It is only fitting that on his tombstone Lady Tintagel should have had
inscribed an impressive and high-sounding misquotation from the Bible.
LXI
"MEASURE YOUR MIND"
"Measure Your Mind" by M.R. Traube and Frank Parker Stockbridge, is apt
to be a very discouraging book if you have any doubt at all about your
own mental capacity. From a hasty glance through the various tests I
figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating "Low
Average Ability," reserved usually for those just learning to speak the
English language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while
another man hits it. If they ever adopt the "menti-meter tests" on this
journal I shall last just about forty-five minutes.
And the trouble is that each test starts off so easily. You begin to
think that you are so good that no one has ever appreciated you. There
is for instance, a series of twenty-four pictures (very badly drawn too,
Mr. Frank Parker Stockbridge. You think you are so smart, picking flaws
with people's intelligence. If I couldn't draw a better head than the
one on page 131 I would throw up the whole business). At any rate, in
each one of these pictures there is something wrong (wholly apart from
the drawing). You are supposed to pick out the incongruous feature, and
you have 180 seconds in which to tear the twenty-four pictures to
pieces.
* * * * *
The first one is easy. The rabbit has one human ear. In the second one
the woman's eye is in her hair. Pretty soft, you say to yourself. In the
third the bird has three legs. It looks like a cinch. Following in quick
succession come a man with his mouth in his forehead, a horse with cow's
horns, a mouse with rabbit's ears, etc. You will have time for a
handspring before your 180 seconds are up.
But then they get tricky. There is a post-card with a stamp upside down.
Well, what's wrong with that? Certainly there is no affront to nature in
a stamp upside down. Neither is there in a man's looking through the
large end of a telescope if he wants to. You can't arbitrarily say at
the top of the page, "Mark the thing that is wrong," and then have a
picture of a house with one window larger than all the others and expect
any one to agree with you that it is necessarily _wrong_. It may look
queer, but so does the whole picture. You can't tell; the big window may
open from a room that needs a big window. I am not going to stultify
myself by making things wrong about which I know none of the facts. Who
am I that I should condemn a man for looking through the large end of a
telescope? Personally, I like to look through the large end of a
telescope. It only shows the state of personal liberty in this country
when a picture of a man looking at a ship through the large end of a
telescope is held before the young and branded as "wrong."
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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