Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/669

Rh common. But genius is an overbalance between the special gift and normal powers, while insanity is an overbalance between high organization on the one hand and deficiency on the other. The examination of brain power shows it to be dependent upon two factors, size and quality. A large brain, full of gray and white matter of low organization, may belong to an intellectual infant. A small brain, composed of highly organized matter, may be the tool of an intellectual giant. In a general way intellectual power seems to be physiologically a function of brain surface. The heightening of organization and increase of surface do not come about as the result of any and every sort of activity. The repetition of an act creates a path of least resistance, until at last seemingly difficult acts become far easier than simple ones that are new and untried. If the repetition proceed far enough, the mental reactions cease almost entirely, and we have automatic action. It is this consideration that makes us spend so much time upon the models used in sloyd and manual training. It is very important to have them properly graded, so that succeeding exercises shall present increasing difficulties. This constitutes a vital difference between industrial and educational training. Industrial work is only practicable where skill is so far automatic as to be utilized with economy of time. But when this takes place, education ends. And this is one of the great reasons why I so warmly disparage industrialism as an ideal of life. It produces, and must produce, fragments of men and women, automatic machines, instead of complete men and women open and ever open to new influences. I mean some time to develop this thought, and to show that in our choice of vocations, even intellectual, and the tenacity with which we stick to them, we practically put an end to our own growth, and rob ourselves of the most complete manhood and womanhood. And I mean to recommend that we make life itself educational, and that we undertake a rotation of related vocations just as our farmers do a rotation of crops. They could undoubtedly hoe corn more economically if they did nothing else, but the thing is that the ground would not stand it, and the crops would get smaller and smaller while the hoeing was growing more and more efficient. We can work more economically by sticking to our last, but the thing is that the spirit will not stand it, and the good that flows out of our shoemaking grows less and less, even though our rate increases.

There is a striking parallel between these reactions and the reactions that follow upon pain and pleasure. Those of you who have experienced grief and suffering know that the terrible thing about it is its monotony, its dull monotony, a monotony so terrible that if it continues too long it leads to despair and to the paralysis of feeling