Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, October 1899: Vol. LV, May to October, 1899Various
Philosophy
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, October 1899: Vol. LV, May to October, 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
Take a laborer from his pick and shovel on the railway embankment and
put him at the desk of the general manager. He can read and write. Let
the messenger boys and clerks shower him with the letters and
telegrams that bombard that desk every day, and let him try to settle
the questions to which they give rise.
Now, why can not the schoolgirl run the locomotive, the laborer the
railroad? Because the relations of things necessary to the tasks have
never been imprinted upon their registering cells; because, in the
latter case at least, of the lack of power of co-ordination--that is,
the lack of the power of abstract reasoning that the task involves.
Why can not anybody do anything as well as anybody else? Because
certain relations have been more deeply impressed upon certain brains
than upon others; because of the greater power of certain brains to
co-ordinate certain relations, their greater ability to give concrete
manifestation of the result of such co-ordination through the efferent
nerves. Otherwise any one of us could design a bridge, compose a
symphony, or organize a trust.
The oftener relations are impressed upon the registering cells, the
more readily are those relations co-ordinated, provided the brain
structure be of the requisite caliber. Reiterated impression through
the ages of the relations between their needs and surrounding things,
together with the development of structural capacity, has led the
beaver to build his dam, the bee the honeycomb, the ant its village,
the bird its nest. In each case the registered impressions have led to
action made possible by long-continued contact between structure and
environment; the actions are the result of development that has
proceeded mite by mite through unknown time. The brain of neither bird
nor beast nor man will immediately co-ordinate radically new
impressions received in a radically new environment into coherent
action that leads to definite result.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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