Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/825

Rh, the brain does not act as a whole. It is rather a series of resonance boxes, each box responding to vibrations of particular pitch. The reports of the several senses are all duly pigeonholed. In the same way every outgoing nerve impulse comes from a special center. It is not by a general action of the brain that we carry on our several activities, but by the action of a special part of the brain, depending on the nature of the activity. Any injury to this center, and the activities connected with it are as completely paralyzed as if the whole tissue were destroyed. By so much is a man dead; by so much is his universe curtailed. On the other hand, any increase in the power of these centers, and there comes an increase of life, an expansion of the realized universe.

Power, that is what we are after. Let us keep it always in mind. Let us not be turned off from the main quest, however alluring the side issues. We want the increased power of the human spirit.

Now, power is a result as well as a cause. Intellectual power is the result of a developed brain organism. This development comes through use. Any activity at the circumference means a corresponding activity at the center. The exercise of any one of the senses means the development of its corresponding brain center. The sum of this development is intelligence. This is what I mean by the psychological import of manual training. This it is which makes the lovers of power value manual training. Each movement of a motor nerve, whether it be in the fashioning of wood or metal or clay, involves a corresponding brain movement. These movements stimulate growth, and growth is what we are after. Intellect is a function of brain surface.

I believe, then, that the very strongest argument for manual training is not the practical value of the skill which it develops, not even the moral significance of the sturdiness which it inculcates, but that it is something which includes these and the other ends of culture, that it is the increased intellectual power which is the necessary physiological result of such training. This is a large claim, and one that has never been urged before, I believe, on precisely these grounds. But it is a claim which can be fully substantiated.

Perceiving, as we must if these considerations are well taken, that manual training means power because it leads to the development of the brain as an organ, and to increase of function as a result of this growth—it becomes very evident that manual training is by no means the only method of securing this development. It is far from being the end of the purpose which it involves. It is only one out of a group of possible methods which have a common purpose, the development of human faculty. To accomplish