Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/410

394 to include invention or discovery; the culture of the creative faculty is not comprised in the present discussion.

The psychology of constructiveness is remarkably simple. There are certain primary conditions that run through all the cases; and it is by paying due respect to these conditions that we can, as teachers, render every possible assistance to the struggling pupils.

1. The constructive process supposes something to construct from; some powers already possessed that can be exercised, directed, and combined, in a new manner. We must walk before beginning to dance; we must articulate simple sounds before we can articulate words; we must draw straight strokes and pot-hooks before we can form letters; we must conceive trees and shrubs, flowers and grassy plots, before we can conceive a garden.

The practical inference is no less obvious and irresistible; it is one that covers the whole field of education, and could never be entirely neglected, although it has certainly never been fully carried out. Before entering on a new exercise, we must first be led up to it by mastering the preliminary or preparatory exercises. Teachers are compelled by their failures to attend to this fact in the more palpable exercises, as speaking and writing. They lose sight of it, when the succession of stages is too subtile for their apprehension, as in the understanding of scientific doctrines.

2. In aiming at a new construction, we must clearly conceive what is aimed at; we must have the means of judging whether or not our tentatives are successful. The child in writing has the copy-lines before it; the man in the ranks sees the fugleman, or hears the approving or disapproving voice of the drill-sergeant. Where we have a very distinct and intelligible model before us, we are in a fair way to succeed; in proportion as the ideal is dim and wavering, we stagger and miscarry. When we depend upon a teacher's expressed approval of our effort, it behooves him to be very consistent, as well as very sound, in his judgment; should he be one thing to-day, and another thing to-morrow, we are unhinged and undone.

It is a defect pertaining to all models that they contain individual peculiarities mixed up with the ideal intention. We carry away with us from every instructor touches of mannerism, and the worst of it is that some learners catch nothing but the mannerism; this being generally easier to fall into than the essential merits of the teaching. There is no remedy here except the comparison of several good models; as the ship-captain carries with him a number of chronometers.

In following an unapproachable original, as in learning to write from copperplate lines, we need a second judgment to inform us whether our deviations are serious and fundamental, or are venial and unavoidable. The good tact of our instructor is here put to the test; he may make our path like the shining light that shineth more and more, or he may leave us in hopeless perplexity. To point out to us