THE PACE OF MIND.
WE sincerely hope that the French men of science, who are fond, as a rule, of metaphysical inquiry, hoping always to deduce from it positive proof that mind is a phenomenon of matter, will inquire carefully into the per- formances of the new calculating-man, the Piedmontese, Jacques Inaudi. He is the best subject for cross-examination as to the mental processes by which he arrives at his results, who has yet presented himself. He is, to begin with, full- grown, partly educated, and unusually intelligent, and would probably understand clearly the object of searching inquiries which seem usually either to have perplexed or annoyed our " calculating-boys." Mr. Bidder, if we remember aright, never would, or at all events never did, give any explanation of his methods, and as he grew more mature, though he remained a. most able man, he lost the power of using them. Inaudi may not be one of the men who can watch their own minds, though that power is by no means so strictly confined to the culti- vated as we are apt to think ; but he also may ; and if he is, he could give information of some value. Is his power, for example, nothing but an abnormal example of that difference in pace which we all know to exist between the working of different and even of equal minds P Everybody who has studied his acquaintance at all, knows that this dif- ference is very great ; that one man can comprehend an interrogation in half the time taken by another ; that no two children are alike in quickness of thought, as distinguished from accuracy or depth of thought ; and that clever women constantly reach results, which can only be reached by their thinking much more rapidly than clever men. Most men, too, are aware, if they have ever been in contact with affairs, that this difference is especially marked in mental arithmetic ; that the process which takes John a minute takes James five seconds ; and that this difference, though it can be affected by practice or neglect, is ultimately independent of both. The two minds, which may be equal in power, move at a pace as different as that of any two horses, or any two carrier-pigeons. The writer of these lines, for example, though he has no practice, could once calculate small sums in his mind at a pace which far abler men tried in vain to rival. The limits of this difference, unlike the difference of running or flying power, are not yet ascer- tained or ascertainable ; and it is conceivable, and not in- herently improbable, that abnormal mental speed, limited possibly to the one subject, is the full explanation of Inaudi's power. For example, he was asked to state on what day of the week a given date some years hence would fall, and he replied, according to the report, instantly and accurately, " Monday." Now, if we set aside the theories that he merely guessed, which is unreasonable, for he has done it before, and the suspicion of collusion, which is absurd, the examiner being a committee of the Academy of Sciences, his mind must, say, in three seconds have traversed a calculation which would take the few men who could do it in their minds at all, many minutes. Such pace is almost unthinkable, even if we remember that, the day on which the date falls in this year being once ascertained, the rest of the problem is only a swift effort of memory, the days advancing in a regular sequence, accelerated by leap-years ; but still, superior pace is a theory which does meet all the conditions. The probability of the theory, too, is increased by another recorded fact. Inaudi, like all the calculating-men, can multiply long rows of figures by other long rows at a pace which to bystanders seems instantaneous, though of course it is not so, and suggests intuitive knowledge ; and he is said to do this in a special waY. According to the Parisian correspondent of the Daily Tele- graph, he begins to multiply from the left, a statement which, we imagine, must be a true report of Inaudi's own account of his mental action, for nobody else would have thought of it as even likely. We all do it instinctively in multiplying multiples of ten—say, 1,000 by 1,000—but we never think of it as a natural way of working an arithmetical sum. Inaudi must multiply the thousands by the thousands first, then the thousands by the hundreds, then the thousands by the tens, and so on, and add them together,—that is, he must go through an entire process at a lightning pace, yet, owing
to an abnormal perfection of memory, with entire accuracy. To explain the latter feet, we must, we imagine, grant visualisation in a very perfect form ; but as that certainly exists in some men, superior pace would in such a man explain the whole of the phenomena, wonderful as at first sight they appear to ordinary men to be. There is no intuition, only a swift process, though an intuitive sense of the relation of numbers is just as conceivable as an intuitive sense of the proportions necessary to artistic beauty, a faculty which must have belonged to all the great artists of the world. What we want to know of Inaudi is, not whether his mind goes through a process, which we take to be proved by his habit of using a method, but whether he is conscious of each separate step in that process, or whether his mind, or part of his mind, like a machine set going, gets over the steps without his full knowledge. That certainly happens in sleep ; but its ascertained occurrence in a waking state, in the case of a mind moving with such abnormal rapidity, would be curious evidence of the interesting theory that every man has two minds, one of which can move, so to speak, automatically. The whole mind, in the ordinary sense of mind, does not act, or it would remember the steps but only a part of the mind with some special relation to the remainder. Mr. Bidder's mind did not die or grow impaired, but the part of it which used in boyhood to solve his arith- metical problems at that marvellous speed, either died or grew slower in its action.
The question of the pace of the mind is not without its importance, for if it could be quickened by any outside influence without injury to other powers, intelligent life would become much longer and fuller, just as book-knowledge might become much larger and wider in men who could read with an abnormal rapidity. (That really was the case with Macaulay, an extreme exception to the general rule that rapid readers gain little from their reading.) If the mental pace of a race could be doubled, they ought in the highest sense to live longer, and one wonders a little whether any such change does, unperceived, go on. One has a fancy, which we believe approves itself to the vast experience and great brain of Dr. Martineau, that the English middle class has in the last two generations gained so greatly, that the gain is perceptible in mental quickness. Much more of such quickness is certainly required of them, both in business and the professions, and there is plenty of answer to the demand. If that is true, it would seem probable that continuous education does develop what horsey men call " a turn of speed " in the mind, as well as reflective power and self-control; and that is not an unsatisfactory result. It is not proved yet, though, past reasonable scepticism. The oldest cultivated class in the world, the Brahmin caste of India, which in a way has always been more or less educated, is undoubtedly quicker-minded—we mean with strict reference to the pace of the mind—than any other division of the popula- tion ; but then, it has also a certain superiority in race, and in another cultivated caste the quickness is not per- ceptible. The Royal caste of Europe has been educated fairly well for nearly a thousand years; but though it is probably quite as able as any other family, or rather, two families of equal numbers—religion having split what was really one house into two—pace in its brain-work is not a superiority which even flatterers would attribute to those who call themselves (Ebenhiirtige) even-born. Again, lower down in the world, the testimony is not perfect. We believe, although the fact has not been the subject of official inquiry as it ought to be, that nearly all teachers, and especially female teachers, admit that the children of the educated poor are far more easy to teach than the children of the uneducated poor ; that they have not only more " receptive " minds, which may mean only better memories, but that their minds move positively quicker. They can, for instance, not only learn arithmetic more easily, but they work out their problems in half the time. That is important evidence, because it comes from such a multitude of witnesses, many of them, from strong democratic feeling, with a bias in the opposite direction, and because it covers a whole community, and not any picked class or locality. On the other hand, the English educated never seem as quick as the Irish uneducated, and the one instance where the evidence is positive and unquestionable, weighs heavily on the other side. The phenomenal calculators, of whom we are suggesting that their abnormal quality is mental pace, have usually—almost always—sprang from families without hereditary education. Inaudi's father probably never learned to write. There is only a possibility, at best, that education increases mental pace ; but if it does, it will confer on future generations both a longer and a fuller intellectual life,—a distinct addition to the rather small number of advan- tages it can be certainly proved to yield. That Western man has advanced morally in the last thousand years, there can be little doubt—we question if the assertion is true of the whole of mankind—but of intellectual advance we can only say that it covers a wider area than it did. Certainly there is no proof of any extension of positive intellectual force,—such, for in- stance, as would be indicated if every child could do sums at Jacques Inaudi's pace.
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