom is purposely screened off from the view of what is going on outside; while all internal incidents that hold out pleasurable diversion are carefully restrained, at least during the crisis of a difficult lesson. A touch of pain, or apprehension, if only slight, is not unfavorable to the concentration.

A very important observation remains, namely, that relationship of retention to discrimination which was stated in introducing the function of discrimination. The consideration of this relationship illustrates with still greater point the true character of the excitement that concentrates and does not distract nor dissipate the energies. The moment of a delicate discrimination is the moment when the intellectual force is dominant; emotion spurns nice distinctions,