Cobwebs of Thought | Page 4

Nature,
Heredity, Education are the same difficulties, expressed in different
words. Heredity is a circumstance, which has to be reckoned with, but
we have to investigate, not circumstances, but results. Here is a living
complex mind, no matter how I inherit it, here it is; now then, how does
it work, what can I do with it? And then comes the further inevitable
question--What is it? What is this thing, this me, which tends to feel
and act in a certain direction--to admire spontaneously, this, and to
despise with as perfect ease, that. What we need for scientific
investigation into the ME is "to utilise minds so as to form a living
laboratory" Mind vivisection without torture, cruelty or the knife. What
we want to know definitely from science is: How does this thing which
I call my mind work? Science regards mind as the sum of sensations,
which are the necessary results of antecedent causes. It endeavours to
know how and in what way these sensations can be trained and
perfected. Nearly twenty years ago, a writer in the Psychological
Journal "Mind"[1] Mr. J. Jacobs, attempted to form a Society for the
purpose of experimental psychology. Thinkers and scientific men have

carried out this work, but the general public has not been greatly
interested or interested for any length of time. No such society exists
among the English public. The greater number of enthusiastic students
is to be found in Italy and America. But Germany has furnished great
individual workers, such as Fechner, Helmholtz, and Wundt. Collective
investigation was necessary to separate individual peculiarities from
general laws. Science of course aims at changing the study of
individual minds/into "a valid science of mind." Mr. J. Jacobs wished a
Society to be organised for the purpose of measuring mind, measuring
our senses, and for testing our mental powers as accurately as weight
and height are tested now, and also for experimenting on will practice.
He believed it possible to train the will on one thing until we got it
perfectly under control, and in so doing we should modify character
immensely. If this proved possible, we ought to persevere until conduct
becomes an art, education a principle, and mind is known as a science
is known. Mr. Jacobs wanted systematic enquiries to be made into
powers of attention, such as "Can we listen and read at the same time,
and reproduce what we have read and heard." And into the faculties of
observation and memory, with after images, and the capacity for
following trains of reasoning, &c., &c., "When we read a novel, do we
actually have pictures of the scenes before our minds?" Mr. Jacobs
wished for enquiries into every kind of intelligence ordinary and
extraordinary; out of all ingredients of character, out of early
impressions, out of classified emotions to build up an answer to the
question: "Is there a science of mind?" Since he wrote, much has been
done in experiment by the scientific. Children's minds are constantly
being investigated, and the results given to the public. Mr. Galton has
to some extent popularised this sort of investigation. But it is still
generally unpopular. Novelists, and artists, leisured people, women,
everyone could be of use, if they would investigate themselves, or offer
their minds for investigation. But after all that the scientific French,
German, American, Italian, and English workers have done, we are as
yet only on the threshold of mind knowledge--of what we might
know--if we had ardour enough to push self-analysis in to the remotest
corner of the brain, noting down, comparing, tabulating the most
involuntary and ethereal sublimities that appear to flit through the mind,
the most subtle emotion that hardly finds expression in language. We

must push on and on till we arrive at the knowledge of a mind science.
Our scientific enquirers want, as we all do, more ardour, they are dulled
by a cold, uninterested public. Psychologists now seem to despair of
obtaining any large results from the science. Mr. E.W. Scripture in
"The New Psychology" says, in 1897, "It cannot dissect the mind with
a scalpel, it cannot hope to find a startling principle of mental life." If
psychological experiment could be presented somewhat apart from its
technicalities, and if minds could play freely round its discoveries, how
much more interesting it would be felt to be by the general public! The
great experimental worker, Mr. J. Mck Cattell has given[2] some clear
idea of the results he obtained by analysing and measuring sensations.
The physical processes, which accompany sensations of sound and
light for instance, unlike as they must be to sensations, being facts of
matter in motion, yet share with them this characteristic, that sensations
also have each an order in time, the mental processes can be measured,
equally with