THE GROWTH OF HUMAN FACULTIES. T HERE is nothing new that
we see in the exhibition of Herr Heinhaus at the Aquarium. He undoubtedly possesses, by all accounts, the power, which was also possessed by Mr. Bidder, of doing sums in his mind at a speed which to other men is impossible,—telling an interviewer, for example, in half a minute, the number of seconds he had lived, and stating the square root of 154,321 apparently after one momentary interval of thought. It is a power marvellous to the observer, just as the power of running a mile in a minute would be marvellous; but it is not a new power, nor does it suggest in its possessor any faculty which does not belong to the average boy as improved by a School Board education. The ordinary operations of the mind are quickened to an extraordinary degree, but still they are the ordinary opera- tions. Herr Heinhaus has an amazing memory, and he requires only seconds where another man would require minutes, but still he does require time, and his mind does go through a process not differing perceptibly from the process by which other minds arrive at the same result. There is nothing like intuition in the way in which he reaches the answer, and indeed he has an idea himself, or says he has an idea, that all men could imitate him if only they knew how, which is only untrue as it is untrue that all men could be taught to walk at seven miles an hour. Herr Heinhaus possibly could convey his arithmetical method to an average Cambridge graduate, but he could not convey his mental pace any more than a crack pedestrian, though he could teach a clodhopper how to walk, could convey the special strength of his muscles and his will. The exhibition is interesting, as any feat of the mind is interesting—for instance, playing chess blindfolded or capping verses for half an hour without a failure—but one seems to crave for the display of some new force, some positive addition to the capacities of the human intellect, and that somehow we never see. There is no con- clusive evidence that the mind of man has improved since the days of Pericles any more than the body of man, which it is almost demonstrable, though not quite demonstrable, has not.
There is no proof, we say, of advance in mental power, and yet it is a little difficult to disbelieve that advance has occurred, the evidence that it ought to have occurred is so very strong. If there is one thing certain about the human mind it is that education does so affect it that its powers increase, and that the new strength or keenness or speed of movement or whatever it is is transmitted by hereditary descent. There is not a School Board teacher in this country or America who does not affirm that the children of the illiterate and the children of the cultivated display a positive difference in their power of learning, sometimes slight, sometimes very great, but always so perceptible as materially to modify the difficulties of the teacher. The children of the uneducated Feem to be mentally blinded by some sort of a fog, or, to put it in another way, to be deficient in some kind of perceptiveness 4,r power of concentration. You. must "summer and winter" your teaching to such children, as the Scotch say, or it will never penetrate their " heavy," or "thick," or "sluggish" brains,—all epithets which point to a certain positive yet removable inferiority. If such a difference as that can exist, can be demonstrated, and can disappear, the deduction seems to be inevitable that the actual powers of the mind, its muscles and nerves so to speak, are capable of being permanently improved, and that in a way which can be hereditarily transmitted. Grant that the change is best defined by the word "sharpening," that the steel is always there, and that the only thing added is an edge, still the power of a blunt razor and the power of a sharp razor are very different things, nor is there any a priori reason why every bit of steel should not acquire the sharpness of the lancet, that mysterious edge which it is said only a Parisian workman can confer. There is, too, evidence in one department at least of human thought that this advance is progressive. We do not see how anybody can doubt that the minds of many races have become more capable of moral impressions, that they positively open more to receive certain religions ideas. Every missionary affirms that about savages, but there is evidence also about our own white peoples, who though taught a thousand years ago pre- cisely the moral ideas which are taught now, positively could not take them in, and now can do so. To give only one easy illustration. Christianity has not altered, but it certainly seems as if men's minds had in the course of centuries developed an entirely new power of comprehending and re- ceiving that series of Christian ideas which we class under the word "sympathy," and to which our ancestors were as impervious as some ears are to music. It is easy to say the world attends to these ideas now and did not attend then, but does that statement to anybody's consciousness quite explain the phenomena ? Is there not a positive increase in the power of reception, akin to the new power of iron when converted into steel of taking a polish which to the iron was impossible P If this is true, if education does actually enlarge the grasp of the human mind, and if in one department of thought that mind is perceptibly bigger, why should not the process go on till the majority, or even all, possess minds of the calibre now confined to the few ? The growth may be very slow—we know wonderfully little about the time required for such changes— but still is there not a violent probability, to say the least of it, that growth is going on, that at the end of a thousand years, or say ten thousand if you like, the descendants of Englishmen may be to the Englishmen of to-day what Herr Heinhaus is to the prize "mental arithmetic boy,, of an ordinary Board-school ? May not the general human power, for instance, of perceiving as in a flash the relations of cause and effect be enormously increased, so that man's control over natural forces, for one thing, will reach a point which would now be deemed miraculous ? Suppose we " perceived " the laws of electricity as some men do now perceive the laws of harmony, not by a conscious process of reasoning, but by a kind of intuition which, nevertheless, is not wholly a pro- duct of the senses! That is not inconceivable surely, for it is exactly the same as a new power which we see every day, the power of judging accurately from a basis of fact which in every department of life comes to the experienced. Percep- tion is the power most likely to be developed, and with its large development man would become altogether a higher being. Half his present diffimlty in learning anything, for example, would disappear, and he would learn all things as Cardinal Mezzofanti learned languages. "I know," said the Cardinal, "what the word must be."
We are quite aware of the enormous, perhaps the insur- mountable, difficulties which impede the acceptance of any such proposition as this. The improved powers, granted or developed by education, it will be said, last only for one generation. There are Kings whose ancestors have certainly been educated for six or eight hundred years, and their powers are not in any way greater than those of average
men; while the Professorial families, of whom many exist both in Germany and Great Britain, are exactly like other families in their powers of perception or of thought. Half the children of such families indeed are commonly rather more stupid than the average, all the boys, for example, being dolts, while the girls remain bright, or vice-verad. If there were such a thing as moral growth, again, it ought to extend to men of all creeds, and it does not; a Turk of to-day being, on the moral aide of his head, precisely like a Turk of the days of Orchan. We know, too, that in all ages men of the highest mental power have appeared, so that for a man of to-day to think himself mentally stronger than Plato would be to show that he was incapable of comparison or blinded by vanity, and it is a little difficult to understand how it is, if the hypothesis is correct, that a caste has not grown up differentiated in intellectual power, not only from the majority but from the average. There is no such caste in existence, nor can it be proved that there ever was one, though it ought to have been produced among the hereditary priesthoods, which were also the depositaries of all the learning of their time. There is no complete answer possible to those doubts, which might be strengthened by a comparison between the Athenian intellect of, say, 400 B.C. and the intellect of to-day, but we still cling with a little fondness to our proposition, which is, briefly, that an Anglo-Saxon of King Alfred's time could not have learned all that an Oxford Professor of our day thinks "a pretty fair range of knowledge." His mind would not have held it all, any more than the mind of a Zulu Chief would now. If that is true, mental receptivity can be enlarged up to limits of which we know nothing ; and receptivity, if not the greatest, is at all events the most useful, of all mental powers. Something happens to the mind of the man who is learning chess, when all at once his bewilderment about the game ceases, and the something is, we suggest, not wholly an increise ed his acquired knowledge. The particular mental musde—to rt80 a physical illustration—which uses the knowl:dge has suddenly become larger or more capable of work.
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