Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/358

346 differences in the degree of vividness and fervor with which they are impressed by individual objects, which leave so many persons in the most limp indifference, while exciting in others an absorbing and even passionate interest. When the individual impressions are so clear, distinct, characteristic, and interesting as to be quite unforgettable, they soon force upon the mind, after prolonged contemplation of them, suggestions of their multiple relations, and the knowledge which was at first simply picturesque becomes, sooner or later, scientific. The mental power which arrives at this is largely innate, and beyond the capacity of any education to bestow. But if any educational method can increase and develop it, it is that which most nearly imitates the spontaneous habits of fertile and original minds, apart from all systematic intention.

Three characters are conspicuous in the observation exercised by this class of minds: it is single, it is imaginative, and it is indefinitely prolonged. It is single—that is to say, the mind which is powerfully attracted to any object—and none ever discovers anything in any object to which it is not powerfully attracted, is in no haste to detach itself and pass on to anything new; on the contrary, it lingers and hates to go, and delays, and returns again and again to catch still another glimpse of what has been so delightful. To say that an object is suggestive is to say that it constantly opens up new trains of thought, and, so long as this is the case, the mind can not bear to abandon it. It is on this account that the contemplation is indefinitely prolonged, and irregularly so, according to no fixed rule or extrinsic necessity, not even that of mastering a certain quotum of information, but varies in accordance with the infinitely varied accidents of the mental intercourse. Finally, to be fruitful, this intercourse must be imaginative. First, in the lowest and most literal sense of the term, since the mind can not directly handle the sense-perception of the object, but only the mental image of the object, revived and remembered. But, in addition, to detect all its hidden meanings, properties, and possible aspects, many functions of the imagination must be brought into play, and none are useless. Fertility of fancy, rich association of ideas, are as important in collecting the premises for scientific argument as is the argument itself in the discovery of truth.

During the pre-scientific period, therefore, either in the history of the race, the development of the individual, or the evolution of any single idea in an inquiring mind, the cardinal necessity is that of filling the mind with an abundance of distinct concepts and visual images of real concrete existences. Any prolonged attempt to compare, generalize, or reason about these should be deferred, under penalty of substituting a mere verbal imitation of reasoning for a real effort of the mind. A certain amount of reasoning and comparison will, of course,