Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/577

regulating and dominating all these lower tendencies to a certain extent, not to an unlimited extent. We cannot prevent those thoughts and feelings rising in our minds that we know to be undesirable; but we can escape from them, we can repress them; but, as I said, the effort to escape from them is much more effectual than the effort to repress them, excepting when they arise with great power, and then we have immediately, as it were, to crush them out; but when they tend to return over and over again, the real mode of subduing them is to determine to give our attention to something else. It is by this exercise of the will, therefore, in training and disciplining the mind, that it acquires that method by which it will work of itself. The mathematician could never have worked out that difficult problem, nor the lawyer have given his opinion, nor the artist have developed those conceptions of beauty which he endeavors to shape either in music, or poetry, or painting, but for the training and disciplining which his mind has undergone. The most wonderfully creative of all musicians, Mozart, whose music flowed from him with a spontaneousness that no musician, I think, has ever equalled—Mozart went through, in early life, a most elaborate course of study, imposed upon him, in the first instance, by his father, and afterward maintained by himself. When his contemporaries remarked how easily his compositions flowed from him, he replied, "I gained the power by nothing but hard work." Mozart had the most extraordinary combination of this intuitive musical power, with a knowledge derived from patient and careful study, that probably any man ever attained. Now, in the same manner we have persons of extraordinary natural gifts, and see these gifts frequently running to waste, as it were, because they have not received this culture and discipline. And it is this discipline which gives us the power of performing, unconsciously to ourselves, these elaborate mental operations; because I hold that a very large part of our mental life thus goes on, not only automatically, but even below the sphere of our consciousness. And you may easily understand this if you refer to the diagram which I drew just now on the black-board. You saw that the Cerebrum, the part that does the work, what is called the convoluted surface of the brain, lies just immediately under the skull-cap; that it is connected with the sensorium at the base of the brain by a series of fibres which are merely, I believe, conducting fibres. Now, I think that it is just as possible that the Cerebrum should work by itself when the sensorium is otherwise engaged or in a state of unconsciousness, as that impressions should be made on the eye of which we are unconscious. A person may be sleeping profoundly, and you may go and raise the lid and bring a candle near, and you will see the pupil contract; and yet that individual shall see nothing, for he is in a state of perfect unconsciousness. His eye sees it, so to speak, but his mind does not; and you know that his eye sees it by the contraction of the pupil, which is a reflex action; but his mind does not see it, because the sensorium is 36