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
the physical. Of course measuring sensations
is only measuring “the outside of the mind”—but