function, if he can promote the other. Yet it is by no means the express duty of the poet; and is not accounted so by poets generally. Fine Art pleasures in general have one ennobling distinction, that they can be enjoyed by mankind generally, and are not monopolised and exhausted by a few, as is the case with some pleasures. This circumstance is connected with the very material of Art, and is not due to any intention on the part of the artist.

To return now to the main function of poetry, the contributing to our joys, and the alleviating of our griefs. We need not even summarise the means of bringing about these ends; it is enough to advert to the most paradoxical of these, namely, the employment of subjects absolutely painful. Many of Wordsworth's narrative poems are tragical, not to say harrowing; while they seldom rise to the heights of tragic art, and are not redeemed by anything in the treatment. One justification might be given, on the purely moral ground. He might say that it was good for us to have our sympathies awakened towards human distress, instead of being wrapped up in our own comfort and immunity. Now a poet may, undoubtedly, undertake this work, but it is not a poetical duty, and will not be a substitute for poetical arts. A more relevant apology is this. In deep sorrow, it is better to go into the house of sorrow than into the house of rejoicing; and the salutary effect is more likely to be produced by a poetic handling of misery, than by a too literal picture. The heroism of endurance, the solution of moral difficulties, and all the circumstances that attract us to a tale of calamity, can be effectively embodied in a work of poetic genius; nevertheless, the genius is essential.

As to moralising generally, this is the professional work of the preacher alone. All of us are bound to contribute, according to our opportunities, to make mankind better. Any special claim upon the poet in this respect, is owing to the fact that he has more influence than other men; and that, in his search for themes of intrinsic charm, he often falls upon subjects having ethical bearings. If, then, it be the duty of men generally to take the benevolent, instead of the malevolent, attitude, towards each other; it is still more the duty of those in positions of influence, as poets undoubtedly are. From the unfortunate propensity of human beings to delight in malignity, a large amount of poetry is devoted to satire and vituperation. Many writers are occupied with exploring the weaknesses and vices of their fellow-men, without doing anything to reform them. Now, as a maxim, not of poetical criticism simply, but of universal duty, we are led to commend Coleridge for his professed "habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me." If any one is competent to represent humanity and life in its severest and most literal truth, it is a man of science. Only an approximation to truth can be made by a man of language; and as the poet always mingles his feelings with his subject, we should wish him to incline to the amiable side. This may not make him more or less of a poet as such; the highest and most consummate genius may be found on the other side; but as the author of a mixed composition, where poetry is one part and doctrine another, the value of the doctrine must enter into the merits of his work. The malevolent temper of Pope and of Byron may not have detracted from their poetic force. Possibly if they had assumed

a more amiable turn, their invention would not have answered so well to that stimulus. Their harsh views simply abate from their worth as teachers altogether. On the other hand, the claim may be made for Shakespeare that he holds a middle course between the extremes of sentimentality and malignity. (To be continued.)

The Discipline of the Mind.

BY W. C. COUPLAND, M.A., B.SC., Lecturer on Mental and Moral Science at Bedford College, London.

I. INTRODUCTION.

THAT the foundation of the science and art of education must be laid in Psychology is one of those vital truths which obtain only tardy recognition, because an earlier perception of their importance would have been attended by no practical result. The discernment of law in Mind is an achievement of yesterday, and students of this mysterious region are even now but dimly feeling their way through a maze of bewildering complexity. It is not strange, therefore, that theorizers on the methods appropriate to youthful education should have neglected the observation of the mental phenomena, either in the consummate form of a civilised consciousness, or in the historic evolution which has made that form possible. It is only, indeed, within the last fifty years that the thoughts of scientific thinkers have been turned in this direction; and the idea is still so novel that practical teachers in this country can find few aids in literature to deepen their sense of its importance, or to familiarize them with the principle in its actual development.

A very few words will suffice to show the value of the principle itself. The mind of a human being, no less than the body, is a piece of Nature. It has its antecedents and native tendencies, propensities, and untaught yearnings. It might be pardonable in an age ill-accustomed to the strict impartiality of scientific observation, and unprovided with the treasures of comparative research, to imagine that, while the stars seemed to hold their fixed courses, and animals appeared to repeat the same monotonous round of fixed habit from generation to generation, the mind of man rose above the order of the world, was plastic to a practically indefinite extent, and that it lay in the power of an eager trainer, or a strenuous self-will to capacitate it for making unlimited intellectual conquests, or for taking rank with the few moral heroes whose deeds illuminate the pages of history. Proofs pour in thick and fast nowadays, however, to dissipate a belief at once so flattering to human self-sufficiency and so fatal to all true spiritual progress. An unreal picture of individual possibilities may, in certain periods of depression, act as a spiritual tonic, affording the strength to cast off a dangerous self-distrust; but a clear cognition of the permanent causes of our strength and weakness is both a more reliable guide and a more excellent safeguard.

The arts of education must rest, then, upon the conviction that the ground-plan of the future mind is pre-determined in the original constitution. There is a psychical set, as there is a physical build, which may

be favoured or thwarted, but which cannot be largely deviated from, although it may require a tutor of extraordinary prescience to foresee the career of the future man. We may, if we please, resolve this constitution into two parts-one supporting the mental fabric, expressing the result of long-continued habit, what the old metaphysician would have termed the 'essence' of man, and the modern biologist describes as the mind of the race; the other summarizing the influence of proximate progenitors. This is, of course, a factitious simplification, though if the case were really no more complex than that, the practical psychologist would have enough work on his hands to harmonize the broad and narrow streams of tendency; but when we remember that the antecedents of each individual mind are absolutely continuous and regressively indefinite in extent, we shall not wonder that the science of mind is still in so elementary condition, or that human art, which cannot afford to wait upon the slow result of scientific analysis, should proceed swiftly to rules of conduct which later theory will utterly condemn.

The practical difficulty is, to carefully distinguish between those portions of the psychical fabric which are to all intents and purposes unalterable, and those later accretions which are relatively modifiable, and in the latter to faithfully graduate the relativity. It would be alike unreasonable to attempt to change a primal instinct, or to treat a certain vice as beyond the reach of moral therapeutics, because it exhibits an ancestral taint. Some sagacity, again, will be needed to distinguish-in the awkward efforts of unexercised intellect between the irremediable inaptitude of an unpossessed faculty, and the cerebral immaturity which merely retards what will hereafter be a splendid development. These are some samples of the puzzles which await the instructor. It would be folly to ignore or underrate them. They must be admitted in all their force. But the moral to be drawn from their existence is not that of despair or evasion, but a profounder conviction that real aid must come from a deeper study of the human mind, above all in its comparative aspect. The derivative cannot advance faster than the parent science, and the laws of mind are only slowly emerging out of physical and metaphysical chaos. As my concern in these papers will be directly with the practical teacher, I shall not allow myself to wander from the beaten path of ascertained truths, but limit myself to an indication of those mental conditions which help to form the phenomena of our familiar consciousness, accompanied by such applications as are implied in a conscious direction of the mental processes, with a view to realizing the ideal end of full development of faculty.

Before we proceed to particulars, however, we must first form a correct idea of the kind of object it is whose constitution and mode of operation we are proposing to treat. This object is the human mind. The unfolding and discipline of the human mind is the purport of education. But what is the human mind? Does the popular phraseology correctly or adequately describe it ? We hear talk of the 'faculties of the mind,' as if it were a thing parcelled out into provinces, an engine with unlike parts, which may be variously active or quiescent. Again, there is no more popular presumption than that mind is not body, that it is a self-enclosed sphere, open only to the gaze of an individual self, whose kinship with

other individual entities is problematical, or matter of inference. The body is sometimes said to be the mind's 'slave,' at other times its 'master.'

Now, all these varieties of expression are inexact, even when not positively misleading. They are the outcome of rough-and-ready wit, and if taken up without explanation into the scientific vocabulary will seriously vitiate our conception of the actual phenomena.

The dualism thus supposed of body and mind, if taken in the popular sense, is entirely untenable. The perception that mind is embodied mind is the mastery of the psychological alphabet. Scientific psychology may be almost said to date from the recognition of that truth. The assertion involves something very different from the current phrase that body, in whole or part, is Organ of mind. Organ supposes substantial separation. The organ is quite distinct from the authority that wields it. It is a passive instrument of a purpose not its own. But in saying that 'mind is embodied mind' we affirm far more than that; we declare that it and its embodiment are one, that the relation is not that of hand and glove, but of hand and flesh and blood; that he who strikes at the body strikes at the mind, that he who wounds the mind wounds the body. This is no mere hypothesis or possible interpretation of facts. It is demonstrated in every ripple of feeling, in every case of mental pathology.

What becomes, then, of the so-called faculties of the mind if this be so? Where are these faculties, and how shall we effect their distinction? If the mind pulsates in the whole body, although with different energy and evidence according to local conditions, and the dominating centres are impotent without their internuncial connections, qualitative difference being grounded on difference of relation, not of elements, how can we, except by a figure of speech, talk of a faculty of judgment, of reasoning, of remembering? As we shall see presently, this phraseology is the record of a primitive attempt at classification, misdirected by a not unnatural illusion of metaphysics.

But there is something more, of scarcely less importance, to be said in regard to the special nature of mind. Theories of mind surviving in popular speech commit a similar error with regard to distinction of mind from mind, to that which they commit in regard to distinction of mind from body. It is supposed that the mind is or may be isolated from its environment, as it may be detached from its objective aspect. Now, although it must be granted that the reflex action known as self-consciousness is a peculiar phenomenon, usually described in the somewhat inappropriate language of a consciousness immediately visible to introspection, this by no means carries with it the implication that a man's mental self is in fact detachable from other mental selves, or that, in truth, there would be any self at all if it were not for a social self, the resources of the individual self ever growing with the growth of the social self. Self-education is a dream; there is no such possibility. A mind cannot feed upon itself-must, at the least,

Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones,'

and recognize its grandest teachers in the throbbing heart and progressive reason of mankind. To neglect or make light of these ultra-personal

influences is to obscure our view of the most important reality as yet known to us-the human mind. The mind of each one of us at the present day is so remote from the early mind that we cannot possibly put ourselves back in imagination and realise its ruder type. When we reflect what vast controversies, fraught with most important consequences, have hinged on the adoption of a mere word, we may vainly picture the cavern-like stagnation of a consciousness capable of being influenced by its fellow only through the crude media of gestures and interjections.

Language is undoubtedly the great fabricator of the social consciousness. But my point is that the individual cannot be detached from the social consciousness, that what I am thinking now is not my thought, but the thought of a spiritual organism of which my thought is but a transient expression. If it were not so, how could we so readily communicate our ideas to one another? If we did not share in a common psychical nature, how should we be so readily intelligible to one another? It is not the possession of a common language which alone makes this possible. Language is the body of thought and feeling, a body as intimately one with its spirit as the physical body of the psychical mind, but the informing soul must be present or the body is a dead burden.

How vast the range of personal influence becomes in the social state when this is fully realized, it is needless to enlarge upon. It is this great fact which gives such overwhelming importance to the work of the educator, and enables the schoolmaster who is alive to his responsibilities to shape in great measure the destiny of mankind.

I think these preliminary observations regarding the general nature of mind will suffice for placing the student at what appears to me to be the proper point of view for comprehending psychological problems. They are intended to suggest to the reader certain general conceptions which have not yet received the attention they deserve. At the same time, I fear the value of the truths indicated will for some time to come be rather regulative than constitutive. By this I mean that they must be treated by the teacher mainly as pre-suppositions, possessing a restraining value, preserving from dangerous error, rather than as presenting positive material which can largely influence practice. For the body of psychological doctrine on which to found practical rules we must still go to the abstract analyst, to the descriptive psychologist, who, treating the mind as a separate finished organism, places in our hands the skeins of association, as they present themselves to his individual inspection. But, although this mode of treatment must still be classed as primary, the historical spirit is beginning to make itself felt in psychology, as in all other departments of life, and the hitherto neglected antecedents of the infant mind are coming to receive their due. Even now Psychogeny is found a potent instrument where simple observation and analysis fail, and we are obtaining glimpses of light where before was darkness and mystery.

Employing such clues as the progress of science offers I shall, in the rest of the present paper, attempt a rapid survey of the field of mental phenomena, presenting these phenomena so far as possible as a connected whole.

In one sense everything which forms a portion of our thought is a mental phenomenon. Although we

are tolerably sure that the world is larger than Human Mind, the very conditions of our life prevent us from conceiving that world save in terms of more or less distinct ideation and conscious action. That there are subconscious and unconscious states few will deny, but the notion of such states is a fact of consciousness, and it is a fallacy of language when we imagine ourselves capable of transcending this limitation of human spiritual existence. But because we are fast bound within the iron bands of consciousness, it does not follow that the limits of representation should be the limits of belief, and accordingly, while the stream of our mental being yields us only the gold of consciousness, that very gold may bear upon it the mark of its transmutation from the common sand of the unconscious. It is, in truth, so. As Shakespeare said :—

'Our little life is rounded with a sleep;

and consciousness is but a gleam of light in a vast ocean of gloom.

The area of unconsciousness is immeasurably vaster than the area of consciousness, not only without the life of humanity, but also within it. We shall never understand the workings of consciousness itself until we come fully to admit that a vast number of operations are ceaselessly going their silent rounds, of which either no trace exists in consciousness, or of which the effect is perceived without the cause.

The proof of this is found in flashes of so-called inspiration or memory, in incredibly swift perceptions or intuitions, in sudden decisions which pre-suppose long chains of inference and inward struggle. Some psychologists endeavour to resist this evidence. They will have it that as the effect, so must be the cause, that to make the conscious emerge from the unconscious were to violate the maxim Ex nihilo nihil fit; and that to find an unconscious antecedent for a conscious consequent is to confuse two eternally opposed spheres of being. But there is nothing self-contradictory in the assertion that existence is larger than mind, and yet the unconscious consubstantial with consciousness. On the contrary the contradiction lies with those who declare we are strictly bound within the fetters of consciousness, and at the same time postulate an unknown substratum as the condition of that consciousness. To argue this point further would lead me too far. We must rest in this place with the verdict of common sense; and the interpretation of experience, which most readily yields. practical fruit, is that which conceives the mind as ruminating in stillness over its assimilated material, and from time to time revealing the strange treasures of its wonderful laboratory.

(To be continued.)

A CHEAP VOLTAIC CELL.-A cell suitable for ringing electric bells in houses can be procured in the following cheap but efficacious manner. Get a porous clay pot from an electrical instrument maker (price twopence); put it in an old iron 'tin' and fill up the can with a solution of caustic soda. Then roll up a piece of zinc and stick it in a plug of cork or wood soaked in melted paraffin wax; fill the pot with water and insert the zinc. Solder wires to the zinc and the iron tin, and the cell is complete. The efficacy of the cell may be increased by filling the space between the iron tin and porous pot with iron filings.

Chemistry of the Non-Metallics.

BY EDWARD B. AVELING, D.Sc. LONDON. [This series of articles, whilst dealing with the subjects required by the University of London for the Matriculation Examination and with those required at the Elementary Stage of the Inorganic Chemistry (Branch X.) Science and Art Department, is intended as a practical guide to the philosophical and systematic study of the non-metallics.]

CHAPTER I.-ELEMENTS.

CHEMISTRY.

MIXTURES. COMPOUNDS. METALS. NON-METALS. SYMBOLS. WEIGHT-NUMBERS. LIST OF ELEMENTS.

LET us suppose that the following substances, all easily procurable, are placed upon the table before the student:Brimstone, chalk, charcoal, a piece of glass, a bottle of glycerine, gold-leaf, gunpowder, iron filings, iron and powdered sulphur rubbed together in a mortar, a penny, some phosphorus, a shilling, a sovereign, some spermaceti, some starch, a lump of sugar, some sugar dissolved in water, sugar mixed with potassium chlorate (chlorate of potash of the chemist's shop), a glass of water, a piece of zinc.

If the student were asked to attempt some grouping of these twenty things, we may believe that, either unaided, save by his own native wit, or with a little guidance from his teacher, he would after a time place apart from all the rest, the glycerine, the spermaceti, the starch, and the sugar. These all come from plants or animals; these are organic bodies. The rest, noting that the organic body sugar occurred in two out of the seventeen things left, he would name inorganic bodies.

Considering these sixteen, he would in time place on one side the brimstone, charcoal, gold-leaf, iron, phosphorus, zinc, and he would, if not guided, place with these the three coins, unless he remembered that the penny, shilling, and sovereign are made up of copper, silver, and gold, in each case accompanied by some other substances. This group of six, noting that one of the six occurred in conjunction with iron in another substance on the table, he will separate from the rest, because they are all bodies that have not, as yet, been decomposed or analysed into simpler substances. Brimstone or sulphur, charcoal or carbon, gold, iron, phosphorus, zinc, are elements or simple bodies.

Turning to the ten things still before him, the student would arrange them in two groups. In one he would place the gunpowder, the iron and sulphur, the solution of sugar, the sugar and potassium chlorate; in the other he would place the chalk, the piece of glass, the water. The one group he would name mixtures, the other chemical compounds. The gunpowder he would recognise as a mixture of nitre, sulphur, charcoal; the chalk as a chemical compound of calcium, carbon, and oxygen. The penny, shilling and sovereign would present some difficulty. They are alloys of two or three elements. Upon the whole, it is better to place them with the compounds, though they hover close to the border-lines of the two groups of elements and compounds.

If, now, the mixture of iron filings and sulphur be placed in a porcelain capsule, and the capsule supported on one of the rings of a retort-stand (Fig. 1), whilst upon

a lower ring some wiregauze is placed, at such a level as to be only just below the bottom of the capsule, and if the flame of a Bunsen burner be applied to the bottom of the capsule through the wire-gauze, the iron and sulphur are found to unite, and a black substance is formed unlike either sulphur or iron. This substance is a compound of the two elements.

FIG. 1.

If a glass rod is dipped in very strong sulphuric acid and then applied to the mixture of sugar and potassium chlorate, flame bursts out, and a yellow gas is given off. From the mixture certain quite different compounds

As far as we know, all bodies in the universe can be arranged under one of these three heads. The study of elements, mixtures, and compounds is Chemistry.

Consider the six elements in the first list. They can be grouped into two sets, each of three. The gold, iron, zinc, as metals, are separated from the sulphur, carbon, phosphorus, as non-metals. The marks of the metallic elements are:

(1) Solidity. As a rule they are solid bodies, whilst several of the non-metals are gases. Mercury is a liquid metal, and, later on, we shall see reason to believe that the gas, hydrogen, usually classed with non-metals, is metallic in its nature.

(2) Lustre.

(3) Heaviness. As a rule, metals have a greater relative weight than non-metals.

(4) Good conducting powers as regards heat and electricity.

=

(5) Ductility, from duco I draw (the capability of being drawn out into a wire).

(6) Malleability, from malleus a hammer (the capability of being hammered out into a plate).

These last two properties, whilst they are only possessed by some metals, are not possessed by any non-metals.

We know, at present, some sixty-three elements. Of these the majority are metals. Only fifteen elements at most are regarded as non-metallic, and three of these hover on the border-line between the two classes of simple bodies. In these articles we shall confine our attention to the study of the non-metallics, and to the study of twelve of these. Their names follow in the order in which they will be studied. Opposite each name is written the sign, symbol, or abbreviation that is used by students of chemistry for the purpose of saving time. Most of these elements recur so frequently in the study of this science that it is wise and necessary to have some symbol by which to designate them. Lastly, each element has, in addition to its symbol, a number. This I call its weightnumber. Without entering too fully at present into the meaning of these numbers, it may here be said that they express the relative weights of the different elements under like conditions. Thus hydrogen (1 in the list) is the lightest body known, and oxygen (16 in the list) is, under like conditions, sixteen times as heavy as hydrogen. The phrase 'under like conditions' is of great importance. Thus the solid, carbon, is far more than twelve times as heavy as the gas, hydrogen. But we have evidence that if hydrogen and carbon could be compared in the gas condition, at the same temperature, under the same pressure, the latter would be found to be twelve times as heavy as the former.