Part 3
“Language,” as one able student of human development, Doctor A. A. Berle, has recently pointed out in his valuable book for parents, “The School in the Home,” “is the tool of knowledge. It is the instrument by which we gain and garner information, by which we co-ordinate what we know and make inferences and express results. But if you blunt the tool, not to say destroy it, before you begin to use it, how are you ever to get knowledge in any proper or real sense? Everything depends upon this tool. The mastery of a proper use of the mother tongue is the first and last requisite of sound and extensive mental development. Language is the key to everything that pertains to human life. Once get a language and you have the key to manners, civilisation, habits, customs, history, and all the complex and fascinating story of humanity. Because you get all these things by reading about them, and to read you must know the language and you must know it accurately and extensively, and be able to follow the masters of it who have embodied their great ideas in literature. That process begins almost at the cradle. It begins by cultivating accuracy and skill in the use of the tongue. It begins by striking at, and out, every false thing, the moment it appears.”
And, commenting on the special dangers of “baby talk,” Doctor Berle justly observes:
“It is not enough that a word be spoken. It makes a great deal of difference how it is spoken. The proper vocalisation of words has an effect upon children, which is often, one may say generally, overlooked. Almost everybody is fond of repeating the baby’s efforts to talk, and ‘baby talk’ lingers in many homes an innocent but costly pleasure, for the parents and the children alike. There are many persons of mature age at this moment who will never pronounce certain words properly, since they became accustomed to a false pronunciation in childhood, because somebody thought it was ‘cute.’ There are many persons who will never get over certain false associations of ideas, because somebody thought it was very amusing and funny to see the child mixing up things in such a beautifully childlike way.”
Putting into practice this first principle of education through the suggestive power of a parental example characterised by correctness of speech, soundness of thought, and the moral qualities of cheerfulness, unselfishness, kindness, politeness, industriousness, and the other virtues, the greatest care must also be taken to “fertilise” the child’s mind through proper adjustment of his physical surroundings. Nothing is more certain—and least appreciated by the average parent—than the fact that every detail in the child’s material environment is of suggestive significance to him. Even the pictures on the walls of his room, the design and arrangement of the furniture and ornaments, the pattern and colouring of the wall-paper, may play a decisive part in shaping his character and quickening or deadening his intellectual activities. For the matter of that, as observation and experiment have repeatedly demonstrated, adults almost as much as children react to the suggestive influence of their home environment, even to the extent at times of thereby being unfavourably affected in health.
That is why sick people are so frequently benefited by change of scene. Travel removes them from the baneful influence of their accustomed environment, and assists in breaking down the mental habits injurious to their well-being. Too often, however, to their bitter disappointment, they suffer a relapse after returning home. Yet they need not remain abroad indefinitely in order to obtain a lasting cure. In many instances they need not go abroad at all, but can secure the desired result by making a change in their home surroundings. A most instructive case in point is afforded by an experience that occurred to Mr. Frank Alvah Parsons, a practical psychologist as well as a successful teacher of art in New York city.
The mother of one of Mr. Parsons’ pupils had long been regarded as a hopeless sufferer from “nerves.” She lived in a suburban town, not many miles from New York, but her condition was such that it had been months since she visited that city, and usually she remained at home, secluded in a private apartment, of sitting-room and bedroom.
One day, having occasion to call on her, Mr. Parsons was much impressed with the fact that the furniture and decorations of both these rooms were exceedingly faulty from a psychological as well as an æsthetic point of view. The walls of the sitting-room were hung with mirrors, and the room was fairly smothered with bric-a-brac. In both rooms the colouring and design of the wall-paper contrasted harshly with the floor-coverings, while the furniture, though expensive, was gaudy and inharmonious. He talked the situation over with her daughter, and between them they persuaded her to allow them to make radical alterations in the furnishings of her rooms.
They papered the walls with a soft sage-green paper, without design. The woodwork was made lighter, with a shade of green in it. A brass bedstead was installed, the yellow of the brass blending well with the green of the paper and woodwork. The bric-a-brac was unceremoniously bundled out, and, excepting for a few green draperies and some well-chosen pictures, the rooms were left without ornament. Mahogany furniture, of a quiet, dignified style, replaced the gilded chairs and tables previously there.
The effect was to substitute for the former nerve-irritating environment one that gave out a constant stream of restful, soothing, strengthening suggestions; and the therapeutic value of the change was increased by Mr. Parsons wisely insisting that the patient should not leave the refurnished rooms for two weeks. He desired to expose her, at once and systematically, to the full suggestive effect of her new surroundings. At the end of a month, although she had been told that she would be an invalid for life, she felt strong enough to undertake a shopping expedition to New York, and soon was as well as in her earlier days of robust health.
In this case, of course, the cure was effected at a cost beyond the means of most people. It is not everybody who can afford to refurnish and redecorate his living-quarters. But the point is that everybody can so arrange his environment to begin with as to extract from it suggestions that will assist in maintaining his health and happiness, and in promoting the proper upbringing of his children. This is equally within the reach of a dweller in a Fifth Avenue mansion, a Newport palace, a crowded East Side tenement, or a lonely, isolated farm-house, miles from the nearest village. I might cite many illustrative instances to bear out this statement. Here is one, reported by an observant New York physician:
“The refined tastes and joyous dispositions of the elder children in a family with whom I often came into contact were a matter of some surprise to me, as I could not account for the common trait among them by the position or special characteristics of the parents: they were in the humblest position socially, and all but poor. My first visit to their modest home furnished me with the natural solution, and gave me much food for reflection.
“The children—there were six—occupied two rooms into which the sunlight was pouring as I entered; the remaining rooms of the apartment were sunless for the greater part of the day; the colour and design of the cheap wall-paper were cheerful and unobtrusive; bits of carpet, the table-cover, and the coverlets on the beds were all in harmony, and of quiet design in nearly the elementary colours; everything in these poor rooms of poor people had been chosen with the truest judgment for æsthetic effect, and yet the mother seemed surprised that I could make so much of what seemed to her so simple.”
That colours have a profound psychological effect on human beings is a fact which should be appreciated far more generally than is now the case. Used in small quantities, either in the clothing or in household decoration, the colour red, for instance, is most stimulating, both in the way of helping to overcome depression, and quickening the intellectual processes. But when used in any great amount it tends to over-stimulation, with resultant nerve-strain. According to an English savant, Havelock Ellis, who has made a careful study of the psychology of colours, there are some people so constituted that they become violently excited, fall into convulsions, or faint, if obliged even for a short time to look at anything vividly red.
The same effect has been noted from yellow. In one instance, the case of a man operated on at the age of thirty for congenital cataract, it is recorded that “the first time he saw yellow, he became so sick that he thought he would vomit.” And that yellow has a nerve-stimulating effect fully comparable with that of red is curiously indicated by the statement of a friend of mine, a professor in a Western university, who says:
“Whenever the day is overcast, or I have to do a piece of work calling for unusual mental exertion, I always wear a red or yellow necktie. I find that either colour has a stimulating effect on my mental processes.”
On the other hand, the colour violet appears to have a deadening effect. Another acquaintance, a member of the Harvard University professorial staff, and a well-known psychologist, assures me that the sight of anything violet almost nauseates him, and gives rise to a most depressed feeling. In such a case, however, it may be that the colour is subconsciously associated with some unpleasant occurrence in the earlier life, and that the nausea and depression are merely symbolical manifestations of the presence in the subconsciousness of some memory of this occurrence, concerning which there is no conscious recollection. (This important point will later be discussed in detail.)
Of more immediate significance is the fact that violet rays are sometimes used to quiet unruly patients in asylums for the insane, and that the alienist Osburne, after many years’ experience, testifies that “in the absence of structural disease, violet light—for from three to six hours—is most useful in the treatment of excitement, sleeplessness, and acute mania.”
Altogether, there is warrant for the assertion that red, yellow, and violet are colours that should not be used overmuch, either in one’s apparel or in the decorating of one’s home. Blue, green, grey, and brown, on the contrary, have psychological qualities that make them particularly desirable for decorative purposes.
Care must always be exercised, though, to work out a colour scheme that harmonises, since discordant colour effects inevitably carry to the mind suggestions of discordant thinking and feeling and doing. As a first aid to the study of colour harmony—a subject which, as soon as its significance to human welfare is more generally recognised, will be taught far more systematically than at present—I recommend painstaking observation of the colour schemes developed by master artists, as shown in the paintings to be seen in the art museums of our cities; or, better still, excursions into the country, where, in the colour combinations of earth and sky, tree and water, mountainside and valley meadow, one can gain invaluable hints from that greatest of artists, Nature. On such excursions, need I add, the children should be taken along, to receive early lessons in the appreciation of true beauty.
But now, while thus utilising to the full the educational possibilities opened by the suggestibility of childhood—while reinforcing the educational value of example by the educational value of a well-arranged home environment—it must also be recognised that the child’s extreme suggestibility carries with it certain dangers. As was said, the essential element in every successful suggestion is the automatic, uncritical acceptance of whatever idea is thus intruded into the mind. It goes without saying that, so long as the critical faculty remains unawakened and untrained, it will always be possible to intrude by suggestion erroneous as well as sound ideas.
More serious still, there is warrant for adding that unless the child’s critical powers be developed at an early age—unless he be taught from the outset of his life how to observe accurately and reason closely—the tendency to uncritical acceptance may become more or less of a habit. That, under present conditions of child training, this is a real danger is clearly shown by the results of recent experiments by French and German psychologists.
In Germany, Kosog, visiting a school-room before the beginning of the lesson-hour, placed three objects, a pen-holder, a pocket-knife, and a piece of chalk, so near the edge of the teacher’s desk that they could be plainly seen by every pupil in the room. During the brief recess that followed the first lesson-hour, he removed these objects, and after the pupils had reassembled asked them what they had seen on the desk the previous hour. Hardly one of them, it turned out, had noticed the objects at all. Next day, _after leaving the desk entirely bare the first hour_, he put the same question to them at the beginning of the second hour. Now 26 per cent. of the pupils asserted that they had seen the pocket-knife, 57 per cent. the chalk, and 63 per cent. the pen-holder.
In France, the headmaster of a school, following the instructions of the famous psychologist, Alfred Binet, announced to a class of eighty-six boys that he intended to test their memory of the length of lines. A line two inches long, ruled on white cardboard, was shown to each boy, who, after looking at it, had to draw it as accurately as he could on a sheet of paper. The boys were then told that they would be asked to draw another line a little longer than the first, and were accordingly given a second line to copy. In reality it was shorter than the first, being only an inch and three quarters long. Yet out of the entire class only nine resisted the suggestion and believed their eyes and their memories rather than the master’s statement. The other seventy-seven boys—some of whom were fourteen years old—made the second line longer than the first.
A variation of the same experiment was made on another class, to whom a series of thirty-six lines was shown, one after the other. Of these lines the first five progressively increased in length, while the remainder were uniformly long. Not one of the forty-two boys who were asked to copy them reached the maximum length at the fifth line, while nine industriously continued making their lines longer up to the last line shown them. The first five lines, that is to say, had acted as a suggestion having sufficient force to induce in them, despite the evidence of their eyes, a belief that the entire series similarly increased in length.
Much the same thing, as everyday observation shows, occurs in the case of full-grown men and women. The judicious have long grieved at the gullibility with which people who are by no means illiterate and uneducated accept and act upon the most preposterous suggestions of the fraudulent advertiser, from the patent-medicine man to the swindling promoter. Political mountebanks and charlatans daily ride into power through nothing else than skilfully working on the suggestibility of the voters. So, too, religious cults, no matter how fantastic, gain a foothold and a following. “I am Elijah,” some one announces, and straightway a multitude proclaim him Elijah. “There is no such thing as disease,” says another, and thousands take up the cry, accepting the absurd suggestion with as much unthinking readiness as was shown by the French boys who, although they had concrete evidence to the contrary, accepted their master’s deceptive statements.
What these, and even more glaring evidences of undue suggestibility, really mean is that there is something wrong with our educational methods. Appreciating this, there is an increasing tendency to criticise and condemn the school system. “Our common schools,” exclaims President Emeritus Charles W. Eliot, of Harvard University, “have failed signally to cultivate general intelligence, as is evinced by the failure to deal adequately with the liquor problem, by the prevalence of gambling, of strikes accompanied by violence, and by the persistency of the spoils system.” From the standpoint also of mere efficiency much complaint is made. The charge is even heard that the public schools of to-day make for mediocrity, and that instead of fostering they in reality retard the development of a child’s intellect. In the words of a recent critic (_The Psychological Clinic_, vol. iv., p. 141):
“The public school attempts the impossible feat of making a course for all children, irrespective of strength, mentality, inheritance, or home environment—whether they are to be lawyers or blacksmiths, artisans or mathematicians. Plainly, this course cannot suit all children. Is it, then, adapted to the bright child? Doctor Witmer, Professor of Psychology in the University of Pennsylvania, says, ‘The public schools are not giving the bright child a square deal. He is marking time, waiting for the lame duck to catch up.’ Is the course intended to fit the dull pupil? Evidently not, in view of the tears shed by the many who, despite their efforts, fail to keep up to grade.
“It has been suggested that the course has been designed for the average pupil. The ‘average’ pupil does not exist. You cannot strike an average between a goose and an eagle, nor can you add a dull pupil and a bright pupil together and get anything. A course of study based on this idea is not fitted to any one. Instead, then, of a school to fit the pupil, the pupil is made to fit the school. The lock-step masquerades under the name of discipline. The rigid curriculum tends with each passing year to produce more and more the type of factory employés, obliterating individuality and forcing all into the same mould.”
That there is a large measure of truth in these criticisms cannot be denied, and our school authorities to-day are bestirring themselves to effect sundry greatly needed reforms. But is it wholly fair to cast on the schools the blame for human irrationalities of thought and conduct? Nay, is it not possible, in view of the fact that habits are formed so early in life, that the real trouble may be that the material with which the schools have to work—the children of the nation—is more or less unworkable by the time it gets to the schools? Is it not reasonable to assume that neglect of proper instruction in the pre-school period has permitted the formation of faulty and well-nigh unchangeable modes of thinking and feeling?
“But,” I hear a puzzled parent protest, “do you mean that the formal education of the child should be begun before he has reached school age? Would you have us lay on the tender mind the burden of actual study?”
I mean precisely that. Not only do I believe that the postponement of formal education to “school age” is a serious pedagogical error, but I also believe that “actual study,” properly directed, would by no means prove such a “burden” on the mind of the child as most people take for granted.
I am willing to go further than this, and to contend, for reasons which I shall endeavour to make clear, that if the formal education of children were begun earlier than is the rule at present, and if it were carried out with the supplementary aid of education through a really good example and a really well arranged environment, our boys and girls would develop not only into morally superior men and women, but also into men and women of mental attainments fairly comparable with those to-day displayed by the comparative few acclaimed as men and women of “genius.”
III
THE SECRET OF GENIUS
The theory of genius which it is my purpose to present and defend has little in common with the views held by most students of this world-old problem. Especially does it differ from the well-known and at present dominant doctrine of the Moreau-Lombroso-Hagen school of investigators, by whom the man of genius is regarded as an aberrant, even degenerate, type of humanity, closely allied to the insane, and hence by implication deserving to be repressed rather than encouraged. Nor am I at one with those who, justly protesting against the degeneracy theory, themselves contend that genius is an anomaly in the scheme of Nature, and that the man of genius, biologically speaking, is a “variation” dependent on unknown, perhaps unknowable, laws of heredity.
On the contrary, following the lead of the late Frederic W. H. Myers—the first, in my opinion, to glimpse the true significance and fundamental characteristics of genius—I shall endeavour to show that in the man of genius there is, at bottom, no real departure from normality, and that he differs from the “average man” only in being the fortunate possessor of a power for utilising more freely than other men faculties common to all. More than this, going beyond Myers, I venture to affirm that genius is to an appreciable extent susceptible of cultivation, so as to become a far more frequent phenomenon than it is to-day.
In other words, I maintain that God, in giving to the world its Dantes, Newtons, and Emersons, has not intended them as mere objects of admiration and bewilderment, but as indications of possibilities open to the generalty of mankind.
Such a view, it may at once be conceded, could not reasonably have been advanced many years ago. It rests mainly on facts then unknown or misunderstood, and even now little appreciated outside of a narrow circle of scientific investigators. Foremost in importance is the discovery that, in addition to the ordinary realm of conscious thought, there exists in all of us a second realm—that of the so-called subconscious—in which, quite without any will-directed effort of our own, the most varied mental processes are carried on.
The subconscious, in fact, is a kind of vast store-house, wherein are preserved, seemingly without time limit and in the most perfect detail, memory-images of everything we have seen, heard, or otherwise experienced through our sense-organs. It is also a kind of workshop for the facile manipulation of ideas, including even the elaboration of complicated trains of thought. Manifestly, the more freely and habitually one can draw on its resources, the more one ought to be able to accomplish with regard to any set task or chosen field of work. And in this, I am persuaded, we have the clue to the true explanation of the brilliant achievements of the man of genius.
He does what he does so well, not because he is of an abnormal type of mentality, as the Lombrosians ask us to believe, nor yet because he is born with gifts transcending those of other men, but simply because he has found a way more readily, more frequently, and more profitably than others to avail himself of the subconscious powers that are the common heritage of the race. Or, to put it more elaborately in the words of Frederic Myers:
“I would suggest that genius—if that vaguely used word is to receive anything like a psychological definition—should be regarded as a power of utilising a wider range than other men can utilise of faculties in some degree innate in all—a power of appropriating the results of subliminal mentation to subserve the supraliminal stream of thought; so that an ‘inspiration of genius’ will be, in truth, a subliminal uprush, an emergence into the current of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other ideas which he has not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond his will in profounder regions of his being. I would urge that here there is no real departure from normality; no abnormality, at least in the sense of degeneration; but, rather, a fulfilment of the true norm of man.”