life.  Mr. Romanes studied the elementary rate of apperception in a large number of persons by making them read a paragraph as fast as they could take it in, and then immediately write down all they could reproduce of its contents.  He found astonishing differences in the rapidity, some taking four times as long as others to absorb the paragraph, and the swiftest readers being, as a rule, the best immediate recollectors, too.  But not,—­and this is my point,—­not the most intellectually capable subjects, as tested by the results of what Mr. Romanes rightly names ‘genuine’ intellectual work; for he tried the experiment with several highly distinguished men in science and literature, and most of them turned out to be slow readers.

In the light of all such facts one may well believe that the total impression which a perceptive teacher will get of the pupil’s condition, as indicated by his general temper and manner, by the listlessness or alertness, by the ease or painfulness with which his school work is done, will be of much more value than those unreal experimental tests, those pedantic elementary measurements of fatigue, memory, association, and attention, etc., which are urged upon us as the only basis of a genuinely scientific pedagogy.  Such measurements can give us useful information only when we combine them with observations made without brass instruments, upon the total demeanor of the measured individual, by teachers with eyes in their heads and common sense, and some feeling for the concrete facts of human nature in their hearts.

Depend upon it, no one need be too much cast down by the discovery of his deficiency in any elementary faculty of the mind.  What tells in life is the whole mind working together, and the deficiencies of any one faculty can be compensated by the efforts of the rest.  You can be an artist without visual images, a reader without eyes, a mass of erudition with a bad elementary memory.  In almost any subject your passion for the subject will save you.  If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it.  If you wish to be rich, you will be rich; if you wish to be learned, you will be learned; if you wish to be good, you will be good.  Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them with exclusiveness, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.

One of the most important discoveries of the ‘scientific’ sort that have recently been made in psychology is that of Mr. Galton and others concerning the great variations among individuals in the type of their imagination.  Every one is now familiar with the fact that human beings vary enormously in the brilliancy, completeness, definiteness, and extent of their visual images.  These are singularly perfect in a large number of individuals, and in a few are so rudimentary as hardly to exist.  The same is true of the auditory and motor images, and probably of those of every kind;