judgment, character, and will. . . . An education which, will improve the faculty will be the education par excellence"[1]
Whether any one, in the ordinary lay interpretation of the act, is ever able to draw or not is of very little educational importance. But, since we see that the ability of the telegraph operator to attend by ear gives him also the power to attend by eye, we may infer that training to conscious and effective effort by one sense trains all others to some extent. The inference seems rational that training one to attend by eye will strengthen the power of observation in all directions.
The above-quoted opinions all seem to point to the ability to set aside the things that clamor for attention and attend to those that ordinarily escape our observation, as the foundation of success.
Line No. 2 (on chart) differs from line No. 1, because the subject must, before an attempt to locate is possible, determine which of the points will be taken first. This having been selected from the seven and located, six remain. The choice must be made six times, the location seven, each of which is the result of a distinct conscious effort of the will in "bringing back a wandering attention," which, if left free, would be like Huldy's feelin's described by Lowell:
All ways to once her feelin's flew
Like sparks in burnt-up paper."
To arrest those sparks, bring them back, and hold them for a fraction of a second, means a considerable conscious mental effort, each of which brings nearer the state where fatigue prevents further effort and the sparks are followed instead of driven; hence the curve.
The very young child has a good conception of the vertical and horizontal positions and of their conventional representatives in lines. Bat when the line is oblique, the concept of it, as oblique, is altogether insufficient for representation. It slants right or left. This or that end is high, how much?[2]
The composite drawing of fifty-three pupils, average age
- ↑ Psychology, William James, p. 228.
- ↑ In the tests for line 2 no lines were horizontal, none vertical, none parallel to each other or the margin of the paper, no line prolonged would hit an angle. On the nine-by-six-inch paper the triangle sides were 3·4 inches, 3·05 inches, 1·55 inches. The longer diagonal of the trapezium measured 4·1 inches; the sides, 3 inches, 2·87 inches, 2·90 inches, and 2·86 inches. The measurements for the chart were obtained by placing a test sheet over the drawn one, matching the edges with care, and making with a point holes for the true positions of corners, as mechanically located on test sheet. The errors were aggregated on a slip of paper and divided by the number of points (7). The greatest angle error was then selected and divided by 24 (because that figure seemed to make the angle error coeffective with the distance error). The result is added to the average of the first.
