Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/554

536 lofty ideal of Prof. Huxley: "Education promotes morality and refinement by teaching men to discipline themselves, and by leading them to see that the highest, as it is the only permanent, content is to be attained, not by groveling in the rank and steaming valleys of sense, but by continually striving to those high peaks where, resting in eternal calm, reason discovers the undefined bright ideal of the highest good—a cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night." We do not all see the same differentiations of color or appreciate the varieties of taste, smell, or touch, or hear to the same extent the infinite variety of musical expression; and it is only by cultivating our senses that they can be improved. About a year ago, at the Ida Hospital there were some very offensive smells. Everybody thought there must be something wrong with the drains, until the resident, Mr. Wilks, discovered a horribly offensive fungus. I requested him to bring some specimens to the infirmary weekly board meeting, and I was very much interested to hear what the different members would say. The first to examine it said that "it did not smell at all"; the second that "it was not so bad"; but all the other members agreed with me that it was horribly offensive and quite accounted for the bad smells. I mention this as an example of differences of opinion about a fact as to whether something was or was not offensive, and to illustrate that we do not all appreciate sensations to the same extent. You are all of you familiar with the curious phenomenon of color-blindness; but there is a much more common and not so easily detected form of blindness which has received the name of "intellectual blindness." We all suffer from it more or less; some to such an extent as to be almost like unto an ancient description of some heathen gods, "who have eyes and see not, ears and hear not, noses have they and they smell not." You have all of you been struck with the fact that there are certain things we see every day, yet all at once we discover something in them we have never noticed before. I venture to predict that, if I gave all of you a piece of paper and asked you to write down the exact figures as they appear on the face of your watches, not one tenth of you would put them down accurately—i. e., of course if you have not already tried the experiment—and yet all of you have seen your watch faces several hundreds of times. Or, if you like to make the experiment of getting half a dozen eyewitnesses to describe something they have seen, it is more than probable we should find very marked differences in their descriptions. I think you will agree with me that some of the descriptions in the daily papers bear out this contention. You often have your mistakes pointed out to you before you are conscious of their existence. You must have very clear ideas of the anatomy and physiology of a human being in a healthy condition before you can