Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 13.djvu/319

Rh importance, except through derivation from them and the senses together.

The region of Fine Art comprises a large compass of pleasurable feeling, with corresponding susceptibilities to pain; some of-this is sensation proper, being the pleasures of the two higher senses; some is due to associations with the interests of all the senses (Beauty of Utility); a certain portion may be called Intellectual, the perception of unity in variety; while the still largest share appears to be derived from the two great sources above described.

The Intellect generally is a source of various gratifications and also of sufferings that are necessarily mixed up with our intellectual education. Both the delights of attained knowledge and the pains of intellectual labor have to be carefully counted with by every instructor.

The pleasures of Action or Activity are a class greatly pressed into the educational service, and therefore demand special consideration.

The names Self-Esteem, Pride, Vanity, Love of Praise, express powerful sentiments, whose analysis is attended with much subtilty. They are largely appealed to by every one that has to exercise control over human beings. To gratify them is to impart copious pleasure, to thwart or wound them is to inflict corresponding pain.

Mention has not yet been made of one genus of emotion, formidable as a source of pain, and as a motive to activity, namely, Fear or Terror. Only in the shape of reaction or relief is it a source of pleasure. The skillful management of this sensibility has much to do with the efficient control of all sentient creatures, and still more with the saving of gratuitous misery.

Our rapid review of these various sources of emotion, together with others of a minor kind, proposes to deal once for all, and in the best manner, with the various educational questions that turn upon the operation of motives. We shall have to remark upon prevailing exaggerations on some heads and the insufficient stress laid on others; and shall endeavor to unfold in just proportions the entire compass of our emotional susceptibilities available for the purposes of the teacher.

—The state of mind named Terror or Fear is described shortly as a state of extreme misery and depression, prostrating the activity and causing exaggeration of ideas in whatever is related to it, It is an addition to pain pure and simple—the pain of a present infliction. It is roused by the foretaste or prospect of evil, especially if that is great in amount, and still more if it is of uncertain nature.

As far as education is concerned, terror is an incident of the infliction of punishment. We may work by the motive of evil without producing the state of terror, as when the evil is slight and well defined; a small understood privation, a moderate dose of irksomeness, may be salutary and preventive, without any admixture of the quakings and misery of fear. A severe infliction in prospect will