Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/776

758 groups selected and associated by the school examinations into classes. The adult end of it (seventy-five per cent) is the position of the center of groups trained in the schools of the United States and part of Europe. The adult farmer who does nothing else stands on exactly the same center as those graduated from the high schools and colleges who have been licensed to teach. The youth of the rural districts stand five per cent higher than the adult, but they will not all be farmers many of them will drift into the cities and become successful business men with a center at eighty-five per cent or more, which is the point of accuracy attained by all those of any profession reputed by co-workers to have marked ability, which means, as read from the chart, the successful have as much power to direct their own attention to the uninteresting thing as can be lent to them by external aid. That the average school training has carried those who have followed it no nearer success in drawing than those who have not been so trained seems to go far toward taking Mr. Wheelock's statement out of the realm of doubt and extending the scope of it to the school drawing of Europe as well as to the "great State of New York."

Not the least singular of the facts brought out by these experiments is that, while the figure painter (position A) needs ninety-five per cent of the power measured by the test, and the landscape painter (position B) has acquired ninety-two per cent by years of labor, the telegraph operator (also position B), whose training certainly has not been toward eye accuracy, should also be able to locate by observed proportion and direction to ninety-two per cent. By what means did he get the power to locate with an accuracy almost double that possessed by the average mechanical engineer? The telegraph operator has been trained in voluntary attention to such an extent as to be able to listen to certain sounds, not in themselves interesting, and inhibit all others. Herbert Spencer says success in everything depends on the power of observation.

It seems that the foundation of the power of observation is voluntary attention.

Balzac is quoted as saying, "Almost the whole of human genius consists in observing well." And Taine writes, "Success in life depends on knowing how to be patient, how to endure drudgery, how to make and remake, how to recommence and continue without allowing the tide of anger or the flight of the imagination to arrest or divert the daily effort."

Prof. William James writes: "The faculty of bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of