Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/398

386 there would be a continuity of concepts beginning with, the commission of a breach of discipline, followed by correction from the teacher, and ending in improved conduct on the part of the scholar. But frequently this chain is broken. The child fails to recognize the connection between these component parts, or certain parts are obliterated and others exaggerated, or the impression is cross-currented or side-tracked, with the result that the final impression and account of the matter may be widely divergent from the original facts. The conclusion usually is that the child has been willfully lying. Again, the child may see two dogs playing together, and, being subject to abnormal mental processes, comes to his mother with a tale of a horrible struggle between ferocious bears, with imminent danger to himself. The startling element in the matter is that usually the parents either smile indulgently, remarking that the child has a vivid imagination, or on the other hand they will punish him for an attempt at causeless and vicious deceit.

However, I should consider this explanation problematical if it had no further basis than an obscure mental condition. But as soon as one looks carefully at the matter one is strongly impressed by the number of additional conditions which may act in similar ways. Indeed, the matter becomes so plain that we may say, broadly, that any cause which makes for intellectual tenuity has a tendency to bring about this state of things. Recently we have named this psychical trauma, a morbid nervous condition caused by repeated injurious impressions; and it is a fact that beyond distinct mental disorders codified as diseases some of the lower emotional and mental activities may in the same way be markedly injured. We have evidence of this from such signs as nervous digestive disorders, hysterical attacks, loss of sleep otherwise inexplicable, disturbances of flushing and pallor, all of which may be results of psychical effects repeated again and again. These symptoms should not be called diseases, or in any way primary disorders; they are merely natural results which flow from natural causes, just like the loss of self-control in fright or breathlessness from the shock of cold water. The continued repetition of them wears, as it were, a rut in the brain, so that any impulse approaching it slips out of its ordinary path in the direction at once of least resistance and utter distortion. Again, the very faulty methods of our teaching by rote, of mechanical repetition and memorizing, which seems to be the basis of our school system, must necessarily lean toward psychical poverty; and the more these vicious stimuli are repeated, the greater must be the effect toward an unfortunate end.

Still, there are other causes, of a purely physical nature, which doubtless will appeal more strongly to most readers. It is well