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more accurate; or, in other words, his power and skill keep pace with his knowledge. Finally, after much practice, the nerves and muscles which control the act of writing are properly co-ordinated; the habit of writing with ease is acquired; the process becomes largely subconscious, if not altogether automatic. The learner has at length reached the stage in which his attention is no longer concentrated upon the form and beauty of the letters, but rather upon the thought to be expressed, and it is quite possible that henceforth his chirography will grow more illegible the more he writes. Of course, he is now learning the art of composing by composing; but he has ceased to learn in the direction of his handwriting by writing, because the attention is riveted upon something else. Even before the subconscious stage is reached, practice, if too long continued, may exhaust the powers of attention, and doing can no longer issue in learning by reason of fatigue.

On the score of attention there is a limit to the application of the maxim in another direction. Talking, oral reading, and public speaking may be spoiled by too much attention. Practice in these, under the guidance of an injudicious teacher, may serve to make the gestures too studied, the pronunciation too precise, and the tones of the voice too artificial, defects by which the hearer’s mind is drawn from the thought to the delivery.

Injudicious criticism.

The lack of good elocutionary drill in youth is a serious misfortune, yet the writer cannot help blaming the elocutionists for ruining one public speaker among his acquaintances. Under their tuition the gestures and articulation of this friend have become almost faultless; but there is such a self-conscious air about his platform utterances that the audience can think of nothing except the delivery. By his efforts at doing he has learned most emphatically not to do. The same thing may happen in elementary instruction, and in the practice-schools connected with our State normal schools. Injudicious criticism by the teacher may so rivet the attention upon the utterance that the pupils lose sight of the thought to be expressed, and the more they practise under his guidance the worse their reading becomes. The vocal and physical elements, in the act of oral reading or speaking, should spring spontaneously out of the thought and sentiment to be conveyed. Any drill which interferes with this natural connection between the mental and the physical is indescribably bad, and should never be regarded as a means of learning. Equally severe must be the sentence of condemnation upon much of the criticism to which pupil teachers are subjected by their fellow-students and their critic-teachers at our normal schools, and upon the comments made by candidates for the ministry and their professors upon the efforts of the embryo preacher during the so-called homiletical exercises. Injudicious fault-finding leads to a kind of doing which cannot issue in learning.

Application.
The arm and hand.

Within these limitations we find a wide field for the application of the maxim to our efforts at learning to think and to express thought. The hand performs a very important function in aiding the mind to perfect its concepts. The metric system remains a dark, confused mass of names so long as the pupil does not actually handle and use the metric units of weights and measures. A few days of manual training, during which the learner is compelled to measure accurately, are of immense account in developing accurate ideas and accurate thinking. Of all the ways of expressing thought, those by the hand and the tongue are more perfect than those by the eye, the face, the gesture, the bodily movement. The latter are well adapted to express feeling; the former, to express thought. Few have ever thought of the marvellous mechanism given to a human being in the arm and hand. A glimpse from the mathematician’s point of view is here very interesting. A pencil fastened to the end of a ruler revolving around a fixed point will describe a circle. If the pencil be fastened to the end of a second ruler revolving around the end of the first, while the first revolves around the original centre, the pencil will describe a very complicated curve. If three radii, revolving in this way, be joined together, the pencil at the end of the third can be made to describe the cycles and epicycles by which the ancient astronomers explained the movements of the planets. The modern mathematician has shown that, by annexing a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth radius, each revolving around the preceding, while the first is moving around the original centre, all curves of the fifth and sixth orders can be described. Let any one examine his right arm, starting from the shoulder and ending with the fingers, and he will find that since infancy he has had this mechanism for executing curves and movements, has been using this wonderful system of revolving radii to express thought, and that it has been to him a source of skill in thinking and doing. When viewed in their anatomical and physiological aspects, human arms and hands are seen to be a still more wonderful mechanism, rivalled only by the tongue in capability for describing any curve and uttering any kind of thought. Whilst the tongue may speak many oral languages, the hand writes them all, and supplies additional methods for expressing thought in drawing, painting, sculpture, instrumental music, in the various handicrafts, and in the machines which act like man’s hand made bigger, more powerful, more tireless.

Apprentices.
Manual training.

From this point of view one can see a wide field for the intelligent application of the maxim to our efforts at learning to write, to talk, to walk, to play on a musical instrument, or to handle the tools of some handicraft. If questioned with reference to these and kindred activities, the physiologist would answer that the repeated action of the nerves and muscles in specific functions fits them the better to act in the same functions, and that the effect of the exercise of any function may be stored up so as to increase the facility of the nervous structure to exercise again every similar function. The psychologist would say that any normal act performed under the guidance of an intelligent will leaves, as its enduring result, an increased power to act and a tendency to act again in like manner. Common parlance, which is apt to enshrine its wisdom in proverbs, simply says, Practice makes perfect. Doing, when it engrosses the attention, exerts a reflex influence upon thinking; after it sinks to the subconscious level it ceases to exert a helpful influence. The methods adopted in our manual-training schools are, in this respect, much superior to those pursued under the old apprentice system. The master mechanic found it to his interest to keep the apprentice upon one kind of work until a high degree of skill was attained. He used the apprentice as a means to an end,—the end being the production of things that would sell and thus reimburse the master for the time and trouble of teaching his trade to another. The mysteries of the trade were kept to the last for fear the apprentice would quit before the expiration of the time for which he was indentured. No better plan for crushing the intellectual life could have been conceived. The manual-training school, on the other hand, makes the boy, and not the product, the end of its training, the object of chief concern. It seeks not merely to make the man a better workman, but the workman a better man. No pupil is asked to go through the same movement, to do the same piece of work, for the purpose of developing skill, until every trace of interest is gone. Nothing is made for the purpose of selling; everything prescribed is for the purpose of developing the pupil’s powers, to enable him to express thought by the use of working-tools and instruments. The working-drawing and the model are the symbols which come nearest to a full representation of the thing to be made. The word, the clay, the stone, the metal, the leather, the cloth, are the materials in which thought finds its final expression. Nothing is carried so far as to deaden the boy’s interest in what he is doing; the charm of novelty is kept up from day to day. If the first product is defective, a new problem is set, involving the same fundamental operations, or the use of the same tools and instruments. The manual-training school and the trade school, if properly conducted, thus become a most valuable means for developing the power to think in things. It aims to create the power to think, as well as the power to do; the two are made commensurate and mutually helpful. The thinking is made to issue in doing, and the doing is kept from sinking into the subconscious stage, where it tends to degrade the individual to the mere level of a machine. Within these limitations we can endorse Professor Wilson’s tribute to the hand, and subscribe to his demand that, as in the days of Israel’s glory, it shall be trained in some useful handicraft, not merely as a means of livelihood, but more especially as a means of making the pupil a better thinker, a completer man.

Handicrafts.

“When I think of all that man’s and woman’s hand has wrought,” says he, “from the day that Eve put forth her erring hand to pluck the fruit of the forbidden tree to that dark hour when the pierced hands of the Saviour were nailed to the predicted tree of shame, and of all that human hands have wrought of good and evil since, I lift up my hand and gaze upon it with wonder and awe. What an instrument for good it is! What an instrument for evil! And all day long it never is idle. There is no implement which it cannot wield, and it should never in working hours be without one. We unwisely restrict the term handicrafts-man or hand-worker to the more laborious callings; but it belongs to all honest, earnest men and women, and is a title which each should covet. For the queen’s hand there is the sceptre, and for the soldier’s hand the sword; for the carpenter’s hand the saw, and for the smith’s hand the hammer; for the farmer’s hand the plough; for the miner’s hand the spade; for the sailor’s hand the oar; for the painter’s hand the brush; for the sculptor’s hand the chisel; for the poet’s hand the pen; and for woman’s hand the needle. And if none of these, or the like, will fit us, the felon’s chain should be round our wrist, and our hand on the prisoner’s crank. But for each willing man or woman there is a tool they may learn to handle; for all there is the command, ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.’”

XXI
THINKING IN THE ARTS

A meagre soul can never be made fat, nor a narrow soul large, by studying rules of thinking.

Professor Blackie.

Have your thinking first, and plenty to think about, and then ask the logician to teach you to scrutinize with a nice eye the process by which you have arrived at your conclusions.

Professor Blackie.

Invention, though it can be cultivated, cannot be reduced to rule; there is no science which will enable a man to bethink himself of that which will suit his purpose. But when he has thought of something, science can tell him whether that which he has thought of will suit his purpose or not. The inquirer or arguer must be guided by his own knowledge and sagacity in

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