CONDITIONS OF SUBJECTIVE ACQUIREMENTS. 121 to one than to the other. Given a certain native power of intellect, the direction taken by it, will determine the intellecttual character. If the Object regards are exclusive or overpowering, the knowledge of the Subject, as such, will be at its lowest ebb. The circumstances favouring the Objective attention can be assigned, with great probability, and their remission would therefore account for the Subjective attention. These objective circumstances are, first, great spontaneous muscular activity in all its forms, and next, a high development of the senses most allied with object properties, as sight, touch, and hearing. Where the forces of the system are profusely determined towards bodily energies, the character is rendered pre-eminently objective; whereas, not only persons differently constituted, but the same persons under advancing years, illness, and confinement of the energies, are thrown more upon selfconsciousness, and exhibit the consequences of this attitude, in greater knowledge of the feelings, more sympathy with others, and an ethical or moralizing tendency. Again, as regards the Object senses, a strong susceptibility to colour, or to music, or to tactile properties, operates in the direction of the object regards; if these sensibilities are only average, or below average, in a mind of great general powers, a large share of attention will be given to subject states. On the other extreme, great organic sensibility inclines the regards to the subject-self. 61. In order to indicate the medium, or organ, of mental study, Reid and Stewart designated a faculty for that purpose, under the name Consciousness.' Hamilton spoke of the same power as the Presentative Faculty' for Self. 'Reflexion' had been previously used by Locke, to mean the source of our knowledge of the Subject world; the name, however, was not well chosen. The word 'Consciousness' is preferable; but if consciousness be comprehensively applied to the Object as well as to the Subject regards, the qualified form Self-consciousness' is still more suitable; it is also justified by common usage. 6 Hamilton calls the first source of our knowledge of facts, the faculty of Presentation. The Senses are the Presentative mediuin for the object world; Self-consciousness is the Presentation of the subject world. BUSINESS, OR PRACTICAL LIFE. 62. The Education of the higher Industry, as opposed to mere handicraft, varies with the different departments. Among the elements involved, we may specify (1) an acquaintance with Material forms and properties, (2) certain technical Formalities akin to science, and (3) a practical knowledge of Human beings. (1) The knowledge of a certain class of natural properties is involved in the various industrial arts,-in Agriculture, Manufactures, and Commerce. This is not essentially distinct from scientific knowledge, although differently selected and circumscribed. The scientific attribute, generality, is not so much aimed at, as precision or certainty in the particular applications. The steel-worker must have a minute acquaintance with the properties of steel; the cotton-spinner must know all the shades and varieties of the material. (2) The formalities of book-keeping, and the modes of reckoning money transactions, are of the nature of arbitrary forms, like Arithmetic and Mathematics. (3) In many practical departments, as statesmanship, oratory, teaching, &c., human beings are the material, and the knowledge of them, in the practical shape, is a prime requisite. The same knowledge is of avail to the employer of workmen, and to the trader who has to negotiate in the market with other human beings. The comprehensive Interest in the present case is worldly means, which is a far higher spur to attention than truth. There are special likings for special avocations, owing to the incidents of each suiting different individualities. Another biassing circumstance is the greater honour attached to certain professions. There is a close relation, in point of mental aptitude, between the higher walks of material Industry and the Concrete or Experimental Sciences; and between the formal departments, as Law and Mathematics. The management of human beings would depend upon the aptitude for the subject sciences. ACQUISITIONS IN THE FINE ARTS. 63. Fine Art constructions are intended to give a certain species of pleasure, named the pleasure of Beauty, Taste, or Esthetic emotion. CONDITIONS OF FINE ART ACQUIREMENTS. 123 The usually recognized Fine Arts are Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Poetry, Dramatic display, Refined Address, Dancing, Music. Their common end is refined pleasure, although their means or instrumentality is different. They are divided between the Eye and the Ear, the two higher senses. Poetry and Acting combine both. 64. The most general conditions of acquisition in Fine Art are (1) Mechanical Aptitude, (2) Adhesiveness for the Subject-matter of the Art, and (3) Artistic sensibility. (1) In those Arts where the artist is a mechanical workman, he requires corresponding Active endowments. The singer, the actor, the orator, need powers of voice (strength, spontaneity, and the condition that determines alike discrimination and retentiveness): the actor and orator are farther in want of corresponding powers of feature and gesture. The instrumental performer of music, the painter, and the sculptor, are workers with the hand. The architect and poet are exempted from the present condition. (2) An adhesiveness for the Subject or Material of the Art is of consequence as storing the mind with available recollections and forms. The painter and poet should have extensive memories for the pictorial in nature, as mere visible display, without regard to beauty in the first instance. The poet should have, in addition, a mind well stored with vocables, and their melodious and metrical combinations. The actor should have an eye and memory for gestures. The musician would derive advantage from an adhesiveness for sounds as such. (3) The Artistic feeling is the guide to the employment of these powers and resources, and the motive for concentrating attention upon such objects as gratify it. The Artist must have a special and distinguishing sensibility for the proper effects of his art; proportions in Architecture, fine curves and groupings in Sculpture, colour harmonies in Painting, melody in Music, and so on. To have a large command of material, without artistic selection is to fail in the proper sphere of art; a pictorial mind, without aesthetic feeling, might make a naturalist or a geographer, but not a painter or a poet. The profuse command of original conceptions was apparent in Bacon, but not a poet's delicacy in applying them. HISTORY AND NARRATIVE. 65. The successions of events and transactions in human life, remembered and related, make History. The adhesion for witnessed or narrated events is often looked upon as a characteristic exhibition of memory. Bacon, in dividing human knowledge, according to our faculties, assigned History to Memory, Philosophy to Reason, Poetry to Imagination. 66. Transactions witnessed impress themselves as Sensations, principally of Sight and of Sound, and as Actions, when the spectator is also an agent. A pageant, ceremony, or other pictorial display commends itself to the pictorial memory. Most active demonstrations are accompanied, more or less, with effects of sound; human agency is usually attended with the exercise of speech. Historical transactions have an interest with human beings generally, although with some more than others. Hence the memory for witnessed events, being the result of a stimulated attention, is usually good. Sometimes a single transaction is, in its minutest details, remembered for life. This is owing partly to the length of time occupied in attending to it, partly to the interest excited, and partly to the frequent mental repetition and verbal narration afterwards. 67. Transactions narrated obtain the aid of the Verbal memory. A narrative is a complex stream of imagery and language. In so far as we can realize the picture of the events, we connect the succession pictorially; in so far as we remember the flow of words, we retain it verbally. Probably, in most cases, the memory is formed now by one bond, now by another; different minds portioning out the recollection differently between the two. OUR PAST LIFE. 68. The complex current of each one's existence is made up of all our Actions, Sensations, Emotions, Thoughts, as they happened. Our own actions are retained in various shapes. (1) Inasmuch as they produce a constantly altered spectacle about us, they form alliances with our sensations. A walk in the country, although a fact of energy or activity, is remembered as a series of pictorial aspects. The same is true of our executed work; an artist's finished picture is the embodiment of his labour for a length of time, and the easiest form of remembering it. EMBODIMENT OF OUR PAST LIFE. 125 (2) If we remember actions as such, and apart from the correlative changes of sensible appearance, it is as ideal movements, for which we have a certain adhesiveness, varying no doubt with the motor endowments as a whole. If we remember an action sufficiently to do it again, we remember it also ideally. We remember our verbal utterances, partly as connected threads of vocal exertion. Still, we rarely depend on this single thread. A surgeon may remember how he operated for stone, by his memory of hand movements; but the sensible results of the different stages impress him much more, The memory of our feelings or emotions, in their pure subject character, as in pleasure and pain, comes under the proper adhesiveness of the subject states. Allusion has been made to the permanent recollection of states of pleasure and pain, as a thing variable in individuals, and of great importance in its practical results. It was also remarked that no law can be laid down as governing this department, no special endowment of sensibility pointed out, except the negation of extreme object regards, in a mind of good general retentive ness. CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS ON RETENTIVENESS. 69. (1) There is some difficulty in establishing what we have named general Retentiveness, seeing that so much depends on the special organ, and on the interest excited. Still, when we encounter a person distinguished as a learner generally, with a strong bent for acquisition in all departmentsbodily skill, languages, sciences, fine arts-we seem justified in representing the case as an example of adhesive power on the whole, and not as an aggregate of local superiorities. The renowned 'admirable Crichton' is a historical example of the class. And we find many men that are almost equally good in language and in science, in business and in fine art. Moreover, the superiority of man over the lower animals is general and pervasive, and better expressed by a general retentiveness than by the sum of special and local distinctions. (2) There can be no question as to the superior retentiveness or plasticity of early years. We cannot state with precision the comparative adhesiveness of different ages, but from the time that the organs are fully under command, onward through life, there appears to be a steady decrease. The formation of bodily habits seems to be favoured not solely by nervous conditions, at their maximum in youth, but by mus |