 CHAPTER 2
Man is the eyes of things.—Hindu Proverb. THAT far-seeing genius, Goethe, once said that he regarded himself as the center of all phenomena, a sort of focus to which converged everything in the universe, out of which came--Goethe. He also claimed that the real standard for all things in life was simply the mass of sensations that were appreciable to the human senses. In other words, Goethe understood perfectly the now widely recognized--and widely ignored--educational principle that all mental activity is based upon the perceptions--upon the things we see and hear and feel and taste and smell. As well might you try to build a house without wood or bricks or stone or mortar, as to try to think without a good "stock in trade" of impressions, images, and memories gathered by the senses and the perceptions. Blurred Mental Pictures. One of the never failing marks of the common mind, the untrained, inefficient mind, is that the mental pictures it contains are confused, blurred, inexact. A person with such a mind will tell you that an auto car just passed him on the road. "Was it a big, red car?" you ask. Well, he does not quite know. It might have been red, and yet he guesses it was black; possibly it was gray. How many people were in it? Three or four or five --four, he thinks. Ask him to give you an outline of a book he has read or a play he has seen, and he is equally helpless. And so on. Such a person is the typical inefficient. You will find thousands of these inefficients filling unimportant places in shops and offices. And even the trivial duties of such positions they are unable to perform properly. They cannot read a line of shorthand notes and be sure of its meaning; they cannot add a column of figures and be certain of the result without repeated checking’s. Such unfortunates are the "flotsam and jetsam" of the commercial world--the unfit who, in the struggle for existence, must necessarily be crowded out by those whose mental processes are more positive and more exact. The extent to which the perceptions can be developed is almost incredible. I know personally a bank teller who can detect a counterfeit coin without a glance at it, judging only by weight, feeling, and ring. Another man of my acquaintance makes a large salary merely by his ability to judge tea through its flavor--a "tea taster." I know an orchestra conductor who, in the full fortissimo of his sixty piece band, will detect a slight error of any one performer. I could give many other instances within my own experience of remarkable powers of trained perception. The Perceptions Are Easily Trained. For the encouragement of those who are aware that they do not get the best possible service from their senses and perceptions--that they do not see all there is to be seen, hear exactly and distinctly and so on--for the benefit of these I may say at once that the senses and perceptions are easily trained. A month or two of discipline such as I am about to describe will show most marked and gratifying development. In most cases a few months' training is all that is necessary; for the habit of close observation is soon formed, and once formed no further thought is required. The matter takes care of itself. The Perceptions of Children. First of all, a word about the senses and perceptions of children. Just here is one of the grievous defects of our defective school system. It practically ignores the fact that the child develops, not through reasoning, but through observation and activity. The child observes everything. His senses are active and acute. Childhood is the time to accumulate observations and experiences; later they will form the material for thought and general development. The child should be encouraged to perceive and to remember. All the methods which I am about to describe are applicable to children of less than ten years old. The more elaborate and far ranging the mass of perceptions are, memories which the child carries over from infancy and childhood into youth and adult age, the greater, other things being equal, will be his intellectual possibilities. Most of Us Are Sensorily Starved. Most of us are grossly deficient in mental images. At a test made not long ago in Boston eighty per cent, of the children had no idea what a beehive was like, over half of them had no conception of a sheep, and over nine tenths had no notion of the appearance or nature of growing wheat. Of course they knew of other things which the country bred child would not know; but fancy the loss in the imagination of one to whom the following lines arouse no vision of a pure, rustic matutinal scene:-- "The breezy call of incense-breathing morn, the swallow twittering from the straw-built shed, the cock's shrill clarion or the echoing horn no more shall rouse them from their lowly bed." |
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